You Can’t Be Serious(42)
“What do you mean? Of course she was Indian. We spent like an hour and a half talking about being brown!”
“Nah, dude. She was just trying to get us to buy more lap dances. That lady was from El Salvador.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. I heard her speaking Spanish to one of the other strippers.”
“So? I took French in high school.”
“Exactly. And you aren’t fluent.”
“What about the PhD program?”
“I’m pretty sure that part was real. But she was definitely not Indian.”
I couldn’t believe it. Yo, Latina Sunny was a good actor!
Today, the Crazy Horse Too is permanently closed. It apparently had a long history of mob ties. The shell of a building a few blocks west of the Las Vegas Strip shut down shortly after our attendance when the owner and some employees pleaded guilty to tax fraud and racketeering. Wherever you are, Sunny, I hope you got your PhD without getting caught up in all that. Your hustle still impresses me. I’d be down to grab a drink and talk Salinger sometime. And if you ever decide you want to put your psychology practice on hold to become a professional actor, I know a very high-powered casting director you should meet. She also can’t tell the difference between Indian and Latin.
1?In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield hires a prostitute named Sunny and all they do is talk. Of course, a white American prostitute named Sunny is very different from an Indian American stripper named Sunny, but this is otherwise a fairly smart literary reference for such a dumb story and you should be impressed.
CHAPTER TEN LIVING THE DREAM
“Don’t you ever regret doing Van Wilder?” is a question I’m asked every so often, by a newer generation of South Asians who have the privilege of seeing the world through today’s vacuum. Answering this question is exciting because it signifies the progress of the last two decades. Do I wish my first movie was an action film in which I played a super-hot marine who saves the world from bad guys parachuting out of the sky? Of course. But I’m pretty sure Chris Hemsworth did that in Red Dawn. Not only did I genuinely enjoy working on Van Wilder (naked back on fire and all), but without Taj Mahal Badalandabad, there’d be no Harold & Kumar in my life. I have no regrets. Here’s why.
I was at an outdoor bar at the farmers market on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood for the birthday party of one of the producers of the Jamie Kennedy film Malibu’s Most Wanted1 when my coworker Billy Rosenberg (then jovial assistant to the birthday boy, now jovial powerhouse Hulu executive!) introduced me to two of his friends: “Meet Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. They just wrote a script called Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle—a stoner-buddy comedy about the adventures of two friends who go on an accidental road trip to quench their late-night munchies.” (Okay, the way he actually said it sounded more casual.) I managed to say, “Hey guys, nice to meet you!” before Hurwitz blurted out, “Whoa, you don’t have an Indian accent.” I must have given him a pretty dirty look because Jon quickly clarified: He had seen me in Van Wilder and assumed the accent was real,2 so he was doubly impressed that it wasn’t. As we made small talk over a beer, we realized that we both attended public high schools in New Jersey in the mid-nineties, and Hurwitz asked, “Wait a second, did you do Forensics? I think I vaguely remember a kid who looked like you at the New Jersey meets.” Being from New Jersey is like an ethnicity. This was instant bonding.
I thought their White Castle concept was potentially funny, and when the guys sent me their script the next day, my mind was completely blown. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was (and remains) the funniest screenplay I had ever read. The characters were smart and hilarious, and the humor was grounded in the friendship the title characters shared. The scenes were so absurd, in all of the right ways, with the two leads getting super stoned and somehow hang-gliding and riding a cheetah on their quest for hamburgers.
And of course, the biggest surprise of all: Kumar and Harold happen to be Asian American—without goofy accents, karate moves, turbans, or any other easy stereotypes. That’s why Hurwitz was excited to learn that I didn’t have an Indian accent. This was the first time I had ever seen non-stereotypical Asian guys in lead roles, in any film script. Harold even gets the girl!
Why did two funny white guys from New Jersey write a movie with two Asian American lead characters? I called the dudes immediately. Jon told me that he and Hayden had a diverse group of friends in high school3 and college. Whenever they’d watch movies together, they thought it was weird that the Asian or Indian characters would barely speak. So, they just wrote them as leads in a movie themselves.
Respect. Unfortunately, these sweet, naive newbies didn’t understand Hollywood the way I did. “Guys, this script is really awesome,” I told them, “but you’re new to LA. There’s no way a studio is going to buy this thing.” I was trying to be helpful. A few years earlier, two Asian American writers I knew were offered sour deals—told by studios that their scripts would be purchased as long as the Asian and Indian lead characters were changed to white ones. In both cases, they said no, opting instead to scrape together the cash to self-finance their films. “When nobody buys Harold & Kumar,” I told Hurwitz and Schlossberg, “let’s just do it ourselves. I’d love to help raise the money to make this independently. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read.”