“Within the last year, I’ve learned a lot about the movie business, and it sucks,” Lin deadpans, eliciting laughs from the crowd. “I don’t want to know about it.”

He says that releasing, distributing and marketing an independent film is often an arduous, disillusioning process.

“When I met with marketers, they showed me a [demographic] pie,” Lin says. “They said, ‘Asian-American spending patterns are the same as white people’s, so we just consider them white.’”

Behind these shocking declarations is a business that has produced stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans dating back to 1930s Charlie Chan movies, and more recently, take-out delivery boys and kung fu masters who only speak broken English. The stereotypical overachievers in academia have been spectacular under-achievers in cinema, with their roles largely consigned to these typecast pigeonholes.

Even with Better Luck Tomorrow, according to Lin, “Distributors said, ‘Hey, can you change them [your characters] to white kids? I know Macaulay Culkin would be good.’”

What’s more, according to Lin, some of the people who wanted to change the characters’ ethnicities were themselves Asian-American.

Lin says his film could have a huge impact on Asian-American actors by creating new roles.

“Hopefully this film will create better opportunities not only for Asian-American actors but for all minorities, who up to now have always been cast as minorities,” he says.

He compares the contemporary burgeoning Asian-American cinema to the circumstances facing African-American cinema in the 1980s, when people said, “‘Oh, you can’t relate to African-American leads like Denzel Washington.’”

Based on the success of Washington and other prominent actors, Lin is cautiously optimistic about the future of Asian-American film in general, but less so when it comes to individual Asian-American actors.

He notes that casting for Better Luck Tomorrow, which took three months, was such a protracted process primarily because “Asian-American actors in Los Angeles aren’t even aware of the roles out there, they’re so used to the shitty roles, the one-liners.”

Lin cites the collection of clips that constitutes Jason Tobin’s (Virgil) film résumé; Tobin has appeared in at least five major television shows and blockbuster movies—every time playing a Chinese food delivery boy.

Needless to say, there has never been an Asian-American film, produced and directed by and starring Asian-Americans, with a budget over two million dollars.

“Financially, we’re not even on the level of the playing field,” Lin says.

Paving the Way for Asian-American Film