Turning Reporting Into Movies: What Became of the Trend *The Great Pacific Escape* Started?

If this is going to be a business, who can produce "nonfiction" steadily enough to feed it? And what does adaptation mean for this kind of writing?

In 2015, Du Qiang, then 27, went to a county town in Northeast China to piece together a case from 2011: on the fishing boat Lu Rong 2682, 33 crew members had killed one another, and only 11 came back alive.

Du Qiang had first heard about it in 2013. Working out when the first man involved would finish his sentence, he went straight to the Northeast and spent more than ten days interviewing him.

The piece, later titled The Great Pacific Escape (《太平洋大逃杀》), became the way many people outside the media — film and TV companies above all — first came across nonfiction writing.

The Great Pacific Escape went up at noon on January 14, 2016. Du Qiang watched the read count on WeChat. By three or four in the afternoon it had reached only a few thousand. He was disappointed.

Then, as the number shot up that evening, friend requests began arriving from people at film and TV companies who wanted to buy the movie rights. "Some of them were blunt about it — hold this for me, don't give it to anyone else," Du Qiang said, still sounding surprised. "No. I never expected any of that."

Le Vision Pictures won, at a price the media widely reported as "in the millions of yuan."

"Nonfiction" is a loose word. It covers every kind of fact-based writing and is not always tied to journalism. The Chinese term, a direct rendering of the English, is new here. What reporters used to produce after long stretches of interviewing and investigation was called reportage literature, documentary literature, in-depth reporting, or the long feature. Because it implied a mature command of investigative writing, it marked out the best journalists. Now it has become a fashionable business concept.

Hollywood has fed the halo. In 2012, Argo, adapted from a nonfiction book and a Wired magazine article, won the Oscar for Best Picture. Condé Nast set up a subsidiary, Condé Nast Entertainment, to turn nonfiction reporting into films and documentaries for Netflix or Sony Pictures Classics.

The other arrival of 2016, alongside Du Qiang and The Great Pacific Escape, was Real Story Project, founded by Lei Lei, a former reporter at Southern Weekly and GQ. It lives mainly as a WeChat official account and publishes one article a day, anywhere from a few thousand characters to tens of thousands.

The subjects run all over the place: students in love with their teachers, broadcasters in Xiamen who shout announcements at Taiwan through loudspeakers, disgraced officials, Chinese people who marry foreigners on paper to emigrate. Pieces that pass 100,000 reads are not common on Real Story Project, but among those whose counts are visible, the average runs to seventy or eighty thousand.

Real Story Project is held up as an example of a journalist starting a business. In an interview, Lei Lei said he hoped film and TV would bring in money for these "nonfiction works." Once a story is written it can be published, made into a book, or shot. As Lei Lei put it: "Of those three industries, film and television is probably the one that can unlock the most value."

Every week Lei Lei meets people from at least one or two production companies to talk about buying rights. Since 2016 he has sold more than a dozen sets of rights, and several of those projects are already in development. One day in September, he posted on WeChat Moments to mark his first film-project planning meeting: "Working quietly. In a year everyone will see the films and shows Real Story Project produces."

Before settling on Le Vision Pictures, Du Qiang talked to production companies one at a time. The first offered 150,000 yuan. "Pretty high," Du Qiang said, laughing. "Sort of. Say I'd sold something like this before for 20,000 — then 150,000 would obviously be an outrageous price."

But the more companies he saw, the higher the offers climbed. He chose Le Vision, he said, not because its "millions" was the biggest number, but because "back then the Le brand was still solid."

Looking back at that first offer, Du Qiang said: "Honestly, 150,000 was never realistic. Far too low. It's just that at the time you had no sense of the thing. No one had done it before."

The "millions" figure startled Lei Lei too. He was then working at a rights company that handled the Great Pacific Escape deal, though he had no hand in it himself. His own estimate had been 50,000 to 100,000 yuan, arrived at by comparing it with similar deals the company had done. That, he thought, was "already as high as it could go."

Lei Lei joked, "That works out to about 100 yuan a character. Not bad at all." A thousand yuan per thousand characters already counts as a high fee to a writer, but film and TV money has shifted the whole frame of reference for pay.

Even now, nonfiction writers cannot work out how these deals should be priced. The reason is simple: not one of the films has been released — not The Great Pacific Escape, not anything from Real Story Project, not any other piece of nonfiction whose rights have sold. With no way to know what the finished product earns, there is no way to price the rights.

One nonfiction-based film has come out and done enormous business: Operation Mekong. But its "nonfiction" came not from a journalist; it came from the Ministry of Public Security.

In October 2011, two Chinese cargo ships were attacked in the Golden Triangle; 13 crew members were killed and one went missing. The case was solved in 2012 and the suspects were handed over to China. The ministry decided to make a film out of it and invited bids from production companies. China Film Group, Bona Film Group and others submitted their approach to the adaptation, budgets and script outlines.

The ministry picked Bona's proposal: a 200-million-yuan budget and the promise to "shoot it like an American blockbuster." Bona lined up Hong Kong director Dante Lam and actors Eddie Peng and Zhang Hanyu to get the film moving.

What interested Dante Lam was "finally having a story that let me shoot an action film outside a Hong Kong setting, like US Navy SEALs enforcing the law." Working through the script with the ministry, he met plenty of objections. "They were all so hardline — this won't do, that won't do. It was awkward to sit through… If I couldn't shoot the things I wanted, then forget it."

Xia Chongyuan, a Party Committee member of the Ministry of Public Security and head of its Political Department, hoped that "artists and writers will go on paying attention to police work and caring about police culture… and create more outstanding works that warm the heart, open the mind and bring people together, works filled with the spirit of realism and heroism, making a fresh contribution to the great development and flourishing of public security culture."

Operation Mekong took 1.2 billion yuan at the box office, sixth for the year. Its success came from more than the natural pull of a true story. The political moment helped too: a patriotic film about police and soldiers can draw on a large part of the audience's feeling for the country.

To a production company, there is little difference between a story from a journalist, a case from the Ministry of Public Security, and something that simply happened in China. The term they use is "realist subject matter." Dearest, American Dreams in China and Saving Mr. Wu all belong to it.

So-called nonfiction adaptation is really the process of turning a piece of reporting into a piece of entertainment, which of course needs a production company.

Plenty of people are drawn by the "realness." Zhang Ji, who wrote the screenplay for Dearest, believes that a true event compelling enough to be read widely usually comes with strong characters and a story already shaped like drama, and both are the foundation of a good feature film.

Dong Chenchen, chairman of Chenming Media, goes further: "Audiences accept real, moving human feeling completely… the material a true story gives you is, for the most part, better in texture than fiction developed from nothing." Chenming Media had invested in Lei Lei's Real Story Project a few months earlier.

Here, Du Qiang thinks, what production companies want and what nonfiction writers can supply line up well. One of the tests his feature-writing team applies when choosing a subject is a strong story. "You can read that as high drama — the chain of events is long, the person did a lot of things, the plot keeps turning."

But writers and screenwriters alike agree that nonfiction and a script are two entirely different products, made with different methods and different skills.

A real event is sprawling, Zhang Ji said, and a film has only two hours, so the filmmaker has to find a precise dramatic theme. Transplanting the event whole will not do it.

Because every production company is in its own situation, none takes nonfiction wholesale. A company that has just made a crime film is unlikely to start another one soon.

Hence the idea of commissioning. A production company names a theme or a lead and asks a nonfiction writer to bring their interviewing, investigating and material-organizing skills to bear, producing a piece of nonfiction that a screenwriter then works up into a script.

Du Qiang used surrogacy as an example. "You want a story about surrogacy. OK, we put a writer on it, and out comes a piece of 30,000 or 50,000 characters, with people in it, a story, plot, plus the industry background and the technical detail. It's all there."

Commissioning is no guarantee either. Chen Haoyi, the director who bought the film rights to the report The Godfather's Last Enemy (《黑帮教父最后的敌人》), said he is developing an original project alongside the nonfiction adaptation. Script development is uncertain, so whichever is ready first goes first.

Dong Chenchen also insisted there is no point looking for general rules in how the film industry develops content. While working with Real Story Project on adaptations, Chenming Media has an in-house team writing original scripts. From pitch to script to finished film, each stage filters the last.

Serve the market, but don't lose the principles of reporting: that is the position nonfiction writers and organizations say they hold.

Du Qiang is careful when he talks about commissioned projects. When a request comes in, they first weigh it internally against their own standards for choosing subjects and turn it down if it doesn't fit, rather than "taking it the moment someone hands over money." What they finally deliver to the production company is still nonfiction writing and raw material, not a script.

About a year and a half has passed since the rights to The Great Pacific Escape sold, and Du Qiang says he hasn't checked on it in more than six months. As far as he knows the project has run into censorship trouble, though the script should be finished. Le Vision Pictures' answer was that The Great Pacific Escape is still in early development.

Du Qiang used to work at ONE Lab, a nonfiction writing team run by Li Haipeng, former editor-in-chief of Esquire China. ONE Lab sat under the ONE team at Han Han's Tingdong Culture, and it is the name the media reach for whenever they discuss "adapting nonfiction for the screen."

In early October 2017, Li Haipeng left, and the ONE Lab team planned to set up a new studio. The press generally read this as the failure of their film and TV venture. Du Qiang denies it: "Looking at last year's income, whether from commissioned writing or selling rights, we could cover our own costs." That no one checked the claim with him bothers him.

Nonfiction writers still want to "make the model work" — to wait for one nonfiction-based film to open and vouch for what the writing is worth. They are careful to mention the other options too, writing fees and publishing royalties, even though this kind of material is not mainstream in publishing and the royalties it brings look like no easy way to cash in.

Lei Lei plans to accumulate more material until it forms a library. He compares it to web fiction: "Every year it delivers a fixed volume of work to the production companies, who pick through it and then put things into production. We're fairly passive at the moment, because we haven't built up enough work."

Real Story Project's material comes from roughly three places: original stories sent in by users, pieces its editors commission from journalists or writers, and work by its contracted writers. It also runs its own "feature and biography production line." Lei Lei says they now get three or four hundred submissions a day, of which only one or two are developed enough to use. They mine those for material, and editors take it from there.

Producing nonfiction steadily and in volume is agreed to be hard. Zeng Ming, features director at GQ, calls it "uncontrollable." "The normal cycle is about two months, but to guarantee quality you sometimes need longer."

Nonfiction writers usually need professional training, and most of them know each other at least a little.

Du Qiang and Lei Lei meet often, but they rarely talk about the business of nonfiction. Du Qiang said: "We're not living as badly as you all seem to think."