You Can’t Be Serious(27)

I took the pile of headshots back to my desk. CM’s assistant didn’t react at all, which told me this was all perfectly normal. I was completely baffled and phenomenally curious. Did it cross Captain Moneybags’s mind that the person sitting across from him was not a “good white American kid”? I neither knew nor cared if Joseph Gordon-Levitt was Asian. Why did Captain Moneybags? Moreover, why was he so angry about it? I wanted to understand what went on in the minds of powerful producers. Specifically, in that moment, I wanted to understand: Were they confused, racist, or both confused and racist?

I let Captain Moneybags cool down for the rest of the afternoon. Before he left for the evening, I asked why it mattered if Joseph Gordon-Levitt was Asian. He answered simply, “Asians don’t watch movies.”

I didn’t even know how to dissect that thought. First, confusion: I’m Asian American. I watch plenty of movies. Second, solidarity: I know lots of other Asian Americans. They also watch plenty of movies. Third, logic: You know why we Asian Americans watch movies? For the same reasons non–Asian Americans do—because movies are awesome.

I followed him down the hall, pushing once more, asking what he meant. As we approached the sleek glass door to the outside, Captain Moneybags shrugged. “Look at the data, Kal. Asians don’t watch movies.”

There was data on this shit? Now we were getting somewhere. I took advantage of my access to studio files by staying at the office long into the night, thumbing through a thick manual with raw data on the business of filmmaking. Around 2:00 a.m., I came across a chart that broke down moviegoing audiences by race and ethnicity. Next to “Asian Americans,” there was just an asterisk.

I flipped to the appendix to see what it meant. As I read, a smirk crept across my face. The asterisk didn’t mean that Asian Americans don’t watch movies. The asterisk meant that Asian Americans weren’t asked if they went to the movies in the first place. That’s like senior year of high school, when Most Likely to Get Caught in an Auto-Asphyxiating Accident Philip Goldstein lamented to everybody, “Most girls don’t actually want to go to prom,” even though he never bothered to ask any girls to go with him. Captain Moneybags didn’t actually have data to back up his claim.

I sensed a massive opportunity here. My excited mind wandered. Once Captain Moneybags learned about the glitch in the data, he’d be able to make better creative decisions. He’d probably go ahead and cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his movie, which would open at number one at the box office. It would make hundreds of millions of dollars and his company would expand. What phenomenal success! Naturally, I would be promoted to junior creative executive, reaping the benefits of a six-figure salary, beefed-up résumé, and more creative input. Maybe I could even get a Panoch of my own. All because I did this research for him and made these helpful recommendations.

The next morning, demographic charts in hand, I explained my findings with the confidence of someone giving a TED Talk.2 Captain Moneybags looked at me, exasperated, and replied, “I don’t care what the asterisk means. If they don’t ask Asians, it’s because Asians don’t watch movies. I’m telling you. They don’t watch movies.” This didn’t bode well for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It also didn’t bode well for me or anyone else who wasn’t a “good white American kid”—because if this was the way all big-time Hollywood people acted, then we were monumentally screwed.

It’s one thing to be ignorant of the facts. It’s another to be willfully ignorant of the facts. Had CM done any real research or bothered to put his hubris aside to understand what the data actually meant, he would have discovered a few things. The first is that Asian Americans, on the whole, have purchasing power at least on par with other demographics,3 meaning, they have ample disposable income to spend at the movies. He also would have discovered something obvious, but important: You don’t need an exclusively Asian American audience to cast Asian American actors.

Now, I admit, this took place before Crazy Rich Asians. And Harold and Kumar. And Justin Lin, Nisha Ganatra, Jet Li, Mindy Kaling, and M. Night Shyamalan. But it took place after Anna May Wong, George Takei, and Pat Morita. It took place after Bruce Lee, Keye Luke, and Margaret Cho. It took place, in other words, after generations of Asian American actors had proven that you could cast Asian Americans—and that audiences of all kinds would see and love them.

What’s both hilarious and awful about Captain Moneybags’s views on the matter is that he wasn’t just stereotyping Asian Americans—he was stereotyping Middle America. He thought they (1) wouldn’t watch compelling content if the characters were not white and (2) would watch crappy content as long as the characters were white. And he wasn’t alone, then or now. Plenty of old-guard executives in Hollywood still buy into this view, and it sets up a Catch-22: Some in Hollywood sparingly cast Asian Americans because they think Middle America won’t watch us, which results in there being few Asian Americans on TV, which results in Middle America not watching us, which results in producers not casting Asian Americans because they think Middle America won’t watch us. Exhausting.

In the moment, I knew that trying to outline this would be like explaining to him that Bruce Lee isn’t related to Jet Li. I wasn’t going to change his mind on anything, so off I went to find good white American actors—and to wonder if the industry I had chosen was the wrong one for someone who looked like me.