Monday, January 5, 2009

My First Kungfu Scene

by: Jonathan 'Cao Cao' Kos-Read

Every cool job I ever got, I lied my way into.

A perfect example of this was a few weeks ago when I was sitting in this director’s office on a movie I was trying to get into and he said, “How’s your kungfu?” and I said, “I’m like totally good at kungfu.”

And I know, right now you’re chuckling and thinking, “bet that was a disaster.” But this month’s column is not another story of how I failed at something and embarrassed myself. No, this month’s column is all about how I am so fucking cool. I mean sure, I’ve never done a kungfu scene before, never studied (never even considered studying) kungfu and sure, of course, I sucked. But think about it. What dude didn’t grow up watching TV shows like ‘Kung Fu’ and dreaming, literally salivating, at the thought of one day getting to do that shit, to throw punches, stand over defeated enemies, to bust out a smokin’, wicked kungfu pose and then say some line like, ‘prepare yourself for defeat grasshopper.’? So this month: flashes from behind the silver screen at how a good fight crew can make a guy like me, a guy who hasn’t exercised in six years and who throws a punch like a sissy girl, look like a God.

* * *

My fist glints in the sunlight as, in slow motion, it arcs across the distance to Yudeshui’s chest. And you can tell it’s a massive, bone crushing punch because as it connects, the impact throws dust exploding out from the pile driver center like a missile impact in the Iraqi desert. And the dust, in that beautiful moment of hyper-velocity that only slo-mo can catch, shudders itself outward into insubstantiability, dissipating in glistening eddies, whorls and vortices. I’ve seen that shot in like every kungfu movie I ever watched and this time it’s my fist.

It’s day one of my first fight scene. I’m playing this bad ass dude during the Boxer Rebellion. Yudeshui is the hero, trying to save China from my evil machinations, but he’s fighting injured so I’m kicking his ass. The dust, the beautiful dust that accentuates the power of my sledgehammer fists is ‘Yinger Chanpin Tender Butt’ baby powder. They shake it onto my hands before every take.

* * *

Across the square I do three back flips. Yudeshui wrenches out a spear-thrust kick at me, I leap back, run up the side of a tree, back flip behind him. He grabs at me, and flips over my head. I wrench his arm behind his back. He spins out of it. Then, like an explosion, we throw a cataclysmic blur of hundreds of punches and kicks as we spin around each other. Finally he cracks one in my face. I leap back, teeth bared in a nasty grin. “Is that the best you’ve got?” I snarl, then with a roar, leap back into the fight for another round.

Or to be technically correct, my double does all that.

* * *

Yudeshui is raining hammer blows on me but, Matrix style, I’m looking him dead in the eyes as my arms, a blur, move in a coordinated and amazing dance that’s like a light speed brick wall against each of his blows. My eyes never leave his. My steely glare is menacing, intimidating, manly.

We do a million takes of this shot. Each time he hits me, a) it fucking hurts and so b) I react like a sissy. The director comes over and says, “Cao Cao come look at the playback,” and there’s me, flinching and blinking like a girl every time he hits me. Shit, I think and do it again, glaring at Yudeshui the whole time. The director shows me the playback again. Again, there’s me still scrunching up my face and shutting my eyes like a pussy. Shit, I think. I mean, this is a real problem - I think I’m keeping my eyes open but I’m not. It’s like an involuntary wimp reaction that I can’t control. And it’s a close up. But clearly they have lots of experience with wimpy actors. They have a clever solution. They have us move at half speed: Yudeshui’s arms lazily looping around into mine. Me slowly moving to block them. At the time I think this is weird but then they show me the playback in slow motion - it looks super cool like ‘ultra slow motion’. My glare is solid as a rock.

* * *

The last shot of the day: I’m standing over a beaten Yudeshui - not like humiliated with clever repartee, but rocked. Through sheer manly power in a deeply meaningful, primeval, violent way, defeated. I’m towering over him, slitted eyes glinting steel as he squirms helpless below me. The camera is on the ground. I’m up on a stool. They’re using a wide-angle, fish-eye lens so I seem to stretch up into the very sky itself like a God. They’ve got a big fan next to me blowing my hair as if I’m standing rock solid against the gale of a storm. In the sky above me they CGI the clouds so they race by, freighted with menace and despair. I say, “Shenshochang is waiting for you in hell.” I raise my arm and bring it shuddering down with the weight of a freight train and crush him into oblivion.

I lose my balance and fall off the stool. This happens several times while the crew stands around smoking and laughing at me. Each time I say, “Sorry guys, I’ll get it right this time,” then I do the punch again and my arms swing out and I go pin wheeling off the stool.

But only the last take matters.

* * *

I go to the editing room a week later to see the scene cut together. I look, devastatingly, deeply, mind-blowingly, profoundly, eight year old kids will measure themselves by my standard, cool. Me, the kungfu master.

I fucking love being an actor.

Stupid TV Show Plots

by: Jonathan 'Cao Cao' Kos-Read

Many expats, in the frightening moment before they manage to push the AV button on their DVD remote, are exposed to the strange, hummocked wasteland of Chinese TV. It is peopled with weirdos in poofy dynastic hairdos, brave, careworn heroes in little green hats and the occasional flashy-lights-and-smoke thing where people in odd clothes sing screechy songs. But as I said, most of you have only caught brief, frightened glimpses of this strange world.

So this month, I'll tell you about it. I'll introduce you to this world by telling you about the plots of three of my most recent shows. Something that, I have to admit, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to do. Because one of the little tragedies of my life is that foreigners don't watch the shows and Chinese, who are used to them by now, don't think they're funny. So I chuckle alone.

But not today.

The first plot was based on a true story: A few years ago, this Chinese dude was studying in the US and then one day he whacked out and shot all his teachers and then killed himself. This really happened, it's not made up. And because it was so fucked up and tragic, everybody was like, “damn that would be such a cool TV show.” The plot, in the show that was finally made, went like this:

X, a bright and honest physics student arrives in America. He is determined to succeed in this new exciting world. But has trouble adjusting. Americans are strange. His Chinese girlfriend becomes a stripper. He falls in love with pistol packing chick cop. His roommate (me) is a crazy gun nut who seduces him into the exciting and dangerous world of packin' heat. His physics professor likes to tie up his secretary and rape her all the time (and because that kind of thing is normal in America she always just goes back to work the next day, but she's kind of sad). As his life spirals out of control, as his prof rapes his stripper girlfriend and steals his research, as his roommate plies him with guns and sleeps with his sister, as his best friend learns how to be American and so bangs both his ex and his new girlfriend, something in X snaps . . . . . and he takes his revenge on America.

The plot of my next show was about medicine. For a while now, there have been all these (alleged) scandals about tainted Chinese products – toothpaste that blinds kids, dog food that makes Fido die in agony, lead painted toys that make your three year old sweetie retarded. If somebody wanted to solve this problem, to spotlight how it could happen and how it could have be prevented, a TV show is the perfect vehicle. So one was made. The plot went like this:

I run an American company. My American company makes fake medicines in China. Not only are the meds fake and kill Chinese people, they also “change their DNA”. So then they need another medicine, one that (conveniently) my company also makes. It turns out that only Traditional Chinese Medicine can save them (the good natural kind, not tiger penises and aardvark testicles and shit like that) And so the heroes go off on a desperate, time pressured, DaVinci Code style search for the twigs and dirt that will change all their DNA back to normal. The actors got to say all kinds of cool lines like, “But we only have ten hours to find the tree bark!”

The third show was about AIDS. AIDS is a growing problem in China, a problem that can be attacked with good education. Here was the plot of my show:

A big American athletic wear company hires a Chinese “Hero Athlete” to be the face of its shoe brand. They spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign. They roll out this big extravagant thing and then suddenly . . . . they discover their guy is infected with HIV (he got it from shaking hands). And they freak out. What are they going to do?! They have choices. They could, for example, slowly push the guy aside, or they could talk to him and allow him to step down. But none of that pussy shit for this company. They find me, an assassin, and they send me to China to kill him. The rest of the show is about how we circle around each other as I try to get him and he slips away each time. And the show is really educational too. For example instead of having something boring like he got the virus from IV drug use or sex, (realistic but zzzzzz, so dull) he got it in a complex revenge plot by a disgruntled bank robber who he beat up with an umbrella as the dude tried to escape from a heist.

And so now, next time you turn on the TV, you can linger a bit on the, now slightly less frightening site before you, now enlightened, now knowing, if only in some small way, what they are talking about. And the vibration of your little smile will spread out through the universe and I won't feel so alone.

Drunk, Naked and Desperate

By:
Jonathan ‘Cao Cao’ Kos-Read


I am desperate for work.

I list, in this column, with some frequency, the degradation I deal with at the hands of rotten producers and retarded directors. But there is a third shitty thing about being an actor, and that is the terrifying, soul excoriation of unemployment. So this month, so you won’t be confused about the nature of what I do, I’ll chronicle the last two months of desperate, grinding panic as I struggled and failed to get a job – the whole process made all the more frightening because I don’t want my new daughter to starve to death before her first birthday or grow up like retarded or deformed from malnourishment.

Around Spring Festival I was thinking, “Damn, the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.” There were like three shows all lined up saying, “Cao Cao, you are a God, you are the One, if we can’t have you then we don’t want anybody.”

But then everything somehow fell apart.

A sure thing about a hard drinkin’, poker playin’, American code breaker fell apart because the producer scammed me.

Another sure thing about a Russian mechanic, sure to the point that the director called me himself and told me it was a done deal, fell apart because I then got greedy and asked for too much money.

A show about a banker fell apart because I was too young.

A show about a tourist in love fell apart because I was too old.

A movie about the Olympics fell apart because I have all this fresh-eyed new competition flowing in from America who (who the hell knows why) want to make it in Chinese soap operas. Damned, cheap foreign labor!

Then I was too expensive again.

Then two shows just fell apart on their own.

So two months later I was fucking panicking, literally, couldn’t sleep, stomach convulsed by cramps of terror, middle of the night drenching icy sweat panicking. Would I ever work again? Was it all over? And then finally, from out of these depths of depression, despair and penury came a call – for a show. And as I stood there, phone in hand, I knew that the crunch time, the time that separates the men from the boys had come. Failure, as they say, was not an option.
Unfortunately though, when I got the call I was at a friend’s wedding and, as is proper at such an occasion, I was falling down, piss on my shoes drunk.

“Whoa man sorry, I’m like all booked today, you know?” I told the AD, trying really hard not to slur, “How about, like, tomorrow?” This was a lie, obviously, but I could barely stand up.

“No, if you don’t come today, we can’t use you. Director is only here for one day.”

I thought about this (or tried to through the booze). On a normal day I’d have just told him to fuck off, said, “Gosh, yeah, what an amazing opportunity, it would be so super to work with you, but gee, just can’t make it today, what a shame! Next time I guess.” He would’ve translated this (correctly) as “Fuck off. I’m too cool and too busy,” and they would have rearranged their schedules to accommodate me, the diss convincing them that I was valuable, making them want me even more.

But drink and panic were clouding my judgment - I needed this job.

“Let me see if I can re-arrange my schedule,” I said.

I hung up and found a wall on which to take a shaky piss. I threw up for a few minutes then called him back. “Hey, yeah, I, like, moved a meeting so, ah, I can swing by at eight o’clock. Okay?”

Then the second problem reared its head.

Directors have no imagination. They decide whether to use you twenty seconds after you walk in the door. And they love clichés. So the most important question I ask before I go see one is, “What does the character do for a living?” If the answer is businessman, I go in a suit, stand up real straight and act like an asshole. If the answer is WWII air force pilot, I go in a bomber jacket, wear tight jeans and chew gum. And the directors (who inexplicably never catch on that it’s a costume) exclaim, with relief and joy, “My God! He IS the character!”

But this time I was caught off guard.

Because the answer was, “He’s a caveman.”

I wasn’t even sure I’d heard him right, “you mean like a wild, hairy guy from before civilization?”

“Exactly,” said the AD.

Shit, I thought. I mean, it sounds funny now right, but like I said, I seriously needed this job so I genuinely had to figure out and put together, in under an hour, and stumbling drunk, a caveman costume.

“Ahh . . . “ I said, “Ahm . . . got it . . . see you at eight.” I hung up and staggered off to find a cab, only stopping once for a long beer pee behind a tree.

An hour later I flounced in, ready for action: I’d done some thinking in the car. I squinted around. There was the director, a bunch of nervous actors. There was some Italian guy with long hair who looked like a caveman - clearly competition. The director asked, “Can we do your audition now?” And my answer was a big, drunken, “you betcha” because, like I said, I figured I had it scoped.

“Gimme two seconds,” I said.

I ran outside and spit a huge loogie into my hands and then used it to make my hair stick out in all sorts of wild directions. Two minute later, hair all crazy and with dirt from the hallway floor smeared all over my face I walked into the audition room butt ass naked and slurred out, “All right dudes, I’m ready.”

I stumbled my way through the audition, more on adrenaline than any actual skill but, you know, I was drunk so it was at least exuberant. When the director finally yelled cut, you could hear a fuckin’ pin drop, not a sound.

And then . . . and then . . . the director started clapping. “Perfect!” he said, “perfect!” he turned to the other actors in the gymnasium. “This is an actor! You see? You all suck! No one paid attention when you auditioned – because you were not committed!” They sat around looking sullen, probably thinking, “dude, we paid attention ‘cause he was naked,” and then on further reflection, “shit, should I get naked too?”

“So there it is,” I thought as I stood up there in front of them, hangin’ in the breeze, “ I guess I’m perfect for a desperate, emaciated wild man scrabbling in dirt and filth for his survival.”

About Me

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I play white guys on Chinese soap operas.