Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: National Lampoon's Chinese Vacation

Thanks for your time. I’ll try to make this quick. Picture Little Miss Sunshine meets National Lampoon’s Family Vacation meets Lost in Translation, but set in China’s Henan province and featuring a Chinese-American family. We’re talking a cross-cultural slapstick pic, but generous in spirit – generous especially to the on-location sets in Henan since the Henan Tourism Bureau is ponying up the big bucks. I see Ang Lee helming this. My thinking is he wants to get away from all the pretentious and soporific Merchant-Ivoryesque stuff he’s been doing. You with me so far? Good.

So this family – an older émigré Chinese couple, pampered American-born kids, daughters-in-law and obnoxious grandchildren – piles onto a bus with dodgy air conditioning and crisscrosses Henan during a searing heat wave. Sweaty hilarity ensues. They start off in Beijing, where the grandparents and a couple of their kids live. Oldest son (I’m thinking B.D. Wong for this role) and his brood arrive from California and wham! They’re promptly locked down in H1N1 quarantine. Resourceful Gramps (maybe George Takei?) is determined that no one will spoil his itinerary, so he mobilizes a commando posse of migrant workers and busts them out. For the rest of the pic we’ve got the Health Department people chasing the family – let’s call them “the Kuos” – around Henan. You lovin’ this yet? Let me continue.

At one point the family manages to get a whole school of Shaolin monks chasing them through the streets of Dengfeng. We riff on all the kung fu classics a la Tarantino’s Kill Bill. We showcase scenic Mt. Songshan, and somehow we put them on the extravagant set of the “Zen Shaolin” show – 500 performers doing martial arts and reinterpreted traditional dance against a massive, USD 15 million mountain valley backdrop, all to the music of Tan Dun. I swear it’s on par with the Olympic opening ceremony. (The Tourism Bureau is pretty insistent that we include this.) But hey, I’m preaching to the choir, right? Product placement, branded entertainment, whatever you want to call it – it’s how films get made these days. We’re both realists, right? There’s no fighting it.

Oh, while we’re at it, I may as well mention that we’ll also want to highlight Zhengdong New District in Zhengzhou. I’ve got some candidate scenes to shoot there. You’ll love it. It’s an unrivaled feat of futuristic urban planning, a hundred square kilometers of glass and steel that’s going to be home to five million people. Amazing what cash-flush technocrats can do when they set their mind to it.

At some point the B.D. Wong character, who’s a typical Chinese-American science nerd, decides he has to try smuggling some dinosaur eggs out of Xixia Dinosaur Park. So now, in addition to monks and quarantine enforcement people, you’ve got these local paleontologists after them too. What a riot, yeah?

Another sub-plot involves the grandmother (Nancy Kwan?) and her efforts to expose the inadequate parenting skills of her two sons and daughters-in-law. Grandma is secretly gleeful at the heat wave and has paid the driver to cripple the bus’s air conditioning unit just to ratchet up the tension in this implicit test of mettle. They suffer in silence until Number 2 son (Russell Wong? Jason Scott Lee? Or I could just play the role) and his wife (Lucy Liu?) totally win the contest by coming down to breakfast on time consistently and not letting any signs of personal discomfort show through. What do you think now, Mom?

Where was I. Anyway, the thing culminates in an anti-climactic visit to the ancestral village, where leathery, gap-toothed farmers identifying themselves as distant relatives paw at them and make things really uncomfortable. Actually, I’m still working on that scene. All the standard gags will be in there, of course – diarrhea, weird banquet food, ping-pong tournament … you know the drill.

So, you in? Well, I gotta tell you, I have some nibbles from some pretty big names. I can get you a treatment in the next week or so. Oh … are you sure?

OK, well, I have another one about this Chinese-American guy – I’m thinking Russell Wong, maybe Jason Scott Lee – who writes a column for an expat magazine in Beijing …