My days were now spent working at Palmer’s and trying to make some headway in the larger filmmaking world. I kept myself busy with making small movies wherever I could.
I directed a public service television spot starring Slim Pickins, who had famously played Major “King” Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Pickens had been a rodeo cowboy and bit player in movies until Strangelove made him famous. He told me Kubrick was a genius who could carry on a complex conversation with you while at the same time playing chess with someone else, but he would often make you do a scene a hundred times. Slim kept forgetting his lines with me and I had to learn ways around that, real fast. It was all about experimenting, taking whatever opportunity presented itself and seeing if you could make something out of it. The writer Hunter S. Thompson had summed it up in advice to a friend by telling him to “beware of goals,” because while you may achieve them, that won’t give you a happy life. Instead, Thompson said, “decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.” I had decided how I was going to live: I was going to make films however I could.
My friend Rick Schmidt, who would later write the influential book Feature Film Making at Used Car Prices, which outlines how a person could make their own films at a moderate cost, was working as an editor on an early film of Wayne Wang’s (who later directed The Joy Luck Club) called Chan Is Missing. This movie cost about $20,000 to make and was largely financed with grants.
Around 1980 Chan Is Missing, like almost all locally made independent films, was rejected by the San Francisco International Film Festival. We were all very much used to this, but this time things went a little differently. Wayne Wang was a Chinese American living in San Francisco, which has a large Asian community, and his entry film cans had been set up to reveal if they had been opened. They had not. It was an embarrassing development for a film that came to represent a new look at the Asian-American experience, through San Francisco’s Chinatown. Festivals often view only several minutes of an entry if all the judges agree to not go on, but to not even open the film cans of a local Chinese filmmaker?
Wayne didn’t give up and his film got in the New Directors program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that basically launched his career. Roger Ebert wrote, “Chan Is Missing is a small, whimsical treasure of a film that gives us a real feeling for the people of San Francisco’s Chinatown . . . Charlie Chan is missing from this film, and what replaces him is a warm, low-key, affectionate and funny look at some real Chinese-Americans.” The New York Times’s Vincent Canby called it “a matchless delight.”
This was just more evidence to me that the “art film” game was somewhat rigged and I had to find another way. What about Hollywood? Ever since Easy Rider had upended the movie business with a cheap road picture that seemed to come out of nowhere and make a fortune at the box office, the commercial movie business had changed. It was guerilla filmmaking at best, but if you could get a movie finished or almost finished, Hollywood could not afford to not take a look at it.