Movie mogul Run Run Shaw, 107, dies in HK

Timeline: Shaw and his empire

Shaw remembered for his pioneering work in cinema

Top 10 films by Run Run Shaw

In 1957, Run Run put his big dream to work. He launched Shaw Brothers Productions and broke ground in a seemingly remote suburb, constructing Movietown - a vertically integrated all-in-one facility that was clearly modeled on a Hollywood studio. The studio took seven years to come to completion, with 1,500 employees and four soundstages in the first phase. Everything required for movie making, other than the negatives, could be achieved on the premises.

As with Tianyi in Shanghai, the Shaw Brothers encountered fierce competition from other studios, especially Motion Pictures & General Investment Co, known as MP&GI.

The two studios would wrangle for talent, but their fights over the same stories were even more spectacular. When Shaw heard that MP&GI was making The Butterfly Lovers, which had a plot similar to Romeo and Juliet, but was based on a folk story, Shaw rushed his own version into production and finished it in just two weeks. Not only did Shaw steal his rival's thunder, but he created a runaway hit entitled The Love Eterne, which has acquired a similar stature to that enjoyed by Singin' in the Rain in Hollywood.

Shaw reached a compromise with MP&GI in March 1963. Three months later, Loke Wan Tho, the owner of MP&Gi, and his lieutenants were killed in an air accident in Taiwan, essentially leaving the Shaws as the only major players in the Hong Kong film industry.

Run Run Shaw started two trends that left indelible imprints on Chinese-language cinema by grooming two unknown genres into pioneers and giants. The first was female-dominated musicals, with Diau Cham (1958) as his opening salvo. Director Li Han-hsiang took two strands, traditional Chinese opera and the Hollywood musical, and fused them into a unique genre that swept the Chinese-speaking world (other than the Chinese mainland, which remained closed to all imports, apart from a handful of government-controlled productions).

When the musicals started winding down in the late 1960s, Shaw gave a directorial opportunity to the erstwhile film critic Chang Cheh to make the kind of movies he had dreamed of. The result was a spate of martial arts films, starting with One-Armed Swordsman (1967), which were so revolutionary they completely upgraded the genre, and the ripple effects are being felt even today.