“So, what film school did you go to?” she asked me.
I looked at her and searched her dark eyes. She was making a positive assumption about my education. That was a good thing, but my answer was not.
“Actually, I didn’t go to film school,” I told her. I left it at that just to see what her response would be.
She said, “Oh,” and was speechless. I read that as: This black girl doesn’t have a chance. She didn’t even go to film school.
I had already heard it through the grapevine (Kendra) that Hollywood crash courses were mostly for film majors and people who were already in the business, and not necessarily for fresh newcomers like myself.
After an embarrassing silence, I decided to release Susan from her hushed suspense.
“I majored in English,” I told her.
“Oh yeah,” she uttered. She was still at a loss for words.
“Then I went ahead and received my master’s in it,” I added.
Susan’s eyebrows raised on that one.
“Oh yeah, a master’s in English? I have my MBA. What did you do your thesis on? I’m always interested in that.”
It was a good damned thing that I wasn’t lying. I would have been busted on the spot!
I said, “The use of common speech for effective human communication as opposed to the rigidness of King’s English.”
She smiled. “Well, you can’t use the King’s English in this business, I’ll tell you that much. No one goes to the theaters with dictionaries in hand.”
“Exactly,” I told her. “The more you can relate your diction to your audience, the more effective your communication becomes.”
“So what do you think about this Ebonics thing that they’ve been bringing up in Oakland? Have you heard about that?”
Girlfriend was right on the case!
I answered, “If you’re an American, then you should be afforded the opportunity to learn how to read, write, and speak English properly. And if you choose, after being educated, to break your diction for whatever reason to relate to whatever group, then fine, but only after you’ve learned the correct methodology.
“That’s what our taxes are supposed to pay for,” I concluded.
My English professors at Hampton would have been proud. I taught from the correct approach to English myself. How else could I be an effective English teacher?
“You know, I was teaching English to middle school students back home in Philadelphia before I decided to try my luck out here in Hollywood,” I said. “I just wanted to see if I could make an improvement on the writing of African-American roles.”
“Who would know better than an English teacher, right?” she joked.
I asked, “So what brings you to a screenwriting class with an MBA? Shouldn’t you be in a film production and financing course or something?”
“Well, I’ve already been through a bunch of those courses, actually. I just want to learn as much about the business of Hollywood as I can, including the writing process,” she answered.
She was straightforward and pretty easy to talk to. I think I liked her. By the time we had finished chatting, the class was filling up and it was getting close to start time. Right off the bat, I witnessed up close that Hollywood was definitely a white man’s game, because including Susan and myself, there were only five women there out of thirty, and there were only three brothers out of the twenty-five men, with two Latinos up in the house.
I began to feel nervous about my prospects again when the instructor walked in with several screenplays in hand. He was a tall, slender guy with a full gray beard and a gray head of hair, wearing wire-framed glasses.
He said, “Well, whatever philosophies you learned in your film schools, kids, forget about them. I’m here to tell you how we actually make films out here. Then again, don’t forget everything you learned in film school, because you can still use a good twenty-five percent of it.”
He waited to see if we would all laugh, and he was unsatisfied with our lack of a response.
“That was a joke, people, loosen up. I mean, this is only a three-hundred-dollar course, right? Am I in the right classroom?” he asked us. “It’s not like that small piece of property you sold to go to film school at USC.”
They laughed a little louder at that, but I had nothing to laugh about. I was paying strict attention.
“Okay,” he said, holding up the finished screenplays in his hand, “these are a couple of the screenplays that we’re going to look at as we get started here. I have Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, Steven Haft’s Dead Poets Society, John Singleton’s Poetic Justice, and Richard Zanuck’s Jaws.
“By chance, have you guys seen any of these films?” our instructor joked again. I even smiled at that. However, I did wonder how many writers in that room saw Poetic Justice. I thought that John Singleton could have used a woman’s touch on writing it myself. He should have given me a call. I smiled and held my thoughts to myself.
“Okay, as you guys should already know, all successful story writing should have a beginning, an ending, a drive, a few conflicts, and a definitive resolution.
“You want to make sure that you define who your audience is.
“You want to make sure that you define your six dramatic stages. Which are ...anyone?” he asked the class.
One of the white guys spoke up first. That was an easy numbers game. They dominated the room.
“Act I, Plot Point I, Act II, Plot Point II, Act III, and the Resolution.”
It sounded simple enough to me. All I needed were the details on how to do it.
“Now a good, well-defined character with drive, pizzazz, and morality, or the lack of morality, as the case may be for some of you, is a great thing to start from. A great opening scene, a strong theme, and inspiring scenery are also good starting points. However, what you’re all here to find out is what is needed to pull all of these separate things together to make a successfully executed story.”
Exactly, I thought to myself as I sat there and took notes. Susan only listened. Like she had said, she wasn’t really planning on writing, she just wanted to know as much about the business of Hollywood as she could. My crazy behind was out there to try and make a difference in the community by learning how to write something worthwhile, and pay my damn rent. I also wanted recognition for my work, of course.
We went over the entire screenwriting process for both days, met some actual screenwriters, watched films, analyzed successful execution, weak execution, and discussed protecting what we wrote, pursuing agents, pitching your stories, and plenty of other needful things in the film game. We even went over some screenplay ideas of our own. I learned a lot there.
During our breaks I made a lot of small talk with Susan, and two of the brothers who were there. I was even asked out for dinner that Saturday night (the day after my twenty-fifth birthday), and I accepted, if only to make a few new friends. What I didn’t do was trade phone numbers with Susan after that second day. After I thought about it, I figured that I should have. Susan may have been a real mover and shaker, sitting right under my nose, so I hoped to bump into her again.
$ $ $
Richard Mack was my height with low-cut hair, slim to medium weight, light brown, and very talkative. He claimed to be from Detroit, but I begged to differ. He seemed more like a suburbanite to me. I was used to people from the suburbs claiming nearby cities from going to Hampton. Everyone did it. If you lived right outside of Chicago, you told people you lived in Chicago and moved on.
Anyway, Rich was not my type, so I planned to stay strictly professional. We went to this scenic restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called The Tropical. They had outside seating and plenty of safarilike appeal.
“So, what kind of projects do you plan on writing?” Rich asked me once we were seated. We both ordered tropical blend drinks with a touch of rum in them. They called them Havanas.
I was skeptical about being too open with my film ideas though. I didn’t know this guy li
ke that. He seemed honest enough, but still.
“I don’t know what kind of projects I plan to write yet,” I told him. In reality, I was still thinking about writing something based off of my drive on Crenshaw.
“What did you think about the crash course?” he asked me.
“It was okay,” I answered. I was barely paying attention to him, daydreaming about my thoughts for story ideas. I guess I wasn’t the best of company that night. I was there physically, but not there mentally. I had a two-month screenwriting course coming up with the UCLA Extensions program later on that September. I heard that UCLA’s courses were more in-depth than the Hollywood Film Institute’s, and the instructors there were supposedly better connected in the business.
I decided to ask Rich what he knew about it.
He said, “;I’ve been there and done that. You get to work on and complete an actual screenplay. Then you go from there and try to find a writing job.”
“So what happened to your job?” I asked him.
He looked shocked at first before he smiled and shook his head. I guess he didn’t expect me to be so forward.
“I was briefly writing for a show that was canceled. That’s part of the business out here.”
“What do you do for money in the meantime?” I asked. I was still concerned about that myself.
He said, “Fortunately, I still have enough saved for a few rainy days from when I was working.”
I had about three thousand dollars left in my bank account after paying for the townhouse, and I was not due a check for the republication of Flyy Girl until after the publishing date in October. That seemed like forever!
“So, what made you decide to write for Hollywood after teaching English in Philly?” Rich asked me.
“Boredom,” I answered. “I needed something more challenging, something that would pick me up in the morning.”
He grinned and said, “Whatever happened to coffee?”, which I felt was pressed and corny. You don’t have to comment on everything a woman says. That’s why he wasn’t my type; he was too short, too ordinary, and not hardly cool enough for me. I hated to admit it, but that Philadelphian cool that I was so used to was a hard thing to replace. However, that didn’t mean that Rich and I could not be associates in the business.
All of a sudden, a lot of the customers started standing up and walking over to the television set in front of the bar.
“What’s going on over there?” Rich asked our waitress.
The tall, attractive blonde was ready to take our dinner orders. She gave us the shocking news, blow for blow. “Tupac Shakur was shot while riding in the passenger seat of Suge Knight’s car after the Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas.”
I looked at Rich and Rich looked at me. We both had wide eyes.
“And he survived again?” I asked our waitress. Tupac Shakur was always slipping away from fatality, like a real-life ghetto hero who wouldn’t stay down. The boy seemed to have nine lives, and every time he escaped from death his popularity increased.
“Oh, I don’t know,” our waitress answered. “They just said that he was taken to a Las Vegas hospital in critical condition.”
Rich said, “Critical condition means that he did survive. I heard he wears a bulletproof vest anyway.”
“They said he wasn’t wearing one tonight,” she told us.
I began to wonder if our blonde waitress listened to rap music herself. She sure seemed keen on who Tupac was and who he was connected to. He was an actor. Our waitress probably wanted to be an actress herself. She sure didn’t look like your average waitress.
It was just my luck when the news reports began to talk about feuds between LA’s Bloods and Crips as a possible motive for Tupac’s shooting. I just couldn’t get a damn break out in LA! I still had to drive the hell home to Baldwin Hills.
Shit! I thought to myself. I knew enough about retaliation to not get caught up in the crossfire, and I was not planning to go anywhere near Crenshaw that night.
Suddenly I lost my appetite. I thought about ordering take-out from my townhouse for the next month until the tension cooled down. You could feel it in the California air as soon as they started talking about the Bloods and Crips.
Rich asked me, “What’s wrong with your food?” He was eating like there was no tomorrow. I guess the craziness out in LA didn’t bother him at all, but it bothered me. I wanted to get the hell out of there, and I was just starting to get my feet wet in Hollywood. I hadn’t even taken off my towel to jump in the water yet.
Rich wanted to hang out and show me around, but I had no plans at all for that. I wanted to get back inside the house like a damn mouse myself. I couldn’t believe that I was acting so damn paranoid, but like they say, Better safe than sorry. Rich didn’t sweat it. I guess he had other women to entertain. So I drove back to my townhouse in Baldwin Hills as nervous as I could be, and rushed to my bedroom to listen to more news about Tupac’s shooting. It was all over the radio stations and everything.
All that next week I received phone calls from my family and friends back home in Philly:
“Is everything all right out there? You sure you don’t want to come back home for a while?”
Even Kendra was nervous about things:
“I told you, Tracy. I bet you’ll listen to me now. These guys out here in LA are not to be played with.”
I had definitely learned to believe her, but I was not a punk either. I had relocated to LA to put my thing down in the industry of Hollywood, and that’s what I planned to do! If I was shot and killed in the process, then that bullet must have had my name on it. Nevertheless, I prayed in my bed every night that it didn’t. I wasn’t even a church-going woman.
It was not hardly a pleasing twenty-fifth birthday treat that September in Los Angeles for me, but like they say, Only the strong survive, and I was damn-sure strong. Or at least I liked to believe so, and I was prepared to find out.
The Fast Lanes
A fast mind leads to
fast situations.
A fast body leads to
fast boys.
A fast boy leads to
fast sex.
Fast sexuality leads to
fast reputations.
A fast reputation leads to
fast propositions.
And fast propositions lead
your fast ass down
empty, one-way streets
that have dead ends
and nowhere constructive to go.
So if I could
do it
all over again,
knowing what I now know,
I would choose to drive
slowly,
and obey the speeding laws.
Copyright © 1992 by Tracy Ellison
April 2000
After the visit to King of Prussia Mall, I made it back to my parents’ house in Germantown right at five o’clock and beat the rush-hour traffic. I was anxious to call up Raheema in central New Jersey (where she still lived after earning her Ph.D. in African-American Studies at Rutgers) to give her the news on Kiwana. Raheema had to pick up her kids from day care, so I knew that she would be home. Imagine that. After all of the daydreaming that I did in our youth concerning a husband and a family, and the fear of boys that Raheema had, it was ironic that she ended up happily married with the husband and kids and I ended up single and was hardly even looking for a mate. Go figure that out.
“Hello,” she answered on the first ring.
“Hey, girl, it’s Tracy.”
“Haaay, you’re back at home now, right? How have things been back home?”
“Drama, drama, and more drama,” I told her. “I haven’t been able to relax at home yet. I almost got carjacked. My visit to Germantown High School bombed out. I was accused of being a lesbian on Power 99 FM this morning, and you would never believe who ended up marrying a white man?”
“Who?” Raheema asked me.
“Kiwana.”
“Kiwana? From Cheyney?!?
?? her voice went high. “Get out of here!”
“I’m serious,” I told her. “I bumped into her today at King of Prussia Mall, and she showed me pictures of her two daughters with her white husband and everything.”
“Did she have the daughters with him, or were they with a brother?”
“No, they were with the white husband, and both of her kids are lighter than you,” I added.
“Oh, well, thanks for the reminder, Tracy. Thanks a lot,” Raheema cracked. “I forgot how light I was for a minute.”
I just laughed it off. Black people would never be able to get away from color complexes, because every day new babies are born with different shades, and we are damn-sure not color blind! Raheema even went through a radical stage in college where she got heavily into Black Power, culture, and politics, and started to remind me of Angela Davis or somebody, wearing her hair in a short Afro. She wasn’t as outspoken about things as Angela Davis or I was, but Raheema kept it real, and she was very much pro-black.
“Well, I can just imagine what she told you,” she said, referring to Kiwana.
“Okay, what did she tell me?” I quizzed her. I loved letting my girl use that brain power of hers.
“She told you that she couldn’t find a supportive brother who could handle her strong independence or understand her career as a stage performer.”
I nodded to myself with the phone in hand. “Basically, yes, that’s what she told me. She said the more ambitious you are as a black woman in America, the less you’ll find brothers who can deal with that, and basically, she said that it wasn’t her problem anymore and she was moving on.”
Raheema was speechless for a second. I heard her three-year-old son, Jordan, asking for help to use the potty.
“Excuse me for a minute, Tracy. You don’t mind if I take the phone in the bathroom with me, do you?”
I laughed. “Do what you have to do. I remember those days of trying to potty train my brother Jason.”
“Well, Jordan only asks for help when he has to do number two, because he likes to sit on the big toilet like his father.”