In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re taking a look back at how unfair representation in early Hollywood led to the creation of one of the first Chinese American film studios in the country.
Frustrations with “one-dimensional,” “demeaning” characters
Sandy Lee can trace her family’s history in America back to the late 1860s. By the 1880s, her ancestors moved from San Francisco to settle in New York City’s Chinatown and opened a business at 31 Pell St.
That same building is now an insurance company, still owned by her family.
Her grandfather, Harold Lee, became a prosperous businessman at the turn of the last century.
“He had a grocery store. He had a curio shop. He started to change people’s money and it became a foreign exchange,” she said.
In the 1920s, Chinese leaders wrote to the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, disappointed by yet another unfair portrayal of their community in film.
“The representations of Chinese and Asians in early Hollywood were really like kind of one-dimensional and really demeaning,” said Herb Tam, Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America.
In response, the board told them to make their own movies if they wanted to change stereotypes. That’s when Harold and his uncle Lee Kee Do founded and financed the Great Wall Film Company in 1921.
“In the 1920s, they had a small population here, but they still had the yearning for culture and film and art,” Lee told Brooklyn reporter Hannah Kliger.
“‘Do-it-yourself’ mentality”
The streets of the city can look almost unrecognizable more than 100 years later, but researchers say I.S. 281 Joseph B. Cavallaro along Cropsey Avenue in Gravesend now stands on the site of the former studio. Some of its early films, distributed both in the U.S. and in China, were shot out of Southern Brooklyn.
“The film company the Lee family created is really reflective of a kind of ‘do-it-yourself’ mentality, and an entrepreneurialship within Chinese-American communities,” Tam said.
The studio eventually moved to Shanghai, producing around two dozen films in a decade. Few still remain, most were lost. The company went dark with the onset of the Great Depression, but the Lee family’s impact in the world of cinema continued with the creation of the New York Chinese Film Exchange.
“My grandfather also bought a theater right on Park Row… and he renamed it the Silver Star,” Lee said. “It was a really big deal. On the weekends, you would go to the Chinese movies.”
Movies remain in the family’s blood. A 1940s photo shows Sandy’s uncle Henry Lee perched on a camera truck, shooting a news reel. Descendants include film production designers, media researchers and TV executives, still making their mark in the world of media.
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