Activists Denounce Film Deal in China

The Hollywood producers of a slapstick comedy that began shooting last week in a city in China’s eastern Shandong Province describe their feature about a young man facing a birthday, “21 and Over,” as an “epic misadventure of debauchery and mayhem.” As it happens, scores of Chinese human rights activists who in recent weeks have been descending on the very same city, Linyi, describe a different kind of misadventure and mayhem in their thwarted efforts to visit Chen Guangcheng, an embattled lawyer who is under house arrest there.

With few exceptions, outsiders who have made the trip to Linyi have been violently assaulted, robbed, detained and then sent on their way by the guards who keep Mr. Chen, who is blind, and his wife imprisoned in their farmhouse. Those same guards, at the behest of local Communist Party officials, have occasionally beaten the couple, most recently in July as one of their children looked on, according to a report released last week by the group China Aid. Once hailed by the official media for his work defending peasants and the disabled, Mr. Chen has been under so-called soft detention since September 2010, when he completed a 51-month prison sentence related to his legal campaign against family planning officials in Linyi.