Mark Salzman Spins Success From `Iron And Silk'

Say you're a young American who has just graduated from Yale, where you majored in Chinese. You're fascinated by Chinese Taoist and Zen philosophy. Thanks to a childhood obsession with Kung Fu movies, you're just as fascinated by the martial arts.

What do you do about it?

Spend two years teaching English at a medical college in a Chinese industrial city, where you happen to become the pupil of one of China's most famous martial-arts teachers as well.

Say those two years offer a fascinating glimpse of an alien culture at just the time when it was opening up to the West. You write a book about it. It's published to extravagant praise. In the meantime you've become quite a martial artist yourself.

What comes next?

Why not make the book into a movie in which you're the star?

If this all sounds like a dream come true, rest assured that author/actor Mark Salzman has the giddy glow of success to go with it. He was in town last week to promote the film based on his fine book, ``Iron and Silk.''

The movie, which opens Friday at the Metro Cinemas, is directed by Shirley Sun (producer of Peter Wang's ``A Great Wall''), with Sun and Salzman collaborating on the screenplay. Salzman attributes the existence of the movie to ``the power of accidents.''

The idea of filming the book - an unusual fate for a travel account - came when several Hollywood studios wanted to option ``Iron and Silk.'' Salzman turned the offers down, however. He was nervous at having no control over the final product.

Soon afterward, he saw ``A Great Wall'' and thought that producer Shirley Sun, if anyone, would be the right person to make ``Iron and Silk'' into a movie. But he didn't pursue the matter.

It was only when Sun's car broke down at an Asian film festival in New Haven that she and Salzman met. A friend alerted Salzman to Sun's predicament and he came to the rescue with a beat-up but road-worthy set of wheels.

It must have been quite a festival for him - he met his future wife (the festival director) there as well.

When pressed to choose between the movie and the book, Salzman admits he prefers the book ``not because the quality is higher, but because there's so much more in the book.''

Still, he says, ``the movie is so much better than I ever expected it to be. It's such a treat. I feel like it's Christmas in March.''

Working on the screenplay with Sun, Salzman recalls, was a painful process. A feature film had to be created from a book that was, essentially, an impressionistic series of places and character portraits. Sun insisted that episodes had to relate to each other - they couldn't be included just because they had interesting characters in them. She also wanted to introduce a female angle to the cross-cultural material by developing a four-page episode into a full-fledged love story.

``She didn't want the thing to be a boy-and-his-sword film,'' says Salzman.

Another tradeoff came when Sun decided the film shouldn't be made in Changsa, where Salzman had taught. She felt strongly that Changsa was such a grim city that anything shot there would result in an ugly film which no one would want to see.

Salzman thought that the quirks and kind gestures of characters placed against a dreary industrial backdrop would have an impact and beauty of their own, ``like flowers growing out of sidewalk.'' But Sun won her point, and the film - made in Hangzhou, a picturesque coastal city - is gorgeous.

There were compensations for the various tradeoffs. Sun agreed to let Salzman play himself in the film, something he was keen on because he wanted to ensure that the fight scenes weren't done in the usual action-film manner - frenzied jump cuts, lots of blood, exaggerated sound effects, etc.

``I felt that martial art in its bare, pure form is so beautiful that it doesn't need all that,'' he says.

The other lure of the project was that he'd learn moviemaking firsthand.

Filming started in August 1988 and ended June 2, 1989. On June 3, the company went to Hong Kong to film one last scene. There, they heard the news of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Hangzhou had experienced daily student protests just as Beijing had, Salzman explains, but the mood was ``ebullient.''

``The press was reporting it - and positively. People really thought it was going to do good for the democratic movement.''

Slogans and chants about the friendship of the army and the students were popular, which made it even more of a shock when the news from Beijing came. There had been apprehension all along, but no one expected that kind of violence at that moment.

Salzman, who says he doesn't enjoy travel, hasn't been back to China since then. ``Now that I feel I got my exploration of Chinese philosophy out of my system, I don't really have a desire to go there. I'm glad to be home, eat what I want, and not have to stand in line for train tickets.''

He has been to China in his mind, however, with a novel he's just published, ``The Laughing Sutra'' (Random House, $18.95).

It's a whimsical tale of a Chinese orphan who comes to San Francisco in search of a religious scroll, the laughing sutra, that's said to make those who read it immortal.

Salzman found fiction writing ``much more difficult, but much more satisfying'' than nonfiction.

Working on ``Iron and Silk,'' he says, was like being dropped into a forest, equipped with a compass and a topographical map with certain checkpoints marked. The trick was to get from point A to point B, and ``render it decently.''

With a novel, he says, you have to make your own map, there isn't a compass and there aren't any checkpoints. The choice of paths extends a full 360 degrees around you: ``The possibilities are endless.''

He has ideas for more novels, but worries that he doesn't have the energy to do it. Eight months after finishing the book, he says, ``I can't even write a sentence, not even a letter home.''

There are no immediate plans for film activity, either. Moviemaking, he discovered, is a collaborative process, and while he's glad of his experience with Sun, he's not sure he wants to repeat it: ``In the long run, I don't think I like collaborating so much.''

It's also an anxious business, he finds, due to the vast sums of money riding on the final product.

``And my whole pursuit of Chinese philosophy was to stop being anxious,'' he quips.

He believes he's gotten almost all the anxiety ironed out of his life, but cautions, ``Talk to me in six months. If I'm still happy then, then I've learned something.''