A note from Yalun: Welcome to my column “The Straight Man,” which depending on the week is either:
- A recap of everything I drank on Friday night
- A poorly informed thought piece on the destruction of modern civilization and our increasingly atomized selves due to life stresses and disruptive technology
- Shameless self-promotion
- Shameful self-promotion
The column this week is the penultimate one on that list. If you’re using this column to teach your child English, make sure they learn the words “penultimate,” “antepenultimate” and “lugubrious” as these often appear on the SATs.
Hi there, HK Magazine reader! What are you doing on Friday night? Going out? I can’t fault you for that, unless you choose some idiot costume related to Occupy HK. But if you’re going out late or staying in I have a simple suggestion: watch my TV show, bitches.
It’s called “Grace” and it’s on HBO Asia, on Friday, October 31, at 10pm. In line with the Halloween theme, “Grace” is a horror TV show about a family haunted by a supernatural presence, which may or may not be Miley Cyrus’ tongue. I wrote it with HK Mag’s very own Editor-in-Chief Zach Hines, and another dude named J. David Harden who is awesome, because he’s both very good at writing and also kind of looks like Moby.
You probably should host your own “Grace” party and invite over all of your friends, especially any friends you have named Grace. Then you can sit around the TV and bask in the blood and guts of your Halloween evening, all while eating spaghetti bolognese. Every once in a while, when you’re not covering your eyes or screaming, you can nod sagely to the party and utter, “Wow, that Yalun Tu is a really good writer.” Then invite me over for champagne, and we’ll party.
Writing a TV show is a strange and wonderful thing where things you put on a laptop are transferred to a piece of paper and given to a professional actor to say in a room full of lots of people with cameras. You have to get your characters to be real instead of poorly drawn cardboard cutouts, or the actors will hate you forever and pretend not to know you at cocktail parties. You have to write the stage directions intelligently or the director will be confused and ask you questions you have no idea about, like: Where do you see Vivian standing in this scene? (ummm—on the right?) And you have to write to meet an actual production budget, because HBO might not accept your suggestion that the evil spirit stops its haunting to do the
haka with the All Blacks, primarily due to budgetary reasons.
But after countless drafts and sleepless nights as I tried to inspire Zach by waiting outside his apartment in full zombie makeup, it’s done and it’s on TV. And despite what I misremember Obama saying, I did build that. Zach and I built it. Zach and J. David Harden and HBO and investors and actors and directors and crew and post-production people built it, and it exists, and it’s good. There’s a nice sense of accomplishment with any finished product—a column, a standup comedy set, a poem about trains—but a film/TV show is on a different level. This is a minimum year-long process, from brainstorming ideas to writing to refining to production to post to marketing to October 31. And in an age of instant gratification and feedback, the craft
of creating something over 12+ months feels long and rewarding.