By Peter Bart
Editor-At-Large
The overlap of awards season with a fire season has posed a stern test of Hollywood fortitude. Will there be shelf space for statuettes?
If Hollywood needs some optimism I’d propose it look to Jon M. Chu, who has contributed both a sharp, but unnoticed, new book plus a hit movie to advance his mission. His Wicked won the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement honor at the Golden Globes, but the kudo crowd also owes Chu a bow for his memoir Viewfinder, which poses his dissent on current issues.
Viewfinder details the hazardous trek of a young Chinese-American filmmaker seeking to pursue his zeal for pure “entertainment” in an industry that periodically seems disdainful of that concept.
As he preps his Wicked sequel at Universal, Chu, at 46, can look back upon a formidable list of snubs, slaps, cancellations and ethnic putdowns littering his younger years.
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The green lights that initially greeted his work had flashed to red time and again, reflecting, to his thinking, “a system filled with cynicism.”
Chu urgently wants to make movies to be shown in theaters, not on streamers. “Movies offer visions that are too sweeping for TV, and too rich to be absorbed in thirty second clips on your phone,” he writes. “No other medium can change the culture as drastically.”
Paradoxically, Chu, the cinema loyalist, grew up in Silicon Valley, the son of a Chinese restaurant owner who he periodically was forced to revisit for interim funding. Though reared in techie heaven, Chu opted to study at USC, where some of his professors were confounded by his pursuit of the cinema of music and dance.
While his college work elicited sporadic praise, his post-graduate rounds of studio interviews and auditions proved daunting. Chu pitched projects more akin to a Singing in the Rain than, say, to a darker theatrical show like Emilia Pérez.
Chu, like Denis Villeneuve, was snubbed this week in Directors Guild nominations. To be sure, they were responsible for two of the year’s biggest box office successes.
Two decades ago, Chu’s ambitious remake of Bye Bye Birdie was budgeted, cast and slotted for production, only to be flushed at the eleventh hour. Disney ultimately lent support for a sequel to Step Up, a modest dance musical that helped set Chu in line for Crazy Rich Asians, the sumptuously comedic movie that enhanced his credentials as a hit-maker.
Chu felt he was further advancing his cause in the movie version of In the Heights, the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, but Warner Bros, slammed by Covid, abruptly canceled its premiere, consigning it to HBO Max.
Releasing Heights on a streamer was “a shitty decision,” Chu argues, because “a movie in a theater has a power that doesn’t transfer to any other situation.” He continues: “Movies can elevate lives and shift perceptions like no other form of storytelling.”
Chu’s takeaway from the Heights debacle: “Hollywood studios need to resist the compulsion to emulate the Netflix philosophy to grow, grow and grow at any cost.” While appreciating Netflix’s worldwide success, he concludes: “Having seen the Silicon Valley and Hollywood pull closer together, I can’t shake the feeling that each has absorbed many of the worst qualities of the other.”
Chu still often inhabits his father’s restaurant with nostalgia, mindful of its uniqueness as a backdrop for a director mobilizing billion-dollar blockbusters.
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