Nahnatchka Khan's experiences as the daughter of immigrants helped shape the outsider perspective of "Fresh Off the Boat"; the box office success of "Zootopia" is due to Disney's embrace of Pixar's ethic; KT Tunstall deconstructs the song that launched her career, "Suddenly I See."
Why 'Fresh Off the Boat's' writing staff is full of 'outsiders'
When Nahnatchka Khan read
's memoir, "Fresh Off the Boat," she says she immediately identified with the kids in the story. Like Huang's character, Khan is also a first-generation American. Her parents are from Iran, but she was born in Las Vegas and grew up in Hawaii.
As Khan told The Frame, by being part of what she calls "the bridge generation," she connected with "the idea that you are like the advance team that reports back to your family. A lot of your time is spent explaining why you need Air Jordans."
So when Khan staffed her writers' room for the ABC adaptation, she wanted to find other people who had their own experiences of being an outsider. It was essential to the story: "Fresh Off the Boat" is about a Taiwanese-American family that moves from Chinatown in Washington, D.C. to the predominantly white suburbs of Orlando, Florida in the mid 1990s. Though the premise of the show is as old as television itself — it's a family sitcom — Khan believed she could create something "revolutionary" by changing the perspective on something familiar. Consequently, her writing staff might be one of the most diverse in show business.
At KPCC's 2016 Leadership Circle Brunch, Khan spoke more about her background, her vision for "Fresh Off the Boat," and what it was like to have one show canceled and another picked up by the same network in a matter of months.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Your parents immigrated from Iran. You were born in Las Vegas, studied in Hawaii, then came to USC. Can you talk about your journey into television, and was it something you were always angling to do?
Definitely. I grew up watching television as a kid. It was always something I wanted to pursue. The first time I ever wrote anything, it was an editorial column for my high school newspaper. So I could write whatever I wanted. It was about something dumb, like prom. I remember the response I got. People would come up afterwards and say, I thought that was really funny. I liked that feeling. So I decided to pursue writing. I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids' show called "Pepper Ann."
It was like the kid version of "Ally McBeal," where she had her fantasy life and stuff would play out in her head. She was raised by a single mom. That was like grad school for me, where I got to learn how a TV show was made, how you sustain characters. It's a natural line to "Don't Trust the B----- in Apartment 23."
That series didn't last as long as some people might have wanted it to. What happens when a show goes off the air? Is there a life experience that can prepare you for what it means to be canceled?
No. I think what nobody ever tells you is they don't use the word canceled to you. You kind of have this feeling, but you're not sure. Then the phone rings and it's Paul Lee, [then] the president of ABC. Your stomach kind of sinks. He's like, You know I love the show. I love you. We have to pull it off the air. The ratings aren't great. And you're [wondering], Are we canceled? You can tell by the reactions of people, yeah. That just happened.
How soon after did you come back to ABC with "Fresh Off the Boat?"
The show got canceled two years ago. Then, that development season, I had already sold one pilot pitch to Fox. So ABC was already upset they didn't get the first one. So they took me out to lunch. I told them I didn't want to be like Charlie Brown and they're Lucy with the football. They said, no — their big push was diversity. They cited the Shonda Rhimes shows as examples, and they wanted to do the same in comedy. So we took the show there.
Let's talk about the source material for the show.
This is based on a memoir by Eddie Huang. I completely identified with being a first generation American. My parents weren't born here. My brother and I were. That bridge generation resonated with me — the idea that you are like the advance team that reports back to your family [on] what's happening. A lot of your time is spent explaining why you need Air Jordans.
So the book is [Huang's] entire life from I think from [age] zero to 30. So this is a very small part. I said, That's what I want the show to be.
When he's a young kid in the 1990s.
Yes, exactly. When his family moves from Chinatown in Washington, D.C. to the white suburbs of Orlando so his dad can run a steakhouse called Cattleman's Ranch. I was like, There's the show.
I think the studio was concerned about why it had to be set in the '90s. Why not make it present day? For me, it was about reinforcing that idea of isolation. In the '90s, right before the Internet exploded, you had to make it work — kids in your school, in your neighborhood, that's it. You either fit in or you don't. We wanted to preserve that time frame.
Any writer who sells his or her book to a studio generally knows that you cash the check and you walk away. Eddie Huang didn't quite do that. How did you negotiate that conversation, when Eddie is kibitzing on the side about his story not being told accurately?
I think you have to understand where people are coming from. Neither of us have had our lives turned into a sitcom. It must be challenging. You have to sympathize with that. To me, that's the difference between writing a memoir — which is truly one person's point of view — and doing a TV show, which becomes a collective. If you do a good TV show, all the voices that contribute make it better.
There was an interesting essay about the show in the L.A. Review of Books. The author found the show energetic and subversive. More importantly, [that] this is a comedy that tackles issues of ethnicity. What does that mean on a daily basis, in terms of what you feel the obligations and opportunities for the show are?
I think it's a great opportunity for us. The DNA of the show is the idea that we're telling stories through a different lens. The family sitcom has been around since the beginning of television. But when you take stories that are familiar and you change the way they’re told because you change who’s telling them, that becomes revolutionary in and of itself. We're telling the story from the inside out. The Huang family — they're not the ones in the fishbowl that people are pointing at. They're never the butt of the joke. They're always looking from the inside out.
One of the most important decisions you make as a show runner is who's going to be in your writers' room. What do you look for, specifically in this show, so that you get the right kinds of voices?
It's hugely important. For me, it was about feeling like an outsider, feeling like you don't belong. Whether it's because your parents couldn't afford to get you the stuff that you liked, maybe it's because you were gay. So I put together the staff with that in mind.
One of the white writers on staff grew up in Hong Kong. I thought that was a great perspective. But we have Indian-American writers, African-American writers, Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean-American. We even have an Australian that snuck in. But he's gay, so it's okay. I let him come in. We're about 50 percent women, which is also rare for a comedy writers' room. Because that's also important.
One piece of data that's come out in relation to #OscarsSoWhite is that when women are running a show, they tend to hire women. As a female show runner — and there are not a lot — do you feel a special opportunity or chance to change the nature of the statistics?
It's funny. I never think about it as my objective, to further women's careers. I just pick the people who are best for the job. It just happens to fall that way. I don't know how men think. I don't know if they don't see what I see, or if they choose to not see it, or whatever. But for me, it's like, This person is hilarious. She's a hilarious writer, an amazing director.
"Fresh Off the Boat" airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on ABC.
'Zootopia' is Disney’s best animated opening ever — thanks to Pixar
The movie “Zootopia” set a record over the weekend for the best opening ever for a movie produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, with estimated ticket sales of more than $73 million. That was about $10 million more than the film was expected to earn in its first weekend — and the film is also doing big business overseas.
The debut for "Zootopia" was better even than Disney’s blockbuster, “Frozen,” which opened to $67.4 million dollars three years ago.
But not that long ago, Walt Disney Animation Studios was struggling so badly that its parent, the Walt Disney Co., was essentially forced to buy its top rival, Pixar Animation Studios, for $7.6 billion in 2006.
In addition to continuing to run Pixar, two of that studio’s top executives — John Lasseter and Ed Catmull — also overhauled Disney’s own animation unit in the wake of the deal. And pretty soon, instead of turning out underwhelming titles like “Home on the Range,” “Atlantis,” and “Treasure Planet,” Disney’s animation department was making much better and more popular movies.
Brent Lang, senior media and film reporter at Variety, spoke with The Frame’s John Horn about Disney’s Pixar takeover and what led to the box office success of “Zootopia.”
Interview Highlights
Take us back 10 years-or-so ago when Disney shells out almost $8 billion to buy Pixar. What was going on at Disney then and what was the game plan?
I think a case can be made that it was really a move of desperation. Their back was to the wall. Walt Disney Animation had never been at a lower point ... The magic touch was clearly gone and the momentum was behind Pixar. They were creating the new generation of animation icons with “Finding Nemo” and “Toy Story” and “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.” And [Pixar] had really just taken Disney’s mantle and become the destination for family fare. So at that point Disney didn’t have a choice. It knew it needed to do something, it needed to do something dramatic, and that’s why it made that kind of expensive bet.
Pixar executives, including Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, looked at Disney’s animation studio and decided it needed some changes. What was their philosophy and what were the kinds of things they did inside Disney?
Well, they basically Pixar-fied it. They took those elements of Pixar that were working — in particular a real emphasis on story, story structure, and [developed] a kind of brain trust where everybody weighs in on development. And they really emphasized moving away from the tried-and-true and [began] thinking outside the box and getting away from just going into generic territory.
One of the things that Pixar does very well is it makes movies that play to all different sorts of audiences. Is the same true of “Zootopia”? That adults and kids alike enjoy it?
Absolutely ... because that’s one of the major principles for example that Pixar operates in. People there are supposed to make movies they would want to see, not what they think kids would want to see. “Zootopia” is almost a kind of noir-ish movie — albeit instead of Philip Marlowe you have a bunny rabbit as a cop.
One of the other things that a lot of people have picked up on with “Zootopia” is that it’s not totally mindless, that there’s a message to the movie, that it has something to say about social issues and about diversity and tolerance. Is that a way in which Pixar is going too, in terms of making sure that the movies have something larger to say?
Well, it’s certainly relevant. Just look at the controversy that sprung up around the Oscars this year. And it’s interesting you say that, because, in his review for Variety, our critic Peter Debruge noted that, in many ways, “Zootopia” is a corrective to “Song of the South,” that infamously racist [1946] film that Disney produced ... a film that has not seen the light of day in the modern era. So it’s clear that they are aware of what our melting pot culture looks like right now and they are shining a light to it. And they’re interested in contributing to the dialogue that’s going on, not just in culture, but in all elements of society.