Cafe Documentary Might Unveil Seedy Side

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Stick around Hollywood long enough and you’re bound to get in to the film business. Just ask Vince Jung, owner of West Hollywood’s Formosa Café.

He was recently approached by two regulars who wanted to make a documentary about the café. He liked the idea so much that he’s been pitching in on the project.

Jung, 47, started his research by sorting through eight volumes of the restaurant’s autograph books lined with the signatures of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.

The documentary, which doesn’t have a release date, will begin in 1939, when Jung’s grandfather, Lem Quon, founded the restaurant with professional boxer Jimmy Bernstein near La Brea Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

But the documentary will focus on the famous mobster Mickey Cohen, who used the restaurant as a base to run his illegal gambling racket.

As for his grandfather’s connection to the mob, Jung said he’s prepared for whatever he may find.

“The older generation never wanted to talk about the seedy stuff,” he said. “But it’s the history that created the restaurant and this part of town.”

Taxi Rider

Fly, drive, meet, repeat.

That was the basic itinerary for Long Beach Harbor Commissioner Rich Dines, who earlier this month was part of a port delegation to China.

Dines, a longshoreman appointed to the commission in July, said the trade mission was busy and productive – but the visitors mainly got to see China from taxicabs. Between meetings, most of the delegation’s time was spent traveling to Hong Kong; Shanghai; and Hainan Province, an island in the South China Sea.

“It was probably 35 hours in the air, and probably that much time in cabs,” said Dines, 43.

Just getting from Boao in Hainan Province to a hotel in Shanghai took about eight hours: a three-hour ride to the airport, a three-hour flight then two hours in Shanghai traffic.

“It was a lot of time in the back seats of a taxi – a lot more than I would like,” Dines said.

Drucker Channel

Rick Wartzman owes a lot of his recent success to Peter Drucker, the famed writer and management consultant who died in 2005.

Wartzman, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times’ business section, was hired four years ago as executive director of Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute, and has written a regular column for Bloomberg Businessweek applying Drucker’s thinking to current events. He recently released a collection of those columns called “What Would Drucker Do Now?”

The thing is Wartzman, 46, never met the man he is now channeling.

“I find myself trying to do this mind-meld with somebody I’ve never met,” said Wartzman.

Of course, it helps that Wartzman has plenty of material to draw from: Drucker wrote a whopping 39 books in his life.

“He’s a tough act for anybody to keep up with,” he said.

Staff reporters Jonathan Polakoff, James Rufus Koren and Richard Clough contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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