Wednesday, September 24, 2008

I'm Famous

By: Jonathan “Cao Cao” Kos-Read


I’m famous.

Really. People want my autograph. They take pictures with me. In restaurants, they yell and wave, “Hey Cao Cao!” I wave back and, because it’s all so new, I fuckin’ love it.

The interesting thing though is, now that I’m famous I’ve been figuring out all this stuff about why stars are the way they are, and so, like a spy into the world of fame, here’s my secret report.

Why do stars wear dark glasses?


It’s a common misconception that stars wear dark glasses so as not to be recognized. “How stupid are they?” the man-in-the-street snarks, “Don’t they realize that makes them stick out even more?” But I now know the truth; he is making a mistake of analysis.

The star isn’t wearing the large dark sunglasses in order to protect, Clark Kent style, his secret identity. It is for another reason entirely.

Imagine what it’s like to be a star. You sit in a restaurant. Everywhere you look, everybody you look at, is looking back at you. And it’s creepy. They all nod at you. They wave.

But if you wear dark glasses, no one can be sure where you’re looking, “Oh look!” the fan thinks when he spots you, “Is he looking at me or something behind me. I’ll nod and wave . . . oh, he must be looking behind me,” when in fact, you, the star are thinking, “damn glad I brought my sunglasses.”

The sunglasses relieve you of the responsibility of responding to eye contact.

How should you sign autographs?

Say you’re mobbed by a crowd of girls, all peeing their pants for your autograph. You, an obliging soul, want to give it to them. But they’re so excited, pushed to such stratospheric heights of ecstasy by the frisson of your proximity that your poor hand is jostled to and fro with such ferocity that you are physically prevented from even putting pen to paper. What does the friendly, right-thinking famous person do in this situation?

Many people (who aren’t famous) say, “I would just like tell them, like really firmly, step back man, just like step back or that’s it, I just can’t sign any more autographs.” And the first time I got mobbed, I did that. But here’s the problem, the girls know there is limited time and at some point, the vicissitudes of fame will pull you out of their dreary lives. It’s this knowledge that drives a brutal natural selection. The most aggressive girls get their books signed first. The others watch and learn. Things quickly spiral out of control.

And herein lies the solution: they aren’t really shoving their notebooks “in front of you” they’re shoving them into “the space from where you take the notebooks.” Your original mistake was allowing yourself to take the notebooks from the same place where you were signing them.

Follow these instructions: The crowd rushes you. You pull out a pen. They stab you in the chest with a hundred notebooks. You, the experienced famous person reach up, over their heads, and take the notebook out of the shy, trembling hands of the little wallflower in the back, sign it, reach back over and return it to her.

They learn fast. After probably two such cullings they’ll cluster around an imaginary spot in the air two feet away from you, still frantic and peeing with worry but now stabbing the air instead of your chest leaving you free to bestow your John Hancock on all those little fans who make you feel so special.

Why are stars assholes?

Everybody who isn’t famous yet says, “I wouldn’t change man.” But of course, everybody does. Why?

First, being famous is like being a hot girl. After years of guys talking to you just because they want to see your pussy you get jaded and just treat all guys like shit. Think how you treat those dork Chinese college students who run up to you and say, “hey, do you want to be my foreign friend?!”

Being a star is the same. Everybody wants to be your friend so they can show you off to their real friends.

The second reason stars become assholes is: life is hard. Before you were famous you ate a lot of shit, steaming heaps of it every day. You did it because you weren’t the top dog, and when the top dog - your boss, your client, whoever - took a shit on you, you had to lick it up, smile and say, mmmm, that shit was soooo good. But now, you only have to be afraid of the audience – and they’re far away. As long as they love you, and watch shows just because you’re in them, whenever anybody you physically work with is incompetent, wants you to do something stupid or dicks you around in any way you can just let loose because your job doesn’t depend on them liking you.

Being a star lets you respond naturally to other people pissing you off.

How famous am I?

So having read this and, because you’re not Chinese, having no idea who the fuck I am, you might be curious and ask, “Jonathan, how big a star are you really? Are you really famous enough to tell me all this shit?” Well, interestingly, on the day I finished writing this, I had an experience that showed me just how famous I am: finally I was accosted by an eighteen year old chick.

“I’ve seen you on TV!” she squeeked.

“Yeah, I suppose you have.” I rumbled smoothly.

“You’re that guy!”

“I am that guy. Which show of mine do you like?”

She called frantically over to her friend and pointed to me, “Look, look, it’s Dashan!”

Friday, September 19, 2008

Elf Hookers

By: Jonathan “Cao Cao” Kos-Read


“Get off the elevator!” the producer yelled at the crippled people.

The patients, some of them really crippled like with broken legs and head wounds and shit looked around myopically. The producer made frantic shooshing gestures.

Before I go on to tell the story of how he managed to kick them off the elevator I want to say a short bit about this month’s column.

Somebody once said: the only normal people are the ones you don’t know well. And I think that holds true with jobs also. Scrape under the skin of every job and you’ll find a festering wound teeming with the maggots of peculiarity and strangeness. My job, playing white guys in stupid Chinese soap operas, is no different.

So: my last few columns have been cutsey little anecdotes, all sort of narcissistically about me. I make fun of myself but in a winking, insidery type way and only really to make myself look cooler. Not this time. This time I’ll tell you the story of the last day on my most recent shoot. No cutsey prose. No embellishment. Just the facts. It was a regular day . . .

The Cripples

We were in a hospital. It was the last day of shooting on this dumb movie about archeology. The plot was about how China has five thousand years of history but only an archeological record for like two thousand of them and I was playing an American archeologist who doesn’t believe(!) in the Chinese history and . . . well thrilling right. Anyway, we were behind schedule on this blockbuster and had to finish today or all of the actors would go into overtime.

We were waiting for the elevator. On one side was our crew. On the other side were real, actual sick people. There was a guy with a bleeding head, a really old guy who couldn’t walk, two guys with broken legs and two other patients who looked drugged or retarded or something.

So the elevator came and instead of saying like, “Hey you sick people, yeah you, the ones who are here for a real reason, you get on the elevator first,” our producer actually scampered over and stood in front of them, one arm outstretched to hold back what he must have anticipated as their mad, lopsided shuffle into the elevator. With his other arm he herded our crew in. Mission accomplished he hopped on and then fidgeted and sighed while the sickies shuffled slowly on board. He jabbed the button for our floor. Two sickies got banged by the closing elevator doors. But finally most of them managed to squeeze into the left over space.

Jab. Jab. Jab. Nothing happened. Then ding, ding, ding, a little alarm started to sound. The patients stared at us. The producer stared back. Nobody said anything. The little alarm continued to ding.

“That’s the overweight alarm,” the producer said to the patients.

They didn’t react.

“You guys have to get off see? There are too many people on the elevator,” he said.

Finally, after he’d browbeaten them into a shaky, shambling exodus we headed up to our location.

We shot like crazy and finished the location in four hours. The producer stepped away and let a pissed off triage nurse wheel some bleeding guy past.

He walked over to me and said, “See Cao Cao, Chinese people need to learn to be more polite. Couldn’t they see we were shooting here?!”

The Pretty Trees

The trees were like calligraphy. We were shooting on a lake and there was a whole starkly beautiful section of it where very old, dead trees reached up out of the greenish black water. The trees were white and clear against the dark water. It was really beautiful in the same way dying autumn water lilies are: stark and melancholy. But one of the biggest, most complex of these trees was in the way of a shot the director wanted.

So what to do in a situation like this? I mean you could maybe shoot from another angle, maybe? Or recognize that the tree was beautiful? Or you could make a third choice, like they did. They said, “Hey, let’s run over it with a boat.”

The actress and I were in a separate little rowboat and they were shooting us from the big barge where all the crew sat. They sort of yelled at us vaguely to wait and then they put the barge in reverse.

So the girl and I sat on this little boat and watched them take this huge barge, back it up for like ten minutes then gun it. It started slow, water boiling out the back but then picked up and by the time it hit the tree it was really truckin’ and didn’t even slow down. The tree snapped like a toothpick and wasn’t even there after the barge passed. The producers cheered. Problem solved! We can shoot! The pretty tree is gone!

So we started the scene again. I’m in the boat rowing the actress around. She’s my girlfriend and I’m trying to rekindle our love. I say my line: “Chinese nature is so beautiful.”

“Yes,” she answers solemnly, “we Chinese have respected nature for five thousand years.”

The Sleepy Hookers

So finally we were doing the last scene. It was like four in the morning and everyone was either falling over or wired on coffee and tea and so spazzy. The scene was this bit where the lead guy and I are in a bar and we both sing a song to impress my girlfriend. He of course sings better than I do and so the whole crowd erupts in spontaneous recognition of how amazingly amazing this Chinese archeologist is (Not only is his version of history accurate but he can sing too! Let’s get this party started!) The only problem: we had no crowd. We were supposed to have like a hundred extras milling around and dancing in this bar but when we got to the location the casting director admitted, well, sort of, he kind of, well, forgot. So we had nobody, not a single extra for the climactic scene of the whole movie and even the optimistic casting director admitted that it might be a little hard find a hundred of them at four in the morning like in the next five minutes.

I snickered and thought, “Well I’ll be makin’ bank tomorrow on overtime,” but it was not to be.

Ever resourceful, they thought of a solution. We were shooting in a big KTV. They went to talk to the boss. I was up on the stage practicing my song. Twenty minutes later, in shambled about fifty sleepy, crabby hookers. Behind them, on tiptoes, were about twenty little cooks from Sichuan. The hookers were mostly from Dongbei and so a bunch of them were over six feet tall. The cooks were from Sichuan and so it was like a scene from Lord of the Rings where the Elves and the Dwarves are lining up for battle except here the elves were crabby and selling pussy and the dwarves were wearing greasy chef hats.

The director paired them off. They started to dance. We started to shoot. I stepped up to the mic . . .

And there I was singing my heart into this weird Chinese song and I thought about the day. I saw the crippled people shambling around the lobby and (because they were blind and shit) bumping into each other like billiard balls, I saw the pretty tree, having struggled all these years to grow, slowly sinking into the muddy water and I saw the little cooks and the enormous hookers slowly circling like a Lord of the Rings nerdfan’s wet dream. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, belted out the chorus and thought, “What a cool job.”

About Me

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I play white guys on Chinese soap operas.