A Kim Jong-Il Production Page 9
Kim Il-Sung managed to keep South Korea in a state of constant paranoia, and the South Korean government’s response was to grow more tyrannical itself. Decreeing martial law, Park Chung-Hee introduced a new constitution giving himself dictatorial power for life. Troops and tanks occupied the streets of Seoul to discourage any protests. Many in South Korea were gnawed by confusion and insecurity. If North Korea was such a terrible dictatorship because people weren’t allowed to do or say as they pleased, how was the South, as they were told, a democracy, since people there weren’t free to do or say as they pleased either?
As a filmmaker, Shin was confronted with new motion picture laws that tightened the already stringent censorship code and introduced a rule whereby the right to freedom of speech could be suspended at any time if the state deemed it necessary. Censorship became so stringent that even a scene in which a character complained too strongly about the weather could be considered “antisocial” and ordered removed. One year the law insisted all production companies should make fifteen films, forcing them to grow; the next it would reverse, banning any single company from making more than five films, and producers, having just gone to great pains to expand so they could produce a wide slate of films, were now forbidden to do so. The system had descended into a farce of incompetence, corruption, and bullying.
Not that any of it was truly to blame for Shin’s pushing Shin Film ever closer to the abyss. He was good at making money, but had little talent for holding on to it. Shin Film had always lurched from huge success to near financial ruin on a worryingly regular basis. One year the situation was so dire, the studio looked like it might have to downsize; eighteen months later the company was flush and expanding. A few months after that it was on the brink of bankruptcy again. So far Shin Film had withstood every storm. But this time Shin had overstretched his company’s resources by buying the vast Anyang Film Studio near Seoul, the biggest physical studio in Asia, with three echoing soundstages, an audio recording studio, offices, an editing suite, a company canteen, a swimming pool, and a gym. Predictably he struggled to make efficient use of so much space, and soon had to resort to renting parcels of it out to fellow producers. And, after years of using creative (albeit unlawful) practices to successfully circumvent the government’s regulations over import and export quotas, Shin finally got caught.
He had always been laid-back about rules and laws. He saw them as things that applied to other people, ordinary people, not to him, and he had no problem breaking them. His friendship with Park Chung-Hee had often come in handy in that sense. In 1965, when the Office of Public Ethics had wanted to ban one of Shin’s films, all he’d had to do was call Park to have the order reversed. A year later the government took Shin to court, accusing him of embezzlement, fraud, and tax evasion for falsely claiming that his latest release, Monkey Goes West, had been a coproduction with Hong Kong company Shaw Brothers, when in fact it was a straight Shaw Brothers production. Needing a coproduction on the books to fulfill the government’s import quotas, Shin had bought a print from Run Run Shaw, spliced in a few close-up shots of one of his Korean actors, slapped on his own credits, and dubbed Korean dialogue onto the print, releasing the film as one of his own. He was found guilty and fined 210 million won (USD $775,000) but, astonishingly, was still given permission to release the film. To Shin, that was all that mattered. Two months later he was arrested again, for the same offense on another film. Again he was found guilty, fined, and allowed to release the film anyway.
Many Korean filmmakers were inventive improvisers when it came to finding ways to bend the rules, but Shin was the canniest of them all. When the law banned companies from making more than five films each, he quietly reorganized Shin Film into what was technically four smaller companies, thereby allowing him to make twenty films. When the censorship board ordered him to cut an offensive scene from a certain film, Shin followed the order—and then spliced the provocative scene into the final cut of an entirely different picture, which had already screened in front of the board and received approval. When he needed an extra couple of movies to fulfill quotas, he put his name on Chinese films he hadn’t actually directed and passed them off as his own.
Shin’s self-confidence had turned into hubris. He was starting to feel invincible.
As he would soon discover, he was anything but.
* * *
IT TURNED OUT TO BE SHIN’S SON!
It was August 1974. Choi Eun-Hee woke up ready for a day like every other. She was forty-seven years old and acting less often, but had few regrets. She had performed for twenty-seven years and starred in over seventy-five films—a good run. She was enjoying being a mother. Four years earlier, at Shin’s urging, she had opened a performance academy on the Anyang back lot, and had surprised herself by becoming all-consumed by the process of guiding and mentoring young actors. Shin Film was tiptoeing just the right side of bankruptcy, and Shin’s films were a little less popular than they used to be: tastes had moved on and, just maybe, the sheer volume of films the law demanded had exhausted his inspiration a little, but she felt sure things would be all right.
And then today, there it was. The headline. Screaming at her from the front page of the film magazine, along with a picture of Oh Su-Mi, a young starlet who was starring in Shin’s new picture, Farewell, about a man torn between his wife and a young employee of the Korean embassy in France, played by Su-Mi. Shin and the cast and crew had just returned from Paris, where they had filmed location shots for the movie. Choi had already heard rumors that Oh had been flirting with Shin, even that she and Shin had shared a hotel room during the shoot. Shin had had the occasional short fling before but Choi always turned a blind eye, because “I knew that he loved only me, so it didn’t bother me much.” He was in love with her and he was in love with making movies. The few women who came and went were only distractions. But “this time it felt different,” Choi said. Oh was an actress, and much younger than her; it felt like her husband had brought his indiscretions into their business, their filmmaking.
The headline screamed, “IT TURNED OUT TO BE SHIN’S SON!” The words kicked the air out of her chest. Shin had been carrying on with the twenty-five-year-old Oh Su-Mi for a while now, the article said, and the young actress had recently given birth to a baby boy.
Shin’s baby boy.
Choi struggled to take it in. My husband’s baby boy.
When Shin came home from work that night, he was spooked by the anxiety and pallor on his wife’s face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you all right?” Choi didn’t answer. It can’t be true, she was thinking. We have been everything to each other. Something like this can’t happen to us.
She felt too embarrassed to ask friends or colleagues to confirm the headline—she still held out the hope that this was sensationalist gossip. So, a few days later, she went to Oh’s house. She stood across the street, hesitantly staring at the door. Night fell. She was about to give up and go home when, right before curfew, Oh’s door opened, and Shin Sang-Ok snuck out, collar up to hide his face.
* * *
The argument was hideous. Shin promised Choi the fling was a mistake, that he was no longer with Oh Su-Mi.
“It’s just a rumor. You can’t believe a rumor like that,” Shin shrugged.
“I saw everything with my own eyes! I went to her house! I saw everything,” she repeated. “Is it true she gave birth to your son?”
Shin’s face grew ashen.
“It’s nothing,” he finally said. “Give me some time … I’ll sort it out…” She screamed at him to leave the house. She pushed him out of the room, slammed the door on him, locked it, and held it shut.
“Please just wait,” she heard her husband say again and again on the other side. “I’ll take care of it.”
She could never forgive him.
* * *
She had so much to make sense of. Oh was now happily talking to the film magazines, enjoying the column inches. She told a journalist that she didn�
�t want to marry Shin, nor did she expect him to get a divorce; “I just want to be near him.” Desperate to confront her, to ask how she could be doing this to a family, Choi went to Oh’s house. It wasn’t uncommon, in those days, for a wife to show up at her husband’s mistress’s doorstep looking to pull some hair off her head and knock some teeth out of her pretty mouth. Choi just wanted to talk. She knocked. When the door opened, there stood Oh, looking young as a child—and carrying in her arms an infant boy. Choi’s anger drained out of her, unbearable pain rushing in to replace it. “I almost forgot why I was there when I saw the baby,” Choi wrote many years later. “I just wanted to hold him, because he was my husband’s son.”
Oh refused to say a single word to her. She just stood there with what Choi interpreted as defiance. “Her silence,” Choi said, “felt like she was saying, ‘I am the woman who gave birth to his child, when you couldn’t.’”
At home that night, Choi cried more than she had ever thought she could. She didn’t stop until it was nearly dawn.
* * *
Shin was taken to court again, this time for bribing a censorship official. He denied the accusation even though he admitted the entire censorship system had become “all about who one bribed and how much one paid.” This time, while officials waited for a trial date, they briefly put Shin in jail—to teach him a lesson, maybe, and remind him what real power, not film producer power, was. With her husband sitting in a cell, nearly bankrupt, Choi’s heart softened just a little. She hadn’t seen Shin since the night she’d thrown him out of the house, but now she went to visit him in jail. She brought scissors and told him he needed a haircut. Shin was ecstatic to see her. She cut his hair in silence, wiped his neck clean, and left. She still couldn’t speak to him. Then, a few days later, she learned that Oh was visiting him regularly, and that he wasn’t turning her away.
Shin was released and moved out of their home. Choi was devastated and lonely. She had lost her husband, her best friend, and her closest creative partner. She couldn’t sleep. She smoked too much. Every night she drank herself to bed. The ups and downs were heartrending. One day she found out that Shin wasn’t living with Oh but in a temporary rental by himself, and was heartened; another day she learned that Shin was remaking Chun-Hie, a film in which she had starred sixteen years earlier, this time with Oh in the title role, and the pain was as fresh and blinding as before.
The judge acquitted Shin of the bribery charge. Rather than admit he had just narrowly avoided ruin, Shin took it as a sign that he would always come out on top. Yet the loss of Choi was, from a business perspective, a disastrous development. In traditional Korean society, wives were expected to find happiness and prosperity through their husbands, because they provided. When Choi—who had been famous first, who had always personally made more money, who in so many ways was wiser and more sensible—left Shin, it exacerbated his precarious situation. Until now his success had depended in great part on Choi’s creative, strategic, and financial contributions.
Bankruptcy soon began to look unavoidable. Shin Film was bleeding money, and Shin’s recent efforts at refilling its coffers by making erotic, sensationalist films—exploitation pictures with soft-core hints of lesbianism and titles like Female Prisoner 407 and Cruel Stories of Yi Dynasty Women—had not only failed to pack theaters but had diminished Shin Film’s aura of quality and sophistication. Shin Film had always been like a family business: two of Shin’s brothers worked for him, as did Choi’s younger brother, and everyone’s personal funds were tied into the company’s fortunes. When assets had to be sold, Shin and Choi lost their house, as did Choi’s parents. One day Choi’s younger brother stood in Shin’s office and shouted in his face for several minutes, blaming him for mismanaging the company and spending too much money. It was the first time Shin had ever been scolded by someone younger than him.
Shin’s friends and colleagues had never seen him this stressed. Censorship had become his bogeyman, and he railed constantly about “the system” and how politicians meddled with things they didn’t understand. He did everything he could to taunt the government. He wanted to provoke it and to beat it, without realizing how isolated he had become. The older generation had never forgotten the young upstart who had stolen an older man’s wife, and the more jealous and resentful of his peers felt it was only fair that, after profiting from what they had come to call “the bad film laws,” those laws should bring Shin Sang-Ok back down to earth—and hard. The Oh Su-Mi scandal had put him at odds with the generally conservative morals of his country, and Choi’s friends were deserting him, including President Park. It was his censorship system Shin was mocking—Park, after all, was the system—and on a deeper, more personal level, Park was a very conservative man. He had been devoted to his wife until the day she died, killed by the bullet intended for him, and since then he had slept with her picture, flowers, and a book of poetry dedicated to her by his bedside table. Shin and Choi had been friends of his and his wife’s, they had visited the Blue House and had couples’ dinners together. That Shin had treated Choi with such disrespect was unbecoming and disappointing to Park’s sensibilities.
In 1974, Shin submitted his new film, a war picture called A Thirteen-Year-Old Boy, to the Berlin Film Festival without bothering to get a stamp of approval from the Ministry of Information. When the film festival accepted the movie, a formal invitation card was sent to the ministry, which turned down the request, apologizing that the film wasn’t an approved Korean production. Shin considered appealing to Park, but he was dissuaded from it. The president, he was told, was “furious and betrayed” by the filmmaker’s recent behavior. With that, Shin had lost his last political ally.
* * *
In the end—after all the controversies, the arrests, the affair, the scandal, and the bankruptcy—it was a three-second kiss that ended Shin Sang-Ok’s career.
In November 1975, Shin screened a preview of his new coproduction with Shaw Brothers, Rose and Wild Dog, for an audience made up mostly of high school students. A shot of a couple kissing, the woman topless, had been ordered cut by the censorship board, but at this screening it had been left in, in what seemed to be, on Shin’s part, either indifference or insolence. The students told their families about the kiss, and the story hit the newspapers. The penalty, according to the law, was for screenings of the film to be canceled until the offensive scene was removed. But the Office of Public Ethics had had enough of Shin Sang-Ok. Citing a violation of the public morals code, it stripped Shin Film of its production license, effective immediately.
It says something about Shin Sang-Ok that he was stunned. He had never imagined it would come to this. Stubbornly, he sued in court, refusing to accept the censorship decision. After he had filed the suit, Shin said, he received a visit from agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. They took him to Namsan.
Namsan, the mountain in central Seoul, was the location of the KCIA headquarters. This is where activists, dissidents, suspects, and witnesses were dragged in for questioning, many of them tortured. Some never left. The KCIA was famous for its “Korean barbecue,” in which a detainee was strung up by his wrists and ankles and hung over a bonfire until he confessed. None of this, luckily, befell Shin. He was seated in a dark room, refused food or sleep, and questioned at length. Pressure was brought to bear and it was made clear to him that his license would never be restored. By the time the agents let him go, Shin had withdrawn his lawsuit and accepted his punishment.
* * *
The Shin Film office in Myeongdong was shuttered, sending shock waves through the industry. An era was over. In truth, the studio was well past its former glory: in the 1960s, the company had had up to three hundred employees on the books; in 1975 it had fewer than ten.
With Shin Film out of business and the Anyang lot deserted, Choi’s Academy of Cinematic Arts also fell into financial difficulties. The school had become Choi’s baby, and her husband’s selfish, headstrong foolishness threatened to take that aw
ay from her, too.
In 1976, Oh Su-Mi’s second child by Shin, a girl, was born. Shin had kept insisting he was through with her. Choi, who had been hoping for a way to eventually repair their marriage, didn’t even know the girl was pregnant. After twenty-two years of marriage, she asked for a divorce.
* * *
Choi was brokenhearted, disgraced, and humiliated. She felt a muffled hate for her husband, out there in Seoul, living a secret life after tearing hers down. And yet, “I missed him,” she said.
Her mother died weeks after the divorce was granted, and out of respect, Shin attended the funeral. It was the first time Choi had seen him since the divorce. He looked wrecked, his “vibrant side,” Choi said, completely gone. He was still coming to terms with a life in which he wasn’t allowed to stand behind a camera and make movies. They spoke briefly. Shin told her he was going to the United States, in the hope he could go on making films there.
For the next two years, Choi would look after her children and try to keep the Academy—the last thing she had left—afloat. Shin traveled the world, applying for visas, looking for somewhere he could find legal status and money to start making movies again. They drifted apart. Those years, Shin said later, “represented the most difficult, frustrating, and unbearable period of my life.” His career as a filmmaker was over.
9
Repulse Bay
Choi Eun-Hee stared into the rumbling ocean waters below and told herself to jump. The freighter groaned and vibrated under her feet as it plowed through the waves, spreading white foam on either side of the hull. Do it, Choi thought. Jump in and it will all be over.