Janet Yang on breaking the rules to bring ‘The Joy Luck Club’ to the screen

Ad Age is marking Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Bing Chen turns the spotlight to Janet Yang, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose credits as a producer include “The Joy Luck Club,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Over the Moon.” Here, Yang writes about the challenge of bringing “The Joy Luck Club” to the big screen.

I was first introduced to “The Joy Luck Club” in manuscript form.

I had just returned from China, where I had what I thought was the pinnacle experience of my life: working with Steven Spielberg as his eyes and ears in China for the making of his historic film “Empire of the Sun.” Shanghai really delivered, Steven was happy, and for me, I had a close-up view of production from the best in the business, which forever changed the course of my life.  

Back in L.A., Steven’s producer, Kathy Kennedy, designated me the Universal Studios executive on the Amblin account, and now she was taking me to New York to meet with publishers of upcoming books that might be adapted into films. Toward the end of a meeting at Putnam, an editor turned to me and said they just paid the highest amount ever for a first-time novelist, based only on three discreet chapters. She handed me a small stack of pages.

On the plane ride back, I devoured these pages and quietly sobbed. I simply had never read anything at all that resembled my family life or reflected my inner life. I was incredulous that the cultural nuances I grew up with could be so accurately and poetically revealed. Amy Tan shined a light on things that were right before my eyes but which I did not see. After I met with Amy, she started sending me chapters as she wrote them. I vowed to her I would do anything to get the movie made. 

As a brand-new producer, I didn’t know about certain unwritten rules of studio moviemaking back then—that subtitles are practically verboten, that flashbacks are highly frowned upon, and the biggest one of all: Non-white people cannot make up the majority of a cast.

So I forged ahead, blind to the obstacles. Eventually, Amy attracted the talents of director Wayne Wang and co-writer Ron Bass and we had a “package.” The best decision they made was to actually write the script rather than beg for funds to develop it. That way, it would be exactly what we all wanted and no one could take the project away from us. But the “package” had no big names in the cast.

Through our merry-go-round of meetings, we suffered through questions like: Can you put more Americans in it? We knew they meant white Americans.

We received one—just one—greenlight, thanks to Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney. And that’s all we needed.

Postscript: While Jeffrey wholeheartedly supported the movie, the marketing department presented initial mock-ups of posters where not one Asian face was presented in full. Some were in woodcuts, others showed the backs of heads. They were flummoxed when we confronted them as to why, and we fortunately prevailed.

Lessons: Forget about the rules. Prove instead that it can be done. Don’t worry about all the no’s—all you need is one yes. Stick to your guns.