His dream hits the big screen

When 28-year-old director Jon Chu was in pre-production on "Step Up 2 the Streets," which opened in theaters Thursday, he and his team used to walk across the Disney's Burbank lot at 3 a.m. to visit the statue of Walt Disney. The studio's patriarch has his arm extended in front of him, and Chu and his colleagues would put their tired heads underneath his sculpted hand.

"It's kind of crazy, but it's just a superstitious thing we did," Chu recalled. "He would bless us every night."

Quirky rituals aside, it does seem like someone has been watching over Chu's charmed career. The youngest of five children of immigrant parents, Chu was raised tap dancing, drawing and playing piano, drums, saxophone, violin and guitar. In high school, he filmed weddings and bar mitzvahs and convinced his teachers to let him turn in video reports instead of papers.

As an undergraduate at USC, he made three well-received musical shorts, "Silent Beats," "Gwai Lo" and "When the Kids Are Away," which led to him signing with the William Morris Agency. After just a few short months, he'd been hired to direct an $80-million remake of the classic 1963 musical "Bye Bye Birdie."

It was a remarkable turn of events for someone barely out of school, but Chu said that he learned from a very young age to relentlessly pursue his goals from his father, who founded Chef Chu's, a staple of Chinese cuisine in Palo Alto. "That's why [my parents] always said to us kids, that America's the greatest place because if you work hard, you can do anything you want," Chu said.

Chu's shorts also demonstrated his facility with large-scale projects. "My short musical was a big production," says Chu. "We did it for $20,000. It's period. We have a 50-piece orchestra, 20-piece vocal choir, 150 actors and dancers in it. And I think people could say, 'At least he can handle doing something a little flashy that has heart to it.' "

But the remake never materialized. Chu spent two years in pre-production on "Birdie" before Sony pulled the plug after a string of box office underperformers, including "Bewitched" and "Memoirs of a Geisha."

Around the same time, though, Steven Spielberg saw "When the Kids Are Away" and asked to meet Chu. "We had, like, a three-hour meeting talking about musicals, about the movies. He invited me back the next week, and then he invited me to his set. It was 'The Terminal' at the time. I think that just having Steven say 'I like you' helped everything around me."