Family Guy writer Cherry Chevapravatdumrong

Family Guy writer Cherry Chevapravatdumrong

By Daniel Robert Epstein
May 8, 2007

You may not recognize or be able to pronounce the name Cherry Chevapravatdumrong but over the next few years she will become one of your favorite writers. Already a valued member of the Family Guy writing staff Chevapravatdumrong has written some of my favorite recent episodes such as Sibling Rivalry where Lois decides to gain a lot of weight and Prick Up Your Ears which has a Christian group take over sex education class at James Woods High School. Chevapravatdumrong has teamed up with SuicideGirls favorite Alex Borstein to write the new Family Guy book, It takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One, which is the companion book to the upcoming episode where Lois becomes mayor of Quahog.

Buy It takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up today?
Cherry Chevapravatdumrong: Besides this with you, we are just starting writing our next script, which I feel like we may have started yesterday but then we just ended up watching Misery because the episode is three different Stephen King stories. It’s called Three Kings.
DRE:
Are you the main person on this episode?
CC:
No, not on this episode. The writer is Alec Sulkin. I’ve got one coming up. I haven’t gone out on a script yet but I probably will in a couple weeks.
DRE:
So this is when you guys all just grab the script and you just tag team for jokes?
CC:
Yeah, that’s what we start doing.
DRE:
Is that a really long, hard process?
CC:
It can be long. It can be hard and it’s always really fun. Sometimes our rewrites go until 2 in the morning and sometimes we’re done at seven or some normal time. The two o’clock in the morning ones are most fun. It’s more fun if everybody gets really hyper by the end of the night because we’re all delirious from being tired.
DRE:
I was mostly surprised at the fact that sometimes you get done at seven [laughs].
CC:
Yeah, we usually take like a couple of days to do rewrites so if we’re not done on the last day we have to stay. But lots of the other times we get by with more or less normal hours.
DRE:
Did Three Kings get assigned to the biggest Stephen King fan in the room?
CC:
I don’t think so. It started off with Peter discovering reading and then we were going to tackle a bunch of big books. I think [Family Guy creator] Seth [MacFarlane] wanted to do Stephen King books but I actually wasn’t into the room for most of the story breaking so I’m not sure how it turned into a Stephen King thing.
DRE:
What’s the episode that you’re working on?
CC:
Peter and the guys pull a heist like Ocean’s Eleven.
DRE:
Since Lois is pretty much Alex Borstein’s character, did she ask you to write this book with her?
CC:
Yeah. We were talking about Jewel and Amber Tamblyn and celebrities who write poetry or whatever. We thought it would be funny if Meg wrote a bunch of really bad poetry. So originally we pitched this as Meg’s bad poetry book. Then Alex got invited to write the episode where Lois becomes mayor and we suddenly like realized it could be expanded into a bigger thing with political stuff like that Daily Show book that came out a couple years back. Now we could do a bunch of different characters instead of just Meg.
DRE:
It sounds like, as usual, Meg is going to get screwed and not get a book.
CC:
She gets totally screwed [laughs]. Maybe one day Meg will get her own book.
DRE:
It sounds like you took this book pretty seriously.
CC:
I think we tried. It was fun so it was not like we were killing ourselves over it or something like that. It was fun to do. We tried to really map it out and make sure all the characters we wanted got in there and that they had different things to do in the book.
DRE:
Will the book be out when the episode where Lois becomes the mayor airs?
CC:
Yes, I think it might be the Mother’s Day episode.
DRE:
Did you and Alex write the episode together?
CC:
No, this is Alex’s episode.
DRE:
I imagine that since you and Alex are the only two female writers on Family Guy you must be pretty good friends at this point.
CC:
Oh yeah. It was totally awesome and fun. We had no problems whatsoever. It was very comfortable and fun the entire time. If we had written alone it would have been less fun.
DRE:
Was it a much different process than writing a Family Guy episode?
CC:
Yeah, we only had to make one other person laugh instead of 14 or something [laughs]. We divided it up into chapters and then traded them back and forth. Writing the TV show is very collaborative with a whole bunch of different people and that’s fun but it is also fun talking it over with one other person and just writing whatever you want and seeing what happens.
DRE:
Do you ever have ideas for Lois where Alex would say, “Oh that’s perfect for Lois”?
CC:
Yeah, it’s like that for everyone. I think we’ve both been here long enough that we know what’s going on. The best thing about Alex is that since she does the voice of Lois when she says anything the actual Lois voice it’s automatically 500 percent funnier than it would be with anybody else saying anything.
DRE:
Steve Callaghan told me with so many writers doing voices, the joke that might end up sounding funniest is the one in the voice of the character that they were pitching it in.
CC:
Totally. If somebody else tells a joke in their own Peter voice but then Seth does it in the real Peter voice it is automatically 45 percent funnier.
DRE:
Do you have good or bad imitations of Lois or Meg?
CC:
My Meg is great because nobody has to do anything. But I would say mine are all terrible.
DRE:
Does everything for the book have to be approved by Seth or FOX?
CC:
We wrote it and FOX did give their normal legal and standards notes so there was some back and forth with things you couldn’t say about certain people or certain words that they weren’t sure about. So it’s not like you can get away with every single thing that comes up in your mind. We tried to work with them to come up with suitable replacements for certain celebrities.
DRE:
Were there certain celebrities that they were like, “No we don’t want to make fun of because they like to sue”?
CC:
Yeah they generally like to steer you away from sue happy people. They all know who those people are and they’re like, “Maybe you should pick someone else.” I think we’re pretty good about staying away from swearing and all that stuff. There were definitely the usual standard notes that were like, “Hey, don’t say this.”
DRE:
Does Renée Zellweger get ripped into?
CC:
I can’t remember. It’s possible.
DRE:
Because you guys seem to have it really out for her and I know Alex does too.
CC:
[laughs] She can be annoying. But since it was a political book, we were taking slams at a lot of politics and politicians.
DRE:
Were you a writer on Family Guy before Alex became a writer there?
CC:
Oh no. I think she was a writer on the first go round before the show got canceled. I didn’t start here until it came back the latest time.
DRE:
What did you do before you were a writer on Family Guy?
CC:
I was a writer’s assistant on Listen Up, that show was on CBS.
DRE:
With Jason Alexander?
CC:
Yeah.
DRE:
That was a show [laughs].
CC:
That was a show that happened. [laughs] Yeah, I was a writer’s assistant there. So I was doing the assistant bit and I had a couple different assistant jobs before that where I met some of the people associated with Family Guy. Then when staffing season came up they remembered me and called me.
DRE:
So you showed them your spec scripts?
CC:
Yeah, I think the spec script my agent sent in was my Scrubs but I could be wrong. I haven’t looked at it for a couple years. [laughs]
DRE:
How soon did you become a producer/writer?
CC:
It was very much not immediate. I think my interview was probably two whole months before I found out I had gotten hired and started to work. During that time I was just working away at my assistant job.
DRE:
Do you remember your first gag that you got on the air?
CC:
Not the first one but one of the earlier ones I did was this Gilmore Girls TV parody.
DRE:
That was great. I loved that one. That was when they’re talking really fast and then they started making out.
CC:
I remember Steve Callaghan and I were pitching that in the room and we were talking really fast. That was one of the first times I ever got to pitch something.
DRE:
I watched Alex’s DVD and she has a behind the scenes video in the Family Guy offices and she showed that really gross bathroom.
CC:
Yeah, there’s a bathroom in the writers’ room. We girls don’t tend to use it but all the guys do.
DRE:
It must be horrible.
CC:
[laughs] I don’t know, I’m not in there that much.
DRE:
So when it’s your turn to do an episode it’s because of the rotation?
CC:
Sometimes people will pitch a story. Mike Henry will tend to get the Cleveland-centric episodes. So I guess that’s not completely random rotation but for the most part it’s like, “Now it’s your turn you go.” We’re hopefully doing a couple Star Wars centric episodes so the Star Wars fans got those but other than that it’s pretty random. Sometimes you can really tell whose episode it should be because of the subject matter.
DRE:
So writing the script is collaborative throughout the entire process?
CC:
It’s pretty collaborative the entire time because we break the story with a couple different people. So then you have your story so you do your outline yourself but you come back and then you get a couple different people to go through and add jokes. Then you go out and you write the script by yourself for two weeks and then you come back and everyone jumps in and adds jokes.
DRE:
Did you get to meet Wallace Shawn or Marilyn Manson on the episodes that you wrote?
CC:
I didn’t. We didn’t actually get Marilyn Manson. [writer/producer] Tom Devanney did that voice.
DRE:
He does it really well. Did you guys offer it to Marilyn Manson?
CC:
I think we offered it and then he didn’t want to do it.
DRE:
Wow!
CC:
I know. What? Come on!
DRE:
He must be a South Park fan.
CC:
We had no idea whether anybody else would think it was funny but we all thought it was hilarious because it was Tom’s voice coming out of a picture of Marilyn Manson. But I didn’t get to meet Wallace Shawn. I think he might have done his stuff over the phone from New York.
DRE:
How does everyone at Family Guy feel about the South Park thing at this point?
CC:
I think we’re just over it. I think nobody really cares anymore. A lot of people here do watch South Park and we all just thought it was funny or didn’t care.
DRE:
What about you?
CC:
I didn’t care. I don’t really watch the show so I heard about it, instead of seeing it. Then for a while we were trying to take shots back but I don’t know if they will end up airing because by the time we air it’s almost a year later. So there’s almost no point. That being said there might be shots coming up but I can’t remember.
DRE:
A writers’ room filled with men can be gross, are you good at dealing with that?
CC:
Gross as in like physically gross or gross as in offensive?
DRE:
Offensive.
CC:
Oh it’s totally offensive and I have no problem dealing with it.
DRE:
Can you be just as offensive?
CC:
I think so. I don’t think I’ve ever been offended by anything anyone has ever said or done in that room. People have told me that I have gotten much cruder and more offensive since I started working here and I’m like, “Well, what can you say?” That’s what happens I guess.
DRE:
[laughs] Mike Henry told me he doesn’t really like the Cancer Boy character which by now is a pretty old character. But is there anything that offends you?
CC:
Not really. Some people who have kids are more sensitive to the kids stuff. Other than that, I think that all of us want to offend every single person.
DRE:
You wrote the Saving Private Brian episode and when I did research on you I found a forum where someone posted that they felt you were insulting the American soldiers too much. They thought you weren’t a real writer and that your last name might be an anagram.
CC:
[laughs] There are so many people out there who don’t think I’m a real person because my last name is ridiculous. But yes, I’m real. I swear.
DRE:
Have you found that people out there in the world will sometimes take offense after they find out you write for Family Guy?
CC:
It usually goes the other way. Usually people freak out and are like, “Oh my God! That’s so cool! I love Family Guy!” I don’t think I’ve ever run into someone who was offended or if they were maybe they just didn’t say anything. Maybe I’ve just been lucky enough to run into people who are fans.
DRE:
I read that were in a sketch comedy group at Yale.
CC:
I was not in a sketch comedy group at Yale. When I was at the NYU I wrote for the Law School Musical Comedy every year.
DRE:
Weren’t you Hunny Bunny at Yale or something like that?
CC:
Oh my God! Oh Jesus, you Googled me! That is my friend Jiaying from high school. He put up a picture of the people we used to roll with in senior year in high school. He used to call me Hunny Bunny. That site’s from forever ago. I don’t even know why that website is still Google-able in the first place. I think he had to do it for freshman year engineering class.
DRE:
[laughs] So did you go to Yale?
CC:
I did but I was not involved in any sketch comedy there whatsoever.
DRE:
What did you study at Yale?
CC:
Psychology.
DRE:
How’s that going?
CC:
Fine [laughs]. It was about as useless as I figured it was going to be [laughs].
DRE:
[laughs] Did you always want to work in TV or work in comedy?
CC:
Yeah I did. I majored in psychology because I liked it and there was not a creative writing major that you could do there so I just tried to take a lot of writing classes. I wanted to write for TV for a really long time. Now I’m lucky enough to be able to do so which sounds cheesy. I wasn’t a film major but I knew that I loved it and thought that it would be awesome but I literally did not know anyone in LA and had no idea how one went about getting this job.
DRE:
Were you a big Family Guy fan beforehand?
CC:
Yeah, I think it came out my senior year.
DRE:
My God, you’re so young.
CC:
Oh shut up [laughs]. When it first came out we really loved it right away. It was hilarious. I thought Stewie was the best thing ever so now actually being here is like, “What? How did this happen?”
DRE:
Is Stewie still your favorite character?
CC:
It’s hard to tell when you’re here everyday and immersed in it. I want to say yes. But I feel like at any given moment I might not be sure because I probably would go in there and somebody will pitch something in Cleveland’s voice and I’ll think it’s hilarious.
DRE:
Did you watch a lot of TV growing up?
CC:
No. My parents did not let me watch TV for a large portion of my childhood and then I discovered Saturday Night Live in ’91 or something like that. So I was completely obsessed with that and The Kids in the Hall for a while.
DRE:
If your family wasn’t so into TV, what did they think when you said, “I want to be a TV writer and live in LA”?
CC:
They thought it was absolutely horrible and the biggest mistake ever. But they were nice enough to give me a car so I could move to LA. So that was support from my parents on that end, but other than that they thought it was a totally bad idea.
DRE:
What about now?
CC:
Now they think it’s great. At the time, they were like, “You want to do what? You just want to put all your stuff in a car and move to LA and you don’t know anyone there and you don’t have a job there? That’s a bad idea.”
DRE:
[laughs] Are they fans of the show?
CC:
Totally not [laughs]. They say they’re going to watch and they just never do. They don’t get it. Bless their hearts. My brother likes it but he’s in the demographic.
DRE:
Are you writing other things besides Family Guy related stuff?
CC:
I’m actually writing a teenage girl novel called She’s So Money, which is a complete departure from what I do on a day to day basis.
DRE:
Is it humorous?
CC:
I tried to make it humorous and I tried to put a bunch of cuss words and jokes in it but they are taking them all out.
DRE:
Are you writing it on spec?
CC:
No, I think it’s with HarperCollins, which is the same company as the Family Guy book. I’m doing a second draft and it has been really fun.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck
3 Comments PRINT
Email this Interview

YOUR NAME:

YOUR EMAIL:

THEIR NAME:

THEIR EMAIL: