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Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man. Steve Alpert
Читать онлайн.Название Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781611729412
Автор произведения Steve Alpert
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Although I was emphatically not a good enough speaker to follow Tokuma or Suzuki, I was very lucky in what I had to say when I got up on the stage. We were in the midst of the seemingly endless process of making the English-dubbed version of Hayao Miyazaki’s record-breaking film Princess Mononoke with Miramax, then a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company. Every week Harvey Weinstein, the chairman of Miramax, was claiming that he was about to hire someone new and amazing for the film’s English-language cast. All I had to do was report it. The other department heads were doing updates from their increasingly struggling businesses. There wasn’t much good news to report, and Mr. Tokuma didn’t like to hear bad news at the big meeting, so mentioning crowd-pleasing topics like business disasters and potential financial collapse was out. While everyone else was struggling with their topics, I was delivering Entertainment Tonight, name-dropping the names of America’s most famous movie stars courtesy of Harvey Weinstein’s expansive vision of the possible (but the very unlikely).
Up I would go onto the big stage with hundreds of pairs of eyes trained on me, the audience’s ears alert from having been enlightened and entertained by the dynamic duo of Mr. Tokuma and his old-world (samurai era) blustering brilliance and Mr. Suzuki and his hip, insightful, and funny message that the company was about to harness new technologies and ride them to success. I took the microphone and tried my best to sound good in Japanese. I did my best to deliver my speech in manly, confident Japanese.
It is a fairly well-kept secret in Japan—something that the Japanese will not tell you until you’ve been there for twenty-five years (if then)—that most foreign males speak like women. The vast majority of Japanese-language teachers are women, and they never really dwell on the fact that men and women speak the Japanese language very differently, and that for a man to speak like a woman immediately reduces his effectiveness as a public speaker to near zero.
The Japanese in general are still fairly open about how they consider blacks and gay people to be inferior (though less open about how they think the same of Chinese and Koreans and a group of Japanese former outcasts known euphemistically as burakumin, “village people”). As a man, when you speak like a woman, the first impression you give is that you are effeminate or gay or both (or Chinese, depending on how you look). When I first learned this, it was pretty much already too late to correct. I also felt even more self-conscious about public speaking than before. And thanks to our chairman, Tokuma Shoten had a particularly manly-man culture of behavior. But then, how hard is it after all to stand up on a stage and reel off the names of America’s most paparazzi-plagued movie stars?
I would begin my talk by doing a little business updating, giving some information about the overseas sales of the company’s animated and live-action films. Miramax had also bought Daiei’s hit film Shall We Dance? and had big plans for the US release. After putting up some numbers, which always sounded more impressive expressed in dollars or euros because most people couldn’t do the math in their heads, I would launch into the report on the casting of the US version of Princess Mononoke. The cast list changed weekly and Harvey Weinstein rarely distinguished between wished for and confirmed. Leonardo DiCaprio agreed to play Ashitaka. Robin Williams is going to perform Jigo Bo. Juliet Binoche will be Lady Eboshi. Cameron Diaz will be San. Meryl Streep is going to do Moro. The audience was impressed and didn’t even seem to notice or mind that actors who had committed one month before would then be out in the next. I was on the verge of discovering one of Tokuma-shacho’s own secrets: for some audiences, if you’re entertaining enough, it doesn’t really matter that what you are saying isn’t factually accurate or strictly true. A whiff of truthiness will suffice.
Also, if you are a gaijin giving a speech in Japanese you start out with a huge advantage. You get a lot of points just for the fact that you can speak and are speaking a more or less recognizable version of the Japanese language. Yes, if you are a gaijin and male you are probably using mostly the female forms of speech that you learned from your female Japanese teacher. Many of the words you choose are wrong, like in the film Sophie’s Choice when Meryl Streep’s character misidentifies a seersucker suit as a cocksucker suit or like President Clinton’s Polish translator getting the wrong word for “delighted.”
As a gaijin you’re lovable and amusing and maybe less threatening by being imperfect. The audience forgives you for your cultural and linguistic mistakes because at least you’re trying. Like a little kid, you’re not expected to understand the complexities that make up the Japanese psyche or the subtleties of the language that give it a voice. Whatever you do know about it just makes you seem precocious. So, as a public speaker you succeed even when you’re not really good at it.
It may not be fair, but fair after all, is not really an Asian concept.
2
A Different Kind of Princess
Princess Mononoke
The Studio Ghibli film Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) directed by Hayao Miyazaki was released in theaters in Japan in July of 1997. Set in Japan’s Muromachi period, the story follows Prince Ashitaka, who is caught in a struggle between the gods of a forest and the humans who consume its resources. The film was a critical and commercial blockbuster, became the highest-grossing film in Japan of 1997, and held Japan’s box office record for Japanese-made films until 2001 when Miyazaki’s Spirited Away broke that record. On each and every weekend in the months of July and August, people stood in long lines outside movie theaters all across Japan to see Princess Mononoke. For the first two months of its release every showing was completely sold out.
Princess Mononoke played in movie theaters in Japan for more than one year. Ticket sales reached 19 billion yen ($160 million). This was a new Japanese box office record, nearly double the biggest box office success for a Japanese film. The previous Japanese-film record-holder, Nankyoku Monogatari, had grossed about $89 million. Steven Spielberg’s E.T., the previous all-time record holder, had earned $133 million in Japan and had held the record since 1983. For fifteen years, no other film had even come close to E.T.’s record. Even big Hollywood blockbuster movies in Japan rarely earned more than $60 million. Princess Mononoke, a non-Hollywood film, and a hand-drawn animated film, had nearly tripled that.
This unprecedented box office success was a cultural phenomenon so big that even foreign news agencies and big international newspapers and TV networks took notice. Princess Mononoke did not conform to anyone’s idea of what a Japanese hit movie would be. And once the foreign press began to notice, the Japanese took an even greater interest.
When I joined Tokuma Shoten, the parent company of Studio Ghibli, Princess Mononoke was still being furiously drawn in pencil. The finished drawings were painstakingly hand-painted onto transparent single sheets of cellulous acetate called cels. The cels were individually photographed to be joined together to make a film. It was October 1996 and production of the new film at Studio Ghibli was only about halfway through. Although the film was in full production, its director, Hayao Miyazaki, had not finished writing the final fifth of the film. He hadn’t yet decided how it would end.
My boss when I joined Tokuma/Ghibli,