Here comes the Hollywood of Taiwanese films!

Text / 蘇致亨
Picture provided / 國家電影及視聽文化中心、北投溫泉博物館、瘋戲樂工作室

Beitou is a segment of Taiwanese film history that cannot be omitted. As early as 1925, a group of people brought their horses on a gasoline truck to New Beitou at 5:00 in the morning to shoot the first Taiwanese silent drama Whose Fault, which drew a crowd of bathers from hotels. In the 1960s, Beitou had been known as “the  Hollywood of Taiwan” and become an important center for filming Taiwanese films.

Let's go to Beitou and make  authentic  Taiwanese films

It is Taiwanese films that exactly began the industrialization of Taiwanese cinema. With nearly 70% of the population still speaking Taiwanese in the early post-war years, it was quite natural for audiences to crave for films in their native language. However, in the early years of Taiwan's film production environment, audiences had to rely on the  orator  who narrated in Taiwanese in cinemas or the Minnan-speaking films produced in Hong Kong. In Southeast Asia, these films were often called  Xiamen films ; in Taiwan, they become  Taiwanese films . However, although the language spoken in these films is of the same Folo language family as Taiwanese, there are obvious differences in accent and wording. Many Taiwanese directors were not used to hearing it, so they were committed to making an  authentic  Taiwanese film.

The first successful hit was Xue Ping Gui and Wang Bao Chuan, which was released in 1956 by director Ho Ki-Ming in collaboration with the Mai-Liao Arch Music Group in Yunlin. Since then, with the gradual lifting of the ban on negative film, Taiwanese films reached their peak production in the 1960s, with over a hundred films produced each year, equivalent to three new films a week. Of the nearly 1,500 Taiwanese films produced, nearly three out of five were produced in Beitou in the 1960s.

The Fantasy of the Deer Warrior, released in 1961, is known as a natural scenery animal costume fairy tale film in Taiwanese and was set in Beitou.（Picture provided：國家電影及視聽文化中心）

(Picture provided：北投溫泉博物館)

Living in Beitou Shooting Location, integrating into the big family of Taiwanese films

Why Beitou? The main reason is, of course, the hotels in Beitou, which are located everywhere because of the hot springs.After the war, as tourist hotels opened one after another all over Taiwan, the business of Beitou hotels declined and they needed to come up with a new way out, so some hotels began to offer film makers the convenience of accepting checks to attract them to rent rooms for filming. In the 1960s, several hot spring hotels in Beitou, such as Yu Chuan Yuan (玉川園), Peony Manor (牡丹莊), Welcome Guest House (迎賓閣), Quan Yuan Manor (泉源莊), Mei Hua House (美華閣), Phoenix House (鳳凰閣), Hua Chuan (華泉), Xin Hui Fang (心薈芳), Bi Yao (碧瑤), Long Feng Valley (龍鳳谷), Southland Hotel (南國旅社), and Formosa Hotel (福祿摩廈大旅社), became ready-made “film studios” one after another. The rooms in each hotel were different in layout, ranging from Taiwanese, Western and Japanese, and the existing furniture was available in the rooms, making them the most handy studios for Taiwanese fashion films. The rent was only NT$600 to NT$1,000 per day, which was a great deal compared to public film studios where the rent started at NT$7,000 to NT$8,000 per day. Sometimes it was possible that on the upper and lower floors of the same hotel, there were as many rooms as there were new films being shot at the same time, which was quite bustling.

As for location shooting, they could find scenes everywhere around Beitou.

They sometimes went to Beitou Park to shoot, and sometimes visited the railway station to shoot a platform scene.For other scenes, there was Datun Mountain for mountain shooting, Danshui River for water shooting, Baxianzhuang for field shooting, and Zhong Yi Xing Tian Gong for temple shooting.If they wanted to shoot high-end mansions, there were also many guest houses and Wellington Villas.In its heyday, there were more than a dozen movies filmed in Beitou every day.The “express delivery” motorcycles that used to carry the “ladies” in Beitou were more often used to transport the actors and actresses to and from the various hotels and theatrical productions in this period.One actor said he lived in Beitou for about 10 months of the year.When they were at their peak, they could run 6 to 10 films a month.Each film would take at most no more than 10 days to shoot, which means that they would have to shoot more than 100 shots a day to cover the cost.If they did not live in the film studio in Beitou, it was impossible to complete such a workload.

The so-called  living in Beitou Film Studio  actually means that the crew opened two more large rooms in the hot spring hotel, one for men and one for women to sleep on the floor. No matter you were the director, the leading actor, the cinematographer, the lighting crew, the set designer or the extras, everyone paid NT$10 for a set of pillow and blanket. All the actors and actresses slept on tatami bunks and woke up whenever they were called. “Despite the hardships, everyone was really nice, no one was a big name, and everyone slept on tatami mats,” Taiwanese actor Tsai Yang-Ming once recalled. Every morning at 6:00 or 7:00 a.m., when it was about to dawn, the manager would come into the room and rush everyone out of bed for breakfast. The entrances to several hot spring hotels are often crowded with people waiting in line for a hot spring bath. The scene was just like being in a marketplace with all the hustle and bustle. In every interview with members of the Taiwanese film industry, they all say the same thing: they all miss the unity, hustle and simplicity of the Taiwanese film industry as a big family in those golden years.

From movies to musicals, continuing to enrich the film culture in Beitou

There are countless Taiwanese films filmed in Beitou, but the most popular one among young people today is The Fantasy of the Deer Warrior (大俠梅花鹿) directed by Chang Ying in 1961. This is a natural scenery animal costume Taiwanese fairy tale film. This film is famous for its unusual and innovative animal costumes. I would suggest you to think of this film, made 60 years ago, as an animated film for children like Zootopia nowadays. Back then, the animation production cost was really too high, so director Zhang Ying could only invite art designer Gu Yi to make the animal costumes and directly hire real people to stage the film. However, the film was shot in the mountains of Beitou, so it is difficult to identify the specific location.

Among the more than 200 existing Taiwanese films, the one that can most easily be identified with the scenery of Beitou is the 1966 film Guitar in Hot Spring Township (溫泉鄉的吉他)  directed by Chou Hsin-I. The opening scene of the film is the Thermal Valley, and the plot is centered around the Yu Chuan Yuan Hotel, the site of which is now the Yu Chuan Hot Spring Villa on Quan Yuan Road in Beitou. In addition, we can also see the Zhonghe Zen Temple in Beitou in the Taiwanese martial arts film Vengeance Of The Phoenix Sisters (三鳳震武林) starring Yang Lihua. We can also see Beitou Park in the film Farewell to 17 years old (再會十七歲)  directed by Xin Qi. We can also see the appearance of the Meihua Pavilion in the Taiwanese film Wang and Liu Tour in Taiwan (王哥柳哥遊台灣) starring Shorty Tsai (Skinny Liu) and Li Guanzhang (Fat Wang) as well as the Taiwanese film No Ordinary Love (不平凡的愛) based on the Japanese film Aye Katsura (愛染桂).

Even though Taiwanese films were limited by the language politics of  Mandarin  in the late 1960s, they were unable to cross the technical threshold of color films. With the decline of black-and-white films, most of them had to switch to color Mandarin films or to Taiwanese TV dramas. However, Beitou continued to nurture the development of Taiwan's film industry. For example, the 1978 horror film The Terrible Night (血夜花), directed by Yao Feng-pan and starring Wang Chun-ru, was set in Beitou. In the 1970s, the Beitou Museum became famous as Gu Yue Zhuang after a film directed by Yao Feng Ban. Subsequent films such as Wang Yu's martial arts film and Cao Yen's Happy Boat (幸福船)were filmed here. In the 1980s, Jiang Long directed the film The Last Train to Beitou (北投最後一班列車). In the film, Li Zhiqi plays the male protagonist, Junming.  When he traveled to Beitou, the place where he stayed was exactly the Gu Yue Zhuang Hotel.

The 24 frames per second film is a precious time capsule for us to retrace the historical scene and preserve the scenery of the past in Beitou. The preservation of the historical sites in Beitou allows the stories to be refilled and the forgotten stories to be reconstructed. The history of Beitou as the  Hollywood of Taiwan  has been better preserved in the past 60 years through the research and study of film history by local cultural historians and colleagues of the Taiwan Film Institute (TFI). In recent years, there have been more and more local related tours, such as the film Forever Love (阿嬤的夢中情人) directed by Kitamura Toyoharu and Aozaru Shiao, the novel Hsiu-Chin, the Girl Who Loves to Laugh by Huang Chun-Ming, and the musical Taiwan Has a Hollywood by Studio M. The story of Beitou's film history has been continuously told, so that more memories can emerge and be kept alive. The richness of Beitou as a keyword in Taiwan's film history will need to be promoted by people from different fields in the future.

Studio M presents Taiwan Has a Hollywood, a musical that uses music and storytelling to tell the story of the history of film in Beitou.
（Picture provided：瘋戲樂工作室提供。Photography：秦大悲）

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