A random movie of the day threw up a standard 1985 entry: "Year of the Dragon," directed by Michael Cimino, 134 minutes, starring Mickey Rourke, rating 6.8 out of 10, genres — action, crime, thriller. My previous foray into Cimino's biography was through "Heaven's Gate" and the range war in Johnson County, so there's no point in repeating that angle.
But I didn't latch onto Cimino. The film's credits list the name of Captain Stanley White, and it belongs not to a character, but to a living person — a sergeant from another department, a thousand miles away from New York's Chinatown. Neither "Year of the Dragon" nor this story about the credits has come up in "Curiosity" before. That means the topic isn't a direct repeat. Let's dig.
Robert Daley wasn't a man of letters who "researched the material." He was an insider: six years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Nice and Paris, six seasons as the PR director for the New York Giants football team, and from 1971–1972, the deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department. He had thirty-five people under him, a car with drivers around the clock, and access inside the yellow tape.
He hit a brutal stretch: the Knapp Commission against corruption, the murders of four cops by militants calling themselves the "Black Liberation Army," the shooting of informants, the ousting of legendary detective Eddie Egan — the very man Gene Hackman's character in "The French Connection" was based on. As a result, he wrote the documentary book "Target Blue," and then "Prince of the City" — about detective Robert Leuci, who turned in his own colleagues. The New York Times Book Review responded with a phrase still quoted today: the police officer as a "flawed hero" has never been done better.
In total, Daley has thirty-one books, six of which were adapted for the screen. He died on May 26, 2026, at the age of 96, in the Bronx. This is important to the plot, because a man who knew the New York police not from interviews didn't want to have anything to do with his own adaptation.
In the 1981 novel, the investigator has a different name. Kirkus, in a review dated October 14, 1981, summarizes the plot without ambiguity: Captain Artie Powers, 46 years old, a difficult man who, due to his own character, never made it to precinct commander. His counterpart is Jimmy Coy, a prosperous funeral home owner and former Hong Kong cop building a heroin empire. A separate storyline involves the Chinese underground figure Luang and the TV host Carol, with whom the married Powers has a "hot but guilty" affair. Daley didn't invent the material for this: he interviewed four Chinese-American police officers and separately traveled to Hong Kong for details.
In the film, neither Powers nor Coy exists. The captain became Stanley White, and the Triad boss became Joey Tai. Where did the name come from? This is where things get less obvious. Oliver Stone, the co-writer of the screenplay, met the real Detective Sergeant Stanley White from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department — a Marine veteran who fought in Vietnam. The contact came from two LAPD homicide detectives Stone was working with on an unproduced screenplay about the "Hillside Strangler." Stone not only modeled part of the veteran's character on him but also gave the hero his real name.
This checks out surprisingly hard. In the American Film Institute catalog, Stanley White has a separate person card, and he is listed in "Year of the Dragon" — as a technical police consultant. Further down on the same card, he is listed as a consultant on Stone's "Platoon" and "JFK," and in 1988 he appears in the cast of "Midnight Run" — playing a character named Stanley. After that, he is credited in five more films: four by Stone ("Platoon," "JFK," "The Doors," "Heaven & Earth") and "Desperate Hours" — by the very same Cimino who came up with him.
There's another detail that shows how the studio understood what it was releasing. White's final line in the film sounds like this: "You were right, and I was wrong. I'd like to be a good guy. I just don't know how." According to Cimino, Stone wrote something else: "Well, it seems if you fight long enough, you finally end up marrying the enemy." The studio banned the line — the director thinks political correctness was the reason. They pulled from the finished film the very sentence that would have articulated the main idea of the picture, replacing it with an admission of powerlessness.
The opening credits deserve separate attention. After weeks of protests, MGM/UA agreed to insert a disclaimer: "This film does not intend to demean or ignore the many positive aspects of Asian-American and particularly Chinese-American communities. Any similarity between the film and any real-life association, organization, individual, or Chinatown is coincidental." The text was negotiated by MGM/UA Chairman of the Board Frank Rothman with Los Angeles City Council member Michael Woo — the first Asian on that council. "The studio is probably making money off what I consider a grossly misleading portrayal," Woo explained, referring to the third of his demands: a financial contribution to the Asian community.
The disclaimer didn't reach all copies: first it was sent with 150 prints, then they talked about 200. Screen International called it the first time a major studio yielded to the demands of an ethnic group and released an on-screen warning at all. And right there sits the most uncomfortable detail of this whole deal: the disclaimer was present on American VHS tapes and cable broadcasts, but in the Region 1 DVD release from 2005, it is missing.
Daley saw what they did with his novel and publicly took the other side. "When I read the script, I wanted to cry," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I thought about buying full pages in newspapers and disassociating myself from Cimino's work. It's offensive to anyone. The film makes it seem like Chinese life is cheap." He lent his name and support to the "Coalition Against 'Year of the Dragon'" and the National Asian American Telecommunications Association — meaning the people who were picketing movie theaters.
Consider the scale: a former deputy commissioner of the NYPD, a writer of police novels whose novel was adapted, stands on the side of those protesting a film based on his very own book. In 2002, in a mailing list about police authors, he was even classified among the "quasi-cops": he didn't serve, but wore a badge and carried a weapon as a civilian administrator.
On August 30, 1985, the Federation of Chinese Organizations in America and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association filed a class action lawsuit in the Los Angeles County Superior Court for 100 million dollars. The basis was not the general atmosphere, but a specific editing detail: the plaintiffs claimed that four characters reading as the association's name appear in the film immediately before the scene where the gang leaders meet. The plaintiffs demanded not only money, but also a court injunction against the screening until the reference was removed.
Here I must admit a gap. How the lawsuit ended, I couldn't find — no ruling, no settlement agreement, no date of withdrawal. None of the materials available to me from 1985–1986 provide a conclusion, and after that, they simply stop writing about it. Perhaps the case quietly died on the court calendar; perhaps there was a settlement with a non-disclosure clause. I don't know, and I won't pretend that I do.
The strongest reaction came not from activists, but from a man in uniform. Hugh Mo, the first Asian-American to serve as deputy commissioner of the NYPD, said this about the hero, verbatim: "If Captain Stanley White of Michael Cimino's 5th Precinct worked for me, he'd last about a week. Nobody can be that brutal, break that many rules, and stay on the job. It's a gross distortion of reality."
And right there is the hook, the reason the film hit people so hard. The objection wasn't that there's no crime in Chinatown: in February 1985, half a year before the premiere, New York indicted 25 suspected members of a Chinese gang. The objection was to the proportion. Woo phrased it carefully: "We're not asking to sugarcoat reality, but we want a balanced portrayal of positive and negative."
Stone took the opposite stance and didn't soften it: the criticizing organizations are "full of hot air," and he himself "recreated the truth." His logic was that "there's no way not to offend somebody if you write about anything important," and that "it's gotten to the point of blandness." Cimino insisted he made a film about racism, not a racist one: "They didn't pay attention to what the film is saying."
And now, something I didn't expect at all. Different Chinese communities reacted differently. Taiwan banned the film, with the head of the import corporation calling it "offensive." Hong Kong met it with packed houses: the local Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority "found nothing racist in the picture," and according to a UPI report, only those who couldn't get tickets came out to protest. Lone stands apart: for his role as Joey Tai, he received a Golden Globe nomination and said the film "opened a huge door" for him. The same text read as slander and as an action thriller — depending on which side of the Pacific the viewer was sitting. The American disclaimer simply didn't make it to Hong Kong: the film played there without it and was advertised as uncut.
Critics split just as sharply as the audience. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker dismissed it: "hysterical, rabble-rousing trash, the kind that plays well to the semi-literate." Vincent Canby in The New York Times, on the contrary, admitted that the film "doesn't bore you for a minute." Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four and said outright that the structure is a mess, but the movie works. Cahiers du Cinéma magazine ranked it the third best film of 1985. At the same time, the picture has five Golden Raspberry nominations — including worst picture, worst director, and worst screenplay.
Box office receipts confirmed neither extreme. The premiere on August 16, 1985, in 982 theaters, 4,039,079 dollars for the first weekend and fifth place in the chart. After that, interest dropped, and the studio decided the protests were to blame. The final gross in the US and Canada was 18.7 million against a budget of 21 to 24 million. Quentin Tarantino later called the final shootout on the railroad bridge one of his favorite scenes in cinema.
And one detail that I like more than all the others. Cimino didn't shoot Chinatown in Chinatown: huge sets were built at a studio in Wilmington, North Carolina, because location shooting in Manhattan would have been disproportionately expensive. Hurricane Diana wiped out almost the entire built block, and it had to be rebuilt in a hurry. Here the sources disagree, and I leave it as is: some write that the storm hit a week before filming started, others (and the AFI chronology) say it was in early September 1984 and pushed production back by two months.
The sets came out so convincing that at the premiere, Stanley Kubrick didn't believe Cimino and had to be persuaded that the streets were shot on location. Cimino later had to prove to the Bronx native that he was looking at plywood.
The film accused of distorting the real Chinatown was shot in a different hemisphere from it — and the first person fooled was a man who knew better than many what New York looks like.