Creative cage match

By Lu Qianwen Source:Global Times Published: 2015-11-29 18:23:01

Alibaba Pictures VP takes aim at screenwriters


Photo:Liu Xidan/GT

"We will not hire professional screenwriters in the future," remarked Alibaba Pictures Vice President Xu Yuanxiang at the Original VS established IP forum in Tianjin on Friday before adding, "I'm going to teach you screenwriters here today a new way of life." Xu's comments ruffled the feathers of domestic sreenwriters throughout the country, leading many screenwriters, including some well-known names, to sound the horn of protest and state they will no longer cooperate with Alibaba Pictures in the future.

A senior executive from the cultural and entertainment branch of China's wealthiest and the most influential company, The Alibaba Group, what would possess Xu to put himself and his studio at odds with so many of China's influential screenwriters? Especially considering that the studio was only established last year and is in urgent need of talent.

Xu's choice of words may indeed have been inappropriate. However, while controversial, his thinking is not entirely without reason.

Industrialized creativity

The core point of Xu's remarks can be summarized thus: Alibaba Pictures plans to nurture its own pool of talented screenwriters by assembling a pool of potential writers from online forums and literature websites, to include fan fiction writers. This pool will be divided into different groups, with each group working on its own screenplays. A panel of established screenwriters will then judge content produced by these groups, selecting the best works. Groups whose works are chosen will be awarded both financially and in terms of reputation, such as having their names listed in the credits.

This dog-eat-dog way of cultivating talent infuriates screenwriters who have come up in the industry through different environments.

"Locking up all those forum and fan fiction writers and having them fight each other is not fostering creativity, but rather incubating disaster. It tramples on the dignity of us all," Dong Runnian, the screenwriter for the film Breakup Buddies and the upcoming Mr. Six, posted on his Sina Weibo Saturday.

Other well-known screenwriters have stepped forward with similar views, describing Xu's plans to a gladiatorial arena where creatives will have to fight and kill each other to win.

"After the killing, they (Alibaba Pictures) will hire established screenwriters to harvest those bloody IPs, but the latter won't do it and neither will those online writers," Yu Fei, a screenwriter whose credits include The Eternal Wave and The VI Group of Fatal Case, posted on his Sina Weibo.

"Harvesting IPs" is actually the ultimate goal of all domestic TV and film production companies today. Given the valuable nature of online writing, proven by numerous hit products adapted from popular original online works, studios have gone crazy searching for the latest hot Super IP (referring to any cultural product from which a popular franchise can be developed). Everyone wants to find the next The Lost Tomb or The Journey of Flower.

With the concept of the Internet and "Big Data" baked into their genes, companies like Alibaba Pictures and Tencent Penguin Pictures have been trying, each in its own way, to nurture the next Super IP. 

"We believe this plan is in line with the process of developing Super IPs. Although lots of people are talking about IPs now, not all of them have the capability to create them," Xu said at the forum.

Time to adapt

While he may have put it a bit too bluntly, Xu may have actually exposed not just Alibaba Pictures' plans, but what many other studios in China plan on quietly doing.  With the huge amount of capital being poured into the domestic TV and film production industry over the past two years, the shortage of outstanding scripts and the writers behind them has become a major issue.

Famous actor-turned-director-and-screenwriter Xu Zheng, now crowned the king of comedy production in the mainland with his record-breaking blockbusters like Lost in Thailand, once stated during the TV program Jin Xing Show that while he commands huge box office appeal, he still lacks excellent screenwriters and screenplays.

The huge imbalance between the number of talented screenwriters and the amount of capital flowing into this industry definitely is a factor that leads capital forces to exert their influence on how things are done in the entertainment industry. This is especially true when investors are Internet tycoons, who tend to bring their mass-produced Internet-thinking with them.

When a region's TV and film industry develops to a point where capital investors begin nudging their way into the creative process, industrialization is usually not far behind. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. An essential part of the entire film industry, script writing or adaptation of other works is probably the most nonstandard operation in the entire chain.

According to what Xu described at the forum, Alibaba Pictures is trying standardize this phase of film production, dividing it into different phases and letting different roles join in at different stages to maximise commercial value of a film or show. If good stories can arise from this production method, then it may not actually be all that unreasonable.

Although they may find this method irritating, screenwriters from traditional environments where things were more relaxed, such as art academies, may need to adapt to the way the Internet has affected the entertainment industry, because this industrialization poses a huge threat to their livelihood. After all, industrialized script writing has proven successful in Hollywood and Hong Kong.

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