1 In Johnfong’s article ”Beyond Finishing the Game: A Look At Asian American Grassroots Outreach,”,he shows us that how Asian American’s filmmakers confront the challenges of attracting people using many films created from 2000 to 2007.Since Asian American’s culture and its movie are not popular with companies which invest money in movie project, companies sometimes expected this project may not pay off and refused to invest it. Therefore, filmmakers have to make every effort to “reach the eyeballs by people”and encourage grassroots in their community to support it by community-focused marketing. This marketing method brought them success in recent years.
2 Gene Cajayon made and released “THE DEBUT” in 2001. This movie and its marketing method is a good example to discover how effective the approach to community is. This movie was targeted at Filipino population. Cajayon and producer prepared massive e-mails, postcards, and T-shirts and gave audiences to chance that they were able to meet film’s stars. While “THE DEBUT” achieved huge success by this method, Asian American community became more sensitive to these movie.When filmmakers advertised the new movie “BETTER LUCK TOMORROW”, they paid attention to this social phenomenon,and spread not only this movie but also the definition of ”cool” which they tried to express.
3 An important term the author argued is “grassroots .” Grassroots usually means that ordinary people in society or community rather than the leaders or people who make trend or fashion. By using these marketing method and attract grassroots, Asian American’s movie have aimed to become more popular as a trend that came up the bottom of the community, rather than a dominant one that was pressed as mainstream.
4 I think the movie version of “Crazy Rich Asians(2018)” shows exactly how people who work on Asian American movies face to these problems to us. This movie is a story about one Chinese American woman who suffered from a fact that her boyfriend is super rich man and their difference of backgrounds in Singapore. I felt it is remarkable point that Asian actors are playing almost all of the main characters following the original novel by Kevin Kwan. Because this movie prove that Asian main characters can yield a large profit if it hits in Hollywood. For the promotion of this movie, Asian Americans working in Silicon Valley have purchased tickets and distributed them free to youth Asian Americans as part of the #goldopen campaign. Due to this attempt, Deadline reported that this movie is expected to sell approximately 30 million dollars in the first five days. The high box-office revenue of first week will attract public attention especially non-Asian people. The author of this article mentioned this phenomenon as “it is still to be seen how these efforts [invest or publicity] will pay off, through first weekend figures for the film have been very healthy in each of the sites the film has opened in.”(Johnhong 9) I think that the #goldopen campaign method will be used more and more to boost movies focused on minorities groups,for instance it was conducted for Asian American youth in this movie and it was also conducted for African American youth in Black panther from Marvel. Because consumers and audiences are sensitive to the trends which was created by media and dominance, and movie maker can get people once they break into the mainstream.
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