Game, set, mismatch

Can a non-stereotypical minority character become a model of American pop culture and at the same time bring success for two aspiring filmmakers?

essica Yu and Jimmy Tsai are hoping audiences say yes when their “Ping Pong Playa” opens Friday in Alhambra and Glendale.

Produced by Glendale-based Cherry Sky Films, directed by Yu and written by Yu and Tsai, the film focuses on loud-mouthed twentysomething C-Dub (Tsai), an aspiring basketball player whose family’s pingpong empire depends on him winning a local tournament.

Yu, a resident of La Cañada Flintridge and a fencer who knows something about family sports dynasties, doesn’t really seem a likely choice to helm a comedy.

Her 1996 “Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien” told of a journalist and poet living in an iron lung and won an Oscar for short subjects.

Ten years later, Yu was just bouncing off a 2006 Emmy Award nomination for “In the Realms of the Unreal,” a film on the work of artist Henry Drager that was produced by Cherry Sky when she was approached to direct a comedy about ping pong.

But perhaps even more unlikely was Tsai, better known as an online entrepreneur and Cherry Sky’s accountant, as the choice for leading man.

“This character was so fresh, funny and different. It was hard to believe this brash-talking mainstream character, that the idea came from Jimmy,” Yu chuckled in a recent telephone interview.

“Jimmy just doesn’t fit that mold. He was always very professional, very polite, a very good boy,” said Yu. When she first saw him in commercials for Tsai’s online business, VenomSportswear.com, Yu said, “I thought, ‘Who is this guy? I’ve never seen him before.’ Jimmy’s C-Dub was a pretty successful transformation”

Born in New Jersey, raised in Houston and now a Glendale resident, Tsai said he originally created C-Dub to “lampoon the child endorsement deals that used 4- to 5-year-old kids.”

“The foundation of C-Dub is an exaggeration of my own personality,” Tsai said. “It has its roots in my interest in basketball. That’s something from my personal life before reality sunk in. I wanted to be a basketball player. No Asian-American has broken that barrier.”

“Ping Pong Playa” is fast-moving and truly funny family fare. Yu’s direction packs each scene with action that’s both physical and mental — visual puns, a bit of slapstick, verbal zingers and a lot of humorous moments drawn from real life.

Yu credits the pacing to her experience directing episodic TV on shows like “ER,” “The West Wing” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“I’d learned the idea of there being a rhythm to dialogue — a scene being like music — was drummed into me, like on ‘The West Wing,’ where the dialogue has such a rhythm to it and you emphasize things to make it flow,” she said.

But while comedy may have been a little off the beaten path, writing about a pingpong dynasty wasn’t a stretch for the 42-year-old, who was part of the “Yu dynasty” of fencing while growing up in Palo Alto. She made All-American while on the Yale fencing team and was a member of the US national team. Her mother still coaches.

Asian Americans, Yu remarked, “tend to excel in some of these not-so-popular sports.”
The 30-year-old Tsai, who graduated from UC Berkeley, has won competitions of a different kind. He beat out a lot of hopefuls to be in FOX’s Writers Program four years ago, and again last year. He’d love to write for serial TV, but instead he’s making people laugh on the film festival circuit.

Although he wasn’t a total novice to the game, he hadn’t played pingpong in years.
Six months before shooting began, Tsai started training at a club out of the Pasadena Senior Center, tutored by former Olympian Wei Wang and her husband Diego Schaaf. Tsai recalled practicing every day for at least an hour, and sometimes for as much as six hours.

“I’m not as good as some of the players in the club, but I certainly got pretty good. The first month I lost 15 pounds,” he said.

That weight loss actually came in handy. In the movie, C-Dub trades in his loose-fitting basketball duds for some tight-fitting ping pong shorts. “So, apparently Jessica had this conversation with the costume designer Jessica Flaherty and said, ‘Get me the ugliest pair of short shorts for the scene and just make them two inches shorter,’” Tsai said.

Though his alter-ego might have raised hell about that, Tsai didn’t complain.

Cast members are scheduled to make an appearance at the film’s  early evening screenings Friday at Alhambra’s Edwards Atlantic Palace, 700 W. Main St., and Saturday at the Glendale Exchange 10, 128 N. Maryland Ave. For more information, go to www.pingpongplaya.com. Call the Atlantic Palace at (626) 458-9748. Call the Glendale Exchange at (818) 549-0045.