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.
* * *
As I spent more time in the office, I got to know Captain Moneybags better. My initial first-day impressions about him were correct: He wanted to be seen as a real player （whatever that means） without necessarily doing the actual work to be a player （whatever that means）。 He had someone else record the company’s outgoing voice mail greeting to make it seem like he was such a busy, important person, he couldn’t be bothered to record his own. Like rich guys in many different industries, I learned that CM could buy his way into and out of anything, with failures being papered over by daddy.
He would come up with dozens of crazy, expensive ideas that weren’t at all related to producing movies. He’d often passionately monologue about his desire to make the company “pop” by spending money on things that seemed cool to him, like stacks of expensive business cards, a fancy watch that I didn’t know the name of, and “This gorgeous recamier,” which “cost me $24,000.” （Told you, ugliest couch I’d ever seen.）
Despite the obvious differences I had with my boss,4 I still took my job seriously and sought to make an impact wherever I could. That’s how I was raised: to work hard and have integrity. As long as I was interning there, I viewed the company’s success as my own. I knew that even in this toxic environment I would at least learn what not to do, and I was determined to get as much out of the experience as possible.
Subversive piece of advice: If you parrot the language of an especially shallow boss, they will like you more, making your work environment more tolerable. I thought of ways to make CM’s company “pop.” Given his obsession with voice mails and business cards, I figured he’d probably love a sleek-looking website with his name in bold print at the top: Captain Moneybags Productions.
An online presence would allow us to consider a wider pool of talent because writers who didn’t have agents could digitally upload scripts for us to consider. That could help us find better projects, since technology would let us tap into a talent pool otherwise closed off to us. （You traditionally need an agent to get a script seen by a production company.） It would also streamline a fair amount of paperwork, making my job a lot easier. So, while eating lunch at my desk one afternoon, I built CM a simple home page using a GeoCities template. It took all of twenty minutes.
Captain Moneybags strolled back from a fancy lunch meeting in an “I love myself extra hard today” kind of mood. I went to his desk and showed off my work.
“You made me a website?! We’re gonna pop!”
“It’s just a template for now. Yes, I did figure it could help the company ‘pop.’？”5
“Is this the internet now? Am I on the internet?!”
“The website will be on the internet, yes. And the most important thing is, it’ll help with script submissions by—”
“Holy shit. I’m. On. The. Internet.”
“Well, not yet, you still have to register the domain and after—”
“How much does that cost?”
“Ninety-five dollars.”
“That’s it?! I’ll pay it!” He handed me his credit card. “Do whatever that thing you just said for the ninety-five dollars!”
“Okay.”
“You are a GENIUS. I’m on the fucking internet! WE. ARE. GONNA. POP!!”
This Crazy Rich Caucasian had absolutely no desire to learn about how digitizing his script process could help his company do better. He spent the rest of the day calling everyone in his Rolodex, directing them to the janky-ass GeoCities link. On his way out the door that night, he promoted me to junior creative executive.
Please take a second here. This is important to digest. After all the grinding and actual work I had done for him, the reason I got promoted was not because I pulled business data, merged it with something creative, and offered him casting suggestions, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, tailor-made for his feature film. No, I got promoted because I made Captain Moneybags something shiny with his name on it that “popped.”
The promotion was essentially a vanity bump. I went from unpaid intern to unpaid junior creative executive, with the promise of a future salary; I would begin getting paid the day after I graduated. I was assigned more responsibility, like being empowered to search for new scripts on my own and hiring our new batch of interns. I realized I was in the right world because I was the first one to come in every day and the last to leave, and I was still taking a full course load at UCLA while working as a Resident Advisor in the dorms to pay for housing, making no money at the film studio, receiving no college credit, working for a wealthy narcissistic racist, and bizarrely loving that I finally had access to this incredible, creative world. The only perk that came with being an unpaid junior creative executive was a pass allowing me to park in a closer lot. （This may not sound like a big deal, but Hollywood people put the specific locations of parking spaces into their employment contracts. There’s a detailed hierarchy that takes years to work through and generally culminates when you pull into your own personal parking spot. With your name on it.）