Review by Cameron Maitland

With Hollywood Chinese, Arthur Dong sets out to document and understand the place of the Chinese in American feature films while also tracing a long history of Chinese-American involvement in the Hollywood industry. As in the similarly styled doc The Celluloid Closet, Hollywood Chinese utilizes film footage and interviews with film artists (including Wayne Wang, Nancy Kwan and Joan Chen) to picture of how Hollywood portrayed the Chinese and also how these Chinese-Americans were affected by and engaged with those images.
Dong based the film around his childhood love of the film Flower Drum Song and the feelings that arose when “his fondest memories in a movie theater became the targets of social and cultural critiques”. Hollywood Chinese gets credit for not shying away from the portrayals of Chinese in early film and its engagement with actors like Christopher Lee who made their careers in yellow-face. The discussions with these actors and their Chinese contemporaries reveal a film industry which exploites stereotypes for financial gain while employing actors who "need to eat" and will take any part. The most interesting revelations come from historian Stephen Gong, who discusses how Chinese-American filmmakers have been working independently since the silent era and shows footage of many actors and filmmakers being directly involved in the birth of Hollywood.
I couldn’t help but feel that Dong was a little too even-handed with the issues, frequently avoiding the brutal realities of Hollywood and praising duds like The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift just because of Chinese involvement in their production. He had interviews with outspoken actors like Tsai Chin, but only let their more pointed comments pepper his film. In the end Hollywood Chinese is an interesting, but artistically and socially unremarkable, doc that is worth a watch mostly for its sense of humour and historical revelations.

Hollywood Chinese
Arthur Dong | USA | 2007 | 89 min

Wed. Oct. 10 | 7:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre