Daily Trojan USC.edu

Issue date: 10/26/07 Section: Lifestyle

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Jack Song/David Magdael & Associates Whitewashed | "Finishing the Game." pokes fun at Hollywood's tendency to cast white actors in ostensibly Asian-American films.

Something I hear all the time in studio casting, is that I'll ask 'Why can't we do color-blind casting?' And they'll respond, 'Do you think a white kid in Middle America can relate to a black face or an Asian face?' And I say 'Yes! I've been relating to white faces in movies all these years!'"

That was Justin Lin, who spoke recently at an event sponsored by Asian Pacific American Student Services to promote his new film "Finishing the Game." He said it to an audience of mostly Asian Americans, who laughed with him, cheered for him and generally seemed to hang onto his every word. The guy, along with the cast of his film, came off like a rock star.

Lin is the Chinese-American director behind "Better Luck Tomorrow," 2002's indie smash about a group of disillusioned Asian-American teens who take up robbery and drug dealing as way to combat boredom. He became the vanguard of Asian-American filmmakers.

"Finishing the Game" is a fake documentary about the search for an actor to replace Bruce Lee in his pet project "Game of Death" after the legendary actor dies during shooting.

The film follows several different actors at a casting call, played by veterans of Lin's films such as Roger Fan and Sung Kang, as well as some newcomers. Many of the characters in the film are comic distortions of their real life counterparts. The endlessly charismatic Fan plays a narcissistic star who doesn't know any martial arts, and the small-town, America-born Kang plays an Alabama-raised boy who comes to Hollywood to make it big.

Their roles, as well as those of their Asian-American co-stars, are a far cry from the Hollywood stereotypes these actors are used to playing: the delivery boy, the laundromat owner and, as Fan related at the USC presentation to a mixture of shock and laughter, the karate instructor.

"I was cast in the new Judd Apatow movie," Fan said. "So I'm really excited and I get the script and see it's mostly about 12- year-old kids. And I'm flipping through it and not seeing my name anywhere. So I ask Judd where I am, and it turns out I'm a martial arts instructor."

"At the end of the day they were open to changing my character to a guy with knives," Fan said, with a sarcastic laugh and a slightly doleful smile.

"Finishing the Game" plays with these experiences and stereotypes for comic effect, and it's easy to see that the script by Lin and Josh Diamond drew from stories told by their actors of Hollywood's racist casting policies.

More than anything, the film contains a simmering subtext of frustration driven by Lin's own experiences in the industry. At one point, Lin's story about the white kid in Middle America is recounted by a character verbatim.

And, in the film's most powerful scene, a racist executive, who exists as the only true antagonist of "Finishing the Game," declares that he can go to Chinatown and in five minutes find a replacement for Bruce Lee. The fictional documentarian, speaking through the pen of Justin Lin replies, "But do you really think that would be the right person for the part?"

When pitching the script for "Better Luck Tomorrow" to Hollywood, Lin found that executives loved the idea but would only produce the film if he made his protagonists white. This drove the then-young filmmaker toward independent production, which gave him the freedom to cast whomever he wanted.

"The fact is that when it comes to Asian Americans, it's not an issue of talent; it's an issue of opportunity," Lin said. "But the flip side is that the studios aren't charities; they aren't going to give money to an untested formula. So we can either sit around and complain about not getting any work, or we can fight for the opportunity and prove ourselves."

Lin did prove himself with "Better Luck Tomorrow," and the success of that film is still evident in the DVD players of many college dorm rooms.

"'Better Luck Tomorrow' was the first time in Hollywood that they tracked that Asian Americans wanted to see an Asian-American film," Fan said. "But even so, 60 percent of the tickets sold were not Asian Americans; other races were crossing over. We realized that now we have empirical data to prove that our films can be successful. The studios decided to make a film that had been sitting around as a script for years. That film was 'Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.'"

This is what Lin has been trying to say through his films. It is why he repeats his story about the studio executives' racism on screen and in real life. He is trying to prove that, though his films are about Asian Americans, they are not solely for Asian Americans. Anyone, his films argue, can relate to the disillusioned teens of "Better Luck Tomorrow" or the struggling professionals of "Finishing the Game."

For all his success with "Better Luck Tomorrow," Lin's idea for "Finishing the Game" was met with exactly the sort of response from Universal Pictures that he parodies in the film: "A martial arts movie? That's really great!" With that disappointing response, Lin went back to his independent roots, with the success of his studio-funded escapades "Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" and "Annapolis" providing the financial backing he needed to make "Finishing the Game."

Lin's status as the first major Asian-American filmmaker making films about Asian Americans means that his latest film, while ostensibly about Bruce Lee and subtly about his crew's experiences in Hollywood, may be lost within the debate over its impact on the film industry. Lin calls this "just the reality we live in."

"Hopefully five to 10 years from now," Lin said, with an understated bitterness in his voice, "we won't be up here still talking about my films from this perspective."

Lin, therefore, sees his films in terms of changing Hollywood: He's creating opportunity. But while "Finishing the Game" is just the second of numerous steps toward casting equality in Hollywood, it is still what Lin called "a showcase of the talents of the actors."

"It's baby steps, and hopefully we can start to get three-dimensional characters on screen and on TV," actor Sung Kang said. "I don't think it's going to happen overnight. If you slowly have these characters available, then America will soon be able to accept it. Then it becomes business, then the advertisers and the studios will slowly start to invest into it."

In light of his efforts to create opportunities for Asian Americans in the industry, watching Lin, Fan and Kang speak in front of all those students was like watching the rise of a new guard.

Among those following in the wake of Justin Lin as a filmmaker is Daniel Zhao, a sophomore majoring in cinema-television production, who worked as a location assistant on "Finishing the Game." While Lin and his crew have had to forge their own way through independent production, Zhao's outlook in the wake of "Better Luck Tomorrow" and "Finishing the Game" is more optimistic.

"There's a breakthrough going on," Zhao said, "Studios are willing to fund Asian-American projects. It's good news to know that we're not going to be forced into an uncompromising system, not forced to be silent. We will have our own voice."

Lin and his actors are well aware of their roles as forebears of opportunity. Much as African-American cinema started to come into its own in the 1970s, Asian-American film is beginning to develop beyond the roles Hollywood has defined for it, swirling around the nucleus of Justin Lin's productions.

"Asian-American cinema is in its infancy," Lin said. "We hope to grow more and more; eventually I want to see movies where we can laugh at ourselves, horror movies. I want to see someone like me up on screen."

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