LOS ANGELES — During its heyday in the 1940s, the Forbidden City in San Francisco billed itself as “the world’s most famous Chinese nightclub.” A jacketed doorman greeted visitors outside, drawing them into the club’s grand interior, with its rich tapestries and Mandarin-collared bartenders. On the bandstand sat a large gold Buddha looking down on the audience, which often included celebrities like Bob Hope, Rita Hayworth and Lauren Bacall. Tourists from the Midwest were there, too, lured by articles in Life and Look magazines, and by promises of the club’s “exotic splendor” and “all-star Chinese floor show.”

Once the show started, however, patrons looking for exotic entertainment found young, mostly Chinese-American performers dancing the Charleston and the shim sham. Larry Ching (“the Chinese Frank Sinatra”) and Toy Yat Mar (“the Chinese Sophie Tucker”) sang the latest pop tunes and Broadway standards, backed by a six-piece band. Other performers played up the disconnect between audience expectations and reality, beginning their acts dressed in Chinese robes before stripping down to showgirl outfits. For the three nightly floor shows, the music could run the gamut from “Begin the Beguine” to Bing Crosby, from sambas to polkas.

Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1960s, the filmmaker Arthur Dong recalled walking by the once-grand Forbidden City as a boy. The place, the brainchild of the owner and entrepreneur Charlie Low, had turned into an adults-only joint by then, its original concept done in by a glut of copycats and by the rise of much racier topless entertainment in the nearby North Beach area. But the club, which would close in 1970, still had black-and-white photographs from those glory days posted outside. Mr. Dong had never seen anything like it before: dancers and singers and showgirls, dressed in taffeta gowns and smart suits, every one of them Asian-American.

Image Mr. Dong. Credit... Emily Berl for The New York Times

Inspired by that childhood memory, Mr. Dong wrote “Forbidden City, USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970,” published this weekend by DeepFocus Productions. Mr. Dong, whose award-winning trilogy of documentaries about discrimination against gays includes “Coming Out Under Fire,” began researching the clubs while working on his 1989 documentary, “Forbidden City, U.S.A.” “I love the big band era, I love Busby Berkeley musicals,” he said. “And the fact that these were Chinese-Americans doing this made it even that much more exciting.”