Subway Cinema News

Earlier this spring, we sent out our first press release devoted to the New York Asian Film Festival, and in it we were bragging about an event we were calling, LADY WHIRLWIND: AN EVENING WITH ANGELA MAO. But between then and now, the whole thing went “poof” for a variety of reasons. We believe in transparency, so here’s what happened.

If you read this blog, you probably know who Angela Mao Ying is. Born in Taiwan in 1950, Angela attended Chinese Opera school from a young age and trained for 14 years alongside several other future actors and actresses (like 80’s HK comedy stalwart Charlie Chin and frequent movie villain James Tien). Signed to a contract with Golden Harvest in 1969, she made truckloads of classic kung fu films there, including LADY WHIRLWIND (aka DEEP THRUST), HAPKIDO, WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES and THE TOURNAMENT. Trained in the Korean martial art of hapkido, she (along with frequent co-star and choreographer Sammo Hung) championed the discipline in several of her films. Angela departed Golden Harvest in the late 70’s and made several films in Taiwan, like SCORCHING SUN, FIERCE WIND, WILD FIRE, before retiring from the industry altogether in 1980 to concentrate on her family. Soon afterward, she moved to New York City, where she and her husband own a construction company and several restaurants in Queens.

Last November, Tokyo Filmex, a one-week film festival held in the Yurakucho district, hosted a small tribute to Angela that included a screening of a restored version of HAPKIDO, presented by King Records, who’d acquired the Golden Harvest library of Angela’s films for Japan and were preparing them for special edition DVD releases. King Records brought Angela to Tokyo to conduct some video interviews for the DVDs and they held a special press conference with her prior to the HAPKIDO screening, and I attended (coincidentally, I was joined by NY Post columnist Vincent Musetto, who’s a member of our first-ever competition jury this year). Afterward, I spoke with people from Filmex and they allowed me to go backstage (with Vincent) to meet Angela and her son, George King. I introduced myself and told them that I was a programmer for the NY Asian Film Festival, and that we’d love to host a tribute to her at our 7th edition the following June. Angela seemed interested, and her son gave me his contact information in NY, and that was that.

Flash-forward to February or March of this year, and I contacted Angela’s son about her appearance at the festival. He agreed in general, and said we should work out specifics over the next couple of months. That was enough confirmation for us to move onto the task of deciding which film(s) to show and sourcing prints, a task we knew wouldn’t be easy considering how poorly most Hong Kong films from that era have been archived. Little did we know at the time that this would prove to be the end of the Angela Mao tribute!

We first tried going through Dragon Dynasty, our main sponsorship partner, who own the U.S. home video rights to HAPKIDO. They were very interested in supporting the event, and interviewing Angela for their upcoming DVD, but didn’t have a usable master yet, or a 35mm film print. So we next approached Fortune Star Entertainment, who own the library of Angela’s Golden Harvest films in Hong Kong. King Records had licensed these films for Japanese release, and were supportive of our efforts, but Fortune Star turned out to be a dead end. Not only did they not have any usable 35mm projection prints, they wanted to charge an outrageous amount of money for the poor-quality prints they did own. Considering that this would be a specialty event during our festival, attended by at most 200 people, the massive screening fee that FS insisted on was far, far outside our budget. Even when we appealed to them that Angela herself lived in New York and had agreed to attend the screenings, they remained unmoved.

So our next step was the private print collector network. But it turned out that most of the films in private hands wouldn’t really be appropriate to show as headline events - they were fun, but lesser, films from her body of work, or titles in which she’s only a supporting character - or were in storage or had gone missing. We were also appealing to several Chinese and Taiwanese cultural agencies to help us maybe scrape together the money to bring over the prints from Fortune Star but they all seemed about as interested in helping stage a tribute to one of the great female movie stars of the 70’s and early 80’s as they did in eating dirty socks.

In the end, all these obstacles proved too much for us and we decided, with a great deal of depressed resignation, to cancel the event. The fact that Angela’s son’s phone number had gone dead was kind of a consolation, as it spared us the embarrassment of having to tell them that nobody else seemed interested in contributing to this tribute to one of the icons of martial arts cinema besides us. We’ve got hopes we can pull this off next year, but the first thing we have to do is find masters or prints of her best films, and unfortunately that seems to be nearly impossible. It’s frustrating that in a world where we can go online and watch a video of a cat dancing to Mexican music on Youtube, we can’t find a screenable print of LADY WHIRLWIND.