Three moves to the big time
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
STAFF REPORTER
Run Run Shaw's legendary career can be broadly divided into three key stages: Early ventures At age 19, Shaw went to Singapore to assist his third elder brother Runme Shaw in their business venture there.
They established the company that would later become the Shaw Organisation, and were involved in distributing and producing silent films in Southeast Asia.
Shaw Brothers Studios In 1957, Run Run Shaw moved to Hong Kong and established the Shaw Brothers in 1958.
He copied Hollywood by setting up a permanent production site where his actors worked and lived on 46 acres purchased from the government in Clear Water Bay.
At the opening of the Shaw Movietown in December 1961, Shaw Studios had the world's largest privately owned film-production outfit with about 1,200 workers shooting and editing films.
By the 1960s, Shaw Brothers (Hong Kong) was Asia's biggest producer of movies, including The Magnificent Concubine, which took the Grand Prix at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and 1967's The One-Armed Swordsman, which broke box office records. Television Broadcasts In 1967, he co-founded Television Broadcasts Limited, the first free-to-air TV station in Hong Kong, growing it into a multibillion-dollar empire broadcasting in 30 markets including the US, Canada and Taiwan. This made it the world's largest producer of Chinese-language programs.
Shaw took a greater interest in TVB after he succeeded the late Harold Lee as TVB chairman in 1980. In December 2011, Shaw retired as chairman of TVB at that age of 104 after more than 40 years at Hong Kong's biggest television company.
He sold all his controlling stake to a group of investors including HTC Corporation chairman Cher Wang and ITC Corp chairman Charles Chan for HK$6.26 billion. He was given the title of chairman emeritus.
