As we are launching the new website and many of you are, no doubt, unfamiliar with our little studio. I thought today I would share with you some of its history.
These days I am typically described as the founder and CEO of Drowsy Emperor and that, technically, is true; for this version of Drowsy Emperor anyway. But decades before this current iteration the original Drowsy Emperor came into being above a goldsmith’s shop back on a dusty Shanghai side street. My grandfather Selwyn Schrodinger founded that first Drowsy Emperor studio.
He was a photographer and early adopter of that new technology for moving pictures who left Constantinople with his family in 1928 to try his luck in booming Shanghai which, back then, was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.
With the money taken from the sale of the family’s Constantinople photography studio and art gallery Selwyn Schrodinger plunged into Shanghai’s burgeoning film industry teaming with local Chinese entrepreneurs and talent. Success came quickly. After a series of “exotic China” travelogue shorts sold well in overseas theatre markets the first Drowsy Emperor decided to move beyond mere documentary footage and trained its sights on telling local stories geared to markets closer to home.
The studio’s first major success outside the travelogue genre was a serial inspired by local hero Constable MeeMee Khang of the Shanghai Chinese Police or Shanghai Public Security Bureau as it was formally known.
On the basis of the success of the serials both in Shanghai and most of Asia and even some strong positive reactions to limited screenings in North America significant funding was raised for a major feature presentation showcasing the Constable Khang character but 3 months into production the Japanese invasion of 1937 and resulting complications led to the dissolution of the studio and mysterious disappearance of not only Selwyn Schrodinger and key Chinese business partners but even the man referred to these days as “The Original Khang”.
Just watched a favorite film; Robert Altman’s noir classic, “The Long Goodbye”(TLG). Altman’s loose adaption of the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name transplants Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe, armed only with a dark JC Penny suit and his 1950s private eye ethos, into the hedonistic, candy colored, self-absorbed swirl that was Los Angeles in the seventies. Neither the suit nor the ethos had much of a chance.
You could recommend the film on the basis of the music alone. Altman whimsically relies almost solely on variations of the wonderful title tune “The Long Goodbye” composed by John Williams and Johnny Mercer throughout the film. It's (with one wry exception) the only music heard throughout the movie right down to the sound of the femme fatale’s doorbell. However, there is more than just music. The cinematography is gorgeous and Altman’s ongoing mastery of light from black luminescent neon nights to dazzling sun drenched Malibu days is much in evidence. Beyond that the legendary director made some off beat but ultimately inspired casting choices to ably support Altman stalwart Elliot Gould's terrific free flowing Marlowe.
Sterling Hayden, in particular, playing a burnt out Papa Hemmingway type steals every scene that he's in and you're glad he does. Hayden also shares some of the movie's best dialogue with Gould in a scene out back of a Malibu beach house. (Watch the clip below starting at about 4 minutes.)
No one plays addled and intriguing as well as Hayden. Not long after Marlowe rescues Hayden’s character from a dodgy upscale rehab facility, if you listen closely he can even be heard playfully referring to Marlowe offscreen as “Marlborough, the Duke of Bullshit”.
It was while contemplating just how good TLG was scenes from another favorite film, yet another noir; Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (TTM) starring the cerebral tag team of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten kept elbowing their way back into my consciousness. (Spoiler alert: if you have seen neither of these two films I disclose the endings of both films below.)
Apart from quirky musical choices the movies share some other interesting similarities:
i) Both plots involve a man who sets out on a quest to defend the honor of good friend who he believes to be dead.
ii) The friend turns out neither dead nor wrongly accused and has, in fact, through his fake death ruse misled and endangered both his friend and others.
iii) The femme fatale continues to carry a torch for the bad friend despite knowledge of his bad deeds and indications of interest from the hero.
iv) The hero after discovering his friend’s duplicity in the climax of the film confronts and shoots him dead.
v) The closing scenes of the two films are also too alike to be mere coincidence. In TTM Joseph Cotten after seeing his morally challenged friend finally buried for real heads down a large tree lined boulevard in jeep where he once again encounters the femme fatale who passes him walking down that same broad tree lined boulevard. In TLG, Gould after killing his friend emerges from the friend’s hideaway hacienda to walk down a broad tree lined boulevard and encounters the femme fatale who drives a jeep past Gould towards, unknown to her, her now deceased lover.
Follow this link to the final scene of "The Third Man" watch from about the 40 second point.
Follow this link to the final scene of "The Long Goodbye" watch from about the 5:30 mark.
If you haven't seen either of these films they're both well worth watching and if you have seen them I'd watch them again. Either way, "It's okay with me."
Next time: My favorite Mainland China noir films. There are some!
Welcome! This past week I have been involved in a lot of discussions of Drowsy Emperor products and our approach and I thought I’d share excerpts of a transcript of a Q&A session with Brian Rangstrom regarding the Constable Khang series that hit on some interesting issues.
Brian Rangstrom: Nathaniel you’ve been responsible for producing, directing and packaging the current Constable Khang story lines. How would you describe your market and where would you place Khang in the pantheon of great cat characters?
Nathaniel Scobie: Well, I think market wise we are looking at a Tintin style audience from children to adults tilting, perhaps, towards a more sophisticated audience with different age groups experiencing and appreciating the series in different ways.
On Khang’s place in the pantheon of great cat characters well, I’m not sure he’s there yet, but we feel he brings a pretty unique package as far as his look, style, narrative voice and operating environment go.
Brian: What do you think were some of the great cat characters?
Nathaniel: Just off the top of my head Puss in Boots, Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Bagheera from the Jungle Book, the Pink Panther, the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, Hobbes from Calvin and Hobbes, Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat who shares with Khang, I believe, a certain feline charisma, Fritz the Cat who was very edgy, all come to mind. Then of course, all the simpler cat characters geared primarily to children, Tom, Tigger, Sylvester, Scratchy from Itchy and Scratchy, Top Cat, and Snagglepuss. Add to that Garfield, Heathcliff and a host of other comic strip format cats.
Brian: This is an “East meets west” studio what about Asian cat characters?
Nathaniel: I was just getting to that. From an Asian cat character perspective, in Mainland China earlier 20th century there were some wonderful cats painted by the master painter Xu Beihong although he was more famous for his horses. Around that time Feng Zi Kai, who we feature in our Words and Pictures Pioneers section on the DE website also created some memorable felines; including two kittens perched on the toes of a man smoking his pipe, sitting back in a comfortable chair reading a newspaper. More recently, there was a successful cat character called “Black Cat Police Commissioner” popular in the mainland back in the 1980s I was introduced to recently who had some fairly bizarre adventures battling some pretty nasty rats. There was also Sagwa “the Chinese Siamese cat” that attempted to introduce elements of Chinese culture to Western audiences and finally, of course, you can’t discuss cat characters in Asia without mentioning the Asia wide and beyond phenomenon of “Hello Kitty” which exists in a universe all its own.
Brian: Constable Khang’s story lines tend to be fairly sophisticated and you have made a point about stressing you aim for a certain historical accuracy in with your stories set out Shanghai and the surrounding world in the late 1920s and 1930s. So if what you are doing is not quite fantasy what is it?
Nathaniel: That’s a good question. I think the genre we’re operating within with the Constable Khang series is Magic Realism. By that I mean in the Constable Khang stories there tends to be one exceptionally odd thing we ask the audience to accept as normal but having done so then they are pretty much finished with the fantastic or fantasy and events continue on in a world operating very much like our own.
This is also where Constable Khang’s positioning vis a vie some of the other cat characters we just discussed comes into play. On this basis I think the character Khang shares the most with is in fact Puss in Boots in that Khang shares with him the concept of cat character as a “familiar” assisting humans in an otherwise natural setting. I think that is key for understanding the Khang genre. He is unique and special but at the same time he is essentially operating as an accepted and unremarkable element of his world.
Brian: Tell us a bit about the steps you have taken to ensure historical accuracy in the Khang books.
Nathaniel: Over the last few years we have had a good time reviewing thousands of archival notes and photographs, and films from the “Old Shanghai” period and reviewed academic works on the period as well as sources such as the Old Shanghai website which is a great resource for those interested in that place and time etc.… All that said, I would not say we have ensured historical accuracy in the books. I think it better to say we have strived to make the story line as historically and visually accurate as possible without getting in the way of the plot. A similar approach to what we believe Herge followed with the Tintin series. And I think we did a fairly good job in the first book of portraying the complex interrelationships of the three police forces that operated in Shanghai at the time and the historical “extra-settlement” roads dispute which lies at the core of the first Khang adventure and served as an excellent structure upon which to drape the story line.
Brian: Tell us a little about the historical context of Constable Khang’s next adventure.
Nathaniel: Well that occurs in 1930 about one year after the first adventure and revolves around the Black Angel, a statue which at that time was the symbol of Shanghai. But then we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s leave that introduction for another time.