Yu Baimei, Who Made "Bad Movies" With Deng Chao, on Stephen Chow, High and Low Taste, and His Own Work

In the late 1990s, when Yu Baimei was knocking around online, he wrote an essay titled 《刀剖周星驰》 (Dissecting Stephen Chow). Stephen Chow later answered it: "...Mr. Yu Baimei understands me quite well. I'm not afraid of people saying I have no ideas, but I am afraid of people not liking me."

In recent years, Yu Baimei's reputation as a screenwriter and film director has been pretty bad.

The reason is the two comedies he made: Breakup Buddies (2014) and Devil and Angel (2015), both co-directed by Yu Baimei and Deng Chao and written by Yu Baimei. Each took more than 600 million yuan at the box office, and each was stuffed from beginning to end with jokes and set pieces that were awkward, crude, and absurd. On Douban, users rated the two films 5 and 4 out of 10 — squarely in "bad movie" territory.

At the Golden Broom Awards, which are decided by online user votes, Yu Baimei won "Most Disappointing Screenwriter" for Devil and Angel.

But disappointment requires expectation. Some of the viewers venting at Yu Baimei were people who had followed him for years — because long before the films, he had built a decent name for himself in other fields. He entered TV screenwriting in 2000, and even earlier, in the late 1990s, he was already known in the small circles of literary websites like Rongshuxia.

Judged by the work, the job he did best was sitcom writer. From 2000 to 2009 he was head writer at Yingshi, the production company run by Ying Da (director of I Love My Family), and he also worked with Shang Jing (director of My Own Swordsman). The shows that earned him the best word of mouth at the time were a handful of TV series: 《西安虎家》 (The Tiger Family of Xi'an, 2004, 8.8/10), 《无敌三脚猫》 (Invincible Three-Legged Cat, 2009, 8/10), 《房前屋后》 (Front Yard, Back Yard, 2007, 7.9/10), and 《网虫日记》 (Diary of a Web Addict, 2001, 7.6/10).

Most of the public attention Yu Baimei gets today comes from his partnership with Deng Chao.

In August 2013, Deng Chao and Yu Baimei set up a film and TV company together, Chengzi Yingxiang. Backed by Enlight Media and Suning, it exists to house a production team led by the two of them. Besides co-producing Breakup Buddies and Devil and Angel with Enlight Media, the company has invested over the years in films and TV series starring Deng Chao, including Duckweed, I Belonged to You, and 《心理罪之城市之光》 (City of Light).

On the surface, like many hot celebrity studios, it sounds like a company that makes easy money. But in a corner unfamiliar to most film and TV audiences, Chengzi Yingxiang also runs theater — a business usually filed under "niche."

In fact, Yu Baimei and Deng Chao first worked together on a 2009 stage play, 《翠花》 (Cuihua). That year Yu Baimei put together a theater troupe of a dozen-odd people, Baimei Studio. Cuihua, a spoof comedy, took a million yuan on its first run and played nearly 200 performances over the next three years. Some criticized it for a hollow plot; others praised how funny it was. You may have seen the photos of Deng Chao in drag that spread online — perhaps the one image of him that has genuinely been called "funny." They come from this play.

Baimei Studio has produced five plays. The most successful was the original stage version of Breakup Buddies, a commercial hit that ran more than 300 performances for close to 300,000 people. In 2015, studio actors including Dai Lele (a sitcom actress and Yu Baimei's wife) and Liang Chao appeared on Dragon TV's comedy show 《欢乐喜剧人》 (Top Funny Comedian).

In 2016, Chengzi Yingxiang added the Chao Theater. This small playhouse on Taijichang Hutong, in Beijing's Dongdan area, opened in June last year and drew attention thanks to Deng Chao talking it up on Weibo and an opening ceremony packed with celebrities. The two had spent three or four years preparing a theater of their own, and signed a 10-year lease on what used to be the Ministry of Commerce's internal auditorium.

These days Yu Baimei's Weibo often carries listings for Chao Theater shows. Unlike the arty, romantic style of venues such as Gulou West Theater or Meng Jinghui's Beehive Theater, the Chao Theater is closer to Mahua FunAge: mainly commercial comedy. Alongside its own productions it also brings in work from China and abroad, including 《恋人》 (Lovers), produced by Stanley Kwan and directed by Tan Shaoyuan; 《蠢蛋》 (Dumbass), starring Ren Suxi, the female lead of Mr. Donkey; and, most recently, the Australian tap-dance show The Tap Pack, picked up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, plus a British children's show, 《孩子臭》 (Kids Stink).

At the end of March, QDaily met Yu Baimei at Chengzi Yingxiang's offices, in an art district in Beijing's Wangjing. Told that the conversation would cover everything he had been through over the past decade and more, including every reaction he has drawn from audiences, the 42-year-old looked at the computer screen on the table and said, "Whatever."

Soon enough, though, once the talk turned to specifics — personal or professional — he could hardly wait to speak.

Yu Baimei has clearly spent time thinking about the "image" he left with the media and with audiences after Breakup Buddies and Devil and Angel, and he has answers ready.

He starts with a distinction: taste. "People sometimes mistake those movies for our own taste. Of course they aren't," he says. "After I finished those two, I did a lot of interviews, and people were surprised — oh, so this is what you're really like. I said, do you think I have to stand on a table to talk, too?" "Watch Deng Chao act in something else, or read something else I've written, and you'd see how that could never be my taste."

As he sees it, what he does is "design." "We admit some of the designs were off. We've gone back over our own work — what should have been cut, what should have been pushed forward." He sorts audiences by age and understands himself to be making "crazy comedy, action comedy" for younger viewers. (In his account, after more than a decade on realist material, he and Deng Chao wanted to make films in the exaggerated, fantastical Hollywood crazy-comedy style — Jim Carrey's kind. "Think about it, that whole system.") "We knew what we were doing when we made it. My dad loves my earlier shows — Front Yard, Back Yard, he watches it over and over and cries every time. I told him, don't watch this one."

What all this "design" is for, what Yu Baimei wants, is "the masses." "In screenwriting we borrow a term from math: the greatest common divisor. We're all forever looking for the greatest common divisor. On the way to finding it there are successes and there are failures."

But on the results of those two attempts, his own verdict is vague. All he says is, "I've been in this business a few years now, and self-doubt and self-regard always get mixed up together." He sidesteps the question of where he gets his "sense of accomplishment," and concludes instead: "I don't rely on a sense of accomplishment, I don't rely on results. Rely on results and you can't stay excited." What he will openly rely on is the process: writing the script makes him "very happy." "The act of creating is at least a pleasure. At least what I write today gives me pleasure."

In the same breath he adds that "sometimes the pleasure isn't all that strong." What matters more is a state of mind he calls "freedom" and "independence." "Pick any work you like — Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, The Shawshank Redemption — almost every work of art that lines up with universal values is, at some level, human beings chasing spiritual freedom." But once the subject turns to audiences, this man who talks constantly about "the masses" shows how torn he is about staying "independent" of what people say. "We can't write plays praising one thing and then follow the crowd in our own lives. Put the two together and it sounds like a contradiction — I'm thinking about what the audience wants, and I don't care what they think of me. But it has to be both."

In fact Yu Baimei is fixated on how audiences react, fixated on the laughter he hears. "A couple of days ago I was on a plane and the person next to me laughing woke me up. I sat up and the plane was playing Devil and Angel. He just kept laughing and laughing. I was so satisfied — a 40-year-old man."

As a viewer, Yu Baimei worships comedy. He says everyone born in the 1970s shares a "video-parlor memory." "I loved I Love My Family. I loved Hong Kong movies, loved hanging around video parlors — Stephen Chow, Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan, that kind of work. You end up loving this stuff naturally."

In the late 1990s, in his early twenties, he was a young man with a "screenwriting dream" — he insists he never had a "directing dream." He was back home in Xi'an then, a computer science graduate of Xidian University working at an aviation research institute, with no future in sight, only the ordinary texture of daily life. (Today, when Yu Baimei lists the work he is proudest of, he names 《西安虎家》 (The Tiger Family of Xi'an), the 2004 series in Xi'an dialect about "a family of brothers and neighbors on the street behind the City God Temple in the old city of Xi'an.") All his enthusiasm went into Rongshuxia and other online literary forums.

Today "web fiction" is a household idea, carried by pay-to-read sites like Qidian and Jinjiang Literature City. Back in 1997, Rongshuxia — founded in Shanghai by Zhu Weilian, a Chinese American — became one of the first gathering places for online writers, with 4.5 million registered users at its peak.

A number of writers made their names inside that small circle: Li Xunhuan (better known now as the publisher Lu Jinbo), Annie Baby (now Qing Shan), Murong Xuecun, Xing Yusen, Ning Caishen, and others.

Yu Baimei was one of them. "Yu Baimei" is the screen name he made up for himself then; few people now remember his thoroughly ordinary real name, Wu Tao. His best-known work was a series called 《网络论剑》 (Dueling Online), which included 《大梦先觉篇》 (Waking First From the Great Dream), 《刀剖周星驰篇》 (Dissecting Stephen Chow), 《爱情老狗篇》 (Love's Old Dog), and 《主力难当篇》 (Hard to Be the Main Force) — arguments about theory, written in a jeering, jokey style. He also wrote several stories: 《马世龙禁烟》 (Ma Shilong Bans Smoking), 《寻常男女》 (Ordinary Men and Women), and 《洪水退去之时》 (When the Flood Recedes).

His most widely circulated piece, Dissecting Stephen Chow, took up the divide between the masses and the elite, the modern and the traditional, the refined and the vulgar.

This is what he wrote: "At bottom, gag comedy is in fact a rebellion against traditional comedy — laughing for laughing's sake, content in the service of form and of the box office. That proposition alone has something going for it. If the art we used to understand was a bomb wrapped in a sugar coating, Stephen Chow confessed from the start that his films do the opposite: the bomb goes off and what pours out is syrup. Against that stand the other manufacturers of mass culture, who, even while racking their brains for box office, still insist on dressing their stories up as grand traditional narratives, acting them out as a cause-and-effect philosophy full of moral judgment and correct values. Haven't we had enough of this shoddy work, this mutton shop selling dog meat?"

"I was very disappointed to see Jim Carrey's new film 《楚门的世界》, also rendered as 《杜鲁门节目》 — The Truman Show... And in his best-known film, The Mask, no amount of technical polish can quite cover his bone-deep contempt for popular art, which is why he is forever striking poses and performing his own 'thought.' The trouble is that this thinking is no more than picture-book illustration — dogmatic, shallow, not serious. If that counts as a serious philosophical experience, it's bound to make people laugh. My guess is that he wants to be a box-office Salinger, to make a wildly popular The Catcher in the Rye. How naive of him."

In 2000, that essay was collected in 《周星驰不完全手册》 (The Incomplete Stephen Chow Handbook), published by Current Affairs Press. Stephen Chow helped edit the book, and in the preface he wrote: "Take the first essay — Mr. Yu Baimei understands me quite well. Ideas matter a great deal in film, but there's no need to deliberately show off your own thinking. When I make a film, the first thing is to get people to watch it, and to make them laugh once they do. Only in the course of making people laugh do I find ideas I can't keep from saying, and then I say them. I'm not afraid of people saying I have no ideas, but I am afraid of people not liking me."

Stephen Chow was at his online peak then. He made A Chinese Odyssey in 1995; it died at the box office in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but after 1997 it became a sensation on mainland campuses and the internet. By Yu Baimei's present account, comedy packed this densely with gags never scores well in any "evaluation system." Stephen Chow's comedies, A Chinese Odyssey included, plainly argue the other way.

Even Stephen Chow's followers back then probably never expected that by the 2017 New Year release of Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back, the question he would have to answer from audiences would be: "Just how much longer is A Chinese Odyssey going to be milked?"

In fact, during those late-1990s years online — much like people today who pour all their energy into virtual worlds — Yu Baimei was anxious about his real life for a while. At the research institute he was "ready to coast through a whole career at that work unit." "My freedom of spirit was cards, ball games, skipping work. The unit couldn't fire me. Socially that's a pretty negative identity, but I had no way out. I started writing in my spare time and put all that helplessness into what I wrote."

He says he wrote a story, 《欢乐麻将》 (Happy Mahjong), describing that state: "It's about me going to work at the institute every day, and one day, playing mahjong, one of my mahjong partners dies out of nowhere, and it pulls out a chain of killings — people keep dying, one after another. In the end it turns out they all killed themselves. Every one of them had been shown a secretly filmed video of a week of their own life, and realized their lives were just too boring."

In the summer of 2000, Yu Baimei and two friends, Ning Caishen and Mikko (Wang Shaoxiong), went to Beijing together to take a shot at screenwriting. Their first script, 《网虫日记》 (Diary of a Web Addict), was modeled on the three of them: "flaky, unreliable Mikko; the compulsive poser and great lover Yu Baimei; and Ning Caishen, a hooligan faking loyalty — three famous web addicts converge on Beijing."

Diary of a Web Addict reached Ying Da (who had made I Love My Family in 1997) through the novelist Wang Shuo. In 1999 and 2000, Rongshuxia held two "Online Literature Awards" and invited a group of established literary writers to judge, among them A Cheng, Wang Anyi, Yu Hua, and Wang Shuo. Yu Baimei and his peers sat on the same panel as "elders of web fiction."

Yu Baimei says he feels "setbacks at every turn" while writing, but in conversation he came across as confident. As a young man he won the regard of several people he considers "elders." Besides Wang Shuo, he brings up Liu Heng, whom he calls his "teacher" — the screenwriter of Ju Dou, The Story of Qiu Ju, 《贫嘴张大民幸福生活》 (The Happy Life of Big-Mouth Zhang Damin), and Assembly. The two talked all night at the literary awards and hit it off; ever since, whenever Yu Baimei has run into a problem he goes to Liu Heng to "sort it all out at once."

Yu Baimei says the prototype for Deng Chao's character in Cuihua actually came from a comic example Wang Shuo tossed out while reading the Diary of a Web Addict script. But Yu Baimei hasn't been in touch with Wang Shuo for five or six years. "Every time, I work up the nerve to call him for New Year or whatever, and he's baffled about why I'd bother. He's a rare, genuinely unguarded person. Every time I see him I feel a lot of pressure, and I have to do a lot of mental preparation first."

By his own description, Yu Baimei is a man "with no enemies in life," because he doesn't "expect to get anything out of relationships." What he enjoys instead is a way of dealing with people where "with friends you just hang out, and with everyone else you stick to business — I have income because I have work, and if the work is bad the income goes down."

Through that first sitcom, Diary of a Web Addict, Yu Baimei met Deng Chao, then still a student at the Central Academy of Drama, who had staged a sketch adapted from the show at school. The two talked about everything there was to talk about, and their careers ended up all but tied together. "To each other, we're the most important person there is." At 26, Yu Baimei also met, through Diary of a Web Addict, the woman who became his wife: Dai Lele, later known as a sitcom actress.

In 2009, at 34, Yu Baimei decided to switch to theater.

He calls it "a very impulsive decision." He had made good money from the day he entered television — "10,000 yuan an episode" right at the start — and once he was writing series on his own, a single show could bring in more than a million.

Theater, by contrast, lives in a small market confined to first-tier cities. From 2005, Beijing's privately run small theaters began to reach some scale, drawing money from film, television, and other industries. But with rent and taxes ever more expensive, their moment of growth came with harsher and harsher conditions for survival.

What drove Yu Baimei out was a set of problems in the TV industry. The first was the decline of the sitcom itself. "Sitcoms in China have always been in a terribly awkward spot. Ying Da, and later Shang Jing — after their breakout shows, each of them hit a wall." Inside China's traditional state television system, a show's price is set not by ratings but by production cost, so even the best sitcoms sell for cabbage prices and can't afford actors once they get famous. "Basically, the moment a sitcom becomes a huge hit is the moment the team has to break up. Once a show takes off they can never assemble that cast and crew again, and they can't sell it at that price anymore."

More fundamental was the screenwriter's position itself: subordinate to directors and stars, with no "say" in anything. "In 2005 I wrote Front Yard, Back Yard — 50 episodes, by myself, a year and a half, alone. Every time I finished a series it felt like I'd died once. Then I realized working that way was worth less and less. You spend a year and a half writing a 50-episode show, they give you 50 days to shoot it, and you have to rewrite huge chunks or they can't finish. In the end you're revising back and forth at home, and then you get to the set and they say we're cutting this part, there's no time. It does terrible damage to the work." "I stopped caring. I'd had enough. I didn't want to work that way anymore."

He turns to theater and his tone changes completely, into longing: "A stage play is a different thing. I'm not dependent on stars. All the actors are here every day, I can get in there with them, we eat and sleep in the same place, and that's enough. If I'm interested I can put it on, and when it's done, if audiences like it they buy tickets. The competition is relatively fair. The income, of course, is a lot worse."

He stayed away only briefly. In 2011 he wrote 《延安爱情》 (Yan'an Love), a TV series starring Deng Chao and directed by Cao Baoping (director of The Dead End) — but this time not a sitcom.

Yu Baimei stopped worrying about having a "say" long ago. He now stands at the opposite end, thinking about how to "take responsibility for more people." Counting from the founding of his studio, he has been a boss for eight years. At Chengzi Yingxiang, Deng Chao is chairman and Yu Baimei's title is "artistic director." The company has 40 or 50 employees in all, including the actors at Chao Theater and Baimei Studio and a young team of screenwriters.

He mentions another kind of "sense of accomplishment" — this one he doesn't dodge. "When our company is running well, there are dozens of young people working together. They work with me and their lives get better. They're happier, and I try hard to give them the conditions I never had when I faced the world alone — nobody bullying them, none of the office politics I hate most. I think that's the sense of accomplishment that comes with being a boss."

Yu Baimei says he enjoys a daily state in which he keeps his own irritability in check, where "life is pretty good when you don't have to lose your temper." While shooting a film he promised his staff he would keep smiling for three months, and asked them to hold him to it. "This stretch of our lives — the film may not turn out well, but these three months we're happy." He remembers his fondness for "making people happy" with a touch of vanity: "As a kid I loved it — having that charm, being able to make other people happy. I don't want to deal with unhappy things."

The most important thing about "freedom," Yu Baimei says, is choosing for yourself what you like and what you do.

He stresses that taste comes before chasing revenue. For Chengzi Yingxiang, theater is a "hobby": it doesn't lose money, but it doesn't make money either. "If I were after box office, why would I do stage plays? Why run a theater? What's the difference between the two? One of the kids at our theater once asked me how our income from plays compares with the income from films. I told him one of our films should earn what the theater earns in 50 years. Fine — so why do I do this, and why wouldn't I do it? Am I supposed to spend every step of my life doing what other people prescribe? I like it, so I do it."

When the theater opened, in fact, Yu Baimei offered the press a comparison: running a theater is like loving golf or keeping horses. You pay membership fees, or you maintain the animals. They pay rent, pay for the renovation, and answer for their own profits and losses.

By that logic, film is not a "hobby."

Chengzi Yingxiang has several plans this year. Given the reviews for Breakup Buddies and Devil and Angel, this next part may worry some viewers: Yu Baimei and Deng Chao are making a third comedy together this year. Yu Baimei has a plain reason for it. "We still haven't made the comedy we have in our heads. Sooner or later we have to make one we're satisfied with."

The company has also turned Breakup Buddies into a TV series, 《复合大师》 (Reunion Master). It is directed by Chen Chang, a Baimei Studio director, with Yu Baimei as producer and Jia Nailiang and Wang Xiaochen in the lead roles, and it will air on Zhejiang TV and iQiyi within the year.

Yu Baimei says bluntly, "TV stations love the idea, it sells very well," then adds: "A TV series isn't chasing the same taste a film is, so the story runs long and slow, and every stretch of human feeling in it is solid."

Cover image from Baike and ICEO; in-body images are film stills.