Golden Harvest
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Golden Harvest (嘉禾) Template:Sehk is a film production, distribution and exhibition company based in Hong Kong.
Notable names in the company include its founders, the veteran film producers Raymond Chow (鄒文懐) and Leonard Ho or Ho Koon Cheung (何冠昌). Chow and Ho were executives with Hong Kong's top studio, Shaw Brothers, but left in 1970 to form their own studio. They succeeded by taking a different approach from the highly centralized Shaws model. Golden Harvest contracted with independent producers and gave talent more generous pay and greater creative freedom. Some filmmakers and actors from Shaws defected. But the making of the company was a 1971 deal with soon-to-be martial arts superstar Bruce Lee, after he had turned down the low-paying, standard contract offered him by Shaws.
In 1973, Golden Harvest entered into a pioneering co-production with Hollywood for the English-language Lee film Enter the Dragon (龍爭虎鬥), a worldwide hit made with the Warner Brothers studio.
Golden Harvest supplanted Shaw Brothers as Hong Kong's dominant studio by the end of the '70s and retained that position into the '90s. Its greatest asset for years was that from the 1980s until very recently, it produced almost all of the films of Jackie Chan, Asia's top box office star.
The company has passed its heyday, and now produces fewer than five films a year. Cinema management in Hong Kong and in Mainland China is now its main business activity.
See also
References
- Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-674-00214-8
- Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute, 1997. ISBN 0-85170-514-6
- Yang, Jeff. Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema. New York: Atria, 2003. ISBN 0-7434-4817-0