Isaac Ho's Blog, page 6

From TV Pitch to Novel – The Making of The Repatriation of Henry Chin – Part 4 (SPOILERS)

It used to be thought that if the universe today was expanding above a certain rate, it would keep expanding forever. And perhaps it will.

—Timothy Ferris

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

—Douglas Adams

How will it all end? In a pilot script that is a tricky question. As a viewer, I’ve always preferred pilot episodes that had a self-contained story. They are very hard to write because the story also has to set up the world, the series and feel like a complete artistic experience.

Sarah Conner Chronicles did this successfully. For the TV viewers not familiar with the “Terminator” movies, Josh Friedman successfully set up the world, the characters, the engine and managed to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end—all in one episode!

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the premise pilot where just the world is set up. You can spot these very easily. If you watch a TV pilot and you reach the end of the episode at the same time you reach the end of the logline, you’ve just watched a premise pilot.

Here’s the summary of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from NBC’s press release:

The executive producer of a late night sketch comedy show sparks a media frenzy when he has an on-air meltdown during a live broadcast. The newly minted network president  has to scramble to make things right by hiring back two former prized employees to become the new executive producers of her network’s flagship program.

—The Futon Critic

Here is the last beat of the pilot episode:

DANNY looks at MATT--

DANNY (CONT’D)

What are you smiling about?

MATT

It’s a nice studio. It’s a great facility with an incredible history. I feel privileged to be here.

DANNY

You like it?

MATT

Yeah.

DANNY

Good, ’cause we live here now.

And the two of them stand still for a moment, and just as small smiles creep onto their faces, DAVID BOWIE’s voice smashes in with

DAVID BOWIE

“Pressure!--“

DANNY motions easily to a FLOOR MANAGER as he and MATT move to address their team--

FLOOR MANAGER

Alright, quiet please everybody. Quiet please.

FADE TO BLACK

When I create a logline, I try to have it cover no more than the first half of the story while teasing the reader with a dramatic question about the second half.

Repatriation still lacked a fourth act. With his wife dead and his son mad at him Henry needed to justify his decision and actions to his son.

Henry says he will stay and fight for the soul of his country.

What the hell does this mean? Who will Henry fight? What exactly is the soul of his country? There are no tangibles here. Perhaps that was the pitch’s greatest weakness. I didn’t have a fourth act that both wrapped up the story of the episode while at the same time made you care about what would happen next for Henry and his family.

My intent was to make Henry’s son Jason emerge as the main antagonist for Henry in future episodes. I wasn’t sure how to include this twist in the pitch but figured it would be included in a subsequent conversation about where I thought the series would go. Who could be better at hunting down Chinese Americans than a Chinese American?

By the time I reached this point, I had nearly burned through the entire two weeks to prepare. Now was the time to work on the presentation.

Roughly two and a half pages of double-spaced, 12 point text will take about five minutes to read at a reasonable pace.

It also took me about a day to memorize.

On the day of my pitch, I had two emergency copies of my presentation with me just in case I lost my place: one in my shirt pocket and one in my pants pocket.

Here is what I presented.

I’m Chinese American.  Despite being born in New York I find I’m often treated like an outsider in my own country.  I wanted to write something that captured that feeling.

Repatriation is a one hour action drama that takes place in the near future in Los Angeles.  It tells the story of a typical dysfunctional American family, the Changs.  Henry Chang is a professor of chemistry.  His wife Elizabeth is a stay at home mom recovering from kidney surgery.  Their two sons are a study in opposites: Jason just got early acceptance to Stanford while Oliver is a college drop out.

In the pilot, Henry celebrates the publication of his paper by playing practical jokes on his colleagues using liquid nitrogen, elemental sodium and nitrogen tri-iodide.

Suddenly, government agents arrive to take Henry into custody.  Before they can take him away, Henry notices that the people being rounded up are all Chinese.

Believing that his family is at risk, Henry uses his expertise in chemistry to create distractions so he can escape and stay one step ahead of the government as he collects his family members.  Liquid nitrogen on a windshield, nitrogen tri-iodide to shatter locks, and elemental sodium in the swimming pool to create a powerful explosion.

The Changs escape to the Angeles National Forest where they stumble upon a group of Chinese Americans also hiding from the government.

Speaking with them Henry discovers the underlying conspiracy.  China has become a world economic power on the backs of its unskilled labor.  What’s missing are people with specialized skills: engineers, architects, and scientists.  All American citizens of Chinese descent, even if they were born here, even if they don’t speak a word of Mandarin, must now go to China for repatriation and the United States is too timid to fight for them.

But Henry has bigger problems.  Elizabeth needs immuno-supressants drugs for her transplanted kidney.  How will they get her medicine when Chinese Americans are being apprehended on sight?  Putting aside their differences, Henry, Jason and Oliver work together to raid a pharmacy.  They create an instant smoke bomb using hand sanitizer, multi-vitamins and Saran Wrap right off the shelves.

Despite their success, they aren’t able to return to Elizabeth in time and she dies in their arms.  Jason is furious with his father.  “Maybe we are better off in China.  If we didn’t run away, Mom would be alive right now.”  Henry says, “This is my home and it’s worth fighting for, even if my own country won’t fight for me.”

But Henry’s words aren’t enough.  Jason runs away to turn himself in.

The engine of the series will be very much like “24” but instead of using a cell phone and a gun, Henry must use his knowledge of chemistry; and Oliver his son, an unmotivated, ne’er do well he hardly knows.

And what about the people in their lives?  The cranky neighbor, the crazy teacher, the ex-girlfriend.  Who can they trust?  Who will betray them?

Living off the grid, unable to blend in, Henry and Oliver must work together to acquire food, medicine and weapons to organize a resistance movement among the disenfranchised Chinese Americans to take back our rights which were stolen away.

The presentation went off without a hitch. I had nailed it. The feedback was generally positive but the consensus was that the story was a tough sell.

Shortly afterwards I had a “slap my forehead” moment. I didn’t write a logline for the pitch. It probably wouldn’t have helped in the actual presentation but it might have helped me focus the story better.

There is no happy ending to this part of the story. The TV industry was reinventing itself after the Writers’ Strike earlier that year. The 2008-09 season brought us dark science fiction shows like Dollhouse, Fringe and Life on Mars. The crime dramas Castle, Lie to Me, and The Mentalist were much lighter with a “blue sky” tone than the typical, gritty procedural.

The only dark drama introduced that year was Eleventh Hour. Jericho was cancelled. It seemed clear to me that whatever they were looking for that year, Repatriation wasn’t it.

I wondered if creating something more conventional would have worked better for me than something so stubbornly offbeat.

I contacted a writer I had met on the picket line and asked for his advice. He said I should write the script exactly the way I want it.  Don’t worry about what they want.  Write what I want.

He told me he had sold many pitches in the room but doesn’t care for that process anymore.  “When you sell a pitch, they ask a lot of questions and want to make a lot of changes.  If you have a strong vision of what you want, write it: it will be much more rewarding.  Write the version that makes you happy.”

He also said that this advice didn’t apply six years ago.  Cable TV scripted dramatic programming has grown and is hungry for original voices to distinguish itself from broadcast television.

He also said that it’s important to know the difference between your career goals and your personal goals: which needs have to be met because you may not be able to satisfy both.

It was a lot to digest.

The one thing I did know was that if Repatriation remained a five minute pitch, it was guaranteed to go nowhere.

I had fallen in love with Henry and wanted to tell his story even though I had no idea what it was yet.

What I did know was that the deadline for the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Competition was seven months away.

Next week: How I turned a TV pitch into a feature screenplay.

From TV Pitch to Novel – The Making of The Repatriation of Henry Chin – Part 3 (SPOILERS)

The actual work of screenwriting, of telling a story in fiction or in screenwriting, is figuring out how it happens. Not the what, but the how. And so all of those how questions are what you end up staring at the giant whiteboard and figuring out, well, who knows this piece of information and what would be the scene or the moment where they learn this thing, and how is this thing going to happen?

—John August

 Second acts are where good stories come to die.

—Hal Ackerman

Write Screenplays That Sell: The Ackerman Way

By now I had a pretty good idea of the world I wanted to set my story in. I also had a pretty good sense of who populated this world. I also had a sense of the emotional tone I wanted to convey. Now I needed to plot it out beat by beat.

For a five minute pitch? Absolutely. I felt that to pitch Repatriation well, I had to see the entire pilot episode in my head as well as where the subsequent episodes were going. If I couldn’t answer those questions, then I risked letting someone else less invested in the story and characters make those decisions.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had premiered earlier that year and I was concerned that my idea for Repatriation might be too similar in story, world and tone.

Set after the events in ‘Terminator 2′ Sarah Connor and her son John, trying to stay under-the-radar from the government as they plot to destroy the computer network Skynet in hopes of preventing Armageddon.

—IMDb

Some choices I made to deliberately set Repatriation apart from Sarah Connor Chronicles:

I set most of the action in the mountains and forest emphasizing survivalism over urban warfare.
I highlighted Henry’s knowledge of chemistry to make the story feel less militaristic.
I chose not to create an antagonist character hoping that there was more suspense if they didn’t know where the danger was.

In hindsight, I realize I didn’t have to worry too much about comparisons because Repatriation and Sarah Connor Chronicles differed in one very fundamental way. Unlike Sarah Connor. Henry could not hide in plain sight. He would have to remain off the grid as much as possible because he wears his ethnicity openly. Henry and his family are Chinese.

What I did like about Sarah Connor Chronicles was that they were on a mission to destroy Skynet. At this point, Henry didn’t have a mission except to escape with his family.

I really enjoyed watching Sarah Connor Chronicles. I was a fan of the show. By now, the pilot script was floating around the internet. I downloaded it and dissected it.

The first thing I wanted to see was if my Third Act Theme Theory held up.

It didn’t.

I watched and rewatched the pilot and didn’t find it around the 30 minute mark. That’s because Josh Friedman put it somewhere else.

Two other places to be exact.

The first in Act One. After Sarah has had a premonition of a Terminator attack, coupled with realization that they’ve been in this unnamed town too long, she determines it’s time to move. Her son John resists.

JOHN

The cops’ll never find us. We’re safe!

And now she’s in his face, intense.

SARAH

Don’t you ever think that, John. Don’t you ever think that. No one is EVER safe.

(beat)

Half an hour. One bag. Plus the guns. I’ll make pancakes.

The next time is in Act Five, near the end of the story. Sarah, John and Cameron have escaped a Terminator by jumping into the future… our present day.

EXT./INT. THE ROADSIDE DITCH – NIGHT

Our threesome pull on the frat boys’ clothes... John looks to the L.A. Skyline...

JOHN

So this is where it all starts? This is where Skynet begins?

CAMERON

Somewhere in there.

JOHN

And no one knows we’re here? We can stay?

CAMERON

Get a house. Go to school. You’re as safe.

JOHN/SARAH

(matter-of-fact)

No one is ever safe.

They look at each other--the apple really doesn’t fall far. Sarah pulls him close, not noticing as he steals a glance at Cameron...

This was an astounding revelation to me. I thought that I had found a hard and fast rule about story structure. This proved to me that while there may be patterns, there are no rules. Josh Friedman chose to bookend his story with the theme. The benefit was that the story didn’t need to slow down to make this revelation. It was a theme that was stated, proven and then restated.

And it felt organic to the story.

I always wondered if Josh Friedman chose to do this from the start or it just came naturally as part of his process.

I still didn’t have a theme yet but I decided to plow ahead and plot out the story with the faith that I’ll discover it during my writing process.

The one hour TV structure that comes most naturally to me uses a teaser and four acts. The way I visualize it in my head is that Act One sets up the story. Act Two is the push. Act Three is the pull. Act Four is the resolution.

“Push” and “pull” are my own shorthand meaning that whatever “push” is, “pull” will be the opposite. Some people use the jargon “rising” and “falling” action; “active” and “reactive”; and, “running toward” and “running away.”

At this point, this is what I had.

ACT ONE – Setting up the story.

Government agents arrive without any explanation to take Henry into custody.  As he is escorted away, he notices both colleagues and students also being detained.  What sends a chill down his spine is the fact that everyone in custody is Chinese.

ACT TWO – The “Push”

Henry decides he needs to round up his family for their own safety. They escape to the Angeles National Forest.  There they find a group of Chinese American refugees who have also fled.

ACT THREE – The “Pull”

But Henry has bigger problems.  His wife needs her medication and they won’t find it hiding out in the Angeles National Forest. Henry with Oliver and Jason return to LA and rob a pharmacy. Despite their plans, Elizabeth dies from complications from her surgery/injury.

For the first three acts I have answered the question “What happened?” I still needed to flesh out beat by beat “How does it happen?”

“They escape to the Angeles National Forest” is easy enough to write. How do they do it? How do they do in a way that’s unique to them? How do they do it in a way that’s unique to them that’s dramatic and full of conflict?

And how do they feel about it?

From TV Pitch to Novel – The Making of The Repatriation of Henry Chin – Part 2 (SPOILERS)

The poet stands at the center of the universe,

contemplating the enigma,

drawing sustenance

from masterpieces of the past.

—陸機 (translated by Sam Hamill)

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

—Dr. Suess

There are very few network TV shows that star Asians or Asian Americans. Margaret Cho’s short lived All American Girl, Pat Morita’s Ohara, and Martial Law starring Sammo Hung are the only ones that come to mind (I wrote a spec of Martial Law that maybe two people have read).

By contrast, during the 2007-08 television season, there was a glut of crime drama procedurals. CSI and Law & Order franchises dominated the airwaves. There was also NCIS, Criminal Minds, Cold Case, Without a Trace, Boston Legal, Medium, Bones, Shark, Numb3rs, K-Ville, Life, and Women’s Murder Club. I wanted a large canvas to paint this story and a world wide conspiracy theory seemed to have the scope I needed. Something like what Heroes and Lost were doing with science fiction.

However, the story I wanted to tell didn’t seem big enough yet. The idea that an official from the University of Beijing has come to collect and detain Henry seemed far fetched and too pedestrian. What if the United States was complicit in the conspiracy?

I thought about it and came up with this:

...some government agents arrive to take Henry into custody without any explanation. As he is escorted out, he notices his colleagues as well as some students are also being detained. What sends a chill down his spine is the fact that everyone is Chinese.

It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for but at least it felt like I was heading in the right direction. Having the story center around an Asian American family was alienating enough for a mainstream audience. If I also made China the villain, that might be too confusing. Plus, I liked the idea of flipping expectations: that the heroes were people that looked like enemies of the US in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the villains… maybe villain is too strong a word… the antagonists looked like vanilla Americans.

By this time, I was pretty certain I wanted to tell a “man on the run” kind of story. That had already been done with The Fugitive and with the unsuccessful remake starring Tim Daly as recently as 2000. Since I had spend some time camping I concocted this idea:

They have to drive through a police barricade before they can escape to the Angeles National Forest. There they find a group of Chinese refugees who have also fled.

I thought that an interesting twist would be to make it a “family on the run” story. Imagine going on the lam with a sick wife, and two sons, one ambitious and one not. I felt I had a family piece that could show some of the internal dynamics of an Asian American family… that we’re not all model minority material.

No TV show can exist playing solely to an Asian American audience. A significant part of white America would have to be interested in it. Why would white Americans be interested in it? I had to answer this question because I knew it would be asked by the executives.

The larger issue was this: white characters in American culture are “race neutral” and read as “universal.” Characters of color cannot help but raise race as an issue because they are not seen as “universal.” That is simply the reality of how race is read as a text in American culture.

I have always believed that in the specificity, you find the universality. I believed that if I could paint this family with a finely detailed brush. I kept the idea of Henry’s sick wife Elizabeth and expanded it.

Henry has bigger problems. His wife needs her medication and they won’t find it hiding out. Despite their plans, Elizabeth dies from complications from her surgery/injury. Jason is furious. “If you had agreed to go instead of running away, Mom would be alive right now.”

I liked this idea because it makes Henry a sympathetic character and creates conflict with his son.

It was here I first articulated the engine of the series.

Living off the grid, the Changs will have to acquire food, medicine and arms while staying one step ahead of the U.S. government. The difference is that being Chinese, there is no undercover, no blending in, this family will be shot on sight as they fight to free their own countrymen.

But if I had the engine, I still didn’t have the soul yet. Why is this story important? Why do I have to be the one to tell it? And why should anyone else care?

I knew by this point that there would be backlash. I grew up in a community that fought in Vietnam and World War II. Aside from being called “Chink” as a child, I was also called “Dirty Jap.” The Vietnam War had just ended a few years before I entered high school and wasn’t taught yet. World War II was taught as a fight between good and evil and if you didn’t look like an American G.I., you weren’t on the side of good. This may not have been my target audience but I knew Repatriation (as it was titled then) would have to attract at least some of them to be successful.

I’m Chinese but despite being born in New York I’m often treated like an outsider in my own country. I wanted to write something that captures that feeling.

At this point, I felt like I had all the pieces I needed. Now, I just needed to plot out the story.

From TV Pitch to Novel – The Making of The Repatriation of Henry Chin – Part 1 (SPOILERS)

Amid the growing hostility between the United States and China, an executive order authorizes the creation of repatriation camps to safely secure Chinese Americans. Mild mannered pharmacist Henry Chin goes on the run with his mixed race teenage daughter and is relentlessly pursued by an ICE agent who will stop at nothing to capture these potential domestic terrorists.

—The Repatriation of Henry Chin – cover blurb

In October 2008 I had an opportunity to participate in the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE) TV Pitch Lab. If you were chosen you were able to attend a special panel discussion with TV executives about how a TV show goes from pitch to programmed.

After the discussion we were given two weeks to prepare and present a TV pitch and the executives would give us candid feedback about our pitch and how to improve it. I had always wanted to create an Asian American action hero… a character who was the hero and not merely a sidekick so I used this opportunity to create one.

The difficulty of creating an Asian American hero is finding that balance between the generic and the specific. If he was too generic then he didn’t have to be Asian American. He he was too specific, then a mainstream audience wouldn’t be able to identify with him. And I did want him to be popular.

A TV action series is fraught with its own problems: they’re expensive. It’s a risky enough venture to create a TV show with a bankable star but the risk compounds if you have an Asian American lead. Mostly because the number of bankable Asian American stars is few.

Daniel Dae Kim was a break out star in Lost at the time. In 2007 John Cho had only done one “Harold and Kumar” film and it would be two more years before he played Sulu in the Star Trek reboot. Ken Jeong had received some notoriety for his scene stealing role in Knocked Up but he wouldn’t gain lasting fame until his role in The Hangover.

In the panel discussion, we talked about “the engine” of a TV show. What was the engine that would drive the story from week to week? At that time I was exploring the concept of theme in TV shows. I had discovered that sometimes in pilot episodes the theme is explicitly stated toward the end of the third act. For example at in House, M.D., Dr. House is told by his patient, “You feel cheated by life so now you’re going to get even with the world.” Dr. House wrestles with this theme in nearly every episode.

I knew I had to find some universal truth that Henry would have to discover and confront by then. Whatever it was, it would have to transcend his ethnicity while at the same time not sound like a fortune cookie fortune. Also, it would have to be unique enough to draw viewers back week after week to see him wrestle with this in some form.

In two weeks we were to bring back a five minute pitch and present it to the executives. By present I mean we had to present it as if we were actually in a meeting… no visual aids. no reading off a card. We were our own instrument.

We had to create the most evocative, interesting and emotionally stirring five minutes we could muster to convince these executives to spend $50 million for the pilot and 21 episodes.

But we also had to do it in a way to show that the story was coming from a very specific place… someplace personal that demonstrated I was a unique and vital shepherd to bring Henry’s story to fruition.

The first thing I needed to do was establish the world of the story and incorporate my personal angle. I went home and wrote this:

In the near future, China will become a world economic power on the backs of its unskilled labor. What’s missing are people with specialized skills, architects, engineers and scientists. What if China looked to the United States and decided to recall Chinese Americans with this expertise to work in China?

What if it included people like me who were born here and don’t know a word of Chinese?

Then I needed to say what it is I was pitching and who the characters are:

Repatriation is a one hour action drama that tells the story of the Changs, a typical American family. Henry Chang is a university professor of chemistry. His wife Elizabeth is recovering from kidney transplant surgery. His youngest son Jason just got early acceptance to Stanford and their oldest son Oliver is a college drop out who is secretly sleeping with Jason’s girlfriend Alicia.

And then what the story is:

In the pilot, Henry celebrates the publication of his paper on thermodynamics in typical chemistry professor fashion – practical jokes... exploding keyholes and liquid nitrogen races.

The festivities are interrupted when a representative from the University of Beijing offers Henry a job in China, which Henry politely turns down. Because of his paper, Henry will be able to collect honorariums to pay for his son’s education.

Then the university’s computer system goes on lockdown. There has been a security breach of sensitive research. Everyone is a suspect, especially Henry, who is singled out to the FBI by his jealous department chair.

When confronted with damning evidence, Henry flees by throwing raw sodium into water creating an explosion. When he contacts Elizabeth, she reports that government agents are searching their home and that Jason is missing. Before he can get more details a voice on the phone orders him to surrender, which Henry refuses to do.

Okay, I didn’t have a complete story yet. Also, I seemed to have been bogged down by the details (liquid nitrogen and raw sodium). I needed to take a step back for a larger overview. At this point, what I had in mind didn’t feel like a TV show yet and I had less than two weeks to figure it out.

I am a Failure

Sounds strange to say with two published novels, a produced screenplay and two produced stage plays. However, those success stories represent a small fraction of my complete body of work. In much the same way a baseball player is considered successful if he gets a base hit once out of every three at bats, I would be happy if my success to failure ratio came close to that.

When it comes to novels, I have a good batting average. I’ve written two novels and had two published. For that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jody Wheeler, my publisher and MFA Screenwriting cohort, for his faith in my writing.

When it comes to screenplays, my batting average falls off a bit. I’ve had one screenplay produced. I’ve written an even dozen. For those keeping track, the produced screenplay was number 10. For that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Peter C. Godwin, my long time friend, for putting together the financing to make a very uncommercial story into reality.

Add to the mix is a fair number of spec TV episodes, one act plays, TV pilots and treatments. I wish each were successful but some things were not meant to be.

It is fair to say I’ve had far more failures than successes.

I do believe there are some writers who are simply blessed. They have a natural innate talent that fosters early success. Finding these prodigies are windfalls for agents because their youth promises a long, lucrative career.

But then, there’s the rest of us. Those who spend years honing their craft and developing their voice hoping to get noticed by an industry that is, at best, indifferent.

Failure to generate heat is not the same thing as failure to be a writer. You can’t be afraid of failure. Every finished script, every finished story teaches you something. Putting it out on the market and receiving feedback is gravy.

I’m always amazed when I run into someone who insists that their unwritten screenplay is better than my written one. Or, that they could write a much better novel than mine if only they had the time.

Part of the reason why their work is never finished is because of their fear of failure. There is no scarier moment than just before sending a new work out into the market for the first time. You’ve probably had it vetted and critiqued by some close confidants but you have no idea how the market will receive it until it does.

Those who never do will never fail. I suppose they take comfort in that false sense of superiority… like the pitcher who never lost a game because he never left the bullpen. Sure you’ve made it to the big leagues but from here you have to demand higher and more ambitious goals for yourself.

By what yardstick do you measure success? What is the prize? I consider each completed work an accomplishment. If it accurately reflects my sensibilities and taste then I consider it a success. I do have faith that eventually, each work will find its audience. It takes time and patience. In the meantime, I’ll work on something new… and finish that too.

For that, you can call me a failure.

You never failed… can you really call yourself a success?

☒ I am a failure.

☐ I am a success.

Death in Chinatown for sale

My second novel is kind of a love letter to San Francisco… if love letters included a lot of shooting and dead bodies.

The old saying is “write what you know.” Having lived in Babylon by the Bay for over five years, I’m familiar with some of her more obscure crevices. I’d cringe when out of town friends would ask me to recommend the best restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Don’t get me wrong, the big tourist spots are a lot of fun but this is the San Francisco I know: the San Francisco as seen from beat up sneakers and sore legs. Those of you who know me will probably recognize some of my familiar haunts.

My twist on the old saying is “write what you want to know.” I’ve always wondered what my life would have been like if I had fulfilled my dream of becoming a hipster folksinger while everyone around me is being murdered.

Okay… maybe not. But hopefully, you’ll enjoy the story.

In San Francisco, the brutal murder of a Chinatown businessman sets off a deadly chain reaction that exposes a long dormant blood feud. The spotlight falls on his eldest son Joe Sung, an aspiring folk singer, who must now evade death at the hands of a rival tong. At the same time, his girlfriend Maya gets caught in the crossfire as she digs deep into his family’s hidden past.

This guy did.