Random film of the day pulled from the database "The Joy Luck Club" from 1993 — Wayne Wang's drama about four Chinese mothers and their American daughters. Rating 7.2, 139 minutes, USA and China. An ordinary line, if not for one circumstance: this was the second film in Hollywood history with a predominantly Asian cast in a contemporary American story — after "Flower Drum Song" from 1961 — and the first made by a major studio. The third was "Crazy Rich Asians" — only a quarter century later.
The subject hooked me precisely with this gap: a film that by all canons of Hollywood logic should not have existed. Female ensemble without stars, significant portion of dialogue in Mandarin with subtitles, sixteen interwoven stories, white characters only on the periphery. The studio should have turned away — and instead Disney made it, brought it to release, and twenty-seven years later the Library of Congress added the picture to the National Film Registry. Between "nobody believed" and "cultural heritage of the nation" — a story about how the stubbornness of several people outplayed industrial wisdom.
Here too — a rare case where a random find branches out like a network of roads: a publishing detective story about a record advance, a casting expedition across all of America, intrigues around Oliver Stone and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and an epilogue about a person whose refusal in 1988 cost Hollywood twenty-five years of downtime.
Amy Tan came to literature not from a writing career, but from burnout. By the mid-eighties she was working as a freelance business writer for 90 hours a week — not from need, as she admitted herself, but because she "didn't know how to say no."
In 1985 as therapy she enrolled in a workshop at Squaw Valley, and to apply she wrote a story "Endgame" — about a chess-playing girl and her stubborn Chinese mother. The instructor Molly Giles, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, returned the manuscript with a verdict that launched a career: "You don't have one story in thirteen pages here — you have a dozen."
Tan never invented the novel. She listened: "I sat there laughing: 'Come on!' — as if people were telling me their stories and I was writing them down." Each story she then rewrote at least twenty times. The collection was called "Wind and Water" — until agent Sandra Dijkstra noticed within the collection a story about the joy luck club and insisted on renaming. Tan agreed, by her own admission, with the words "the hell with it."
What follows — a detective story worthy of separate adaptation. October 1987: Dijkstra sends out the query. One New York editor responds with polite refusal: the material is good, but "doesn't deserve serious money." Knopf offers $15,000, then $20,000 — Dijkstra refuses, explaining the logic: "If the publisher doesn't pay enough, the book won't be handled properly." She announces a pre-emptive bid of $50,000 — and most publishers consider this sum insane.
Doubleday rolls out $135,000 for two books, but the agent doesn't want to "lock in" the second — and on Friday, "agonizing," Putnam publishing house signs a contract for $50,000 for three finished stories. An advance five times the standard for debuts — for a manuscript that three months earlier they refused to consider "serious money."
Tan's mother was asking her then: "If I die, what will you remember about me?" The book became the answer. Tan finished it in four months in the basement of a Victorian house in San Francisco, and in March 1989 the novel came out. What followed was one of the fastest publishing trajectories of the era: reviews like a synchronized volley (LA Times review from March 12 insiders called pivotal), print run of 140,000 copies by July, and April 13 — a twelve-hour auction of paperback rights with ten participants. Avon gave $1.1 million, St. Martin's — $1.125 million, and in the final round Vintage with its "topping right" bought the edition for $1,237,500 — a record for a debut story collection. The book was translated into 23 languages, sold more than two million copies, and according to Entertainment Weekly data, it spent a total of 75 weeks on NYT bestseller lists.
Between book triumph and film lay years and one big trap. The book was structured as sixteen interwoven stories with nearly sixty speaking roles — and Hollywood wisdom unanimously stamped the manuscript with the word "unfilmable." The first to read it, ironically, was Janet Yang — then a production manager at Universal, who received the manuscript before publication and pitched it to Steven Spielberg at Amblin. The refusal was polite and logical: the studio had just released "Empire of the Sun" — another picture about China and war. Who knew then that thirty-three years later it would be Yang who would head the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the first Asian in that position.
Wayne Wang, perhaps the most famous Asian-American director of that era ("Chan Is Missing," "Dim Sum"), after the cool reception of "Eat a Bowl of Tea" at Cannes swore off making "another Chinese film." He read Tan — and arranged a meeting himself. By January 1990 Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass ("Rain Man") joined the duo: his rescue plan consisted of compressing sixteen stories into the frame of one farewell party and hanging extensive voice-over narration on the film. The farewell party — not from the novel, pure cinematic invention.
Oliver Stone assembled the financial part — and here ties the strangest knot of this story. In 1985 Stone was a pariah in the Asian-American community as screenwriter of "Year of the Dragon" with its gangster clichés, and Wayne Wang — his public critic. Their "unnamed war" ended eight years later with a deal: Stone's company Ixtlan shepherded the project through a development fund at Carolco. Carolco collapsed, the deal died, and then Tan and Bass did what screenwriters usually don't do: wrote the script on spec — without a contract, without money, simply because the story was stronger than reason. They sent the finished script to studios, honestly expecting foreign financing.
Disney bought the script — the most "middlebrow" major, which surprised everyone. Henry Huang and Catherine Galan from Hollywood Pictures brought it personally to Jeffrey Katzenberg, and he, according to Wayne Wang's recollection, said the script reminded him of "Terms of Endearment." A revealing analogy: Katzenberg didn't know how to sell Asian drama, but knew how to sell a tearjerking family bestseller — and mentally substituted one template for another. According to Janet Yang, "other studios expressed interest, but only Disney stepped up."
The deal was honest both ways. The filmmakers got full creative control in exchange for a $10.5–11 million budget — a meager sum for an ensemble drama (for comparison: "A River Runs Through It" by the same producer Patrick Markey cost $12 million). Markey, brought in five weeks before shooting and having a reputation as a master of economizing, immediately cut two stories — on the lake and in the ocean — with the famous formula: "You work at half speed on water."
The tastiest part begins in post-production, because here Disney's behavior refutes the caricature of the "evil major." Wayne Wang's first assembly ran almost four hours — the director and editor Maysie Hoy cut an hour before the screening, and the studio, which by reputation interfered in every scene, here barely intervened until the end. Yang supposed that Disney simply didn't know what to do with such material. But the studio added money: composer, reshoots, sound refinement.
Katzenberg, after watching the rough cut, "got a little confused and asked to clean up the stories" — and it was he who three weeks before press screenings demanded finishing the key confrontation scene between June and her mother "on a harsher note." That's how the line "Never expect anything — only hope" appeared. He also invented the swan feather in the opening credits. A film that has a dozen producers and consultants bears the handwriting of one manager — and this handwriting, rare for Hollywood, improved the scene.
The only publicly documented scene of Wayne Wang's rage happened at a marketing meeting: the studio showed poster variants where there were no faces of Asian characters at all — only the actresses' backs. The film was shot, the script sold, the tests excellent — but the studio was afraid to sell "Asian faces" to the audience until the very end.
Casting director Heidi Levitt received a task no one before her had solved: find eight Asian actresses with distinguishable faces, plus their young versions, plus Chinese babies, plus Mandarin-speaking septuagenarian elders. Eight central characters at different periods of life were played by fifteen actresses — Wayne Wang called it a puzzle: "Mother on top, daughter below, then daughter as a child and mother when young — in China. We moved them around the casting office wall for weeks." His rule: "If the casting is right — half the work is done. If not — I'm in big trouble."
Two of Wayne Wang's principles were worth attention even in 1993. First: not a single Caucasian for Asian roles — direct reference to the recent scandal around "Miss Saigon," where Jonathan Pryce transferred his London role of an Asian engineer to Broadway. "Until an Asian actress can get a major Caucasian role, there's no equality," he formulated. Second: for Chinese roles actresses of any Asian nationalities were considered, because there are too few good roles for Asians to cut by blood. Of the eight main women, half had purely Chinese ancestry. When one noticed Japanese actress didn't pass the test, the director explained it with forensic precision: "The tempo of her speech was very Japanese. White audience doesn't care, but for me — it's off."
Levitt deployed an operation she herself called "community infiltration": Asian theater groups in six cities, Asia Society lists, ads in Chinese newspapers of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The culmination was an open casting in July 1992 in the ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel in Flushing, Queens: two thousand people, most — Mandarin-speaking immigrants who came in pairs of mothers and daughters. Wayne Wang looked into the hall and said: "There are at least four hundred Joy Luck Club stories here." The casting director described the atmosphere of that room in one phrase: "People came not with the desire 'I want to be in movies,' but with the feeling 'this is my story.'"
Result: the eight central roles went to professional "non-name" actresses, each of whom carried a personal biography. Ming-Na Wen, who played June, grew up in Pittsburgh "the only Asian among whites"; Kieu Chinh and France Nuyen have Vietnamese roots. According to Academy archive data, this was the first major studio film where the director, editor, costume designer, most of the cast, and two producers — all Asians. Wayne Wang fundamentally forbade dubbing: Chinese scenes went with subtitles, because the character's voice was part of their truth.
Premiere in three cities (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco) — September 8, 1993; Disney opened the picture with a platform release, and in the first five days it collected over $220,000. Disney's record at that moment: strongest Wednesday-start limited-release live film in studio history. Then — methodical rollout: 19 cities by end of September, several hundred screens by October 1. Result according to Box Office Mojo — $32,901,136 with budget of $10.5–11 million: multiplier above three, which for a platform women's drama with zero star power meant failure of all predictions. CinemaScore gave the picture the highest grade A+ — the audience, not critics, made this film profitable. Roger Ebert put it fifth in his top 10 of the year, Gene Siskel — seventh.
And here begins the second half of the story, far less cozy. Wayne Wang formulated the mission directly: "In the end money decides everything. If 'Joy Luck' hits, there'll be more such films." The film hit — and... nothing happened. The New York Times headline for the 25th anniversary called the phenomenon without euphemism: "In 1993, 'Joy Luck Club' Changed Hollywood. Until It Didn't." The industry drew the only correct conclusion from the correct result — and did nothing.
Twenty-five years later Rosalind Chao admitted: "I thought this would be a new beginning for Asians in America. But 'Club' remained a token for two and a half decades." The ensemble actresses at this time competed with each other for pathetic roles and went into television; Lauren Tom told how her agent "couldn't even get in the room" where they were casting white girlfriends of the same age. She found stability in voicing "Futurama" — there, in her words, age, appearance, and even gender didn't matter.
Why did this happen? Hollywood doesn't count destinies, it counts analogies. For "The Joy Luck Club" no analogy was found — every next project with an Asian cast was compared to it and became hostage to comparison: what if this particular film worked, not the genre? Wayne Wang after the premiere pitched "West Side Story" in Chinatown — refusal; asked simply to cast a good Asian actor for a role not written for an Asian — "a fight I couldn't win." Disney offered Tan to adapt the next book — she refused after Sony with a counter pitch proposed "a Shanghai romance with Lucy Liu and Matthew McConaughey for Chinese box office." Her verdict on the industry: "Everyone sticks a finger in the pie and turns it into mush."
The mathematics of representation in Hollywood looks more absurd than any satire. Between "Flower Drum Song" (1961) and "The Joy Luck Club" (1993) — thirty-two years. Between "Club" and "Crazy Rich Asians" (2018) — twenty-five. During this time a generation of actresses managed to grow up, age, and grow up again, and the industry never once tested the hypothesis "maybe this wasn't an accident?" The box office of "Crazy Rich Asians" — $239 million with budget of $30 million, multiplier around eight — finally gave what "Club" lacked: a modern genre template (romcom instead of heavy drama) and statistics from two points instead of one.
The connection of eras closed beautifully: Lisa Lu, who played An-mei in 1993, in 2018 played the strict grandmother in "Crazy Rich Asians" — the only actress standing in both box office breakthroughs. She was ninety-one years old then.
And the stories of the people in this saga diverged surprisingly widely. Wayne Wang the day after the "Club" premiere got a call from Harvey Weinstein with an offer to finance "Smoke" — and now you reread this scene with a completely different feeling. Ming-Na Wen voiced Mulan and appeared in "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." And Janet Yang, whose pitch to Spielberg in 1988 launched the whole chain of refusals, in August 2022 was elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Thirty-four years between "we'll call you back" and "welcome to the executive chair" — an exact measure of how slowly industries that in words love diversity turn.
In 2020 the Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry — for "cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance." In 2022 Tan and Bass announced work on a sequel; according to Deadline reports, it's in production, the script is ready, and Rosalind Chao says she "cried when she read it."
My favorite detail of this whole story — in exactly where industrial wisdom died. The novel wasn't called bad. It was called unfilmable — not "not worth adapting," but "impossible to adapt so it would pay off." This is a much more reliable position for refusal: you don't argue with taste, you argue with mathematics. But all the mathematics of this saga was built on one unverified axiom — that the audience won't go to a film about people unlike them. Not one studio during the years of wandering spent money to test the axiom. One person named Katzenberg tested it — and that because the theme coincided with his personal memory of "Terms of Endearment."
The second observation is less cozy. "The Joy Luck Club" — a perfect example of what I'd call the single data point effect. The film proved: a story about unlike people pays off. But for the industry one success — that's not proof, that's an accident; analogies aren't built on one point. And twenty-five years passed before the curve got a second point. The real lesson of "Club" isn't even that Hollywood was wrong — but that an industry living on analogies punishes the pioneer twice: first no one believes in its result, then no one believes in its repeatability.
And third — about the price of patience. Tan rewrote each story twenty times. Dijkstra refused Knopf with their twenty thousand, because she knew the price more precisely. Tan and Bass wrote the script without a contract, because the story couldn't wait. This whole chain was made by people who refused to accept "no" as final verdict — and each refused in their own way: someone from faith in the material, someone from stubbornness, someone from love. Industries don't turn from arguments, but from personal bets of people ready to lose everything to someday say "I told you so."