Welcome to My World
What you are about to read is a beginning. This is the first of a regular column where I will be writing about my experiences and observations as a young Asian Pacific American working (or, as it is in most cases, not working) in the world of film, TV and theater down here in sunny Los Angeles.
You might be asking: What makes me qualified to write such a column?
Honestly, the answer to that would be — I don’t know. I’m certainly not a wide-eyed and naive novice, but I’m also far from anything resembling a “success,” so each day is still a struggle and uphill climb. But hopefully, I will be able to offer at least a small insight into what it means to be an APA in this business.
So a little background about myself: After graduating from UC Santa Cruz almost ten years ago, I moved down to Los Angeles with a vague notion that I was going to be a writer of some sort. Initially, I thought journalism might be of interest so I tried my hand at that for a couple of years. I got a job writing for the now-defunct Korea Times English Edition, freelanced for publications like the L.A. Times and edited the first issue of YOLK magazine. My main “beat” during this time was covering the post-riot APA community and I must say it was a truly educational and eye-opening experience; but at the same time, I also learned that journalism was not for me. I wanted to write my own stories as opposed to reporting on other people’s.
By this time, I had taken some playwriting classes at East West Players and found that I really enjoyed theatre and writing for that medium. Veteran Korean American actor Soon-Tek Oh (Mulan, Beverly Hills Ninja) encouraged me to pursue this path and that led to the formation of the Society of Heritage Performers, a Korean American theatre group, and the writing and producing of numerous shows here in Southern California and even in Korea.
Around this time, I also fell into television writing at the urging of my high school friend and TV writing partner Corey Miller. We ended up pitching and selling a story to the TV series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and my career was up-and-running. Or at least it seemed so at the time. Since then, I’ve learned that there are highs and lows and you can’t predict where or when they will come (though you can be certain that the lows will appear at some point regardless of whatever else happens).
I’ve worked on TV pilots that never aired (a pilot is the first episode of a proposed television series which a network will watch and decide whether or not they want to buy the show), worked as a script doctor on a number of films, continued to work in theatre and basically tried to learn as much as I could about the business and art. Sometimes, things have been good (the initial TV gigs allowed me to buy my place and financed long periods of unemployment), but other times I’ve wondered why the hell I didn’t listen to my parents and go to law school.
In 1999, the Society of Heritage Performers evolved into Lodestone Theatre Ensemble, an APA theatre company dedicated to doing more “edgy” type work, which I co-founded with my colleagues Alexandra Bokyun Chun, Chil Kong and Tim Lounibos. Lodestone is still going strong (shameless plug: our current production of Freak Storm by Matt Pelfrey runs until Nov. 17 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, Calif.) and I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished and what we hope to accomplish.
Besides Lodestone, there are a number of other projects I am currently working on, about which I’m sure I’ll write about in more detail in future columns. One of them is a short film I wrote and directed entitled A Ribbon of Dreams, starring veteran actor James Shigeta (Flower Drum Song) and executive produced by director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, Red Dragon).
I’m also preparing to shoot my first feature length film, an APA horror project entitled Children in the Mirror.
Despite the still very real obstacles confronting APAs in this industry, I do feel a strong sense of possibility. In the past few years, I feel as if there’s a new charge of electricity in the air, as if a collective APA breakthrough were just around the corner (with MTV Films upcoming release of Justin Lin’s film Better Luck Tomorrow leading the charge). It’s definitely an exciting time to be young, driven and APA. This column will be my attempt to record some of what I feel is behind this movement.
So as Bette Davis said in All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
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