The Inspiration Behind GRACE KIM & THE SPIDER FROM MARS

The play’s writer PHILIP W. CHUNG discusses the origins of Lodestone’s final production opening November 14:

At an early age, I knew I wanted to be a writer.  By the time I got to high school, I became interested in possibly writing for film, TV and/or theater but I wouldn’t really admit this to too many people.  I was an immigrant Korean American kid.  My parents worked 12-hour days at their dry cleaners.  Hollywood and everything it represented might as well have been on another planet.  I rarely saw people like me working in the biz.   I didn’t think I stood a chance.

But luckily this didn’t stop me from trying.  I figured if I wanted to do something like make films, I should study the medium so I watched a lot of movies and read everything I could about them.  I had heard somewhere that the great French director Francois Truffaut learned about filmmaking by watching three films every day and reading three books every week and so I used that as my model.  I was young and had a lot of energy so usually I’d start watching my three daily films at midnight after I had finished my homework and come home from my part-time job, then go to bed at 5 AM and wake up a couple of hours later for school.  I don’t know how I maintained that schedule now but like I said, I was young and full of energy and most of all—I was having a great time!  I was discovering these great films and my passion for writing was growing.

I wanted to get a comprehensive education in film history so I started with the silent movies and worked my way up through history.  At some point during this process, I discovered the great screwball romantic comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s.  Films like BRINGING UP BABY, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, THE PALM BEACH STORY, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, THE AWFUL TRUTH and many others.  I fell in love with this genre—they were so witty, funny and charming that as a writer, there was a lot to admire and learn from.  But one film in particular had a more profound impact on me.  I can’t even say it’s one of my favorites but the story spoke to me in a personal way.

It was the 1938 classic HOLIDAY starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.  Based on the play by Philip Barry and directed by George Cukor, Hepburn played the black sheep of a wealthy New York family who was adrift in her life; unsure of what she wanted.   Her sister comes to visit with her fiancé played by the always-dashing Cary Grant.  Everyone assumes that Grant will take his proper place in the financial world and lead a respectable life but he has other plans.  He wants to “drop out” out of society, travel the world and explore the different things life has to offer.  His fiancée and her family are shocked by this scandalous revelation.  Everyone that is except Hepburn’s character who finally feels as if she’s found a soul mate and, of course, falls in love with Grant and creates further complications.

I was struck by a revelation of my own while watching this movie.  It hit me that Hepburn’s family in HOLIDAY felt as if they could be Asian American.  They were obsessed with status, education, wealth, saving face—qualities I saw in many of the Asian immigrant families I knew who were sacrificing everything to realize the American Dream.  And this led to another thought—why don’t we have movies or stories like this in America that feature Asians?  

It was a depressing moment for a 15-year-old kid.   If the dream of actually being a Hollywood writer seemed distant before, this realization made it feel close to impossible to achieve.  If in the 100 years of Hollywood history, no one had been able to make a true romantic comedy starring Asian Americans, then what chance did I have?

So the years passed and I grew older but the idea of one day writing a story like HOLIDAY but with an Asian American family at its core always stuck in my mind. The characters that might inhabit such a story started to come alive in my imagination.   I knew the lead character (who would eventually morph into the Grace Kim of the title) would be someone eccentric like Hepburn and for some reason, David Bowie’s album THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS kept popping up whenever I thought of her.  Aside from the fact that it’s a brilliant album, it seemed to perfectly capture what and who Grace Kim should be.  Like Ziggy, she’s an alien stuck in a world that she doesn’t necessary fit into.  She’s the outsider who believes the world can be saved by rock n’ roll.

I’m not sure of all the reasons why I lived with the story for twenty years before I decided to finally write it.  I suspect the main reason was fear.   The more I studied the screwball romantic comedy genre, the more I saw how hard it was to do well.  I knew I’d probably only get one shot to do something in that genre featuring Asian Americans so I think I wanted to wait until I knew enough to do it right.  Which isn’t to say I feel like I know enough to do it well now, but there’s also no point in procrastinating forever.

The real impetus to write this happened a few years ago when we decided to shut down Lodestone after our tenth year.   I knew the very last slot for the very last show would be mine and I wanted to do something that really paid homage to the ten years of Lodestone and provide a proper thank you and good-bye to everyone who had supported us.   And that led me to GRACE KIM & THE SPIDERS FROM MARS.  The themes of the story I had in mind seemed as if it could accommodate what I wanted to do with our last show so I figured it was about time that I actually tackled this story.  Little did I know how difficult that would turn out to be.  But that’s a story for a future posting.

Philip W. Chung is the co-founder and co-Artistic Director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble.  He blogs at http://youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily.com/