Hollywood comes to Guam, then leaves:
The
true story of MAX HAVOC: CURSE OF THE DRAGON, Guam’s “propitious” film
In early April 2004, I was contacted by a friend of mine about working with him on a film to be shot that May in Guam. My friend was a Gaffer (motion picture Lighting Director) and I often worked as his assistant. He said I would be doing him a favor as the film was low budget and my pay-rate wouldn’t be much. I wasn’t doing anything work- wise in May, wanted to help my friend, and figured the bad pay would be offset with the chance to travel to and visit a far-off place like Guam. At the time I didn’t know much about Guam except that it was way out in the Pacific and it was somehow part of the United States, not a state, but a protectorate or dominion or province or something. I didn’t know. I would need a passport because of a layover in Japan, but the passport wouldn’t be needed for Guam.
I had never heard of the film’s Executive Producer John Laing, and was only vaguely familiar with the director, Albert Pyun. Pyun had an impressive list of crappy movies he’d made, usually in the grade-B martial arts, cyborg, tits and ass genre. The film he was directing on Guam was called Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon, and it sounded like more of the same. I knew it would be a hellish experience. Unfortunately, working on low budget films mostly always are. They are often made by fools with no filmic aptitude and other assorted transient effluvia who, quite simply, have no business making motion pictures. I was pretty sure Pyun would be no different. In the coming days, when I was ordering the lighting equipment to be used for the shoot and preparing it for shipment to Guam, I learnt just how stupid Executive Producer John Laing and his assistants were. They constantly changed their shooting schedule, my travel plans and generally called me in a panic from Guam, seemingly oblivious to the 17-hour time difference. I would often have to field their insipid and demanding calls at 3am. Yup, they were idiots. I just did the best I could, prepared for the worst and looked forward to my time off on Guam when I could explore the island on my own.
I landed in Guam at about 2am after a 4-hour layover in Japan with several other crewmembers. Someone on the plane had the Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon script but nobody was much interested in reading it. A camera assistant said he had read about 11 pages and was sorry he had. I tried to read it but it was just to dumb too stomach. It was about a sports photographer who tracks down some Japanese antique jade dragon statue and gets in some martial-arts fights. It was insufferably dull and I wondered who wrote this crap and how anyone found the money to make it. One of the wardrobe girls told me it was to star some male German soap opera star and a bikini-model from the Man Show, one of their “Juggy-Girls” who spent the half-hour Comedy Central show bouncing up and down on a trampoline. MTV starlet Carmen Electra was also to star, obviously to garner that prized market of non-English speaking males worldwide between the ages of 13-24. Slap a semi-nude photo of Electra on the DVD box and put it on video store shelves all over Asia and everyone would get rich. At least that was some blockhead’s plan.
At Guam International Airport it was pitch black and humid as Hell. Jetlag was kicking my ass hard and I was seriously disoriented. A van picked us up and took us to our hotel, the Ohana Bayview in Tumon Bay. I couldn’t see anything on the drive over and didn’t know where I was even if you put a gun to my head demanding an answer. The hotel was nice enough and I was grateful for that. Of course, no one in the Max Havoc production office on Guam had informed the hotel when we’d be arriving so our rooms weren’t ready.
I sat in the hotel lobby, picked up the local paper as I waited, exhausted. The front-page story had proclaimed, “HOLLYWOOD HAS COME TO GUAM!” and was about the Max Havoc film, and an entire sidebar on Carmen Electra statistics. Seems she was born in 1972 in Ohio, given her name by the musician Prince, married a basket-ball player, then a rock-star, blah, blah, blah. I turned the page, continuing to read, front to back, every section, because I always believed what journalist I. F. Stone said about newspapers: You read every section thoroughly because you never knew where you were going to find a front page story. And there it was, buried deep on page 4 or 5, a small story about how the Executive Producer of Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon, John Laing, was given a loan guarantee of close to a million dollars by the Guam Economic Development and Commerce Authority, a Guam Government office. In the 15 years I’ve worked in the film industry I’d never heard of such a thing. State Film Commissions are always aggressive in luring films to their area, giving tax breaks to film productions and assisting in logistics like closing streets and sidewalks for filming, but for a local government agency to put up money for a loan guarantee for a film’s producer was insane. With this loan guarantee that GEDCA put up for Max Havoc, the government of Guam and the people of Guam were, in effect, now the Co-Executive Producers for a low-budget, low-rent crappy Kung-Fu movie.
As I staggered up to my room and into bed, I wondered how much anybody on Guam knew about the financing, production and distribution of feature films. Whatever they knew, or though they knew, Guam was about to learn some hard lessons.
The film crew gathered in the morning in the hotel lobby to wait for the production shuttle van to take us to our first day’s location, the 21-story Outrigger luxury hotel in Tumon Bay, the main tourist drag on the island. Of course the shuttle van never came and we ended up walking the half-mile or so to the hotel. It was thick and humid. There were massage parlors and strip clubs with American motifs everywhere: Club USA, Red, White & Strip, and so on. A red trolley drove by with a newly married Japanese couple on the outer deck waving to no one in particular. I waved back.
Once at the hotel, the crew was directed to the Max Havoc production office. The Outrigger hotel was situated within a shopping mall/restaurant/entertainment complex and the film’s production office was basically an empty storefront beside a Hertz rental car office. Inside we were given contracts to sign. The deal memo said I would be working for a company called Guam Motion Pictures Company. This seemed strange to me as I had been originally contacted in Los Angeles by a company called Rigel Entertainment; they had make my travel plans to Guam, helped me get my passport and had requested that I work in Hollywood in early April preparing the lighting gear for shipment to Guam. I had assumed I would be continuing to work for Rigel in Guam, also.
“So what’s with this Guam Motion Pictures Company deal memo?” I asked someone in the production office. “In LA I was working for Rigel Entertainment.”
“Oh it’s all the same company,” I was told. Against my better judgment I signed the deal memo. What could I have done anyhow? Here I was on a tiny island thousands of miles away from home with a return ticket four weeks from now. There was nothing I could do. Like a good soldier, I just signed the contract, hoped for the best and got to work.
The equipment room was in another empty storefront, this one sandwiched between a Footlocker and an ice cream stand. The film’s lights, camera and sound gear was all rented in Hollywood, placed in freight containers and shipped 6 weeks across the Pacific to Guam. Now, here it lay, piled floor to ceiling in an abandoned clothing store with as much organizational forethought as 3am phone calls, unprepared hotel rooms and missing crew shuttle vans.
I immediately began organizing the electrical cables and lights, trying to make sense of the mess. Afterwards, I headed to the hotel’s back parking lot to run cable from the film’s generator, up the hotel’s stairwell, 21-stories, to the roof. An eager, hard working local hire was to help in the time consuming, arduous task. I was more then happy to consume as much time as I could to avoid having to spend time on what was sure to be an inane film set. Hours later, exhausted, the local hire, Frank, and I sat on the roof of the beachfront hotel, gazing in all directions. Far below people waded out into the crystal blue water as sandy beach stretched as far as the eye could see. A quiet warm breeze swirled around us. Frank turned inland and pointed out where he and his friends use to drag race cars as teenagers. “You could see the cops coming from miles away, but they didn’t care. They just wanted to watch, too,” he said.
I imagined growing up on a peaceful tropical island where everyone knew everyone else and even the cops like to watch illegal street racing. The reality of growing up on Guam was probably somewhat different. “It gets kinda boring around here sometimes,” Frank continued. “It only takes 40 minutes to drive around the island and you can’t even go onto the military bases. That’s where some of the best beaches are.”
Frank was a hard, intelligent worker and I was curious what the producers were paying him. “Minimum wage,” he frowned. I can’t say I was really shocked; this seemed like the kind of film where the producers got as much as they could for as little as possible which is probably why they came to Guam to begin with. I assured Frank I would talk to the producers and tell them how valuable he was and try to up his rate. They were going to say no, but I had to try.
Suddenly my walkie-talkie rang, shattering the peace and quiet. We were wanted on set, things were getting big.
The shooting set was in a 3rd floor banquet room. There was a table set up with some chairs dragged in from the hotel lobby. The table was draped with a black cloth with a
6-inch clay dragon statue on it. It all looked like the set of an elementary school play sprinkled with menace. While I set up some small lights the director, Albert Pyun, gave some directions to a couple of actors, more like a traffic cop then a filmmaker. Pyun, dark-skinned, short and chubby like a bloated carnival barker, was the director of such cinematic milestones as Bloodmatch, Dollman, Nemesis 4: Death Angel, and a gang of other remedial movies you’ve never seen. It seemed to me that with Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon he was adding another video box to his seldom seen repertoire. So, finally, after traveling close to 14 hours by plane to a tropical paradise, we were shooting a set in a windowless hotel banquet room that could’ve been anywhere, like someone’s garage in Burbank.
And so it went on, day after 14-16 hour day, shooting all over the Outrigger Hotel: hallways, hotel rooms, elevators, banquet rooms, back kitchens, front kitchens, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. We’d shoot one scene on the 4th floor then move all our lighting and camera gear to the 11th floor for a scene there, then move all our gear back to the 4th floor for another scene there. As I expected, it was unorganized and unnecessarily chaotic. Nothing we shot made sense: actors ran up and down hallways and got in and out of taxis. Occasionally we’d shoot 1/4 or 1/2 of a fight scene somewhere. Director Albert Pyun never seemed concerned or much interested in completing the entire action sequence, to great frustration of the stunt crew. The lead actress, bikini-mode Joanna Krupa, burnt through endless takes, bumbling over cockamamie dialogue like: “Look! He’s got sunglasses, a dark suit, a gun, and he’s Japanese! He must be a Yakuza!” (I for one thought this would be an awesome and effective advertising tag line for the Max Havoc film poster, but no one else on the crew shared my enthusiasm.)
By week’s end a joke began circulating amongst the crew that Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon wasn’t really a movie; it was someone’s tax shelter.
Most nights ended the same, everyone exhausted and staggering back to the hotel for
4-5 hours sleep before starting the nonsense all over again the next day. One week in Guam and all I’d seen of the island was the hotel room I slept in and the 1/2-mile road to the hotel we shot in. No doubt about it filmmaking is hard work. Both big budget films and low budget films are equally arduous tasks and seasoned film crews are used to working long, hard hours. However, there’s a vast difference between working smart and working stupid and the Max Havoc crew were forced to work as stupid as possible. The producer’s of Max Havoc were the kind of film producers who would trip over a $20 dollar bill to pick up a nickel. Real Einsteins.
As I’ve mentioned before, Dear Reader, no thought was given to basic scheduling, or anything else for that matter. I was forced to have the set’s lighting generator moved from the front of the hotel to the back of the hotel and right back to the front again, at $50.00 a move, which is what a local equipment company we rented the generator from charged us to move it. The production office was always crying about lack of funds but thought nothing of paying unnecessary generator moving fees.
I argued to production that if we came up with a proper, realistic shooting schedule and only moved the lighting generator once a day, we could save hundreds of dollars and maybe use that money to hire some more local crew to help lighten the work load. These requests were always met with blank, vacuous stares from the producers, like I was speaking heresy in an alien language. Eventually our 1st Assistant Director quit in disgust and flew back to Los Angeles. Now we didn’t have an essential motivating and organizational crew person and things seemed genuinely bleak. I’ve worked on films, T.V. shows, music video and still-photography shoots, of all sizes and budgets, for close to 15 years, and I began to sense that something with this film here in Guam was very wrong.
One hot and humid afternoon as I sat in the cab of the pick-up truck that was moving our lighting generator for the hundredth time, at $50.00 a pop, the local guys from Morrico Equipment, the company in Guam the film hired to provide generator services, informed me that the Max Havoc producers had asked Morrico if they could just bill production all at once at the end of the movie. The Max Havoc producers, in essence, wanted a running tab with Morrico. It suddenly struck me that this was a burn job. This whole film was a burn job. The producers intended to get as much as they could for free or on credit, and then flee the island. I told the Morrico guys not to trust the film’s producers and to demand their money as services were rendered.
The first day I was on Guam and on the Max Havoc set the Morrico Equipment Company president invited me to a steak and seafood dinner the company was having for their employees. Several of their employees offered to take me out to see the “real Guam,” the local sights. I was always working late on the film and didn’t have the time, but I was struck by their friendliness and hospitality. I was beginning to feel an affinity towards the local people of Guam, whom I was told were Chamorro People, the indigenous people of Guam. I felt embarrassed and disgusted by the “take as much as you can” attitude of the Max Havoc producers. They wanted as much as they could get from the locals for as little as possible.
I kept reading in the local Guam paper about how the film was going to be so beneficial for Guam. And of course, the film’s biggest cheerleader was John Laing, Max Havoc’s Executive Producer and beneficiary of Guam Government’s $800,00 loan guarantee. “We believe that Guam will profit tremendously and take pride in the movie, will have no financial risk from its propitious investment in the film and that this production will only lead to bigger and better film events on Guam,” Laing would tell Guam’s Pacific Daily News with a straight face. I’m sorry I didn’t see it. I didn’t believe him, and my local Chamorro hire for the lighting department, Frank, didn’t believe him either. When I tried to get more money for Frank I was told in no uncertain terms by the producers that they were doing him a big favor by even hiring him because they claimed that Frank was in some sort of “rehabilitation employment program” for people who had been in “trouble with the law and couldn’t get a job because of it.” The producers hostilely told me Frank’s pay would stay at minimum wage. Of course I didn’t believe them so I asked Frank. “They’re lying,” Frank told me. “I’m not in any rehabilitation employment program.” I believed Frank and because he had become such an asset to us, several of us in the crew chipped in our own money to up Frank’s pay.
When payday did come, things were in chaos. The crew wanted their pay and had to sit in the production office and practically beg for it. Finally, we were given handwritten checks and told not to cash them right away “because the funds weren’t available yet,” setting everyone on edge and in a panic. No one could cash their checks anyways because they had been issued from a bank in Guam, and since almost no one on the crew lived there, nobody had a bank account there. We would have to wait for our first day off, whenever that was going to be, and cash the checks then.
Meanwhile shooting on Max Havoc toiled on, ridiculously unorganized and stupid as ever. Heat and humidity, sun frying our minds, sleep depravation was starting to set in, but most everyone on the crew were professionals and acted accordingly. We kept working our Asses off for the good of the film even though the director and producers seemed to be working against us.
One day we were lighting one of the back hallways in the Outrigger Hotel for a pivatol scene of somebody running around, back and forth, when the Executive Producer, John Laing, burst onto the set, making a rare appearance from his luxury hotel suite, ranting and raving about how the scene was suppose to be taking place in Japan and the hallway didn’t look “Japanese enough,” whatever that meant. John Laing was a suit and a suit of the very worst kind. He had a greasy pathology about him and you knew that whatever he did back in Hollywood was either seedy or pedestrian. I slapped some red gel on a background light and that seemed to appease him. Now the hallway looked “Japanese” enough for him to get off our set and out of our face. John Laing and Albert Pyun were really wearing everyone down. Why should we give a fuck if they didn’t?
Finally, after almost two weeks, I had a day off. I rented a car and headed straight to the Bank Of Guam to cash my paycheck. I fully expected the check to bounce; it didn’t. I fully expected to pay a bank service fee for the privilege of cashing a Bank Of Guam’s check make out to me; I did. Back in the car, I headed south, desperate to get out of Tumon Bay, which was by all indications a tourist hole with shopping malls, Hard Rock Cafes, and other homogenized souvenir shops making it look as indistinguishable as every other tourist hole in the world.
I knew Tumon Bay wasn’t “Guam” and I wanted to see “Guam,” so I headed south. The beauty of the island stunned me; the amazing vistas of the Philippine Sea and of the Pacific Ocean were breath taking. In the village of Merizo families were walking down the road, children hand-in-hand in their Sunday bests, on the way to church. In Talofofo Falls I stopped at a park and went swimming in a tropical pond with a waterfall cascading down upon me. I climbed a giant hillside somewhere and sat gazing out at the vast blue ocean. It was sad to me that with all the picture-perfect beauty around me on Guam, the Max Havoc crew was stuck filming some back hallway at an overpriced hotel.
On the drive back thru Merizo, someone ran up to my car and flagged me down. They were having a cookout at their house, a “fiesta” they called it, and they wanted me to come. I was blown away. They didn’t know me from Adam and they were inviting me into their home to eat their food. In Los Angeles when someone runs up to your car they want to rob you then kill you. Around the barbeque pit I told my gracious hosts that I was visiting their island to work on the Max Havoc film. Everybody was excited: they wanted to know how I liked Guam, how the film was going, when they could see it, when were more films coming to the island, and when was Carmen Electra going to be here? I had a sinking feeling in my gut. There was poverty all around and everyone was hoping for jobs and an economic boom with film production on the island. It wasn’t going to come, not with this film, not with this production by two Hollywood carpetbaggers.
That night I sat on my hotel balcony and thought of the local people I’d seen and visited with that day. A quiet warm breeze swirled around me. On Guam, a quiet warm breeze seems never to be far, but it didn’t help. As I sat on my balcony watching the lights of Tumon Bay, I became seriously depressed.
The big day finally came, Carmen Electra showed up, making approximately $100,000 for two days work, plus a $500 per diem per day. She was supposed to “star” in Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon and her “starring” role lasted about 15 seconds. She plays a vendor on the beach and the title character rents a jet ski from her. She had one line, literally 4 or 5 words of dialogue. On the day she appeared the set was besieged with local press and politicians. The island’s Governor, Felix Camacho, came and had his picture taken with her. It was funny. Camacho was as nervous as a little boy and couldn’t stop staring at her breasts.
Later in the day, Carmen Electra re-emerged from her penthouse suite in the Outrigger Hotel to do some Public Service Announcements for the Guam Visitors Bureau. We shot her PSA spot at the beach out in front of the Outrigger telling people of Guam not to litter. We had to shoot retake after retake because Electra kept saying “GLUAM” instead of “GUAM.” It was truly pathetic that anyone would think that the indigenous people of Guam weren’t smart enough to respect their own island and not litter until some Hollywood starlet with a plastic body like Carmen Electra told them not to. We also shot another Guam Visitors Bureau spot with Electra telling us “When you come to GLUAM, be sure and visit all the villages of the island, like I have,” when in fact the only thing Electra had seen of Guam in the day and a half she was there was her luxury suite at the Outrigger and the duty-free Louis Vuitton outlet store across the street from the hotel.
Several days after Carmen Electra had left, the crew was preparing for a shot of someone running down a hall of the Outrigger, when director Albert Pyun came shrieking onto set. Apparently ALL of Carmen Electra’s sound was missing - all her takes for the film and all her takes for the Guam Visitors Bureau’s spots. It was all missing, nowhere to be found. It had been properly recorded. During all her scenes I had thought there may have been a sound problem caused by a buzzing noise coming from one of my electronic lights, so I reviewed the playback between each scene and it was all there, clear as day. Not only was Electra’s sound missing but all the corresponding sound reports (a comprehensive written log of each take) were also missing. It was too much of a coincidence that both Electra’s sound tape and sound reports were missing. Obviously, someone had stolen them. Conspiracy theories began to spread thru the set: Did Albert Pyun take them as a future bargaining tool against the film’s Executive Producer, or vice-versa, did Executive Producer John Laing take them as a bargaining tool against the director and/or the Government of Guam? The only thing for sure was that the sound was missing, and the director and producers were pissed. Strangely enough, after a day or two, the sound was still missing, but Pyun didn’t seem to care much anymore, leading many conspiracy theorists on the crew to finger him as the culprit. Whatever. Who does care? I sure didn’t. I just wanted to go home.
One of the last things we shot was a commercial for Guamcell, a cellular phone company on Guam. We had been using their cellular phone/walkie-talkies and their airtime, and in exchange, the film’s producers would shoot a commercial for them featuring their cell phones. It was, to put bluntly, the dumbest commercial I’ve ever worked on (and I’ve worked on some dumb commercials like the one a couple of years ago for Pepto-Bismol with Professor Pepto, a talking puppet schooling viewers on diarrhea. Compared to Albert Pyun’s Guamcell spot, Professor Pepto could start writing his acceptance speech for his Clio, advertising’s annual “best of” award.) Director Albert Pyun just re-used a scene from the film for the commercial. At the end of a take from a scene from the film where someone is running (what else?) thru a hallway (where else?), Pyun just had them stop, hold up a cell phone, and say to the camera, “Guamcell!” Presto! A commercial and a film all in one take! Pyun seemed pretty happy with his clever self. “Someone should make a documentary film about me,” he proudly announced to himself because by this time nobody was listening to him anymore.
Not everybody was so happy. Film technicians and actors usually make more money on a commercial project then a film project and we had all been brought to Guam to make a film, not a commercial. Angry, the sound mixer boycotted the shot and refused to roll tape. Pyun didn’t seem to notice the absence of a boom microphone during the shot. In fact, for most of Max Havoc, Pyun seemed oblivious to the fact that sound pictures require two separate and distinct elements: sound and picture. After the chaotic film/Guamcell commercial take, my local hire, Frank, turned to me, and I’ll never forget the look of disbelief etched in his face for the rest of my life, said “Are all film sets this fucked-up?”
Sure enough we worked till the last second before getting on the plane to leave the island. Towards the end of the shoot, a local group on the island treated the crew to a beachside barbeque, however, since on-set communication was so bad, no one bothered to inform the working crew and nobody went. In fact, both Albert Pyun and John Laing seemed to have a healthy distain for the laborers on their film. Pyun and Laing never ate with the crew, not once. To them, we seemed to be a necessary and problematic evil to their grand design. We simply didn’t matter to them. There was a wrap party of some sort. I think the production company bought us a beer or two at a local bar and gave us each a cheery snapshot of the Producer and Production Manager standing on the beach, smiling. It was signed: “Thanks for your hard work on the film.” John Laing and Albert Pyun were nowhere to be seen that night.
As everyone on the crew expected, we weren’t paid our last weeks wages, but were absolutely, positively assured we’d have our pay checks one week after returning to Los Angeles. The producers even brought in a daisy-fresh, bright-eyed accountant from LA to assure us all in person that there was “nothing to worry about.” The crew all knew this was a load of bullshit. They weren’t going to pay us, they were going to stiff us and anybody else they could get away with stiffing.
My local hire, Frank, was still owed his last week’s wages and I knew that once we were gone there’d be a slim chance he would be paid. I made one last pitch to the producers to pay him. Frank was a massive help to the film and he deserved to be treated fairly. The last I saw of Frank he was sitting worried in the production office trying to get them to issue him a check. I felt horrible, but my plane was leaving soon, and of course the production shuttle van was nowhere to be found, so I was force to find my own way to the airport.
I
don’t know if Frank was ever paid, but in hindsight, I doubt he was.
Needless to say, once we were back in Los Angeles, nobody was paid. Eventually the Producer, Production Manager and Accountant all quit because they hadn’t been paid, either. All summer long the Max Havoc crew tried in vain to get paid and Executive Producer John Laing dodged us at every turn. He eventually sent us all a letter, what was really just a veiled threat telling us to back off or we’d never see a dime.
The crew broke apart, people moved on to new and different projects. Every once in awhile we’d all get together on the phone and inquire as to whom if anybody had been paid. No one had. We all made attempts to get paid, both alone and collectively, and still nothing. Several of the crew went to John Laing’s office in LA, having conversations with his attorney by speakerphone, to absolutely no avail. The checks were always coming next week, the week after that; and week after week, they never came.
During late Summer of 2004 I got a call from the sound mixer of Max Havoc who informed me that he was working on a film in downtown LA in a giant, abandoned newspaper building, and another film was shooting in the same building called, you guessed it, Max Havoc: Curse Of The Dragon. Calls were made and a good portion of the Guam crew showed up to the Max Havoc set in LA the next day. I saw an acquaintance of mine working on it and I pulled him aside, telling him of our situation. He told me he had been called to work on a film that was originally made in Guam and that was “so bad” and “made no sense whatsoever” that the producers were forced to remake it here in LA with a new director and a new cast.
The Guam crew became infuriated: So instead of John Laing paying us what he owed us, he instead spent the money to remake Max Havoc in Los Angeles with a new director, new cast and a new crew. I secretly wondered if Laing intended to pay this new crew working for him. The Max Havoc Guam crew stormed the Max Havoc Los Angeles set and frantic phone calls were made to John Laing, who as usual, fed everybody shit and assured us are “checks were on their way.”
I
decided that John Laing had till October 20, 2004, nearly six months after my
money was due, to pay me or I was going to take this all the way to End Game. If
John Laing didn’t pay me by October 20, 2004, it was going to become a whole
different ballgame: I was going to
find out exactly who John Laing was, I
was going to find out exactly who
Albert Pyun was and I was going to find out exactly
how these two men conned the Guam
Government into risking close to one million dollars with them.
The morning of October 20, 2004, in Los Angeles was postcard-picturesque as I made my way down Wilshire Boulevard to John Laing’s office, a warm and quiet breeze swirled around me, just like when I was in Guam. I went into the nondescript office building at 4201 Wilshire and came out five minutes later. John Laing had, again, refused to pay me.
I
boarded the Number 16 bus to downtown and got off at the Los Angeles Superior
Courthouse and immediately got to work.