Scene one, take one: Shanghai, the original Hollywood of the East, decamps to Hong Kong post-1949 and helps the local industry to grow into the third largest producer of films in the world and the second-largest exporter.
Scene two, take one: flashback to 1993. Triads are blamed for a massive onslaught of cheap inferior offerings in the local market and audiences experiment with Jurassic Park - making it the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong's history. Local movies still gross three times their Western counterparts, however, and nobody realises the writing is on the wall.
Cut to the present day: after a four-year slump, figures for 1997 reveal that for the first time in memory, overseas films outgrossed Cantonese movies. It is a shock, but it has been advancing with all the menace of a spitting velociraptor (The Lost World, a sequel to Jurassic Park, was Hong Kong's highest-grossing film in 1997 by a significant margin).
The Hong Kong film industry is in a massive state of flux.
This past year has not determined where it will end up - the figures merely indicate the map is still being significantly redrawn.
Local production is down, down, down.
With 90 Cantonese movies screened in Hong Kong last year, the SAR can no longer lay claim to being the world's third-largest film producer (after the United States and India). Pride aside, that spells a more than 50 per cent drop in production in three years.