Brian T Tue Feb 04, 2014 12:39 pm
Not knocking the silent or golden eras for sure. If you skim through my "now watching" posts, you'll see I've been watching my fair share of both over the past couple of years, and still have mountains of both yet to tackle, but I think it's really a question of eras that has popped up here because of my simple oversight in the original post. Obviously the Hong Kong studio system was very much influenced by the Hollywood model, but it managed to make it work
considerably later into the century and that's no mean feat. And even when Hong Kong's studio system started to give way to independents and smaller corporations, those independents likewise operated with a similar "factory" mindset: "crank out as much as you can, as fast as you can" (Philip Ko Fei and a few others were still thinking this way right into the early 2000's as my immense VCD library attests -- mind you, lots of junky movies by then, which was the inevitable trade-off).
Like you say, we won't see that kind of prodigious output from Hollywood ever again—or from Hong Kong cinema or most others for that matter (though I have my suspicions about the Filipino industry)—but implied in my original comment (i thought) was the notion that even in the 60's and 70's we weren't seeing it from Hollywood anymore (well, unless you factor in the numbers from the exploitation markets), which is a shame because that's the era when the studio system finally started to see the shackles come off, but naturally by then it—and filmmaking in general—seemed to have evolved to value quality over quantity. In theory, anyway. Mind you, that era did produce a staggering amount of provocative, progressive cinema and technical advancements that Hong Kong filmmakers and other industries often didn't/couldn't adapt until much later (example: ZU using FX techniques that were already old hat in Hollywood films; or nearly the whole of the "second wave" and their sociological explorations).
As much as I admire the products of the silent and golden era Hollywood factories, Hong Kong cinema had the benefit of its factories churning out product in a much less restrictive and more technologically advanced era and environment than Hollywood of the 1910's to 1950's—in spite of if it being a bit behind the curve on the latest techniques out of L.A.—which is why Wu Ma and his contemporaries could be as prolific as they were throughout the 1970's and 1980's, while the era for doing so in Hollywood was long past.
Mind you, to followup on your comments about his films, I'm not surprised he might have rubbed people the wrong way. I should seek out that commentary—it sound's interesting. Some of his 80's/90's supernatural films are real mixed bags: reliable (if increasingly outmoded) technical skill, above-average martial arts stuff (usually), but too many childish asides. Mind you, I haven't seen all his films from that era, so those silly bits may have been exceptions.
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Actually if you pick studio directors up until the 50s it is easy to find ones who could match that output. It is the newer Hollywood (and European) directors who tend to do fewer.
