From hollywood with love, p.33
From Hollywood With Love, page 33
Diversity
Though Crazy Rich Asians was frequently celebrated as a new landmark in Hollywood diversity, it was also slammed for not being diverse enough. In addition to complaints about casting the half-white, half-Asian Henry Golding as Nick Young—replied Golding: “How Asian do you have to be to be considered Asian?”—Crazy Rich Asians was criticized for filling its main roles with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean actors while relegating South and Southeast Asians to background roles as guards and servants. “If the film puts Asian America in the spotlight, it does so for a very slim portion of that demographic,” wrote Mark Tseng-Putterman in The Atlantic. “It is diverse when you look at it in the scope and context of Hollywood, which is predominantly white. But in terms of representing all Asians and Asian Americans, it doesn’t hit that mark. It is a very specific story to a specific enclave, and even within that enclave, a specific class of that enclave,” said Biola University sociology chair Nancy Wang Yuen in an interview with The Washington Post.
In an interview when the movie was released, Jon M. Chu expressed skepticism that one movie could make up for Hollywood’s severe lack of representation. “It’s unfair for one movie to represent all these people. One movie that represents [all] Asians—that’s just ridiculous,” he told Deadline. But in a subsequent 2021 interview with Insider, he acknowledged the criticism as valid and said he wished he could go back to the film and address it. “That’s a lesson that I did not understand until it happened,” he says, vowing to “pay more attention” to similar concerns in his future films.
For now, all eyes are on the sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, which remains unreleased at the time of this publication. Unfortunately, this last part of the story also comes with a note of discord. When offered $110,000 to return for China Rich Girlfriend, Adele Lim discovered co-screenwriter Peter Chiarelli would make as much as $1 million for the sequel. Though Warner Bros. described the disparity as “industry standard” based on their respective experience levels, Adele Lim quit the sequel in September of 2018, and declined another offer to return in the following February, when Chiarelli offered to split his salary with her. By then, the damage had long since been done. “Pete has been nothing but incredibly gracious, but what I make shouldn’t be dependent on the generosity of the white-guy writer,” she said in 2019.
Crazy Rich Sequels
A mid-credits scene in Crazy Rich Asians teases a spark between Astrid (Gemma Chan)—who has just left her cheating husband, Michael (Pierre Png)—and a handsome, mysterious man at a party (Harry Shum Jr.). Fans of the original novel and its sequels, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems, will recognize this man as (minor spoiler alert!) Astrid’s hunky ex-boyfriend Charlie Wu, whose relationship with Astrid is a major arc in the following two books.
Jon M. Chu reveals that a lengthier dance scene between Astrid and Charlie was shot, but ultimately cut to keep the focus on Astrid’s journey toward independence in Crazy Rich Asians. That hasn’t stopped Crazy Rich Asians fans from clipping a few frames of Astrid and Charlie dancing, briefly glimpsed in the movie’s first teaser, and turning them into GIFs to throw heart-eye emojis at.
When asked about this disappointing coda to the success of Crazy Rich Asians, Lim chooses her words carefully. “I didn’t want to detract from the movie, and the goodwill, love, and warmth. How much it really built, and brought a lot of the Asian community together,” she says. “But I was shocked when my agent first told me what the number was. I literally burst out laughing. I thought he was fucking with me. Because, honestly . . . what they were offering, I would have made more money being a mid-level TV writer on a CW show.”
A rom-com as successful and enjoyable as Crazy Rich Asians is, undeniably, a major and important step forward. But it’s also just one step, and many more will need to be taken before the film industry can fully take credit for finding, championing, and fairly compensating the creators who are going to push the romantic comedy—and the rest of Hollywood—to new and more interesting places.
Henry Golding
New Star in Town
When he was looking for an actor to star as the romantic lead in Crazy Rich Asians, director Jon M. Chu issued his casting directors a warning: “You’re not going to find them at an agency. Agencies won’t rep them because there’s no roles for them.”
This is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody writes movies centered on Asian leads because, people are warned, there are no bankable Asian actors to play them. And then, because they’ve been told there are no bankable Asian actors, no one writes leading roles for them.
It’s not very often that a star truly comes out of nowhere. “Breakout” rom-coms stars, like Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant, had been working for years before the movies that propelled them to superstardom arrived. Chu was right, of course. In a version of an arc that will likely become more common as YouTube, TikTok, and other forms of social media end up surfacing the next generation of stars, Henry Golding ended up in Crazy Rich Asians because an accountant happened to remember seeing him being charming years before Crazy Rich Asians even existed.
No one could have predicted it, but Golding’s personal background happened to dovetail perfectly with the charming, worldly rom-com hero novelist Kevin Kwan had originally conceived. “It was serendipitous because Henry’s and Nick’s backgrounds are so similar. Henry was born and grew up in Malaysia before being sent away to school in England, where he became very British,” says Kwan. “We found the perfect combination of an actor who is comfortable with both Eastern and Western cultures, while remaining deeply rooted in his family obligations.”
Golding, prone to following his whims wherever they take him, had dropped out of school at age sixteen to work as a hairdresser in London. When he tired of that, he moved to Kuala Lumpur, put together his own demo reel, and broke into a career as TV host. It wasn’t exactly the arc of Nick Young, a dashing and cosmopolitan figure who split his time between three different continents—but Golding’s curiosity and vague, amiable sense of restlessness were just what the character needed to come to life on the big screen.
Superstardom came fairly easily to Golding as well; just months after making his film debut in Crazy Rich Asians, GQ put him on the cover as a Man of the Year. “When I finished filming it, but before the movie was out, I went to a lot of these general Hollywood meetings,” says Golding. “They’d have to look at the paper that had my face on it and a little bit of a bio. And they’re like, ‘Crazy Rich Asians. What the hell is that? Is this, like, a television show? Is it a web series?’ I’d be like, ‘No, no. It’s a movie. I think it’s gonna be pretty big.’ ”
Owing, in part, to the fact that no one had seen him in anything else, Golding makes a strong impression from the first moment he walks onto the screen in Crazy Rich Asians. Handsome, charming, and entirely self-possessed, it’s the kind of performance that should lead to a fast-track to stardom—as long as Hollywood is wise enough to open its doors this time around. Too often, a script written for a generic everyman is read, by unthinking default, as a white guy, and plenty of would-be leading men who aren’t white have been sidelined because of it.
But in his maneuvers since Crazy Rich Asians arrived, it’s clear that Golding has a plan, and it seems to be working. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times leading up to the release of Crazy Rich Asians, Golding laid out his acting role models. “I want to bring back that old Hollywood charm. I want to be a leading man who is suave and sophisticated. I want to bring a little bit of intelligence back into leading men—the days of Gregory Peck, the days of Cary Grant, Paul Newman.”
It’s worth noting that all three of the men listed by Golding were also known for their versatility. Over the course of his career, Gregory Peck played heroes as novel as To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch and villains as evil as the Nazi Josef Mengele. Cary Grant leapt from rom-coms like His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story to thrillers like Suspicion and Notorious. And Paul Newman frequently veered from charismatic to tortured within the same movie, and sometimes the same scene, before capping off his career by cheerfully voicing a talking car.
It’s easy for actors to get pigeonholed—but if Golding’s goal is a similar kind of versatility, he’s off to a strong start. Having broken out in Crazy Rich Asians, Golding capitalized on his success with an eclectic slate. In addition to the upcoming Crazy Rich Asians sequels, and a second (and underrated!) holiday rom-com called Last Christmas, there was Paul Feig’s campy thriller A Simple Favor, which weaponized Golding’s charisma by making him a possible villain in his wife’s disappearance; Monsoon, an intimate drama about a man returning to his native country to spread his parents’ ashes; The Gentlemen, a Guy Ritchie action-comedy about British gangsters doing British gangster stuff; and Snake Eyes, a blockbuster about a G.I. Joe character you might remember if you were collecting action figures in the 1980s.
Maybe the most hopeful sign of Golding’s career as an actor is his next project: appearing opposite Dakota Johnson in a new version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Though he’d be an obvious fit for the romantic hero, Frederick Wentworth—described by Austen as “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy”—Golding will instead play the sketchy Mr. Elliot, in what the Hollywood trades describe as a deliberate effort to play against type. It’s the left-field kind of choice an actor makes when he’s just starting to figure out what he can really do.
“This is our story, and we’re still at the beginning.”
—LARA JEAN, TO ALL THE BOYS: P.S. I STILL LOVE YOU
Chapter 16
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
(And What Happens After Happily-Ever-After)
IN 2017, SCREENWRITER TIFFANY PAULSEN HEADED TO TEXAS TO MODERATE a panel at the Austin Film Festival. The panelists were a who’s-who of modern writers who specialize in rom-coms, from Tess Morris—writer of Man Up, owner of a cat named after Nora Ephron—to (500) Days of Summer’s Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
The subject of the panel was romantic comedies, and since the year was 2017, the conversation quickly shifted to the question of whether the romantic comedy was dead. “It was funny,” reflects Paulsen. “The panel was literally held in this big church. Like, ‘We are gathered here today’ . . .”
Viewed today, the panel offers a fascinating snapshot of the rom-com in transition. In 2017, the stigma at the studios was still very real; Neustadter and Weber admit that anytime they sensed that their pitch for a rom-com was making a producer wary, they would start describing it as a “relationship movie” instead. “Even then, sometimes they’re like, ‘Are there superheroes?’ ” said Neustadter. Meanwhile, in defiance of what seemed like the way the wind was blowing, Tess Morris counseled the screenwriters in the audience to persevere. “If you love the genre, write the genre,” she said. Her agent might have offered different advice.
Cut to a year later. It was November of 2018, and Tiffany Paulsen had been working on a movie called Holidate for the better part of a decade. It was a classic will-they/won’t-they setup with a simple hook: A man and a woman, hoping to spare themselves the awkwardness of a string of nights alone, agree to be each other’s platonic date to every holiday party over the course of a year, inevitably falling in love along the way. “I can’t even tell you how long I had that idea,” Paulsen says. “I wrote it, and I loved it. And it just became one of those things: ‘Oh, this is really cute, Tiffany. Nobody’s making romantic comedies anymore.’ ”
Until—quite suddenly‚ they were. McG, the director who had kicked off his Hollywood filmmaking career with movies like Charlie’s Angels and Terminator: Salvation, had quietly carved out a side career producing romantic comedies for Netflix, including Ari Sandel’s When We First Met and Nzingha Stewart’s Tall Girl. When the Holidate script was sent his way, he knew he wanted it, and he wanted to make sure no one else would beat him to the punch. “He said, ‘Give us twenty-four hours and let us see, give us an exclusive window,’ ” Paulsen says. It was a short window, but McG was true to his word. “I got the phone call the next day: ‘Netflix loves it and we’re going to make your movie.’ ” Netflix signed off on Holidate in November of 2018. By January of 2019, Emma Roberts was set to star. By May of 2019, the movie was in production.
Netflix is a maddeningly impenetrable company. They don’t release official viewership numbers, and their internal metric for what counts as a “hit” is dubious at best. If you’re going to judge what’s working for the company on a real, tangible level, your best bet is to queue up the Netflix app, take a long scroll, and say, “Why are they producing so much of this right now?” And by that metric, the real story of Netflix’s success over the past few years is romantic comedies.
Crunching the Data
Netflix’s notoriously guarded approach to its viewership data even extends to the people behind its own movies. “What you get from them is top secret, and it’s almost nothing. You’re in those very, very confidential meetings, and you have to sign away your first three children,” says Tiffany Paulsen. “They know exactly who’s watching it, exactly when, exactly how many times. That had never been possible, really, before. I was getting these reports: ‘645,000 minutes of Holidate have been streamed.’ I’m like . . . Is that good? I don’t know if that’s good.”
A rare moment of genuine candor from Netflix came in 2018, when co-heads of indie film Matt Brodlie and Ian Bricke sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to explain why the streaming service had suddenly gone all-in on romantic comedies. As is typical for a tech start-up, it began with recognition that there was a gap in the marketplace. “We knew romantic comedies used to be a key piece of the studio slate, but the business has moved away from that model,” says Bricke. “Where’s My Best Friend’s Wedding now? Where is The Holiday? Where are these films now? We asked our colleagues who keep track of what everyone is watching, and they said people are heavily watching our rom-coms from various studios. Our hunch was that people would like to see newer versions of them,” says Brodlie.
As they reached out to agents and producers to see if they had any rom-com scripts, the Netflix team discovered, to their delight, that they were essentially alone in the market—able to pick and choose the best scripts available without fear of getting outbid by a studio or a rival streaming service. The first big acquisition was The Kissing Booth, which characteristically fell into a very specific target audience Netflix thought they could reach: teenagers who were growing out of movies aimed at kids, but not quite satisfied by rom-coms aimed at adults. “It felt like it was in this interesting spot in that it was a little bit more adult in sensibility than a Disney Channel movie but lighter than a lot of the teen/YA romance films we were seeing in the marketplace. We thought maybe there was a lane there,” says Bricke.
The Kissing Booth is a singularly great example of how circuitous and unexpected the path to success can be in the streaming era. The story on which the movie was based was originally posted by fifteen-year-old British author Beth Reekles onto Wattpad, an online community where writers can post their stories for an audience of eager readers. As Reekles added a new chapter every few days, the story quickly caught on with the site’s audience, eventually winning the Wattpad Award for Best Original Teen Fiction, which—in true, Netflix-style algorithmic fashion—got the story in front of even more eyeballs. It also drew the attention of an editor from Penguin Random House, who slipped into Reekles’s DMs and offered her a three-book deal.
The novel was adapted and helmed by a little-known writer/director named Vince Marcello, who specialized in made-for-TV stuff for kids with titles like Teen Beach Movie and Liar, Liar Vampire. Netflix snagged the rights in 2016. When The Kissing Booth finally premiered in 2018, it was with very little fanfare, and it was shredded by the few critics who even bothered to review it. In one typical review, IndieWire’s Kate Erbland called it “a sexist and regressive look at relationships that highlights the worst impulses of the genre.” Netflix didn’t care, and by their account, its subscribers didn’t either. Shortly after The Kissing Booth’s release, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos claimed it was “one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe in the world.” Later, Netflix asserted that The Kissing Booth had achieved a metric that no one ever had the ability to track before, until Netflix’s innate ability to harvest data could be exploited: One in three viewers who watched The Kissing Booth later ended up watching it again.
This ratio might sound astounding in an era of unprecedented choice, where anyone who is looking for something new to watch has dozens of options—premiering across at least a dozen different services—every single week. But it will not sound astounding to anyone who loves romantic comedies, which have always benefited from the innate, comforting rewatchability of seeing lovely people fall in love. For a key subset of Netflix subscribers, rewatching The Kissing Booth was just the modern equivalent of rewinding and putting a worn-out copy of Pretty Woman back into your VCR. “There’s a really intense level of engagement from a big part of this audience,” says Bricke. “It’s usually that sense of ownership—I found this, I want to share it with my friend, I want to watch it again and again.”
As disruptive as they’ve been, Netflix’s model is a simple one: Figure out what its subscribers want, and then figure out how to give them more of it. On a macro level, the success of Netflix rom-coms means more Netflix rom-coms. But on a micro level, the breakout success of an individual rom-com leads to a different series of questions: Can this individual rom-com generate one sequel? Two sequels? A full-blown fictional universe? In the case of The Kissing Booth, the answer was obvious: as many sequels as quickly as possible.
