Adam’’s Franchise

LAWRENCE GRAY was born and educated in the UK and took BA honours in Economics and Politics from Leeds University. He lived in Hong Kong for twenty four years and in 2015 moved to Johor Bahru, Malaysia. He is a professional screenwriter and director and has written many episodes of UK and Singapore TV dramas and written, produced and directed a number of films in English and Cantonese. He directed the feature film ＂Lust ＄ Found＂, which he describes as an eccentric English gangster movie set in Hong Kong. He has also edited and ＂doctored＂ many feature scripts from around Asia and Australia. Gray’s collection of short stories, Odds and Sods, was published in 2014 as a Proverse Prize Publication. It features stories that meld French farce, Chinese Opera, religious mysticism, Hollywood and Hong Kong movies in a kaleidoscopic tour de force. His novel Cop Show Heaven, also published by Proverse Press, is a parody of parodies, set in a part of Hell rented by Heaven for the purpose of allowing dead film directors to continue making movies. It is a Pirandelloesque topsy-turvy concoction of Hollywood plotting and stories of actors desperate for roles in bad movies that strangely echo the world of Hong Kong during the 1997 return to China. In London he was a founder of the London Screenwriters’ Workshop and in Hong Kong he founded the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle and chaired the group for twenty years, publishing many collections of stories from a wide variety of Hong Kong writers. Gray has taught screenwriting in various cities around the world, and was one of the first to professionalise the industry. In 1996, he won the first Public Awareness of Science drama award (PAWS) and the Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum’s (HAF) award for best Hong Kong Film project of the year 2006.