Back in the Picture

The gray dust of construction clinging to his shoes, Lloyd Chao leads a visitor through one of the cavernous sound stages in the new Shaw Studios production complex, perched on a windy hillside in Hong Kong. In its heyday Shaw Bros. churned out hundreds of films for Chinese-language audiences around the world, leading an industry that, by the mid-1980s, made a city of 6 million the world's third biggest movie producer. That's when Shaw began to phase out film production in favor of TV. Though other studios filled the gap for a while, Hong Kong, which had made 234 movies in...