Free Dog Beach by John Fusco Page B

down the movie. Whoever doesn’t walk off the set tonight has made me lose face.”
    Uncle Seven, then a “Red Pole” member of the Heaven and Earth Society, never even gave Louie a chance to speak, just hung up. Louie saw all the eyes on him, could sense the tension over in the video village. He saw Jimmy Tang, the high-paid action star, getting his leather jacket on and heading toward his town car. He realized then that Jimmy Tang wasn’t quite worming out of a dangerous stunt; he, too, had taken a call from Uncle Seven and wasn’t going to cross him. He was leaving the set like a good boy.
    Louie sidled up near Clifford Kwan, the director, got the story. They were already over budget, had no money to pay the Heaven and Earth Society—better known on the street as the 14K Triads—who were demanding a tax for filming on the harbor.
    â€œGo home, Louie,” Kwan said.
    The irony of the dilemma wasn’t lost on Louie. “We make movies about gangsters with gangsters,” he once told Clifford. “ For gangsters.”
    â€œYeah,” Clifford commiserated back then, “but it’s been going on for four hundred years, man.”
    Clifford was right; the underworld operation known as the Triads had its roots in the late 1600s, when five Shaolin monk renegades teamed with Ming Dynasty loyalists to form the White Lotus Society. Their patriotic intentions back then were to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, but as the secret society of boxers evolved, they began to be viewed as a legitimate way of aiding immigrants from China as they tried to settle in new lands. Over time they became extortionists and launderers and traffickers, “like any other mafia,” Clifford said. The booming Hong Kong movie industry of the ’80s and ’90s attracted them like wolves to goat herds.
    At first, it was simple: You paid “lucky money” to get location permits or to protect crews filming in certain areas. If a production didn’t pay, equipment was tampered with, film reels stolen, actors intimidated. Police protection was impossible to secure; the society ran too deep. By the late ’80s the Triads became so embedded in the industry that some Dragon Heads like Uncle Seven began to catch the moviemaking bug, and started to produce their own films. If a star like Jimmy Tang didn’t sign on to star in some low-budget gangster flick—movies about gangsters made by gangsters—he’d rue the day he said no. The same with Louie Mo and the Hong Kong stunt riggers. If Uncle Seven was producing a new movie, no matter how dreadful, that’s what a stunt crew committed to, even if it meant passing on a high-end production that paid more. And the stunts were unregulated, highly dangerous. Resist the extortion and a man-on-fire death scene could become real, insurance paid out to the producers.
    Now the extortion was spreading beyond the sets and the crews. Louie reminded Clifford of a recent incident just a few blocks away. Four reporters for Affairs magazine, a Hong Kong glossy, were attacked in their offices, brutally beaten, and hospitalized. Turned out that the magazine had published a critical review of a certain film and the starring actress. The Triads were running the business at every level. Not only did actors and crew have to commit to a Triad-produced movie, critics had to like it. In Hollywood, certain critics might be barred from future screenings if they turned up their noses at a film; in Hong Kong they got their noses broken or earlobes cut, offices ransacked. It was getting ugly.
    â€œAre you ?” Louie finally said. “Are you going home?”
    Kwan didn’t answer for a time. He looked gaunt and weary, like he had aged ten years over seven weeks of shooting. “We’re one stunt away from having the movie in the can.”
    â€œThen we do it,” Louie said. “I can do it in one take. Fast. Then we go home.”
    Kwan