Hollywood heroes?

Huang Wen-tse (黃文擇) isn't fully satisfied by his success, even though, at the age of 44, he is a household name across Taiwan, an honor usually reserved for politicians and pop stars, not film directors.

With the glove puppet film Legend of the Sacred Stone (聖石傳說), he has stunned everybody but himself with its popularity. The first feature film to use Taiwanese glove puppets, Legend of the Sacred Stone topped the box office in Taiwan last month, beating promising Hollywood productions that usually go over well here, such as Toy Story 2.

"I had been confident all the way that this was going to be a hit," Huang said. "I dare not say this for a regular type of film, but this is a movie of Taiwanese glove puppetry. No one is more professional than me and my family."

But sitting atop Taiwan's commercial film industry isn't enough for the puppet master. He wants to make it big -- Hollywood big.

Bolstered by his tremendous success in Taiwan, Huang is bringing the film across the Pacific in hopes of introducing the unique Taiwanese art form to a broader audience. At least three American film distributors, such as Columbia, have expressed interest in releasing the movie.

"We are making some adjustments to the lines and making voiceovers so the characters would be speaking English," Huang said. "People ask me if I worry about whether Americans will accept the film. ... It's a mystery, so far, whether overseas audiences will receive the movie well, but I won't miss out on this good opportunity to promote (glove puppetry)."

If anyone has a chance at making Taiwan's puppets make millions in Tinseltown, it's Huang and his family. From the little town of Huwei in central Taiwan, the Huangs have been working with puppets for four generations. Huang's grandfather, Huang Hai-tai (黃海岱), introduced the puppets to television 30 years ago, starting a sensational craze that, at its apex, garnered the show a 97 percent viewing rate.

Today, Huang's grandfather, now 104 years old, is still an active puppeteer as well as a witness to his grandson's engineering of another wave of glove puppet frenzy. The fans, about 65 percent of them aged between 20 and 35, seem to be a nostalgic generation, looking to return for a while to the time when they were kids who sat glued to the TV as their kung fu fighting heroes meted out punishment and praised moral virtue.

Making changes

For Huang, making the film was the challenge of a lifetime. As a first-time movie director, he took two years to complete the project, spending nearly NT$300 million. Conceptually, the traditional folk art has been enhanced and directed toward a path that exhibits values different from yesteryear.

The once popular TV hero of glove puppetry, Shih Yen-wen (史豔文), was one of the reasons that the peculiar art form stepped into the spotlight. In many ways, he was the Superman of Taiwan. He looked nice and acted decent. He stood by justice. And he fought well.

But these days Shih's heavy-handed moralistic ways might not have gone over as well, so Huang created Su Huan-chen as a new character to carry on the charisma of Shih Yen-wen, but in a somewhat different way.

"We adjusted the character to fit in with modern society," Huang said. "The puppetry scripts of tradition overtly teach values, such as being loyal to your country and society or being obedient to your parents, but, this time around, we don't want to preach."