Peter Bart: Jon M. Chu And His Zeal For Pure, Big-Screen Entertainment Offer Much-Needed Dose Of Hollywood Optimism

deadline.com:

The overlap of awards season with a fire season has posed a stern test of Hollywood fortitude. If Hollywood needs some optimism I’d propose it look to Jon M.

Chu, who has contributed both a sharp, but unnoticed, new book plus a hit movie to advance his mission. His Wicked won the Cinematic andBox Office Achievement honor at the Golden Globes, but the kudo crowd also owes Chu a bow for his memoir Viewfinder, which poses his dissent on current issues.

Viewfinder details the hazardous trek of a young Chinese-American filmmaker seeking to pursue his zeal for pure “entertainment” in an industry that periodically seems disdainful of that concept.

As he preps his Wicked sequel at Universal, Chu, at 46, can look back upon a formidable list of snubs, slaps, cancellations and ethnic putdowns littering his younger years. DEADLINE RELATED VIDEO: The green lights that initially greeted his work had flashed to red time and again, reflecting, to his thinking, “a system filled with cynicism.” Chu urgently wants to make movies to be shown in theaters, not on streamers. “Movies offer visions that are too sweeping for TV, and too rich to be absorbed in thirty second clips on your phone,” he writes. “No other medium can change the culture as drastically.” Paradoxically, Chu, the cinema loyalist, grew up in Silicon Valley, the son of a Chinese restaurant owner who he periodically was forced to revisit for interim funding.