How Mary H.K. Choi Built MissBehave, Reinvented Deadpool and Wrote the Book on DJ Khaled | Blueprint

[Music] writer author and media correspondent Mary HK Choi turned a chance internship at a graffiti magazine into a career of influential bylines boundary-pushing comic book stories and eventually many many book deals this is her blueprint [Music] so you grew up in South Korea and in Hong Kong and move to San Antonio as a child how drawing was that transition it was really really crazy I grew up predominantly in Hong Kong I was born in Korea but I moved to Hong Kong when I was 11 months old and this was when it was still a British Crown Colony it was very much a commercial hub but I knew that we would have to leave because in 1997 Hong Kong would go back to China from British crown rule and because we were Korean and because I wanted to go to college somewhere else my family was just like let's go to America so we're like cool in my mind I'm thinking Hong Kong too I would have done like in New York I would have done like Los Angeles my parents were like San Antonio but the nice thing about Texas is that there was nothing to do and that's when I started reading and I would read a book a day in what genre all genres like Greek mythology a lot of Norse mythology I was reading a lot about like just Grimm's fairytales like all the Wow I'm such a nerd apparently a lot of yaa so as you're thinking about colleges were there any other schools outside of UT at Austin that were sort of on your radar my parents were like yo we moved to America so you could go to college here we're in Texas there's a very affordable in-state school that you can go to that's good and literally in Texas by law if you're in the top 10% of your class you could you just like automatically get into UT it was the only entrance application an essay that I did it was the only one so you go to UT what are you specializing it and what is your your you know sort of center of study I was just like I want to be in fashion except because I'm so pragmatic and because I'm so Asian and such an immigrant I was like even if I want to be in fashion I don't think I am ballsy enough to be a designer so I want a major in textiles apparel with a focus on merchandising so that's what I did I moved to New York I packed two suitcases I had six thousand dollars from selling my Honda Civic and that was all I had and I moved to New York without telling my parents I knew that I was going to be on the Saks Fifth Avenue corporate program that's where I'd done my internship I had worked at Armani Colette Sione on the second floor of Saks and so I was just like this is safe this is cool how does one get from working at sex to applying to an indie graffiti hip-hop you know downtown lifestyle magazine I was hitting refresh on every tab for any magazine internship and the reason why mass appeal was so attractive to me it was because it was the only place that would take me at the point that I walked into mass appeal and I was wearing a Calvin Klein suit with an attache case and Prada heels and I wanted to discover that the editor-in-chief is also 22 years old and wearing a phat farm sweatshirt it was the Lord track suit velour track suits Palgrave velour track suits and we talked I think solely about interests at that point and you seemed so dubious that I would want a job at a graffiti / hip-hop magazine my goal at that moment was simply to show you that my intellectual curiosity would fill in any gap and that my learn learning curve would be quick the first day I - things happen one I was asked to do all the research for an Air Force one 20th anniversary package and I was responsible for all the facts on that and - I got the opportunity to write a book review and I had never written a thing in my life and seeing my name in print but also not seeing my name in print for the Air Force one story was really interesting because it gave me an appreciation for the fact that like sometimes you get credit and sometimes you don't and how magazines work and that's okay after about a year though the time of mass appeal comes to an end and you end up working at double XL as an editorial assistant and eventually as the associate managing editor there mm-hmm what was the adjustment from working at this indie startup to now you know a part of Harris publications Elliott Wilson needed an assistant this was during I would say peak lion days and so Elliott had sort of mastered that sort of like comment type dialogue of the double XL recent reader and basically just like with Chum the waters with everything on double XL to where a lot of people in New York and these like hip hop concentrated areas wanted it the second it was out and I always remember thinking how amazing it was that he was able to create that kind of immediacy and like urgency and buying the next issue in a monthly magazine and so that kind of blew my mind over the course of time you started getting violence with increasing frequency throughout the magazine was that a pointed ambition of yours or were you just sort of filling in gaps what happened was Vanessa santen gave me the job of writing the +1 column and that was a column about like industry insiders and interviewing just like everyone from like managers to like publicity people and things like that but it didn't leave a lot of room for voice you can't work for Elliott Wilson and be under the spell of his editorials like his editors letters and not dream about like one day being able to write with that much like unfettered freedom like what were you imagining the next step of your career to be after that I did not have a lot of designs on what my next step would be what happened actually was mass appeal was launching a girls magazine and they were like you should do it and so that wound up being misbehave and misbehave I launched while working at double XL and every girl's magazine I was like who is this for and it was almost like this like weird like robot lady ideal that like a bunch of like white male advertisers and corner offices had concocted and I was just like that this is so bunk to me like it's just advertising and so I wanted to create a magazine that talked to girls who I knew who were smart and if they were really smart they would go to Barnes and Nobles not even buy the magazine and just read it and then leave I was just like that's why one how did you think like strategically about if I'm going to create this magazine and aim it at this demo that is underserved how do I make them sort of how do I ingratiate this product to them the first issue came together as a product of Steven Victor being a magician and delivering me Nelly Furtado who at the time was a bigger star than I should have ever gotten for a premiere issue and writers and journalists who I really admired but I was doing it in a really sort of like bizarre way where I would email a writer from men's magazine that I really admired in England knowing that he'd been an editorial assistant for maybe too long like you man was a little bitter right and I was like I knew that if I knew everything about this person's of and matched them up with a subject that they could be excited about they would do it for me for free and the other thing that was really really great about it is finally I had a place to sound exactly when my internal monologue sounded like and just build an entire house based on that choice time at misbehave came with highs and lows but as the media landscape changed around her she refocused on her singular writing voice what was that transition like from being you know a behind scenes player at a magazine where you sort of sit on the periphery of the potential readership to now being you know the face of this new product so I would physically fly myself out of pocket to LA and just post up in different conference rooms of any publicity place that would let me in the door and my whole peg was this girl's magazines want a list girls men's magazines want sealless girls who get naked I want sealless girls who are messy to talk about whatever they want and they can keep their clothes on and so for misbehave the cover artists were people like mena Suvari Lily Allen Amy Winehouse these were the people that we had in the magazine because I was just like these are the people who I want to talk to you and it's this predilection of girl that I want to be our audience actually Amy Winehouse is a funny story in that it's the saddest story ever when we did her shoot and Amy wouldn't let you touch her hair wouldn't let you touch her makeup she wouldn't get out of the bathroom when she did get out of the bathroom she couldn't stand so we put her on a stool but the stool she kept slipping off the stool and she kept shaking that the photo of her that became the opening spread of just her standing looking off to a corner and just being so far away and she has she's covered in bruises and scratches and what may have been track marks and I remember thinking okay we're misbehave we're on issue number two I think one of the most important editorial decisions I can make right now in this moment is to not retouch her at all that was kind of like the level of honesty that I wanted another very typical cover line vegans and 23 other dudes we won't shag Kelly Bundy style icon also an ode to how packed Kiernan from New York one is a DILF so yeah it was all very sort of mischievous and irreverent and like bright and largely done a lot of the time for free so that was not easy to accomplish so then you go and start working it misbehaved full-time mm-hmm and now again go from being sort of a a middle cog in a large machine to being the leader of a small team what was that transition like being the leader of a small team for a girls magazine designed for messy girls and girls who took up a lot of space was emotionally something I was not prepared for I had girls show up to the office being like you said that moving to New York was the most important part well I'm here and I'm just like what do I do with you did you expect that I would give you a job they're like yes and I'm like did you expect me to pay for the shop because I cannot and they were like oh there was one day I misbehave I remember where not only was everyone strangely stoned but that day one of the interns dogs had gotten loose and I was just like first of all I was like why is there a dog here it was a tiny hippie hippie dog and I raced past us and everyone was laughing until it raced off the roof and onto the ground like many stories and I was like this is not an office and then I was like this is probably my fault misbehave was really valuable in that I learned that a little bit of office culture is good for any office no matter how much of a pirate ship you are and I'm not a good leader I am NOT a good boss and I have never attempted to repeat that mistake at any other juncture in my career so how did you come to terms with walking away from his face I walked away from misbehave because I was burnt out like I was physically sick and giant magazine reached out to me and needed a features editor and I was like features great you mean just the middle of the book like I don't have to do anything like I don't have to do payroll I don't have to like send issues I don't have to carry magazines around fine I will do that for this many dollars that you're gonna pay me incredible so I left misbehave and I worked a giant and it was really great and I was googling private Pilates courses because suddenly I had so much money and that's when I was fired not for googling Pilates classes but because everyone was being laid off media at the time was bananas and I would go to the unemployment office and I would see so many people I knew and that's a feeling that you don't really forget within six or eight months you really started getting your writing career off the ground how did you transition your thinking to making yourself the brand at the time I was doing a lot of short stint but I also started blogging for a website called the all and the all was really interesting because it was run by two former Gawker editors and that was the first time that white people read my writing through the all I got the opportunity to write for a little publication called the New York Times and I did four op eds A's for the opinion desk and I remember writing that and thinking okay so this is what people will finally see and this is the voice I will be introducing myself as to a lot of people and what I will probably be remembered for that is when all the magazine's started calling and that's when I started being able to be the brand the way I liked which was completely unseen just by voice for several years you continue doing this sort of short form first-person accounts and then you get a break into comic books so I had known a bunch of comic-book people I've been going to comic-con in San Diego since way before it is what it is now and I knew a lot of these editors like I was friends with CBC bullski and axel Alonso and I'd met Joe Quesada a couple times and so apropos of those New York Times pieces my name came up in a development meeting just with a bunch of editors through someone I didn't know to where the person I did know was like huh and reached out was like would you ever write a comic book and I was like yeah and so then the first comic book I did was Lady Deadpool issue number one and it was a 22 page just standalone and it was the greatest experience ever there's a lot of the questions I was asking was like can I impregnate her and they're like what sure for continuity no but it's fine I was like can I kill her and they're like well you can't really kill her you know think about the weapons X program bla bla bla because it was a spinoff and they were doing a lot of dead pulls at the time like kid pool dog pool all of this stuff there I could get away with more like it wasn't anything that would affect the Marvel you at large but yeah this was super super fun and a huge exercise with getting away with a lot how did you wrap your mind around not only the format but just fiction in general fiction is really hard but the really lovely and beautiful thing about comic book writing and the thing that I'm so grateful for in terms of it being my very first foray into fiction was the math has to line up you've got twenty two pages a three-act structure you can only have so many boxes per page you can only have so many speech bubbles in each box and so that gives you an economy with which to have to have to work as a result of that it sort of solves something that is a huge problem with people who usually write magazines - going into fiction which is that whole show don't tell you can't tell as much as you want ever and showing is the most beautiful and elegant solution to a lot of the story problems so just show that's when I got into television and I was just like magazines first love the love I will never ever give up but I also need to know how to do video I need to know how to do news I need to know how to do live video know how did you wrap your head around literally putting your face out you know on video the one thing that I figured out way too late is that for every TV appearance or every sort of video appearance that you have it just makes the imprint that much bigger and so I had to accept that I was just like I have to accept the fact that the pound of flesh that you give the audience or the reader or whoever it just becomes a currency that translates into like more people reading your stuff you say pound of flesh what's the cost to you there's a hallowed area me that all the writing comes from and it's a garden that I tend very closely and I don't want it to become adulterated with too much of this like back and forth transactive nature with the people that you write for it's really really easy and really seductive to get caught up in the current of needing that sort of positive reinforcement so constantly so like I was very reluctant to put myself on camera but at a certain point I could no longer accept that video wasn't the future and part of controlling a certain aspect of that was putting myself in front of the video and that's when I decided I would do not only Viacom with MTV stuff but even the career I had now which is that I moonlight for vice news tonight on HBO as a cultural correspondent that is in keeping with the fact that I've fallen in love with storytelling forms that have disintegrated that I really want to cover as many bases as possible and that means having some mastery of as many conduits as possible how do you balance though the part of you that is actually creating art versus the amount of time that you dedicate documenting other people creating art no lesson was more sort of vivid then when I wrote DJ Khaled's book people were like this business book writes itself it's like major key after a major key after another one lie in all of it right there was a point at which I realized when I was staying the st. Regis of Bal Harbour that's where he put me up right and I was like oh my god I've arrived I'm finally like you know the the official biographer of this person and like this hotel room is so nice I might take it off it's like so great he just ignored me for three days but there was just a point at which I was just like timeline-wise I'm not gonna get this book and if I don't get this book that's on me the one thing dj khaled had that is very specific to him at this point was that he didn't fly and I knew he was getting on a tour bus and I knew that he was driving to Atlanta and then driving to California and that's a lot of time so I was like bet I gotta get on the bus and a lot of businesses lessons I was just learning by watching him I don't know I mean like I understand if you would want the secret to success to be something really elaborate some sort of elegant algorithm with like a lot of points and like you know that's really hard to replicate but what I saw was the purest distillation of success which is do not be afraid to make demands for things but also be relentless about being delivered your goods and for an immigrant and Asian female I was like oh my god I have to be more like dj khaled I also learned not to renegotiate how much money you should get based on like pain threshold and inconvenience before you've delivered your book because he actually called me gave me a special personal key and he was just like are you an artist and I was like man this feels like a trick question I'm like yes I'm an artist he's like are you the best artist and don't tell me you're not because there's no way I would have hired not the best artist to work with and I was like all right let's go I am the best artist he's like art is like a really unpredictable thing and it's a magic thing and when people come together as artists to create art you never know what's gonna happen so why would you bring in a conversation about money that is something that artists shouldn't have to worry about in the moment that they're creating art together at the worst possible time like don't try to exert control over something that is just like naturally uncontrollable and don't introduce something as terrestrial and basic and like for other people to worry about an argue on your behalf about like money when you're supposed to be creating art together after helping dj khaled realize his vision Troy now looks ahead at the launch of her debut novel and a future as a career author so this is the cover of my book emergency contact I knew that I wanted this kind of pink okay millennial pink that is a very sort of specific color to calibrate and I had the pleasure of working with Simon & Schuster's art department and they were amazing and they came up with this idea of having the character is facing away from each other which just perfectly encapsulates the book so take me back to the process of putting together this first book I had written a book I had written this book and finished it and I showed it to my agent at the time and he didn't love it and he said to me this is cool on some singer/songwriter [ __ ] but I want you to write a Katy Perry anthem now I dislike Katy Perry a lot and in that moment I was like this is not the place for me so there was another agent who hit me up clear out of the blue a couple weeks later and he was just like I'm a huge fan of yours I've read everything would you ever write a book and I said actually I have a book he's like why is there a manuscript of yours that is just living in a drawer can I read it and I was like yes he read it overnight and he said to me I can sell this and actually started a bidding war how did you sort of place yourself in that world to create these characters and flesh out you know this sort of imagined world the way I've been lucky in my career is that I've always put myself in a position of being able to learn on someone else's dime and with that I wrote for Wired magazine an article on the texting and social media behavior patterns of teens and so I embedded with a bunch of teens all over the country and we casted that for a while too and I just hung out in their bedrooms and I learned that they're not that different like these all the crises are exactly the same it's like who they have a crush on whether or not their parents understand them if their parents divorce is weighing on them in a certain way and that really informed the kernel of what became my book it's about texting and about how no matter how noisy the world is and no matter how many sort of like little tendrils are RF communication that it is possible to feel totally alone how did you even approach putting together something that big is this a system of note cards or like are you just plowing through it one page at a time I learned how to write a book from a youtube tutorial that teaches you how to break a three-act structure into 27 chapters don't overthink it human beings like certain rhythms it's like the hook on a song like why would you be like no I find this totally cravin to do a hook on a song like I do not kowtow it's like no people like a story that goes like this that's it so all I did was follow the directions of this YouTube link which is pretty generic of how to do that and then I wrote that into a book what does success look like I never thought I had the right to write fiction like I'm not trained in it I have a degree in textiles and apparel but waiting for permission was just the wrong move you just had to rate it and have enough faith in your faculties to know that you can get to the end of something like a book finish it and then show it to people and see what happens and trust that it'll find its audience and success for that would be is if people don't hate it because this is the book I wanted to write when you think about your career and your aspirations and ambitions what does money mean to you if I didn't work a day in my life with what I have in my account and what my current burn rate is but I didn't make a dime I'm good for three years I can write stories that don't have to be informed by how someone will pay me for them for three years I cannot imagine a place from which to create from that is more free just like fully liberated and also weird money is important to me because money means freedom that's what money means to me do you feel like you know having dabbled in comic books written short form now done long-form fiction is this the format that you want to stay in as you move forward I know I'm gonna write books until I die that's really important to me I respect it so much I love it I want to direct before I die and I think that like writing and learning what things look like as you write it down and like framing and even comic books and all this stuff is sort of feeding towards that and I want it's so dumb but I really want an Eisner okay so I know I will do comic books again in whatever form it takes like this is the space I will be in and I think that that's going to be the focus and I think I'm going to be interested in that for a long time it's funny like you get older and like all of the sort of airport book Maxim's start actually making sense you not like the gift or whatever a bit like there's like a Warren Buffett quote about like prioritizing right you make two lists it's 25 things that you want to do with your life before you die you take the five most important put them on one list the rest of this one you go on another list and as the story goes you know you'd think like naturally that you would focus on these five but then dabble in these other twenty when you have time but it's not it's that to do five you must ignore the twenty no matter how good you are at it no matter how seductive it is no matter how much money will make you because if you are to do the five before you die that's what it's going to take [Music] [Music]

Channel: Complex

Views: 96,042

Rating: 4.9153957 out of 5

Keywords: sneakerhead, complex, complex originals, sneakers, news, entertainment, current affairs, young man, culture, cool, edgy, funny, complex tv, complex media, Mary H.K. Choi, Mass Appeal, XXL, Lady Deadpool, Noah Callahan-Bever, blueprint the show, complex news, hip-hop, music journalists, Elliott Wilson, MissBehave, New York Times, Marvel, emergency contact, writing, DJ Khaled, the keys, mary choi, deadpool, writer, author, journalist

Id: kY6MnGvc3xo

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2017