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INTERPRETATIONS Short Film Spotlight: CANVAS

  • August 26, 2010 1:57 pm

As many of you already know, we’ve launched a new film initiative entitled INTERPRETATIONS to support aspiring filmmakers. In a nutshell, you make a short film of no more than 3 minutes using the same script we provide (get all the info here). To help us launch, we commissioned several filmmaker friends to make their own shorts using our script and we’ll be featuring each one of them here (including a few words from the filmmakers themselves). Just a reminder that the deadline has been extended to 11:59 PM PST on Sept. 15. Also, check out our latest INTERPRETATIONS blogs including a Q&A with producer Dan Lin (Sherlock Holmes) and an edited transcript of the INTREPRETATIONS New York panel.

Today we present our final commissioned sample short Canvas by Mora Stephens and starring acclaimed artist James Jean:

 Read more...

Chinese Diggers, Asian ANZACs

  • August 23, 2010 12:06 am

YUEY

Yuey is a China-born, Australian-raised Asian Australian. He lived most of his life as a model minority before discovering another side to Australian history. That, coupled with reading the book Growing Up Asian in Australia, awakened his inner self and led him to embrace his identity. He spends his time thinking of more effective ways to promote Asian Australian culture as successfully as Asian Americans promote theirs. You can read Yuey’s blog here.

I first came across an Asian ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) when I was channel surfing through all five of Australia’s television channels.

The ABC was showing live footage of the ANZAC day parade, an annual event where ex-Servicemen march down the road. I was just about to change the channel when I heard the commentator announce “and here is Jack Wong Sue”.

Jack with some of his children.

“Jack Wong Sue”? I thought to myself, that sounds a bit Chinese and sure enough on screen appeared an Asian looking man in a wheelchair. This was weird and my only thought was that he was from Asia and he must have helped the Australians during one of the wars and in recognition of this, they let him march in the parade. (South Vietnamese Veterans are allowed to march in the parade, even though they weren’t Australian at the time and weren’t fighting for Australia.) We all know from school that ANZACs are white.

I didn’t think too much of it and left it at that, resuming my 5-channel surfing odyssey.  Read more...

Web or Without You: The Spider-Man Musical Cometh

  • August 19, 2010 12:01 am

DOMINIC

Dominic Mah is a writer/director/nerd from Berkeley, CA, living in Los Angeles. He has a leaked, albeit completely made-up, version of the Spider-Man musical script at www.dommah.com, as well as a bunch of thoughts on Robotech and casinos. He has a long history with both superheroes and rock musicals. Mispronounced in the right way, his name is a strong Vietnamese curse word.

Last week the Broadway Powers That Be announced that the Spider-Man musical is back on track for a December opening in New York. For those of you normal citizens who didn’t realize that such a thing existed, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark is an oft-delayed, utterly expensive stage musical to be directed by Julie Taymor, with songs by Bono & The Edge from U2. You really cannot make stuff like this up. Being a mighty nerd for comics, theater, and 80′s rock, on my scale this event is somewhere between Titanic and The Perfect Storm (my scale’s rating system consists entirely of nautical movie titles). I mean just look at this epically unlikely trifecta:

- Spider-Man: Possibly-overexposed comic book hero with own line of films, cartoons, lunchbox thermoses
– U2: Post-gigantic rock band that seems a little too serious to be into comic books
– Julie Taymor: Polarizingly audacious director responsible for the stage version of The Lion King and films featuring Frida Kahlo, Shakespeare, and the Beatles, and who for that reason also seems like she would not be into comic books; favors visual grandeur and some questionable cultural appropriations

…Well OK. Some could say this is a recipe for disaster, but that all depends on one’s definition of “disaster,” doesn’t it? True, it seems at first glance an unwieldy mix of aesthetics on which to spend a $50 million budget. But I believe a Spider-Man musical could still have a larger purpose: I’m thinking that a large-scale superhero musical is just what we need to counteract this trend of nerd icons becoming cool. Seriously, it’s gone too far, and it’s got to stop.  Read more...

Random Tips on Self-Distribution

  • August 16, 2010 12:01 am

QUENTIN

Quentin Lee would like to think he’s a part-time drag queen and and full-time hustler moonlighting as a filmmaker. He went to UCLA Film School with fellow Offender Justin whom he co-directed his first feature SHOPPING FOR FANGS with. Subsequently, he made DRIFT, ETHAN MAO and THE PEOPLE I’VE SLEPT WITH which is currently in theaters in New York and opening in L.A. (Aug 27), San Francisco (9/3) and San Jose (9/3). He also blogs as Film Hustler. Today, Quentin gives tips on self-distributing your own movie.

For The People I’ve Slept With, I wasn’t originally planning on doing theatrical self-distribution because we have already made a basic cable sale and were on the verge of finishing up the rest of North American sales. But when the fall cable date pressed closer, I wasn’t sure that our potential North American distributor would do a theatrical so I decided to take it on as a summer job. I had originally planned only to do San Francisco, but when I got a New York date I decided to also do Los Angeles.

New York and Los Angeles are often the toughest and most expensive markets. But if you don’t show in New York, you won’t really be taken seriously. Showing in New York can also help you get into other markets.

So ultimately why theatrical distribution?  Read more...

To Boldly Go…

  • August 12, 2010 12:01 am

LIZ

Liz Ho is an actor by day, Trek lover by night. Originally from a very yuppy suburb near San Francisco, Elizabeth now calls Los Angeles home. She loves Hello Kitty, pandas and food. You can get a glimpse into her thinking at her blog “The Positive Experiment”. You can also watch her on TV recurring guest star Rhonda Cheng on ABC Family’s newest show “Melissa & Joey”. Liz also appears in the INTERPRETATIONS commissioned short “Good Shot” by Offender David.

The Vegas Star Trek Convention 2010: the final frontier. These are the voyages of Liz Ho. Her weekend mission: to explore strange new venues, to seek out new costumes and new vendors, to boldly go where she has never gone before.

*CUE EPIC MUSIC*

I am a Star Trek fan. I have been since I was a kid. My parents were pretty strict about what we could and could not watch on T.V. My father, a closet trekkie (or trekker, I embrace both), deemed Star Trek appropriate for us to watch, something about how it was a scientific show (nice excuse, dad). So, on the weekends and during our school vacations, my sister and I used to sit up late at night with our bowls of ramen and watch re-runs of TNG (Star Trek: The Next Generation) until the wee-hours of the morning. There was something so magical about each episode. Who knew what was going to happen next to the Enterprise and her crew? The storytelling ignited my imagination. I just couldn’t get enough. Thus that summer, a trekkie was born.

Anyways, a couple of months ago, my friends and I decided that we should go to the 2010 Star Trek Convention in Vegas. I had never been to a Trek convention before and I was excited. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Sir Patrick Stewart, and more were supposed to be speakers this year. Fast forward to around midnight last weekend: I found myself in my car with my boyfriend, making the trek (haha, I’m so funny) to Vegas for my first Trek convention. The convention this year was held at the Hilton. Now, the Hilton was the hub of all things Trek for years. It was the home to the now defunct Star Trek: The Experience and all the previous Star Trek Conventions. Walking through the lobby from the garage, we were greeted by two Vulcans in full costume from the original series, a Klingon from TNG, and a kid dressed as kid Spock from the 2009 Star Trek movie. I hadn’t even set foot inside the convention and already it was awesome.  Read more...

The Golden State of Marriage

  • August 5, 2010 6:10 pm

CURTIS

Curtis Chin is a Motown-born, New York-bred, Los Angeles-based writer, producer and community activist. He’s proud to have co-founded the Asian American Writers Workshop and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress and for writing and producing the documentary, “Vincent Who?” He’s less proud of having started the Young Republicans Club in high school. He’s currently working on a new webventure with a former HBO exec and developing a comedy script with an independent director/producer.

My husband and I were pigging out at our favorite all-you-can-eat Korean bbq when the first text came in, “So when’s the big reception!”

We immediately knew what our friend was referring to: Perry vs. Schwarzenegger and the drive to overturn Prop 8, the ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in California.

And while we were happy that Federal Judge Vaughn Walker, a Bush-appointee, had ruled Prop 8 to be unconstitutional, we both knew it wasn’t exactly time to celebrate. With every court decision and public opinion poll, our emotions have continued to rise and fall. Yesterday was no different.

You see, my husband, Jeff, and I are one of the 18,000 gay or lesbian couples married in California before the narrow passage of Prop 8 in 2008. In our case, we had a shotgun wedding just days before the election. No frills. No gifts. Just a couple of signatures. And while that was legally good enough to get our marriage grandfathered in, we have been in this perpetual state of marriage limbo.  Read more...

Can You Name 10 Central Asians*?

  • August 2, 2010 12:08 am

ZOHRA

Zohra Saed aka Professora Talibonita is currently living in ABD-istan, a small island off the coast of PhD-land, the realm of steady salary and glamorous curriculum meetings. She is Afghan by birth, Brooklyn through sheer hard labor. She maintains her own Central Asia blog. She is the co-editor of the upcoming One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, Fall 2010).

A flash of amber skin, a few strings played in a soundtrack, the symbol of the wolf, a familiar name and suddenly, I’m verified/validated/authenticated/truncated/and blissfully accepted into the folds of dominant society… here is my top ten list of fun Central Asian Stuff (for lack of a better term) from 2000-2010 (because it takes a decade of mainstream cultural digestion in order to get this large of a list).

Do you remember Zhang Ziyi being serenaded in Uyghur in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)? I couldn’t stop yapping about that short little sliver of Turkic glow in a film filled with luxurious special effects and orientalist wow-things (scimitars, bamboo flying fighters, silky blouses with secret loves… etc etc). The accent almost stuffed up all the Turkic sounds in Lo’s nose but whatever, “Gozal Qiz” (beautiful girl) survived his accent and that, accentuated with his scimitar and his natty hair most certainly validated by 1/4 drop of Uyghur blood.

Top Ten Central Asians (2000-2010)

10) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Lo and Jen by the Yurt – in the background

Before Ang Lee broke any mountain — he dared to have an Uyghur, Alim Jan, perform traditional Uyghur instrumental for the soundtrack of this film. You can hear it in this scene.

Music by Alim Jan (Soundtrack 8 )  Read more...

Defiance of a Child of 4.29

  • July 29, 2010 1:20 pm

K.W.

At 82-years-old, K.W. Lee is considered the “Godfather of Asian American journalism.” He immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 on a student visa and became the first Asian immigrant to be hired by a mainstream news daily and has reported for the Kingsport Times and News in Tennessee, the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia and the Sacramento Union. He has covered stories ranging from the plight of coal miners in the Appalachians to the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South to the unjust incarceration of Chol Soo Lee. K.W. founded the Korea Times English Edition and continues to work and lecture across the country. He is also working on a project to document the Korean American experience during the L.A. riots.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre broke out in 1989.

Nobody knew the name of that forlorn figure of a Chinese youth on the TV screen in a death-defying, heart-stopping standoff, daring to stop the rolling tanks at Beijing’s blood-drenched Tiananmen Square.

Three years later, a made-in-USA mini- urban pogrom erupted in, of all places, the City of Angeles. It’s called the April 29, 1992, L. A. Riots or Sa-I-Gu (4-2-9 in Korean).

Nobody knew another lonely figure, a faceless Korean grocer’s son, who penned a heart-rending letter of protest and defiance to the mighty Los Angeles Times at the height of the local media-instigated open season on hapless Korean mom&pop storekeepers in the crime-and-violence-ridden inner cities of LA.  Read more...

Being All-American Means Eating All That You Can Eat

  • July 26, 2010 12:16 am

TOM

Tom Huang is an indie filmmaker, as well as paying his bills as a writer, director and producer. His latest feature, Why Am I Doing This?, a multi-award-winning film about an Asian-Am guy and a African-Am guy failing in Hollywood, is now out everywhere on DVD, including amazon.com. The Boston Herald called it “a raucous look at life in Los Angeles for an actor,” while Tom’s mom said, “I don’t get it.” He is currently working on Unusual Targets with Harry Shum, Jr. from Glee, and is also trying to catch the first season of Mad Men on DVD because everyone says it’s so good.


Being American, and being Asian, I love seeing things that have fused the two, that shows how our increasingly diverse cultures in America have had sex and made a hapa child that is Asian in background, but totally American in it’s design. In this case, what do you get when you mix Asia and the American spirit? No, I’m not talking Keanu Reeves … I’m talking about the all-you-can-eat Asian food extravaganza.

I’m talkin’ the all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ experience, where, for a set price, they give you all the various Korean marinated flesh from four different animals you can ask for (no sharing or take-outs, please), and then make you cook it all yourself on a table-top grill (who thought that up scam up? You pay so you can cook?). Or the Hong Kong buffet, where you pick from about 500,000 trays of Chinese food (including the real shit like chicken feet and rubbery cows parts), poorly prepared sushi made by a Chinese immigrant in a karate outfit, and a soft-serve ice milk ice cream machine that you can top with nuts, chocolate sauce and lychees.  Read more...

The Oil Spill Spiel

  • July 22, 2010 1:53 pm

LEO

S. Leo Chiang is a Taiwan-born, San Francisco-based filmmaker. His most recent film, A VILLAGE CALLED VERSAILLES, has been making the rounds at film festivals and just had its broadcast on PBS Independent Lens. He is a frequent flyer program junkie and would do just about anything to get more miles. He loves reading “US” magazine but feels compelled to always couple it with an issue of “Economist” to offset the trashiness. Leo is currently working on a short documentary about Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao for the Center for Asian American Media.

“Vessels of Opportunity”? Really? Someone at BP actually thought it was a good idea to call this program “Vessels of OPPORTUNITY”?

I arrive in New Orleans for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April, which marked the beginning of one of the biggest man-made disasters in American history. I’m here to cover the BP Claims Fair, hosted by Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-LA), for local residents suffering financial hardship from the oil spill to apply for compensation from BP. My cameraman Charlie and I are shooting the Vietnamese-speaking “Vessels of Opportunity” trainer demonstrating a Hazmet suit to a handful of Vietnamese American fishers.  Read more...

INTERPRETATIONS Short Film Spotlight: RUMBLE

  • July 21, 2010 12:20 am

As many of you already know, we’ve launched a new film initiative entitled INTERPRETATIONS to support aspiring filmmakers. In a nutshell, you make a short film of no more than 3 minutes using the same script we provide (get all the info here). To help us launch, we commissioned several filmmaker friends to make their own shorts using our script and we’ll be featuring each one of them here (including a few words from the filmmakers themselves).

Today we present Rumble by actor Ken Leung (Miles on Lost). We wanted to do something special for our recent INTERPRETATIONS Film Panel in New York and what better idea than a new short by a native New Yorker featuring the city he loves:

 Read more...

My summer in less than 350 words

  • July 19, 2010 12:42 am

KONRAD

Konrad Ng, PhD is currently in DC for the summer, serving as the Acting Director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institute. He is also an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he teaches film theory at the Academy for Creative Media (ACM). Originally from Burlington, Ontario (that’s Canada, folks), Konrad, on occasion, has cravings for Smarties and maple syrup. On January 20, 2009, Konrad became mistaken for someone else.

It has been almost two months since my appointment as Acting Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American (APA) Program. I am having fun. Everyday, I don a suit and tie (respect, ya know), pack my things and head to the office. My task can be summed up like this: work on reflecting the APA experience in Smithsonian collections, research, exhibitions, education, and national outreach. While Washington, DC is known for its humid summers and being “Hollywood for ugly people,” a lesser-known fact is that this place is a site for Asian Pacific Hawaiian coolness.  Read more...

Indie Filmmaking in the Age of Terror

  • July 15, 2010 12:22 am

DOMINIC

Dominic Mah is a writer, director, and ex-professional gambler. He is currently editing a movie, a feature-length dark-comedy-type-movie. He also blogs about pop culture, girl problems, casinos, and Robotech at http://dommah.com/. Mispronounced in the right way, his name is a strong Vietnamese curse word.

I recently wrapped principal photography on a feature HD movie. Although it was exhausting, the shoot was remarkably disaster-free. So far in my filmmaking travels there’s nothing to compare to That One Time where we were almost shut down by the Department of Homeland Security (also the FBI, the LAPD, and the Fire Department). And hopefully, knock on applebox, nothing ever will. So I’m revisiting this fun and perspective-keeping story, which was chronicled previously in both my blog and an article by Offender Philip. (The very brief lesson of it is, DON’T park your unmarked white grip truck overnight next to a government facility during the Age of Terrorism, even if you have a permit to shoot there.)

MARCH 13….SEVERAL YEARS AGO.

…So it’s 6:30 AM Saturday morning and my phone’s ringing, I imagine it’s someone from cast or crew with some last minute crisis that will require solving before 8 AM calltime.

….Soooooo wrong. It’s the LAPD. An officer asks me if I’m renting a truck parked outside the Van Nuys state building (where we’re shooting this weekend). Yes, I am. We parked it there last night with all the grip gear because we thought it’d be safe. “It’s causing quite a stir,” the officer says.  Read more...

My Dad, The Vagina Man

  • July 12, 2010 12:26 am

LEE ANN

Lee Ann Kim is a dog, virgo, recovering television news journalist and boss lady of the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Among her many talents are barking like a chihuahua, doing the splits, and the ability to remember random lyrics to cheesy 80s songs. Hailing from the mean streets of Chicago (Downers Grove, IL to be exact), she’s known among Filipino gangstas as “Lizelle” and aspires to take over her father’s OBGYN practice. IUDs anyone?

Thank God my dad is a doctor. And not just any doctor – he’s a lady’s man, Delivery Daddy, King of Pap. Yup, he’s an OBGYN. And this morning, when I felt an awful burning sensation when urinating, I knew it was time to call dad to phone-in a UTI prescription at my drive-through Walgreens. No waiting for a doctor’s appointment for me!

Most of my friends blush when I tell them my father looks at vaginas for a living. I don’t know why the V-word seems so dirty to people. But I guess when your father is an OBGYN, you have a different perspective.  Read more...

Keeping Confusionism out of our schools and community

  • July 8, 2010 12:12 am

JAY

Jay Chen is the Vice-President of the Board of Education for the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District, from which he graduated in 1996. He attended college at the Kremlin on the Charles, where he read Marx, wrote a paper on Che, edited for The Crimson, and won a fellowship to study in the People’s Republic of China. He also regularly pays into his Social Security and Medicare accounts. Learn more about him here and here.  

In the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, with budget cuts looming, teacher layoffs cascading, and achievement gaps growing, who could have imagined that the most controversial issue at our school district would be the acceptance of free money and books to expand an existing Chinese language class?

That is the strange reality I have been facing for the last six months, ever since our board approved an agreement with the non-profit Hanban to create a Confucius Classroom at Cedarlane, a predominately Latino middle school in Hacienda Heights. Instead of seeing this as an innovative opportunity to educate students at no cost to taxpayers during a recession, we’ve been accused of bringing Communism to the classroom. I actually think most districts would be envious of having a problem of too much funding. But I digress.

 Read more...

Is Vomiting A Dramatic Action?

  • July 5, 2010 12:08 am

DOMINIC

Dominic Mah is a writer, director, and ex-professional gambler. He is currently editing a movie, a feature-length dark-comedy-type-movie. He also blogs about pop culture, girl problems, casinos, and Robotech at http://dommah.com/. Mispronounced in the right way, his name is a strong Vietnamese curse word.

So I’m trying to figure out what to do with the vomiting scene in my movie. By the traditional Mamet-preached rules of storytelling, every scene should have a dramatic action, which involves someone needing something and their obstacles towards getting it. By the more modern Youtubey rules, every scene just needs something sensational or cute happening. Being a microbudget movie, we don’t have many car chases, alien invasions, skydiving or guys being shot out of cannons. But there is a rather handsome shot of a guy throwing up into a three-foot-high brandy snifter, and the question is how/whether to use it to its fullest potential.  Read more...

G.O.O.K. is a Four-Letter Word

  • July 1, 2010 12:34 am

K.W.

At 82-years-old, K.W. Lee is considered the “Godfather of Asian American journalism.” He immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 on a student visa and became the first Asian immigrant to be hired by a mainstream news daily and has reported for the Kingsport Times and News in Tennessee, the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia and the Sacramento Union. He has covered stories ranging from the plight of coal miners in the Appalachians to the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South to the unjust incarceration of Chol Soo Lee. K.W. founded the Korea Times English Edition and continues to work and lecture across the country.

In this day and age of Political Correctness, you seldom hear the G-word uttered in our public or even private conversations. It’s frowned upon at any public discourse, especially among the American-born generations, ever since the Great Awakening of Asian Americans in the 1970s and 1980s.

For this FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) immigrant from Korea, however, the racial slur did hardly rattle my Teflon nerves, since my slow-boat-to America generation had been exposed to all sorts of racial epithets bandied about among different ethnic groups.

But it’s instructive for the younger generations who have grown up in the PC years to get some historical perspective of not only the G-word but other epithets in the fast-evolving demographics of this nation.  Read more...

Working with Prince

  • June 28, 2010 12:00 am

DHH

David Henry Hwang is a playwright who has been producing plays, musicals and operas for three decades. He won the Tony Award for his play M. BUTTERFLY and also writes for movies and television. After his previous blogs where he unleashed his Asian Shame and discussed his worst career moves (see here, here and here), he turns to write about something more…funky.

Growing up, I listened to lots of music, but the two artists who meant most to me were David Bowie and Prince. I discovered Prince through his 1980 album DIRTY MIND. See, back in 1980, there was black music, and there was white music. Period. I listened mostly to black artists cuz I imagined most of the white guys would just as soon beat me up as pick up their guitars. Unless they were British, in which case they might not beat me up cuz, I dunno, they had cool accents.

But Prince. DIRTY MIND. What WAS this? Kinda R&B, kinda New Wave. Kinda disco, kinda … punk? How was this guy managing to pull it off? The sound wasn’t black, wasn’t white, it was BOTH. Or neither. Whatever. It was totally new. And brilliant. So danceable. And … really nasty. I loved, loved, loved it.

From then on, I bought every Prince album the day of its release, scoured record stores for unreleased and bootleg tracks, followed each concert tour. I saw 1984’s PURPLE RAIN show in Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis — on Christmas Eve.

So imagine my groupie heart in 1989, when I opened PEOPLE Magazine to find a picture of Prince, coming out of M. BUTTERFLY, my Broadway show! Prince goes to Broadway? Who knew? He saw my play! Did he like it? How come no one told me? I could’ve been there! I could had like a … casual conversation with him. “Hey, Prince, how ya doin’?” Do people actually call him “Prince?”

Four years later, in 1993, I began hearing through my agents that Prince was interested in meeting with me. To talk about an idea for a stage musical.  Read more...

My First (and Nearly Last) Day on ‘Friends’ (Part 2)

  • June 24, 2010 12:10 am

LAUREN

Lauren Tom began her career at the age of 17 in the Broadway musical, A Chorus Line. She is best known for her roles in The Joy Luck Club, and Friends, but has also appeared in Men in Trees for ABC, and in the films Bad Santa, In Good Company, When A Man Loves a Woman, Mr. Jones, With Friends Like These, Catfish in Black Bean Sauce, and Manhood. Lauren’s voice work can be heard in the animated series, Futurama, King of the Hill, Codename: Kids Next Door, Teacher’s Pet, Rocket Power, Max Steel, Batman, Superman, Kim Possible, Baby Clifford, American Dragon, Mulan II, Penguins of Madagascar, and the upcoming Kung Fu Panda (the sequel) and Kung Fu Panda (the TV series.) Lauren is a Leo/Pig and is the mom to 2 Chewish boys (that’s Chinese and Jewish), and a Can Opener to a cat, a dog, four turtles and 13 fish.

Read Part 1 here. Part 2 begins as Lauren accompanies Michael McKean to Carrie Fisher and Penny Marshall’s big party…

As we pull up to the valet parking service in front of Carrie Fisher’s house, I hear music and laughter pouring out the front door. The house is a traditional style mansion behind a gated wall in Bel Air. Michael steadies me as I negotiate my platform heels on the uneven brick steps. At each landing, votive candles glow from inside paper bags. I take a deep breath and smell jasmine.

Michael pushes open the front door. I’m immediately surrounded by every famous person I could ever name. Waiters carrying trays of hors d’oeuvres bustle about. I look straight ahead and see Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Ben Stiller, John Lovitz, Jamie Lee Curtis. I look to my left: Martin Short, Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, David Lander. Michael takes me, the invisible ant woman, by the arm, and leads me towards them.  Read more...

My First (and Nearly Last) Day on ‘Friends’ (Part 1)

  • June 21, 2010 12:23 am

LAUREN

Lauren Tom began her career at the age of 17 in the Broadway musical, A Chorus Line. She is best known for her roles in The Joy Luck Club, and Friends, but has also appeared in Men in Trees for ABC, and in the films Bad Santa, In Good Company, When A Man Loves a Woman, Mr. Jones, With Friends Like These, Catfish in Black Bean Sauce, and Manhood. Lauren’s voice work can be heard in the animated series, Futurama, King of the Hill, Codename: Kids Next Door, Teacher’s Pet, Rocket Power, Max Steel, Batman, Superman, Kim Possible, Baby Clifford, American Dragon, Mulan II, Penguins of Madagascar, and the upcoming Kung Fu Panda (the sequel) and Kung Fu Panda (the TV series.) Lauren is a Leo/Pig and is the mom to 2 Chewish boys (that’s Chinese and Jewish), and a Can Opener to a cat, a dog, four turtles and 13 fish.

It’s the summer of 1994. I am an out of work actress sitting in my home in the Hollywood Hills watching an episode of a new sit-com, Friends, on NBC. I seem to be having a mild crush on one of the characters, Ross. I distinctly remember thinking, “I’d love to work on this show. And I’d love to play my scenes with that guy. I’ll wait to see what his name is in the end credits. David Schwimmer. Got it.”

The next morning, I’m walking on my treadmill eating a Krispy Kreme at the same time, when my agent, Leslie Siebert, phones. “Lauren, I have a job offer for you.”

“A ‘what’offer?” I say, slowing down the treadmill.

“I know, it’s been awhile,” she says in a dry, flat, tone. Even when Leslie was a fledgling agent, she always sounded like she had seen it all, heard it all, and done it all before. Most people are afraid of her, including myself. “The producers of Friends want to know if you’d like to do a 6 episode arc on the show starting next week—playing Ross’s girlfriend.”  Read more...