Terence Chang Chia-Chen (Chinese: 張家振) is a Hong Kong and American film producer.

Career[link]

Chang is one of John Woo's long time friends and favoured producers. Chang produced the 1997 action hit Face/Off and Woo's 2000 espionage/gun fu blast Mission: Impossible 2.

Documentaries[link]

Chang is among the actors, producers and directors interviewed in the documentary The Slanted Screen (2006), directed by Jeff Adachi, about the representation of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood.

[edit] Kowloon City

On August 22, 2007, Fruit Chan announced that he will make a film on Bruce Lee's early years, specifically, the Chinese-language movie, Kowloon City. The film will be produced by Chang. The film will be set in 1950s Hong Kong. Chang's credits include Made in Hong Kong, Hollywood Hong Kong and Durian Durian.

Stanley Kwan stated that he was talking with Lee's family to make a movie about the late action movie icon. Further, in April, Chinese state media announced that its national broadcaster started filming a 40-part TV series on Bruce Lee to promote Chinese culture for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.^[1]

Partial filmography[link]

As producer

• The Killer (1989)
• Once a Thief (1991)
• Hard Boiled (1992)
• Hard Target (1993)
• Broken Arrow (1996)
• Face/Off (1997)
• Windtalkers (2002)
• Bulletproof Monk (2003)
• Paycheck (2003)
• Blood Brothers (2007)
• Red Cliff (2008)

External links[link]

• Terence Chang at the Internet Movie Database

References[link]

This article about an American film producer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Alleged portrait of Terence, from Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3868. Possibly copied from 3d century original.

Publius Terentius Afer (195/185–159 BC), better known in English as Terence, was a playwright of the Roman Republic, of North African descent. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on, impressed by his abilities, freed him. Terence apparently died young, probably in Greece or on his way back to Rome. All of the six plays Terence wrote have survived.

One famous quotation by Terence reads: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", or "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." This appeared in his play Heauton Timorumenos.

Biography[link]

Terence's date of birth is disputed; Aelius Donatus, in his incomplete Commentum Terenti, considers the year 185 BC to be the year Terentius was born;^[1] Fenestella, on the other hand, states that he was born ten years earlier, in 195 BC.^[2]

He may have been born in or near Carthage or in Greek Italy to a woman taken to Carthage as a slave. Terence's ethnonym Afer suggests he lived in the territory of the Libyan tribe called by the Romans Afri near Carthage prior to being brought to Rome as a slave.^[3] This inference is based on the fact that the term was used in two different ways during the republican era: during Terence's lifetime, it was used to refer to non-Carthaginian Libyco-Berbers, with the term Punicus reserved for the Carthaginians.^[4] Later, after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, it was used to refer to anyone from the land of the Afri (Tunisia and its surroundings). It is therefore most likely that Terence was of Libyan^[5] descent, considered ancestors to the modern-day Berber peoples.^[6]

In any case, he was sold to P. Terentius Lucanus,^[7] a Roman senator, who educated him and later on, impressed by Terence's abilities, freed him. Terence then took the nomen "Terentius," which is the origin of the present form.

When he was 25, Terence left Rome and he never returned, after having exhibited the six comedies which are still in existence. According to some ancient writers, he died at sea.

Terence's plays[link]

Like Plautus, Terence adapted Greek plays from the late phases of Attic comedy. He was more than a translator, as modern discoveries of ancient Greek plays have confirmed.^{[citation needed]} By borrowing from earlier Greek works, Terence provided in his plays what is considered to be an authentic view of Greek society in the 3rd century BC.^[8]

Terence wrote in a simple conversational Latin, and most students who persevere long enough to be able to read him in the vernacular find his style particularly pleasant and direct. Aelius Donatus, Jerome's teacher, is the earliest surviving commentator on Terence's work. Terence's popularity throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is attested to by the numerous manuscripts containing part or all of his plays; the scholar Claudia Villa has estimated that 650 manuscripts containing Terence's work date from after AD 800. The mediaeval playwright Hroswitha of Gandersheim claims to have written her plays so that learned men had a Christian alternative to reading the pagan plays of Terence, while the reformer Martin Luther not only quoted Terence frequently to tap into his insights into all things human but also recommended his comedies for the instruction of children in school.^[9]

Terence's six plays are:

• Andria (The Girl from Andros) (166 BC)
• Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law) (165 BC)
• Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) (163 BC)
• Phormio (161 BC)
• Eunuchus (161 BC)
• Adelphoe (The Brothers) (160 BC)

The first printed edition of Terence appeared in Strasbourg in 1470, while the first certain post-antique performance of one of Terence's plays, Andria, took place in Florence in 1476. There is evidence, however, that Terence was performed much earlier. The short dialogue Terentius et delusor was probably written to be performed as an introduction to a Terentian performance in the 9th century (possibly earlier).

A phrase by his musical collaborator Flaccus for Terence's comedy Hecyra is all that remains of the entire body of ancient Roman music. This has recently been shown to be inauthentic.^[10]

Cultural legacy[link]

Terence's plays were a standard part of the Latin curriculum of the neo-classical period. US President John Adams once wrote to his son, "Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin...His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model."^[11]

Two of the earliest English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle are thought to parody Terence's plays.

Due to his cognomen Afer, Terence has long been identified with Africa and heralded as the first poet of the African diaspora by generations of black writers, including Juan Latino, Phyllis Wheatley, Alexandre Dumas, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou.

American playwright Thornton Wilder based his novel The Woman of Andros on Terence's Andria.

Questions as to whether Terence received assistance in writing or was not the actual author have been debated over the ages, as described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica:

[In a prologue to one of his plays, Terence] meets the charge of receiving assistance in the composition of his plays by claiming as a great honour the favour which he enjoyed with those who were the favorites of the Roman people. But the gossip, not discouraged by Terence, lived and throve; it crops up in Cicero and Quintilian, and the ascription of the plays to Scipio had the honour to be accepted by Montaigne and rejected by Diderot.^[12]

See also[link]

	Ancient Rome portal
	Africa portal
	Biography portal
	Literature portal
	Theatre portal

• Translation
• Prosody (Latin)
• Codex Vaticanus 3868

References[link]

External references[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Terence

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Publius Terentius Afer

• The six plays of Terence at The Latin Library (Latin)
• Andria at The Perseus Digital Library (English)
• Hecyra at The Perseus Digital Library (English)
• Heautontimorumenos at The Perseus Digital Library(English)
• The Eunuch at The Perseus Digital Library(English)
• Phormio at The Perseus Digital Library (English)
• The Brothers at The Perseus Digital Library (English)
• 15th century scripts from Hecyra and Eunuchus, Center for Digital Initiatives, University of Vermont Libraries
• Terence's works: text, concordances and frequency list
• The Life of Terence, part of Suetonius's De Viris Illustribus, Translated by J. C. Rolfe.
• Commentum Terenti by Aelius Donatus, at the Internet Archive; 1902 Teubner edition. (Latin)
• SORGLL: Terence, Eunuch 232-264, read by Matthew Dillon
• Latin with Laughter: Terence through Time

John Woo
John Woo attending the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
Chinese name	吳宇森 (Traditional)
Chinese name	吴宇森 (Simplified)
Pinyin	Wú Yǔsēn (Mandarin)
Jyutping	Ng4 Jyu5 Sam1 (Cantonese)
Origin	Hong Kong
Born	(1946-05-01) 1 May 1946 (age 66) Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
Occupation	Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Editor
Spouse(s)	Annie Woo
Awards Hong Kong Film Awards Best Picture 1986 A Better Tomorrow Best Director 1989 The Killer Best Film Editing 1990 Bullet in the Head 1992 Hard-Boiled Other awards Saturn Award for Best Direction 1997 Face/Off

John Woo Yu-Sen SBS (born 1 May 1946) is a Hong Kong film director, writer, and producer.^[1] Recognized for his stylised films of highly choreographed action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and use of slow-motion.^[2] Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard Boiled and Red Cliff.^[2] His Hollywood films include Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2.^[2] He also created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics. Woo was described by Dave Kehr in The Observer in 2002 as "arguably the most influential director making movies today".^[3] Woo cites his three favorite films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï.^[2]

Early life[link]

Woo was born amidst the chaos of the Chinese Civil War in 1946. The Christian Woo family, faced with persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, fled to Hong Kong when he was five.^[4][5] Impoverished, the Woo family lived in the slums at Shek Kip Mei. His father was a teacher, though rendered unable to work by tuberculosis, and his mother was a manual laborer on construction sites.^[6] The family was rendered homeless by the big Shek Kip Mei fire of 1953.^[5] Charitable donations from disaster relief efforts enabled the family to relocate; however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects.

At age three he was diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Following surgery on his spine, he was unable to walk correctly until eight years old, and as a result his right leg is shorter than his left leg.^[7] Woo went to Concordia Lutheran School and received a Christian education^{[citation needed]} (his Christian background shows influences in his films^[8]). As a young boy, Woo had wanted to be a Christian minister. He later found a passion for movies influenced by the French New Wave especially Jean-Pierre Melville.^[2] Woo has said he was shy and had difficulty speaking, but found making movies a way to explore his feelings and thinking and would "use movies as a language".^[2]

The local cinema would prove a haven of retreat. Woo found respite in musical films, such as The Wizard of Oz and in American Westerns. He has stated the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made a particular impression on him in his youth: the device of two comrades, each of whom fire pistols from each hand, is a recurrent spectacle later found in his own work.

Woo married Annie Woo Ngau Chun-lung in 1976 and has three children.^[5] He has lived in the United States since 1993.

Hong Kong career[link]

In 1969, aged 23, Woo was hired as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios. In 1971, he became an assistant director at Shaw Studios, where he was mentored by the noted director Chang Cheh.^{[citation needed]} His directorial debut in 1974 was the feature film The Young Dragons (鐵漢柔情, Tiě hàn róu qíng). In the Kung fu action genre, it was choreographed by Jackie Chan and featured dynamic camera-work and elaborate action scenes. The film was picked up by Golden Harvest Studio where he went on to direct more martial arts films. He later had success as a comedy director with Money Crazy (發錢寒, Fā qián hàn) (1977), starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui.

By the mid-1980s, Mr. Woo experienced professional burnout. Several of his films were commercial disappointments. In response, he took residence in Taiwan.^{[citation needed]} It was during this period of self-imposed exile that director/producer Tsui Hark provided the funding for Woo to film a longtime pet project called A Better Tomorrow (1986).

The story of two brothers—one a law enforcement officer, the other a criminal—the film became a financial blockbuster. A Better Tomorrow gained prominence as a defining achievement in Hong Kong action cinema^{[9][citation needed]} for its combination of emotional drama, slow-motion gunplay, gritty atmospherics, and trenchcoat-and-sunglasses fashion appeal. Its signature narrative device of two-handed, two-gunned fire fight within confined quarters—often referred to as "gun fu"—would later inspire American filmmakers such as Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.^{[citation needed]}

Woo would make several more Heroic Bloodshed films in the late 1980s and early 1990s, also with leading man Chow Yun-Fat. These violent gangster thrillers typically focus on men bound by honor and loyalty, at odds with contemporary values of impermanence and expediency. The protagonists of these films, therefore, may be said to present a common lineage with the Chinese literary tradition of loyalty among generals depicted in classics such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms".

Mr. Woo gained international recognition with the release of The Killer (1989)^{[citation needed]}. Widely praised by critics and audiences for its action sequences, acting and cinematography,^{[citation needed]} The Killer became the most successful Hong Kong film in American release since Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973) and garnered Mr. Woo an American cult following. Bullet in the Head followed a year later, which Mr. Woo has stated he still considers his most personal work.^{[citation needed]} Bullet in the Head did not meet financial expectations.

Among the director's American admirers are Martin Scorsese and Sam Raimi (who has compared Woo's mastery of action to Hitchcock's mastery of suspense).^{[citation needed]} Mr. Woo accepted a contract to work in America at a time when the 1997 handover of Hong Kong was imminent.^{[citation needed]}

His last Hong Kong film before emigrating to the United States was Hard Boiled (1992), the antithesis of his earlier glorification of gangsters. Memorable among its preponderance of action scenes is an approximate 30 minute sequence of gun-play set within a hospital. The director pointedly depicts the vulnerability of patients caught in the crossfire. One particular long take follows two characters for an elapsed time of 2 minutes and 42 seconds as they move between hospital floors. On the Criterion DVD and laserdisc, this chapter is referenced as "2 minutes, 42 seconds." The film climax extols the virtues of its leading man, a law enforcement agent, Chow Yun-Fat, who is seen to comfort an infant with a lullaby while engaged in fire fight with his criminal pursuers. He heroically takes leave of this carnage when he leaps to safety from a window, babe gallantly in arms.

John Woo: Interviews (ISBN 1-57806-776-6) is the first authoritative English-language chronicle of Woo’s career.^{[citation needed]} The volume includes a new 36-page interview with Woo by editor Robert K. Elder, which documents the years 1968 to 1990, from Woo’s early career in working on comedies and kung fu films (in which he gave Jackie Chan one of his first major film roles), to his gunpowder morality plays in Hong Kong.

American career[link]

An émigré in 1993, the director experienced difficulty in cultural adjustment while contracted with Universal Studios to direct Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target. As characteristics of other foreign national film directors confronted the Hollywood environment, Mr. Woo was unaccustomed to pervasive management concerns, such as limitations on violence and completion schedules. When initial cuts failed to yield an "R" rated film, the studio assumed control of the project and edited footage to produce a cut "suitable for American audiences". A "rough cut" of the film, supposedly the original unrated version, is still circulated among his admirers.

A three year hiatus saw Mr. Woo next direct John Travolta and Christian Slater in Broken Arrow. A frenetic chase-themed film, the director once again found himself hampered by studio management and editorial concerns. Despite a larger budget than his previous Hard Target, the final feature lacked the trademark Woo style. Public reception saw modest financial success.

Reluctant to pursue projects which would necessarily entail front-office controls, the director cautiously rejected the script for Face/Off several times until it was rewritten to suit him. (The futuristic setting was changed to a contemporary one.) Paramount Pictures also offered the director significantly more freedom to exercise his speciality: emotional characterisation and elaborate action. A complex story of adversaries—each of whom surgically alters their identity—law enforcement agent John Travolta and terrorist Nicolas Cage play a cat-and-mouse game, trapped in each other's outward appearance.

Face/Off opened in 1997 to critical acclaim and strong attendance. Grosses in the United States exceeded $100 million. As a result, John Woo is generally regarded as the first Asian director to find a mainstream commercial base.^{[citation needed]} In 2003, Mr. Woo directed a television pilot entitled The Robinsons: Lost in Space for The WB Television Network, based on the 1960s television series Lost in Space. The pilot was not purchased, although bootleg copies have been made available by fans.

John Woo has made three additional films in Hollywood: Mission: Impossible II, Windtalkers and Paycheck. Mission: Impossible II was the highest-grossing film of 2000, but received mixed reviews. Windtalkers and Paycheck fared poorly at the box office and were summarily dismissed by critics.

Recently, John Woo directed and produced a videogame called Stranglehold for games consoles and PC. It is a sequel to his 1992 film, Hard Boiled. He also produced the 2007 anime movie, Appleseed: Ex Machina, the sequel to Shinji Aramaki's 2004 film Appleseed.