REMAKE MAN.(film producer Roy Lee)(Interview)

One afternoon last winter, the movie producer Roy Lee sat in a taupe wing chair in the bar of Raffles L'Ermitage, a hotel in Beverly Hills, posed as if for a formal portrait. A thirty-four-year-old Korean-American in a nearly all-white industry, Lee is keenly aware of the impression he wants to make. Only his splayfooted walk is unstudied; everything else about him is clean, modern, contained. In Lee's business letters, the paragraphs are all five lines long, for maximum tidiness and impact. He recently considered putting his black Mercedes in a garage and buying a scooter for his five-minute commute but, after reviewing the mental image of himself in a helmet, decided against it. He had three meetings lined up at L'Ermitage that day, and he was dressed in a short-sleeved black knit Donna Karan shirt and dark-tan Donna Karan chinos. His bedroom closet currently contains only Donna Karan; in the coming year, he says, he intends to wear only John Varvatos. Two years ago, Lee dropped thirty pounds and got rid of most of his possessions.

What Lee does for a living sounds simple enough, but no one in Hollywood had thought of it before. He watches videos of every Asian movie ever made, picks the biggest hits, and then, on behalf of their Asian distributors, sells the "remake rights"of those films to studios here, so that they can be turned into big-budget American spectacles. Lee got into this work in 2001, after seeing a Japanese horror film called "Ringu,"about a videotape that kills everyone who watches it. With Lee serving as an intermediary, DreamWorks bought the remake rights from the Japanese for a million dollars, and "The Ring"went on to become a surprise hit last fall, earning more than a hundred and twenty-nine million dollars domestically. Although Lee doesn't speak Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, in the past two years he has helped American studios option the remake rights to an additional seventeen Asian movies. "Roy is the go-to guy for Asia,"Julien Thuan, an agent at United Talent Agency, says. "He knows the right people, he knows what's going to be happening in a year, and he's voraciously aggressive."Lee created and cornered his market by merging two traditional Hollywood success stories: that of the obsessive video-store clerk (Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino) with that of the hard-nosed immigrants who founded the business nearly a century ago (Samuel Goldwyn, Jack and Harry Warner, Louis B. Mayer).

The first person Lee would be meeting at L'Ermitage was Taka Ichise, one of the producers of "Ringu."?"Taka is known as a bully in Japan,"Lee said, "but he's nice to me, because I made him a fortune."Taka, a sturdy, bullet-headed man in his mid-forties, bowed to Lee, shook his hand, and sat down. He had brought a female translator with him, and he was wearing a shirt that featured a print of black women's hairdos and the legend "Afro Coiffures."

After a few seconds of small talk, Lee said, "Well, what's next?"

"First is 'Ju-On II,' in January,"Taka said. His haunted-house film "Ju-On,"or "The Grudge,"had recently been a hit in Japan.

"What's the story?"Lee asked.

Taka shrugged. "Oh, it's just the sequel. It's like 'Friday the 13th--Part 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.' "He laughed mirthlessly.