you can see the special swivel throne chair we got for Kingpin grandma here, those much labored about hanging buds drying in the “dehum” section, AND the right old food container tupperware on top of the fridge in the corner! I go in depth about the tupperware that had their star moment in 302 here.

Episode 5 in Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens is maybe the funniest episode of the season. Grandma and Nora build a weed empire together with the help of Grandma’s senior center friends and Grandma breaks bad.

We learned a lot about the details of creating an at-home weed operation (work research!), activated all the wings of the art department to come together to create a large quantity of realistic looking fake weed buds still on the plant, and had a lot of fun leaning into pimping out kingpin grandma’s room.

Grandma is the Wolf of Wall Street (Queens Blvd?)

When I read the script (written by Kyle Lau) for ep 305, the scene above noted “Major ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and Theranos vibes” (see script excerpt below).

So we immediately with the help of Kiran, got to work pulling images from iconic scenes in the movie “Wolf of Wallstreet.”

When I saw the hint of different clocks denoting time zones and suggesting a world empire in the “Wolf of Wall Street” still above, it reminded me of a very funny “different time zones” clock set up I saw once in an office in Manhattan years ago.

spotted this in a Manhattan office space in 2019

In our set: of course Queens is in the middle!

When I saw this still from “Wolf of Wall Street” (below) I thought maybe we could ask our fantastic graphic designer Dan-ah Kim to make a really silly graphic of glass bricks to mimic the background of the speaker in the image to frame grandma.

Fortunately the Awkwafina is Nora from Queens is a very open and collaborative set where truly everyone feels like they are delighted to be there and play around for the best joke possible.

So when I proposed doing a version of this idea in our set to the production designer Laura Miller, she liked it and encouraged me to pitch it to the director Bill Benz.

Bill chuckled and said sure!

Making all that fake HANGING weed

For those of us who didn’t have any experience in a homegrown weed growing and distribution empire (uh, me), production provided us with a detailed breakdown of step-by-step what this would entail from an interview someone in the writer’s room did.

here’s an excerpt of the detailed process breakdown provided by production (hahaha, seriously!) and my notes calculating how much material we would need to buy to make buds…

Margie our set dec buyer called around different prop houses to find who might already have fake weed we could rent.

these are buds we rented from a prop house put in different containers we and props bought. Margie even bought old jam jars to accentuate the DIY feeling of the operation.

She found a person in Atlanta who had fake plants, fake bricks, and fake buds (all which we rented) but nobody who had buds drying on still on a plant what is noted above as “Cutting/Trimming Process/dehum.”

Laura found some great reference images of home “dehum” stages and we were aiming to create a visual like the image below for the set.

Though to add an even more DIY and Immgirant-chic aesthetic we wanted to use the hangers that look like the ones in this hilarious drawing I found amongst my set notes.

Well since nobody had any branches of buds of weed we could rent, (and I even talked to real growers who might sell us real branches in this stage!), we had only one choice:

MAKE IT OURSELVES.

First, Ashley the assistant set decorator went to a fake plant warehouse to find branches and leaves that looked closest to hemp plants that we could attach some homemade buds to.

Then, Ashley went and bought all the supplies to make a bunch of buds.

To test out ideas, make some prototypes, come up with best practices and see what would work and what wouldn’t the UPM Amanda Distler let us set up a little faux bud making workshop outside her office and our office elves got to work.

Once we had some prototypes made, it was time to bring in the big guns: we set up a real bud making assembly line workshop in the set dressing shop and the set dressers GOT TO WORK.

Then after assembling our fake buds on the vine, we brought them all over to the scenics in their shop to help us paint in even more realistic finishes.

Then when the filming crew was at lunch, we had 1 hour to install our weed operation.

There’s also a mailing operation which we also dressed in:

pimping out Grandma’s Room

Nora and Grandma start their little grow operation in Grandma’s closet with the help of Doug.

I know the point of these scenes is really about the weed plants growing and the funny DIY home growing operation of it with tin foil, but for me it was about getting a Chinese grandma’s closet right.

I thought a lot about the memory of my two grandma’s closets (one in in Queens and one in Boston) and tried to evoke the feeling of each and the particulars of a lot of folded up bedding, mismatched hangers, old vintage cases and lots of random colored plastic bags with mysterious items in them.

Closets are always such an opportunity to do character and backstory storytelling through items thrown together and packed in. It’s about accurate true-to-character details but it is also about visually balancing materials, textures, shapes, and colors to create a feeling of visual harmony.

Even though to look right it should look like a lived-in natural haphazard chaos of years of life, it is actually a detailed process of putting together (hopefully) an artfully stage managed still life.

we really adorned each lampshade with gold chains. as many gold chains as our little show could afford 🤑

we also got Grandma a fur coat, a cane! (Ashley found some great canes as well as all the burner phones on the bed at a prop house and bought the fur coat at a thrift store).

IG story Awkwafina shared from set on the day they filmed this scene featuring the set dressing cane and burner phones Ashley our assistant set decorator found!

The Chinese Calendars

Lastly, the pile of Chinese calendars you see in the deep background of the upperhand left corner deserves its own shoutout thanks to our WONDERFUL graphic designer Dan-ah Kim.

the only calendar that was still with the set dressing from Season 2 was a Year of the Dog (2018) calendar so I knew we needed to make a few more since COVID was a reality in the show’s timeline.

One day in Manhattan Chinatown I took photos of these calendars on the wall as great reference images to pass along to Dan-ah.

Dan-ah is an accomplished graphic designer for movies and TV (and a published children’s book author and illustrator!) working on some of the biggest productions in NYC, yet she noted to me this was her first time to get an opportunity to make one of the ubiquitous grocery store or bank calendars seen in many Asian American spaces.

and of course Dan-ah made three spectacular calendars with so many perfect details all aligned with the Chinese zodiac.

As you can see, this episode was quite a collaboration amongst our whole art department and beyond. Fun in the silliest way, it was also gratifying to see it all come together to deliver maximum laughs.