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.”

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!”

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.”