BANGKOK – The amazing diversity and artistic quality of bootleg DVDs available on the streets of Southeast Asia has been definitively traced back to its source – a single Chinese mafia boss who happens to be a failed filmmaker and frustrated cinephile. According to a new report by Interpol, as much as 60% of the catalog of bootleg films sold on Asian streets were hand-picked for pirating by Sam Yin Chueh, the 47-year-old leader of the south-Chinese Hua Seng cartel, who dropped out of USC film school in 1982.
“Sammy Chueh, who also went by the pen name Samuel Yindenberg on his five unsold screenplays, was an aspiring filmmaker in his 20s,” said Foster Vandernees, a senior agent on the Interpol team that has been tracking the pirate DVD industry since 1998. “He worked as an unpaid intern for [top talent agency] CAA, despite coming from a wealthy Chinese family in the construction industry, apparently hoping to get a foothold in the movie business.”
According to the Interpol report, which was partly funded by the Recording Industry Association of America as part of ongoing efforts to protect intellectual property, Chueh spent almost a decade in the trenches of Hollywood, waiting tables and watching late-night double features alone at the New Beverly Cinema, while writing screenplays which he sent to agents and producers without success. According to his former roommate Jeff Hurstwell, Chueh’s favorite directors were Robert Altman, Douglas Sirk, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. “Sam was also into the real weird shit, like the cult films of (John)Waters, (George) Romero, and (Derek) Jarman. He had this huge poster of Eraserhead over his bed, I remember.”
After failing to sell his screenplays or secure an agent, Chueh tried to self-fund a low-budget independent film in 1993, which Hurstwell recalls vaguely as “some kind of irony-tinged homage to Jim Jarmusch, which is a pretty bad idea if you think about it.” Unable to secure a distributor or investors, Chueh abandoned the movie and Hollywood altogether and returned to China, where, according to Interpol, he spearheaded the then-fledgling bootleg VHS tape industry.
Chueh’s decision to pirate movies for a living appears to be not only an act of revenge against Hollywood, but also, at the same time, an act of enduring love for film. “While Chueh’s dubbing factories were robbing Hollywood of profits by churning out bootlegs of Armageddon and Men in Black, he was also putting out a startling number of independent and art films, which we first started noticing in about 1999,” said Vandernees.
By that year it is believed that Chueh had taken over wholesaling turf in Southeast Asia previously held by the Malaysian mafia, and was supplying almost 70% of the bootleg VHS , VCD, and DVD market. It was around this time that investigators started noticing “new and unexpected movies” such as the works of Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Wong Kar-Wai among the usual popcorn blockbusters.
“Some of it kind of made sense from a retail view,” said Robert Goodman, a trade analyst at Time Warner Home Video who worked on the investigation. “At the time, the legal video shops in Asia had a very poor selection, usually the B-grade castoffs that were cheaply licensed for the Asian market. Chueh was filling the void, with lots of popular classics like Orson Welles and MGM musicals. With zero licensing costs he could make a profit on those. But that can’t possibly explain making copies of, say Salo, The 120 Days of Sodom, or Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid. I mean seriously, how many copies are you going to sell?”
Also according to Goodman, by 2005 the average bootleg DVD table on Silom Road in Bangkok had “a better selection of movies than any legal shop in the world, or for that matter, the whole Netflix catalog.” A sample of recovery from a police raid in 2006 included the Criterion set of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue, Noburo Tanaka’s Showa Trilogy, and both Todd Haynes’ Poison and Superstar, the latter of which is so rare it is not legally available in the United States. The sheer depth of film knowledge required to have even heard of these movies led investigators to look for film-school backgrounds among known Asian mafia, which eventually led to Chueh.
“It’s incredible, and kind of weird,” said Vandernees. “Chueh can’t possibly be making money by burning and distributing these obscure films. He’s probably bringing them a wider audience than they would ever have had otherwise, in fact. He may be a pirate, but if you’re a film lover in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur, and are tired of finding nothing in the legal shops except Look Who’s Talking Too then he’s kind of a hero too.”
An RIAA spokesperson, however, insisted that Chueh was a criminal. “The widespread, cheaply accessible distribution of highly artistic film art is not, and has never been, in the interest of the industry, and we at the RIAA vow to pursue by any legal means those who would violate the copyright of our clients.”
Though Chueh’s current whereabouts are unknown, he was last reported seen in Singapore in April, trying to raise interest in funding an all-Asian cast remake of Logan’s Run.
