Straight to Video

Veteran filmmaker Wayne Wang, known for his big-budget Hollywood feel-goods, returns to his roots with a new bit of scrappy guerilla filmmaking uploaded straight to YouTube.

Up until last Friday, you could easily argue that director Wayne Wang had lost his soul. His career began in the early ‘80s with a burst of promise, when he released the critically lauded indie film Chan is Missing, a “semi-documentary” that explored the deep recesses of San Francisco’s Chinatown, a neighborhood where eccentrics dwell and languages mix. An immigrant himself (Wang relocated to the Bay Area from Hong Kong in the 1960s to study film at CalArts), such gritty but accomplished early work became staples of the Chinese-expat-experience genre. Wang was unafraid to examine the malleability of identity, to play with the “Asian-American” label.

“You no longer have any excuse to not make a film—a friend of mine shot an entire feature film on his iPhone.”

But the talented young director soon caught the eyes of big Hollywood execs and fell into the rabbit hole. He achieved his first major picture in 1993 with The Joy Luck Club, based on the bestselling book by Amy Tan, before continuing further into megaplex territory with heartwarmers like Maid in Manhattan, Because of Winn-Dixie, and last year’s Queen Latifah vehicle, Last Holiday.

Now Wang is enjoying a third act, this time as a new-media frontiersman. On October 17th, he released The Princess of Nebraska, a barebones drama about a teenage Chinese immigrant dealing with an unexpected pregnancy. And he released it in an unorthodox way: in YouTube’s Screening Room, in high-definition, for free. The film garnered nearly 200,000 views in one week, making it the biggest online full-length feature release to date (and a clear success when compared with a traditional indie box office release, which is lucky to sell 30,000 tickets).

Wang chose to release the film online as a companion piece to A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a simultaneous theatrical release that’s the more traditional of the two. Both films are based on elegant short stories by the young Chinese author, Yuyun Li, and explore the lives of recent female immigrants searching for identity and stability in a new country. Told he couldn’t release the films as a double feature by his distributor, Wang and his team turned to other avenues. “We thought, wouldn’t it be fun and a bit revolutionary to take a brand new film by a veteran filmmaker and put it on YouTube?” says Matt Dentler, an executive at Cinetic responsible for brokering the YouTube deal. “The film is now attracting audiences that a theatrical film would never attract—people who don’t live in a major city and would not have a chance to see the movie are flocking to it. This is a good sign for the independent filmmaker, and it’s much like what Radiohead did by giving away their music online. You don’t have to always go the traditional route.”