The Celluloid Prospector

An eerie quiet pervades Dimension Films’ offices in West Hollywood. Mostly abandoned since the bulk of the studio’s staff moved to new headquarters on Sunset Boulevard, the cavernous complex feels downright tomb-like compared to the typically frenetic pace of business at a studio such as Warner Bros. But Roy Lee isn’t complaining as he picks a Japanese movie with a goofy title from a pile in his office and slips it into his DVD player. The opening credits roll for “Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius,” and Lee--an independent film producer based at Dimension who sits behind an immaculately clean desk--folds his arms across his chest and focuses on the large-screen TV that dominates his back wall.

This is work for Lee. Unlike many producers and executives who pitch projects by phone or hustle to get the hottest available scripts, the 33-year-old Lee spends much of his time in solitude, wading through stacks of tapes and DVDs of Korean and Japanese movies, looking to find something a Hollywood studio might want to remake--with him as a producer, of course. Although he watches most of the films at home--he tries to see two or three a day--he has the kind of work setup that’s ideal for viewing movie after movie. Besides the TV set and DVD player--both gifts from Asian companies he has worked with in the past--Lee also has a machine that inserts English subtitles, important because although he’s of Korean descent, Lee doesn’t speak or understand either Korean or Japanese.

During the past two years, Lee has carved out a niche for himself as the sole go-between for Korean and Japanese filmmakers eager to sell the remake rights to their movies and Hollywood executives scrounging to find new sources of commercial ideas. Since Lee first discovered Asia as an untapped reservoir for Hollywood-friendly concepts, he has helped broker the sale of 10 Korean and Japanese films. The first, a Japanese movie called “Ringu” (“The Ring”), was sold to DreamWorks for about $1 million in early 2001. The American version of the film, also called “The Ring” and featuring “Mulholland Dr.” star Naomi Watts, hits theaters Oct. 18. Last October, Lee arranged the first-ever purchase of the remake rights of a Korean movie by an American studio; Miramax paid almost $1 million for the action-comedy “My Wife Is a Gangster,” for which a script is being written.

All this has raised Lee’s profile in Hollywood--he and his partner, Doug Davison, last year were awarded office space and a first-look deal by Dimension, a Miramax-owned studio that has developed “Spy Kids” and the “Scream” movies--and it has transformed him into a veritable Lew Wasserman in much of the Asian film community. “All Korean film people know him and, as far as I know, everyone is approaching him regarding the remake rights potential of their films,” says Josh Lee (no relation to Roy), senior manager for international business at Cinemaservice, a Korean film company.

Their interest is understandable: the checks Hollywood is writing for their movies is enough to cover the entire budget of some originals. Not surprisingly, Lee is being inundated with movies from across the Pacific, typically receiving 10 per week. Some filmmakers can’t even wait until they shoot their movies. “I’m getting scripts from directors, saying, ‘What do you think of this? Do you think you could sell the remake rights after we make the movie?’ ”

Lee tries to read and watch some of everything sent to him. With its opening credits finished, “Transparent” begins in dramatic fashion: a plane crashes into a desolate forest; a fleet of helicopters crosses the sky, presumably on its way to find survivors. That Lee has quickly made a place for himself in the Hollywood system by peddling obscure Asian movies like this one raises some intriguing questions about the state of the movie industry today. Has Hollywood run out of fresh ideas? Has the industry’s obsession with making movies with international appeal made it more receptive to ideas that have already proven themselves with foreign crowds? It’s probably a little of both. What’s clear, though, is that Roy Lee, through instinct and maybe a little luck, is in a perfect position to take full advantage.

Virtually from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles in 1996, after an eight-month stint as a corporate attorney in Washington, D.C., Lee has been trying to innovate. At Alphaville, the production company behind the “Mummy” movies, he was a tracker, a person whose job it is to be aware of, and get, all the available scripts, books and material floating around town. Historically a time-consuming task done on the phone, Lee decided to put the whole process online, creating an Internet tracking board where people could quickly post and share information about available scripts. Importantly, as the person maintaining the board, Lee established a wide network of grateful contacts and a deep knowledge of what kind of material sold. Later, Lee co-founded ScriptShark.com, a Web site that allows aspiring writers the chance to have their scripts evaluated by industry experts.

When Lee decided to become an independent producer in 2000, he already understood how tough the competition was for the best material and, as a relative neophyte, how minuscule his chances were of getting them. “I just wanted to look in a different place for ideas that could be good movies,” says Lee, a man more inclined toward one-sentence answers than long expositions.

His chance came in January 2001, when a friend of a friend--who runs a film festival in Puchon, South Korea--urged him to watch “Ringu.” He got a little more than halfway through before he was too spooked to continue. In the film, a strange videotape circulates among a group of friends; everyone who watches it dies exactly a week later. As Lee watched it the first time, he found the tone and imagery of the movie chilling. One scene in particular--he refuses to divulge its details because a similar scene is in the remake--scared him enough to abandon watching altogether.

“I can’t be this much of a wimp,” he remembers telling himself. “I’d push the videotape in again, trying to watch it, and something else weird would happen. I finally just turned it off.”

Trusting his visceral reaction to the movie, Lee popped the tape out of the player, jumped in his car and drove to the house of Mark Sourian, an executive he knew at DreamWorks SKG. Together they watched the movie all the way through. The next day, Sourian drove the film to the house of Walter Parkes, co-head of the motion picture division at DreamWorks, and they watched it together. “Don’t lose this,” Sourian remembers Parkes commanding him once the film was over. “When you get that kind of edict from the co-head of the studio, you want to make sure you don’t screw it up.”

He didn’t. DreamWorks bought the remake rights for the film and made Lee an executive producer, a role that requires him to help the studio find a writer and director for the remake and, along with his partner Davison, help shape the direction of the new film. Encouraged, Lee sought more titles from the woman at the film festival and, during the past year, visited and networked with filmmakers in Korea and Japan. Impressed with what he saw, Lee also discovered he was the only American showing any interest in Korean and Japanese films. “We’ve brought films [to Hollywood] before,” says Youngjoo Suh of Cineclick Asia, a film company in Seoul. “But they thought Korean films were small and not interesting.”

That’s not the case anymore. In fact, having a movie, rather than a script or a book, to show people may be helping Lee immensely. “It’s tough enough to get a studio executive or an executive anywhere to read a script,” says Mark Morgan, president of Maverick Films, Madonna’s company, who, along with Lee, is producing the remake of “My Sassy Girl,” a Korean romantic drama with a surprising ending. “They’re much more likely to put the movie in, relax and watch it.” Just as important for Lee, people in the industry trust his instincts. “It’s hard to get through the clutter of Hollywood, and you look for people who consistently have good taste,” says Greg Silverman, an executive at Warner Bros., which bought a Korean film, “Il Mare,” through Lee. “Roy is usually right. He gets my attention when he calls to say he has something.”

Whether Lee is able to build on his early success is, of course, an open question: Hollywood is famously fickle. But Hollywood as a whole is more focused than ever on making movies that have as much appeal to viewers in Berlin as in Burbank. “Since the mission of Hollywood is now more global than ever--to make as much money as possible all over the world--the tastes of the world come into play with greater frequency and importance,” says Tom Abrams, an associate professor at the USC School of Cinema-Television. “Thus, remakes of foreign movies make even more sense and are less likely to have been seen here, or even by a global foreign audience.”

Lee says the remakes may even do well in their original markets, because a film’s fans might want to see how a more expensive version of a movie turns out with better special effects. And he doesn’t see this ending anytime soon. He points out that the Asian film industries are making more and more movies. “There are always fresh new ideas constantly coming out of these foreign countries,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a well that’s going to run dry.”

Back at Kee’s office, “Transparent” plays on. He’s picked it from a pile of films that share one trait: they come from companies that have granted Lee the freedom to shop the remake rights. If he gets someone interested, he steps aside and lets the Asian and American companies negotiate; if they can work out a deal, Lee becomes a producer on the Hollywood version of the film. These companies also share an allegiance to Lee. “I give all [suitable] tapes to Roy,” says Cineclick Asia’s Suh. “I always want to give the first chance to Roy.”

Lee says these relationships make him confident that no one in Hollywood can do what he does. He swings the monitor of his Sony flat-screen computer to show an e-mail from a colleague in Korea: the production company of a prominent Hollywood actor has contacted them about the remake rights of one of their films, and they want to know if Lee wants to see it first.

Initially, when Asian filmmakers were more discriminating in what they sent, one in five movies he watched had potential as a remake; now it’s one in 30. Lee says he has been careful not to dilute his standards, which are based primarily on his gut reaction to a film. “If I enjoy it, there’s a chance that other executives would enjoy it, too.” There are other, more specific, questions he asks as well. “What city in the U.S. could we set it in? What actor could that be? If I can pick a certain city and a certain actor, and the story is not too cultural to Asia, then I can figure out a way to set it up,” he says.

In general, Lee says, the Asian films don’t require wholesale changes. “The thinking is, if something worked really well in another culture and has universal themes and story lines, why screw with it too much?” he says. In “The Ring,” for example, the setting is changed from Japan to Seattle, and character names are Americanized. The basic elements of the story and the tone of the original movie remain intact, he says.

After watching the opening crash and rescue scenes in “Transparent,” Lee is optimistic. “Nothing says this has to be Japan,” Lee says of the nondescript terrain. Despite the dramatic start, as the movie unfolds it turns out to be a comedy. Transparents, it’s revealed, are geniuses so smart that their thoughts escape their heads, audible to anyone within 10 meters of them. They’re also vital to society, working on solving big problems, such as global warming (it’s a Japanese movie, after all). But there’s a catch: If transparents discover people can hear their thoughts, they may become despondent. To prevent that, and to avoid losing out on their good works, the rest of society is trained to ignore what they’re thinking.

Lee embraces the concept quickly and, to be honest, the movie does have its moments. It follows one rather bumbling transparent, whose thoughts are both inane and biting. Convinced of the salability of the movie, Lee starts brainstorming casting ideas for the male lead. “I’m thinking we can’t do Jim Carrey, since he did ‘The Truman Show,’ ” he says. He throws out other names: Nicolas Cage, Ben Stiller, Jack Black. The movie plays on in the background, but he’s no longer watching, but plotting his next move. It’s been 25 minutes since the movie began. “This one is going to be easy,” he says.