The graphic novel Shortcomings is a cherished work of contemporary Asian American storytelling, but the main character, Ben Tanaka, would surely roll his eyes, cross his arms, and heave a deep sigh of exasperation over anything described in such precious terms. He’s over all that. But also identity, representation, and pride can be difficult to grapple with when you don’t like yourself very much.
Ben pushes back at these things the way he pushes off the people in his life who love him. He’s a malcontent who is equal parts hilarious and tragic, an iconoclast who buys into stereotypes even as he’s determined not to be judged as one, and his search for romance crisscrosses between awkward, shocking, endearing, and infuriating.
He’s a brilliant character. So how is it possible that Shortcomings has never been brought to the screen before? The answer to that, like the character himself, is complicated.
Artist and writer Adrian Tomine has now adapted his own screenplay from the 2007 book, and actor Randall Park is stepping behind the camera to make it his feature film directorial debut. It’s early in the process, but their journey together highlights the changes underway in Hollywood as filmmakers try to present newer and fresher perspectives. Sometimes they have to team up.
For that last decade or so, Tomine has resisted a film adaptation of Shortcomings, partly because of how appalled he was by how studio executives approached his book when it first came out. “The experience between then and now is night and day,” he said. “I mean, I hit a lot of brick walls immediately when I first tried to do it. The closest I got would be one meeting, and they were often heartbreaking. I did an in-person meeting with someone, and, you know, I was overly optimistic already, but right off the bat they said, ‘How hard would it be to rewrite the script so that it would be castable?’”
That was code for something very specific. “Well, turn it into white people, I think,” Tomine said.
One strength of Shortcomings is its relatability. You don’t have to be a 30-year-old Japanese American guy who manages a movie theater in the Bay Area to connect with Ben. He’s someone you know, or maybe he’s you, if you’ve struggled with neediness, yearned for the acceptance of others to fill voids in yourself, and occasionally been your own worst enemy. That led some would-be producers to think the part could be played by anyone. But the young Asian American experience is an essential part of Tomine’s tale, and not something that can be removed without serious harm to the story.
Shortcomings’ characters are trying to find a place for themselves in their own country and culture, where they are often wrongly treated as foreigners or made to feel like they’re outsiders. Tomine, who is Japanese American, also explored how pressures associated with race and ethnicity factor into the intimate and interpersonal. Ben’s girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, is politically active and culturally tuned in, programming an Asian American film festival, which Ben resents: “Why does everything have to be some big ‘statement’ about race?” he snaps at her. She resents that his porn habits and workplace flirtations have revealed an unrequited attraction to white women. Meanwhile, his best friend and confidant, Alice Kim, asks him to pretend to be her boyfriend because she doesn’t think her churchgoing Korean American family would react well to her being a lesbian. They also aren’t thrilled that he is Japanese, given the historical conflicts between those countries, but she thinks they’ll get over that hang-up more easily.
Park discovered Shortcomings in a comic book shop back in late 2007, when he was in his early 30s and still a struggling actor getting by on bit parts in comedies, crime shows, and soap operas. “I remember getting it at the Giant Robot Store on Sawtelle Boulevard in L.A.,” Park said, speaking from his office via Zoom, with a framed cover of Shortcomings hanging on the wall behind him. “I remember flipping through it at the store and was just like, I gotta get this book. I was walking out the store, flipping through the pages—I couldn’t put it down—and immediately I just searched for all of Adrian’s stuff that was out there.”
At the time he was a no-name. “Picking up your book was actually really pivotal for me,” Park, who is Korean American, told Tomine in their joint interview with Vanity Fair. “It was so inspiring for me because it felt like, Gosh, these stories exist. There are writers like Adrian who are writing these stories about everyday people, right around my age. Funny stories that also touched on subject matters that no one else was talking about in popular culture.”
“Where were you at in your career at that point, Randall?” Tomine asked. “What were you doing?”
“I was officially pursuing this career as an actor, and I was in a very, very vulnerable place,” Park said. “There was no work available—to me, at least. I was struggling just to find out about auditions, you know? And the landscape, as far as opportunities for actors like me…Everything seemed kind of bleak.”
It was more than four years before he started his scene-stealing work as Governor Danny Chung on Veep in 2012, and eight years before his lead role as the steakhouse-running dad on the series Fresh Off the Boat. It was more than a decade before his double superhero breakthrough in 2018, playing FBI agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man and the Wasp and marine biologist Dr. Stephen Shin in Aquaman. Park’s career would level up again with the rom-com Always Be My Maybe, alongside Ali Wong, and the reprisal of his indefatigable Marvel agent in WandaVision, but at the time he was first flipping through Shortcomings, Park was a long way from a household name.
At that age he might have been the perfect choice for Ben Tanaka. Ironically, at the same time that Park was struggling to find someone, anyone, who would cast him, producers and executives were telling Tomine that there were no young Asian American actors around to play the part as written.
“It went dormant for, like, a decade,” Tomine said. “Basically it went into hibernation because I was so put off by that experience. If that is the reaction, okay. That seals that deal, and fuck it. I’m going to go do something else.”
Over the years Park kept at it. Now that people finally did know his name, instead of just shouting “Asian Jim!” at him because of his long-ago guest spot on The Office, he wanted to use that status to bring Shortcomings to the screen.
It took a while for Park to finally reach out to Tomine, even after breaking out on a hit sitcom. Self-doubt was the culprit, as it often is with Ben Tanaka himself. “I was on Fresh Off the Boat, and I felt like I might be at a place where I could maybe do something with this. I found out that Adrian and I had agents at the same agency, and I asked mine four or five years ago, ‘Hey, what’s going on with that book? I’m really interested in maybe optioning it.” Park heard back that Tomine had become resistant to the idea of it becoming a movie, but Tomine’s agent suggested he write a personal letter to persuade him. “At the time I was like, I don’t know if Adrian would want to hear from a sit-com dad about Shortcomings. I just didn’t feel like I was at that place, you know?”
As it happened, Tomine’s worries about trusting Hollywood with his book had begun to ease, partly because of Park and others who kept striving. “Much to my surprise, things really did start to evolve,” he said. “And every time something would pop on my radar, like, ‘Look at this movie that came out,’ or, ‘Look at this TV show’—Randall, you were often a part of that—I thought, Maybe there is some hope for that script. Maybe I don’t want to just completely give up on it altogether.”
Park’s profile, meanwhile, continued to rise. “As I felt more confident in what I would be able to bring to the project, I felt like, Okay, maybe now’s the time to reach out.” He found out the production company Roadside Attractions had optioned the script in the meantime. Park felt he was no longer right for the lead. “I’m too old to play Ben,” the 47-year-old said. “If I was the right age, of course. I mean, it’s kind of a dream role. For a comedic actor to play something grounded and so layered and so complex, it would be a dream. But yeah, I’m too old.”
But now he has other ambitions. “I was like, I want to direct it,” he said. “I didn’t know that they were already talking to directors for it, but I threw my hat in the ring, and they really liked what I had to say.”
Tomine himself would be the deciding factor. “They set up a meeting with Adrian, which I was very nervous about because, again, I’ve been such a huge fan for so long,” Park said. But also, given how personal and intimate Tomine’s work was, Park had other concerns.
“I thought that Adrian would probably be like Ben Tanaka a little bit!” Park said. “I was expecting, uh, not a nice person, but to my surprise, he is incredibly gracious and kind and down to earth. So that’s how it all started.”
It’s still technically starting. “We have the script, and my production company, Imminent Collision, is working with Roadside,” Park said. “We’re meeting with studios, and I’m pitching my director’s vision and seeing who is interested in terms of financing it.”
Shortcomings always took place in the present day, but Tomine had to update it from 2007 to take place in the present present day. That meant changing some of the dialogue, which was edgy then but over the line now. “Those are pretty significant 14 years in our culture,” Tomine said. “That definitely called for some adjustments in a lot of back-and-forth. Randall has been right in there with me in terms of getting granular about, ‘Let’s look at this one sentence, and let’s think about the repercussions of how strong this guy comes on.’”
But those cultural shifts also opened up the industry to be more enthusiastic about stories like Shortcomings. “Just from the announcement, we have so much incoming interest,” Park said. “I don’t think that would have been the case even two years ago. There is an awareness of the importance of telling these stories, and I think there is an awareness of the business opportunity.”
After Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell, Minari, and other successful and innovative projects about Asian American life, Hollywood is starting to realize it is leaving money on the table by not telling these types of stories. And filmmakers like Park are now asserting themselves and calling for the chance to tell those different types of stories. That same impulse drove Tomine to write Shortcomings in the first place: “I was trying to create a book that I wish someone else had already made for me. It was a lot more important to me to have the kind of ‘boring’ stuff that Randall was talking about—like people having lunch together, people cooking and getting into an argument—all these things that are just sort of taken for granted in white-based movies or TV shows or comic books.”
“I think in this industry, when it comes to stories about Asian Americans, there is such a premium placed on really getting that authenticity right,” Park said. “But I think that the industry has very specific parameters as to what that authenticity means.” In other words, studios tend to favor the unusual or extreme instead of the familiar and relatable. “There has to be some sort of immigrant experience or an overseas experience,” Park said, continuing his critique. “There has to be a wise elder or a scene where people are eating dumplings. Like, there’s a checklist of what authenticity means for Asian Americans in this industry.”
In fact, the Shortcomings book opens with Ben and his girlfriend, Miko, at her Asian American film festival, watching one such movie—with an earnest narrator describing her Chinese immigrant grandfather as being like the fortune cookies he has spent his life making: “A hard, protective shell containing haiku-like wisdom.” Ben despises it so much that it leads the couple into a bitter argument.
“I think 10 years ago, 15 years ago, my impression was there were so few opportunities for Asian Americans to get a film made or a book published, or to be on a stage, that if you’re going to do it, it’s gotta be profound,” Tomine said. “It’s gotta be solemn. It’s gotta be heart-wrenching. It’s gotta be giving thanks to all your elders and expressing hope for the future and all these massive things. And I felt like we weren’t given the room to be funny, to be jerks, to be messy—to be normal. That parody at the beginning of the book is not so much a swipe on the artists who made that kind of art, but on the pressure that society was creating for them at that time.”
“All of the films that have come out before us that aren’t quite like this are important steps in getting us to making a film like this,” Park said. “We have to have told those stories to get to tell this story. I think Adrian was just really ahead of his time back in 2007.”
If Tomine and Park get Shortcomings to the screen, it may open things up for others. “I do feel like there hasn’t been a Ben Tanaka role available to an actor before,” Tomine said. “And you know, maybe if there had been, there would be more actors who saw it as a viable career when they were younger. I feel like a path has been cleared to a degree for us, but I feel like we’re kind of in the trenches a little bit ourselves still clearing it.”
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