Someone is angry.
Perched on his chair in his Beijing office, he is screaming into the telephone, unleashing a torrent of Mandarin swearwords as he tells his people how to handle a problem. This could be any Chinese boss cursing his minions' incompetence except that the face uttering the imprecations is distinctly Caucasian in appearance. The likes of Gong Li and Zhang Yimou may continue to wow them abroad, but their superstardom means little at home, where the glitter has long since faded off the big screen. The mainland's film industry is in the doldrums, and with ticket sales declining, local filmmakers have less money with which to reverse the trend. In 1996 the bespectacled, gum-chewing New Yorker founded Imar, the only independent film company in China, with the aim of tapping and developing young Chinese talent.