`Joy Luck Club's' Success Was A Surprise For Tan

While she was writing it, Amy Tan never thought of "The Joy Luck Club" as a movie. Indeed, she didn't think the book would be published.

"If it did get published, I thought it would be like any other book by a first-time writer," she said during a Seattle visit this week. "In other words, it would fall off the shelf or all the copies would be bought by my mother's friends."

Yet just four years after it became a bestseller, this "unfilmable" book, which features eight Chinese-American characters and 16 stories, has been made into a 135-minute movie that doesn't skimp on any of them. Already a box-office hit in New York and Los Angeles, it goes into national release Friday.

Working with Tan almost from the beginning was the Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass ("Rain Man"), who felt that the strength of the book was the diversity of the characters - as well as the universality of the mother-daughter relationships.

"It was such an opportunity, working with the emotional impact of all those stories," said Bass, who accompanied Tan to Seattle. "It's really the first general-audience movie of its kind."

Although Disney sponsored it and Oliver Stone acted as executive producer, the finished film is essentially a three-way collaboration involving Tan, Bass and director Wayne Wang (whose gentle 1985 generation-gap comedy about Chinese-Americans, "Dim Sum," made a lasting impression on Tan).

"The day I thought it was a movie," said Tan, "was the day all three of us met, in January 1990.

"A couple of months after the book hit the bestseller lists, my agent started calling about movie options," she added. "My big fear was that they would make half of the mothers Russian, or that they'd turn the characters into stereotypes."

TIGHT BUDGET

But Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg offered total artistic control, as long as the budget could be kept to $10-11 million. Financing was so tight that Tan had to pay her own way to China, where she worked on rewrites during the two weeks the production stayed there. The other scenes were shot in San Francisco.

The cast includes a few familiar faces (France Nuyen, Rosalind Chao) as well as relative unknowns in key roles (Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin). The filmmakers had no trouble finding the cast they wanted.

"Once the call went out, they came from all over," said Bass. "We had hoped to use Joan Chen, but she was doing `Heaven and Earth' for Oliver Stone at the same time. We also talked with Gong Li (the Chinese star of `Raise the Red Lantern'); she's booked up for the next three years. But this movie defines ensemble acting at its best."

Another well-known Asian actress they didn't end up using was Nancy Kwan, who starred in the 1960 movie of "The World of Suzie Wong" and is angered by "The Joy Luck Club's" mockery of "Suzie Wong" as a racist film. Tan and Bass point out that Nuyen and Chin had also played the spunky Hong Kong prostitute on stage; all feel that the play and film have dated badly, even though they were not perceived as racist at the time.

DRAWN CRITICISM

Like "The Color Purple," "The Joy Luck Club" also has drawn criticism from minority males who feel that it's unfair to them. Tan's book was inspired partly by her mother's marriage to a cruel man in China in the 1930s.

"The problem is that there are so few films about Asian-Americans that each film is expected to represent everything to everyone," said Bass. "It's not like we're ganging up on guys. There are sympathetic men in the film, though we did not do that just for balance. The criticism may not be accurate, but perhaps it's inevitable."

"Thank God we didn't have a woman director or co-writer," Tan laughed.

During this promotional tour, Bass and Tan have found themselves talking about what happened to several of the characters, especially Rose (Rosalind Chao) and Ted (Andrew McCarthy), and they're discussing a sequel - as well as the film version of her second best-seller, "The Kitchen God's Wife."