A young scriptwriter raised in San Francisco hooks up with Spike Lee to give Showtime

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"Sucker Free City"
Television shows and movies based in San Francisco -- "Presidio Med," "Pacific Heights," "The Rock" -- are named mostly by tourists. People who have perched in cable cars and tasted the sourdough, but still think the Tenderloin is something on the menu at Fog City Diner.

Alex Tse did his sightseeing through the graffiti-etched window of a Muni bus, studying the gentrification and gangs and racial boundaries before his path veered toward Hollywood. Now the 27-year-old is sitting in a cramped office making the final changes to his screen-writing debut -- "Sucker Free City," a Showtime network pilot directed by Spike Lee and packed with more authenticity in a three-word name than most San Francisco-based shows can summon in a 22-episode season.

"All we see of San Francisco is cable cars, Golden Gate Bridge, hills, dah, dah, dah, and there's Pacific Heights!" Tse said during a recent interview in Los Angeles. "Man, you're not really seeing it. I don't remember 'Streets of San Francisco' too much, but I don't remember anything real or gritty that was done in San Francisco. I kind of felt this was a good opportunity to do that. It's an untapped market, really."

"Sucker Free City" -- premiering as a two-hour pilot in the fall -- is about the interactions of a diverse group of San Franciscans after housing prices force a young white resident named Nick to move into a predominantly black neighborhood. In preparation for filming this month, Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule production company has been quietly scouting several San Francisco locations: the Mission District, Chinatown and the show's main focus, Hunters Point.

During a phone call from Los Angeles, Lee said the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars weren't on the itinerary.

"We're not doing no Rice-a-Roni," he said.

Lee brings to the project his experience in dissecting racial relations in movies such as "Do the Right Thing" and "Summer of Sam." Tse adds his knowledge of the city. He grew up in the middle-class Richmond District, attended Alamo Elementary School and later took the bus to Presidio Middle School and Lowell High School.

Tse also contributes youth. With baggy clothes, sullen face still unmarked by age and the occasional "hella" in his vocabulary, he looks and acts far younger than his 27 years. Tse seems more motivated to prove his maturity in his writing -- the few pages of script The Chronicle was allowed to see show a studied understanding of how young people from different cultures interact.

"Are you gonna get the rest of my s-- back? My family's s-- too?" Nick asks second-tier gangster K-Luv, trying to negotiate over some stolen possessions.

"I'll try," K-Luv responds, shrugging. "But the s-- is doubtful."

Lee called Tse a "fine young writer," complimenting his ability to create realistic characters and dialogue.

"Sorry to say it, but most scripts you read aren't very good," Lee said. "Right away, I could tell -- whoever this guy was, he could write."

After graduating from Emerson College in Boston, Tse chose Los Angeles to pursue his writing career. The decision gave Tse more sun and better parking, but the San Franciscan stubbornly remains.

"When I moved down here, people were saying, 'Los Angeles isn't a walking city.' Well, I made it a walking city," Tse said, slumping on patio furniture in the courtyard of the show's downtown Los Angeles headquarters. He walked from his house in Hollywood to the Beverly Center -- "which is ridiculous. After a while, I said 'F-- this.' I can't walk everywhere. The blocks just never end."

Tse now drives to his job, where he works on rewrites after rewrites while conferring with Lee in an industrial-looking studio building that appears to have been designed by the architect responsible for the local post office or Department of Motor Vehicles.

When he set off for Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, Tse gave himself 10 years to make it. After less than three years of producing rap videos and working at low-level temp jobs at Miramax and Disney, he sold "87 Fleer," which centered on four middle-class kids in the Richmond District.

Impressed with the script, Showtime executives last year asked him to write a pilot about gangs. In a town built on copying success -- "Give me 'Die Hard' on a boat . . . give me 'American Idol' with little kids" -- the pay cable channel in no way burdened Tse with formulaic restrictions.

"They said they didn't want it to be too young -- all about teenagers," Tse recounted. "What they really liked in 'Fleer' was those characters were middle- class kids, from good families, and they became bad. They wanted a character like that. And that was about it."

Free to set the show anywhere he wanted, Tse remembered the neighborhoods in San Francisco that the movies never represent. He knew he had an opportunity.

"I don't know if you've ever been to Hunters Point. You're on top of this hill and you're right on the water and you've got a great view," Tse said. "Of course, the only reason why that place hasn't been redeveloped is because it has one of the higher cancer rates in the nation because of all the ground toxins from the shipyards. It's a fascinating place.

"You're not going to find that anywhere else. You're not going to see these frickin' s---ass projects with this good kind of view in one of the most expensive cities to live in."

"Sucker Free City" is by no means the first major production to explore corners of the city unseen by tourists.

San Francisco filmmakers such as Philip Kaufman and Wayne Wang have gone out of their way to shoot less familiar angles of the city. And smaller independent films coming out of the southeast portion of San Francisco -- most recently Kevin Epps' documentary "Straight Outta Hunters Point" -- have provided an insider's look at the artistic output of some of the city's roughest neighborhoods.

But most of the time, after the obligatory trips to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of Fine Arts, mainstream filmmakers ignore San Francisco's diversity, politics and overcrowding issues.

Last year's "Girls Club," David E. Kelley's television series on the antics of three straight white women in a San Francisco law firm, could just as easily have been set in La Jolla. "Presidio Med" unveiled a similarly mono- ethnic cast, then further ruined its street cred by putting the fictional hospital several miles from the real-life Presidio. In Hollywood's most common version of San Francisco, students can afford to live in Victorian flats, parking is plentiful and little exists west of City Hall or south of Potrero Hill.

Tse never lived in Hunters Point, but he has several early memories courtesy of his uncle, who had a mail route in the area and parked there for Giants and 49ers games at Candlestick Park.

"He would just bring his crappiest car that no one would want to steal anyway, and he'd park there and we'd just walk to the game," Tse said.

That same uncle recently served as unofficial location scout for "Sucker Free City," driving Tse and later executive producer Sam Kitt through the area.

"He knows it like the back of his hand. He knows all the streets and has friends who still work out there," Tse said. "He let me know what was going down."

The name "Sucker Free City" is a recent development. Security guards at the studio still hadn't gotten the memo about the name change, referring to the project as "The Game." Tse used that title while he wrote the script.

"I knew that 'The Game' is a played title, but that's what I called it," Tse said. "I met with Spike and he had this whole list: 'Alex, I want you to look at this.' It was a page of like 300 titles that incorporated the name 'The Game.' "

The director liked "Sucker Free City" -- a title Tse suggested but takes no credit for. He quickly points out that the name was born on the streets.

For years, hip-hop was strong in the East Bay but ridiculed in San Francisco. Tse explained that rappers in the Fillmore district and Hunters Point took pride in their hometown as they rose to prominence.

"Then RBL Posse came up. Rappin 4-Tay. JT the Bigga Figga and San Quinn," Tse said, listing several trailblazers of San Francisco rap. "Those were the guys who were sayin' people from San Francisco are not punks. They started calling San Francisco 'sucker-free.' There's no suckers in San Francisco. We're sucker-free."



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E-mail Peter Hartlaub at phartlaub@sfchronicle.com.