Post #2: Beyond Finishing The Game: A Look at Asian American Grassroots Outreach

In his article, Fong’s main argument and focus to his thesis was the idea of how Asian American Films are marketed. He mentions how important marketing a film is, as that is how people show up to watch the film in the first place. He emphasizes the fact that normal American movie’s have marketing budgets multiple time larger than that of the entire budget of an Asian American film.

Fong uses four specific examples of how Asian American movies were marketed to support his claims. The first being the 20th anniversary of CAAM and their use of an email newsletter. The second of how The Debut used the closing night of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. The third being how Better Luck Tomorrow rode off the success of a premiere on sundance and an acquisition by MTV. Finally Fong discusses the grass roots campaign conducted by the cast of Finishing The Game.

The main term throughout the article was grassroots. A grassroots campaign is one in which you focus on community and small scale advertisement that will eventually spread by branching off of itself. Fong discusses how the Asian American community is relatively close to one another and that can be used as an advantage for marketing purposes. This also enables films with low budgets to accomplish a sufficient amount of marketing and advertising.

The ideas that Fong is trying to convey, are expressive of the overall amount of work that it requires for an immigrant race to become successful in a white dominated america. It is clear that a typical movie budget is in the millions even for something that isn’t necessarily mainstream, whereas an Asian American film would be a fraction of that requiring the staff of that movie to work much harder to make it a success on the big screen. Fong also highlights the strengths of the Asian American community and how they stick together and can accomplish amazing feats with a limited amount of resources.

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