Roy Lee’s gold-plated recycling bin

TAKASHIGE ICHISE is enthroned on a stately rattan chair in the pool cabana of his new mansion in the hills. Samuel Goldwyn used to own this airy remnant of old-time Hollywood glamour, so it’s fitting that Ichise, one of the biggest movie moguls in Japan, has assumed this abode. Dressed in carefully distressed jeans and a colorful button-down shirt and accompanied by a pretty interpreter, Ichise is carefully picking the brains of Roy Lee, a seemingly mild-mannered 36-year-old in earth colors, who’s believed by the cognoscenti to be one of the youngest producers in town with first-dollar gross points.

Lee is tall, vaguely pudgy and mostly unremarkable, except for his manner, which is so blunt and matter-of-fact, and curiously non-self-promoting, that it’s hardly possible that he’s been steadfastly climbing up the Hollywood hierarchy. With five movies coming out this year alone, Lee is in fact so big that he no longer needs Ichise, with whom he made his first films: “The Ring” (2002), “The Grudge” (2004) -- both major hits -- and last year’s “Dark Water,” all remakes of Japanese horror films that Ichise produced in his homeland.

But Lee likes him, and deftly plays Virgil. Ichise has wanted to do a comedy, and now Lee has an idea.

“The semi-inspiration to start with is from ‘Stripes,’ ” explains Lee.

“ ‘Racing Stripes?’ ” Ichise asks, referring to a recent kids’ flick.

“No, ‘Stripes,’ a very funny movie starring Bill Murray,” says Lee, referring to the slob comedy classic in which Murray joins the Army. “If you like it, we’re thinking of attaching the Rock or Will Ferrell.”

Ichise, who’s clearly used to being presented ideas like plates of sushi, is noncommittal. He’s more interested in gleaning ideas from Lee about who to hire to run his new production company at Fox. When Lee mentions a former studio executive who’d want a $750,000 salary, Ichise looks dumbfounded and replies “Arigato!” which means “thank you” and “goodbye” in Japanese.

In an industry that’s predominantly white, Lee stands out not as much for being a highly successful first-generation Korean American but for having carved out a niche for himself as the king of the Asian remake, at the exact moment that Asian film began to entice the American marketplace with such transported hits as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the studio-bred, Asian-inspired “The Matrix.”

Eschewing kung fu, Lee instead brought over what’s called J-horror, or Japanese horror, nonlinear mood pieces infused with the Shinto belief that the spirit world coexists with our world of bricks and mortar. The films usually feature a female protagonist and often a spooky kid. It’s less slasher horror than guilt horror, metaphysical revenge wreaked by wronged ghosts and entities. As Lee summarizes: “It can be more ambiguous. Everything doesn’t have to be spelled out. With U.S. studios, everything has to have an explanation.”

He’s moved on to other parts of Asia, selling comedies and thrillers from Korea and Hong Kong. As Lee points out, much of the material could never have been developed from within the studio system, which has grown leery of original screenplays or anything that hasn’t been pretested on audiences, such as a book or a TV show. With his projects, they have access to fresh stories in which the dots have already been connected by Asian filmmakers, and the premise tested on Asian audiences, though such is the might of Hollywood craft and marketing that the remakes often do better business in Asia than the originals. The American “Ring,” starring Naomi Watts, grossed far more in Japan than the original “Ringu.”

Despite his metier, Lee doesn’t speak Korean, Japanese or any other Asian language. A popcorn movie fan in the “Star Wars” and “Jaws” tradition, he had never even seen a subtitled film until 2001, when he saw the videotape of “Ringu.” A Maryland native, he had never left the continental United States until 2002, when he attended the Pusan Film Festival in South Korea, the Cannes of Asian film. He says American buyers couldn’t care less about his background, but being Asian did help him with the moguls and filmmakers of Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, who have opted to entrust their material to him. While other American producers have scored one-offs from the region, no one has accumulated a slate that approaches that of Lee and his partner Doug Davison. Says Lee, “It was lucky that it was an Asian who approached them because that gave them a comfort level.”

“When he goes after something, one of the things that makes him great is that it’s his, whether it’s his or not. Anyone that gets in the way of that becomes an enemy, and he doesn’t mind having enemies,” says a colleague, producer Nathan Kahane, with whom he made “The Grudge” and its upcoming sequel. Indeed, despite his seemingly low-key demeanor, Lee is also well known -- and completely upfront -- about his ability to hold a grudge.

Kahane describes his friend as part Sammy Glick, part pop culture savant, with an immigrant’s son’s fanatical work ethic. “He just has a real sense for the popular and what consumers want, because he loves movies. He just works harder. It’s undervalued. So much weight is put on politics, but this guy is unbelievably tireless. I’m constantly amazed how many times Roy beats us to the punch.”

Lee and Davison’s company, Vertigo Entertainment, now has a production deal at Universal and some 25 projects set up all over town. Their five movies debuting this year include “The Grudge 2”; “Eight Below,” based on a 1983 Japanese blockbuster about a pair of Antarctic scientists who embark on a dangerous mission to rescue their sled dogs; “The Lake House,” starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, a supernatural romance based on a South Korean film about a couple, living in different years, who fall in love via time-traveling letters; and “The Departed,” based on the snappy Hong Kong crime drama “Infernal Affairs,” about an undercover cop who has infiltrated the Irish mob battling an undercover mobster who’s infiltrated the Boston police. This is the big time: It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson. Martin Scorsese directs.

Lee has been so successful plucking jewels from Asia that a number of studios are dusting off their remake lists and handing them off to him in hopes that he can somehow infuse them with some Asian cool. That can mean either resetting them in Asia (he is working on a remake of Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” set there) or adding an Asian director (he’s remaking “The Entity,” an ‘80s demon-possession flick, with Hideo Nakata, the director of “Ringu”).

Lee’s process can sound almost unbelievably literal. When a Warner Bros. executive inevitably asked him to find another “Ring,” Lee -- who’d recently read in a magazine that classic titles work best as remakes -- went out and bought the book of the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

He quickly realized that if you changed the gender of the protagonist, “you could turn ‘Invasion’ into ‘The Ring’ in terms of similarity of the story structure. ‘The Ring’ was a mother protecting her son against this videotape which causes this viral curse to kill you. ‘Invasion’ is a mother protecting her son against this alien invasion that’s occurring secretly behind the scene.” He actually “beat it out, like a beat sheet,” mechanically transposing the structure of “The Ring” onto “Invasion” to show the studio how it could be done.

Lee’s new rendition, now called “The Visiting,” just wrapped principal photography. The Warner Bros. production is a global melting pot, with a German director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, and an Australian star, Nicole Kidman.

“It’s about box office and the lack of new ideas in Hollywood,” says USC professor Stan Rosen, who directs the East Asian studies center there, explaining Hollywood’s mad dash for Asian films. “These films do well because the stories are so interesting. I just showed ‘Old Boy’ in my class. There’s lots of twists and turns, a lot of violence and sex. It’s perfect for Hollywood.”

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Enthralled with the fear factor

BACK in his West Hollywood offices, a sparse set of cement cubicles formerly occupied by Tony and Ridley Scott’s company, Lee explains how he launched his producing career. He says it began whan a programmer for a Korean horror film festival sent him the original Japanese-language “Ringu.”

He was too scared to watch it alone in his West Hollywood home, so he called a friend, DreamWorks executive Mark Sourian. “We were like two kids watching this movie. At the end of the movie, when [the spirit] comes out, we literally jumped out of our seats,” he says, later adding what appears to be the ultimate definition of his aesthetic: Here, finally, was “the type of movie I would have killed to see when I was younger.”

The next morning, Sourian took the tape to his boss, DreamWorks’ then production head Walter Parkes, who watched it with his 13-year-old daughter, “who then had to sleep in the bed with her parents,” says Lee with a laugh. DreamWorks paid the film’s Japanese production company $1 million for the rights, almost as much as it cost to make the original film. Lee doesn’t charge the Asian sellers anything; he gets his cut as a producer’s fee from the studios.

In this case, he also earned one of his first public enemies, a former friend, Mike Maceri, who has said he was the one who introduced Lee to “Ringu.” Like Lee, Maceri ended up as an executive producer of the film.

As Rosen points out, the resulting $40-million DreamWorks version of “The Ring,” directed by Gore Verbinski, turned out to be a lot less psychologically complex and more thrill-seeking than the Japanese original. DreamWorks toned down the original ending, in which the mother opts to sacrifice her father to save her son, a theme that might be too strong to play in Peoria.

At the time, Lee was merely a producer wannabe, working out of the offices of the young management-producing team of Chris Bender and JC Spink. The son of a doctor and a very religious Christian schoolteacher, Lee graduated from law school and worked briefly at a law firm in Washington, D.C., before bailing out to move to Los Angeles, where he landed as an assistant at the production company Alphaville.

The year was 1996, and his job was to find new material. He wound up creating a mini-revolution by marrying Hollywood’s age-old practice of info-swapping with the Internet. With a friend, he created a website, Filmshark.com, for 20 of his friends, to which they could download their thoughts on the latest spec script. Then he created 25 similar Internet bulletin boards on which other newbie development executives could swap information. The only common denominator was Lee, who now had access to the collective mind of almost every 23-year-old working in town.

Before, agents at CAA and ICM could control information about spec scripts and could pit buyers against one another; now a script could be killed with one pithy disparagement posted on a tracking board. It’s unclear if this turn of events made movies better or worse, but it certainly helped gut the spec market, one of the few sources of original material. Lee and another pal created yet another website, Scriptshark, to which wannabe screenwriters could submit their scripts, with a $100 fee, and get professional coverage; good material was circulated to executives and agents.

Lee often stayed out all night and worked all day, with an ability to elude exhaustion that earned him the nickname “Roybot.” He wound up selling the tracking boards (for more than half a million dollars and some soon-to-be-worthless stock) to Ifilm, and Scriptshark to Baseline.

The accumulation of information and the use of the Internet would prove to be a cornerstone in Lee’s further ascension. Given that he knew nothing about Asian film, he tried to expand his repertoire by plumbing the resume of “Ringu” director Nakata: He sold Hollywood the remake rights to “Dark Water,” about a woman and her child who move into a creepy apartment building that drips water, and “Chaos,” about a man who helps a woman stage her own fake kidnapping. He methodically watched the top-grossing movies for all the regions in East Asia, focusing particularly on high-concept ideas, and sold Hollywood the remake rights to Korea’s second-, third- and fourth-most popular films.

He introduced himself to potential directors via the Internet and flew out to meet them on their home turf. (Now he’s so big that they fly here, and Lee also arranges meetings for them with agents.) He promised sellers access to top talent -- for instance, assuring the makers of “Infernal Affairs” that he’d get the film to Brad Pitt. Lee didn’t know Pitt, but he knew Jennifer Aniston’s best friend from high school, who worked at the then Pitt-Aniston company and who did, as promised, bring Pitt to a screening of the film. (Pitt wound up as a producer.)

Now that most of the big titles have been plundered, Lee must be more creative in his quest for material.

Despite a Korean wife and two small babies, Lee, who doesn’t like to eat at home because he hates having the smell of cooking food lingering in the house, spends from midnight to 3 in the morning trolling through message boards on blogs such as www.horror-movies.ca and www.twitchfilm.com for movie tips. “I have a lot of ... “ he pauses, searching for the word, “ ... scouts.”

Film fans in Asia, whom he meets on the Internet, send him tapes. “I don’t pay them,” he says, “but the person who sent me the original videotape of ‘The Grudge’ -- he got a special thanks at the end of the movie, and I sent him a sizable check. He wrote an article in some obscure magazine, saying the scariest movie he’d ever seen was this straight-to-video title called ‘The Grudge.’ ” Lee sent him an e-mail asking for a copy of the film.

As the company grows, it is moving into more full-fledged producing, hiring writers to conceptualize films for an American audience. That’s largely the purview of Lee’s partner Davison, as is the daily supervision of production. Lee says he recognizes when a script’s good, but when it needs help, “I’m not sure I can always say how to fix it.”

Davison says the revitalization of the horror genre is coming from Asia, where there is “a real freedom to experiment.” The American-language “Grudge” was shot in Japan, with the original Japanese director (Takashi Shimizu). “It’s completely nonlinear,” Davison says. “It’s very unconventional, not something you would have been able to develop in the studio system. The advantage with the remakes for a studio executive is they can watch the [original film] and go, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s really scary.’ It’s much easier for them to take the leap of faith.”

“[Roy] caught our attention just by virtue of the level of material he was able to bring to different studios,” says Universal president of production Donna Langley. Universal signed the duo to an overall production deal in 2004, granting them a seven-figure producing fee and first-dollar gross points on their films, meaning that Lee gets a cut of every dollar earned at the box office.

Says Langley, “He’s not out there making a lot of noise getting the studio to pony up for a hot spec, but he’s methodically getting a slate of movies together that are stylistically [similar]. He’s not a guy who’s overtly aggressive or out there, but when he’s passionate about something, we know about it.”

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Time to make the pitch

ON an afternoon a few months back, Lee, producer Spink and “Grudge” writer Stephen Susco assemble in a New Line screening room to watch -- with a bevy of New Line executives -- “Sigaw,” or “The Echo,” the first movie Lee has ever scored from the Philippines.

The asking price isn’t high -- $30,000 against $300,000 if the movie gets made -- and they’re watching a subtitled DVD played on a movie screen.

It’s a creepy tale of a young man who moves into his first apartment only to be haunted by a female ghost next door, who has confused him with the previous tenant, another young man who stood by and did nothing as the woman’s policeman husband beat her to death. In production value, the film looks like an artifact from the ‘70s, but its sinister exploration of the culpability of the bystander hooks you in.

When the lights go up, New Line executive Jeff Katz seems intrigued. “His good samaratanism bit him in the ass,” he says.

Spink and Lee go into sell mode. In this match-up, though, Lee hangs back, and the more gregarious Spink, who produced New Line’s “A History of Violence” and “Monster-in-Law,” aggressively tries to close. Lee has ideas on updating the film: Maybe put in an African American lead such as Snoop Dogg.

New Line is the third stop on the “Sigaw” selling junket. Universal has passed on it because the studio found its theme of domestic violence too close to “The Grudge.” Paramount executives liked it but figured that they could remake their own similarly themed movie, Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant.” Lee doesn’t seem fazed by any buyer’s apparent lack of interest. “The Grudge” -- in its original form a pair of scary but somewhat incoherent videotapes -- was turned down everywhere before director Sam Raimi was hooked to produce.

“It’s in the Asian creepy kid subgenre. It’s always a woman with a creepy kid,” muses Katz.

“I dig it,” offers Susco succinctly.

Katz is upfront about his not-always-great track record at getting his boss, production president Toby Emmerich, to bite on horror. He reels off some of the films New Line has passed on, including “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” which turned into a huge hit for Sony. “I’ve also been told that horror is dead,” he grumbles. “Good horror always works. Fifty percent of bad horror works.”

“Sigaw” will lie in limbo for several months at New Line, in part because Susco goes off to work on “The Grudge 2.” Now the plan is to set up the film with an independent financier.

After the New Line screening, Lee and Spink are off to a reconciliation meal. The two did not speak for several years, after Lee grew to believe that Spink had spread nasty gossip about him in the press.

There’s a reason why a good chunk of Lee’s slate features tales of retribution, of people wronged and thus determined to wreak havoc. Obviously the theme of honor is one that runs through Asian cinema, but it’s also one that seems to draw Lee, who has an exquisitely calibrated sense of justice. There’s a Mr. Hyde to his more public Dr. Jekyll. When he was a teenager, a neighborhood bully once shot him in the foot with a BB gun, and Lee responded by secretly removing the lug nuts from the wheels of his adversary’s car. (No one was hurt.)

“There’s a code of honor there, even in the grudge-related area,” says Spink. “I’m sure people are afraid of Roy, but why? It’s pointless. The worst thing he can do is not get you a piece of material. I think he’s mellowed out a little bit.”

Lee himself is not so sure he’s mellowed. “It takes a lot to provoke me,” he explains, but it’s still possible, particularly for “people who are really mean for no specific reason.” He gives the example of an agent he saw at a party consistently flicking ashes into the drink of a mentally retarded person. He devoted himself to bad-mouthing this agent and disrupting her business. “I try to do anything I can to make their lives miserable, if I can get away with it. It’s not a rage that comes out of nowhere.”

It’s also the flip side to the incredibly focused energy it can take to climb the Hollywood ladder. A grudge can help orient one, and so can ambition. Lee relentlessly pursues what he wants. A new Hollywood warrior, he explains what seems to be his rallying cry: “If I focus on one thing, I can easily get something accomplished.”

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Contact Rachel Abramowitz at calendar.letters@latimes.com.