For the Love of Money

  He said, “I wouldn’t worry about it this soon. After week seven, then I would start to worry.”

  I began to think that the network would put Rich out of his misery after only six episodes, but he laughed at the idea as if it were a joke. I could hear Yolanda’s mouth somewhere in the back of my mind. I told you about that black shit. You’re gonna be running around in circles chasing your cheese like a sewer rat. I could damn near see her in my mind!

  I broke out laughing.

  Rich said, “What’s so funny?”

  “You don’t even seem as if you care about this show,” I responded.

  “This is all business, Tracy, you can’t care.”

  That was what I was afraid of; the Hollywood pessimism had gotten to him. Rich was throwing in the creative towel for money. It was a decision that everyone would have to juggle with in Hollywood; you either sell out or starve (Hollywood Shuffle), unless you were plain gifted or lucky. I had been mostly lucky, because I didn’t want to think of myself as gifted until I succeeded at the next level and had an original screenplay produced.

  Just to change the subject, I said, “You know, I talk to a lot of the actors out here now, and it just amazes me how so many of them have no clue where their next role is coming from. And I keep asking myself, ‘How can they live like that?’ I just don’t get it.”

  Richard said, “That’s why I’m not an actor,” and laughed. “I’m no damn fool.”

  “Yeah, but when they hit it big, they can hit it for a lot more than us,” I argued.

  “Yeah, and it’s a thousand of them looking to strike it rich at only two or three slot machines.”

  He was still laughing about it, but it was true. Black actors in a predominantly white country was a tough bag to be in. Oh, sure, everyone dreamed about the few starring roles, the magazine covers, and the television interviews, but I got a chance to see the paranoia of not knowing where your next meal ticket was coming from. Nevertheless, if I hadn’t lucked up and gotten a chance to show off my writing skills, I wouldn’t have been able to count on my meal ticket either. Thank God that wasn’t the case!

  “So, what’s gonna happen to the actors on your show?” I asked Rich.

  “They get over it and move on, but the show is not over yet, Tracy.”

  In my book it was. Brothers and Sisters couldn’t even get a serious look from the small black market that the studio was trying to attract. The show aired on Tuesday night when a bunch of basketball games were on cable, so it attracted virtually no males. I didn’t tell Rich what I was thinking though. The brother simply needed to do more homework.

  “You’re not backing down on me are you?” Rich asked me.

  I hadn’t signed any paperwork or anything, and I was glad that I hadn’t, because I actually was thinking about ditching his show. It wasn’t a money thing for me; I wasn’t starving, so I didn’t want to ruin my good track record with some bullshit show, friends or not. I was even beginning to think of creating my own show idea.

  I said, “What has Juanita come up with?” I didn’t want to answer him.

  “Oh, she’s all right. Her stuff is just a little too hard-core. I told her to tone down some of that New York stuff. These shows need to play nationwide. It shouldn’t be a coastal thing.”

  “Well, in that case, what do you think of my stuff?” It wasn’t as if I was writing girly stuff, especially for Conditions of Mentality. I even agreed to cowrite a Watts gang story with redheaded Liz.

  Rich said, “You got all the right stuff, Tracy. Your writing is realistic, smart, funny, in-your-face, and subtle, all at the same time. It just works.”

  I smiled. Just like my poetry, I thought to myself, it just works!

  I said, “Well, thank you for the compliment, but remember, you still can’t sleep with me. You have a woman.”

  He laughed it off. “All right, well, get back to me as soon as you have something.”

  “Do I have a deadline?”

  He paused. “I’ll need something finished in another week.”

  I nodded, thinking of a million different ways to get out of it. “Okay,” I told him, but I had to admit it to myself: I was not planning on touching that pilot show. I had other plans, which included creating a pilot of my own. I had told Rich in the beginning that I would write for his show only if it was good, and I meant that!

  $ $ $

  I had a lunch meeting later on that week with a young actress who I was interested in creating a show around. Her name was Reba Combs, from Decatur, Georgia. She was a cute brown-toned sister with a perfect build, nice height, good attitude, and commendable acting skills. However, she represented exactly what was wrong with so many of the actors out in Hollywood, black and white: they had no faith in developing their own ideas. Not saying that they all needed to be full-fledged writers or anything, but at least have an idea of what kind of project you would like to be in.

  Reba Combs was twenty-three years old and had finished only a semester at Clark Atlanta University before traveling to California for her big break in Hollywood. So far she had played a bunch of minor roles and as an extra before I came along and helped her to get some quality work with my scripts.

  “So, you mean to tell me that you’ve been living off and on with different people out here since you stepped foot in California?” I asked her. She had lived out in LA twice as long as I had, and she had just gotten her first small apartment on account of the paychecks that she had received from performing in my scripts.

  “Well, it wasn’t as if I was leeching or anything, because they weren’t doing that well themselves a lot of the time,” she answered with a chuckle.

  I just stared at her. “And it never bothered you that you didn’t have any stability?” I couldn’t imagine it myself. I always had stability, whether I was chasing the fast life out in the streets or not. I knew I always had somewhere safe to return home to, even if I had no furniture.

  Reba said, “It’s all a part of putting in your dues.”

  At least she had the right attitude about it.

  “So, what things are you working on in the future?” she asked me, bright-eyed and interested.

  I said, “Have you seen that new Brothers and Sisters show yet?”

  She shook her head. “No. What about it?”

  “Do you stay up on the new shows at all?” I asked her.

  She said, “I used to, but after a while it got depressing. A lot of those roles I wasn’t able to get, so now I try to focus only on what I’m up for.”

  “Is your agent doing a good job trying to place you?”

  She grimaced. That meant no, but she tried to give her agent the benefit of the doubt.

  She said, “You know the truth about agents: they can only take you as far as you can take yourself, really. Because if nobody wants you, then it’s very hard for an agent to make them want you. But if everybody wants you, then it’s easy.”

  I nodded. “That’s true,” I told her. “Agents can’t create the work, all they can do is pump you up and talk about it.” I still didn’t have an agent myself, but I figured that I would need one as soon as I stepped it up a notch and started creating my own pilot shows and original screenplays.

  “What kind of productions do you imagine yourself starring in?” I asked Reba.

  “Any- and everything,” she answered. “Do you have any preferences?”

  “If I did when I first came out here, I sure don’t now,” she said with a laugh.

  I figured that Reba would do very well in emotional roles. Her face was a magnet for emotional depth. Some people had faces that could look a million different ways with just a twitch of a muscle, and Reba had it. Of course, if no one bothered to use it, then what difference did it make?

  I said, “I know you’re not a writer, Reba, but if you could write a script for yourself, what would you write about?” That was a question that all actors should ask themselves, really. However, my question caught Reba totally off guard.
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  She smiled and said, “Oh, good question.” She had to think about it for a minute. “You know what we haven’t had much of? Black Southern stories. So I would write something about growing up in Georgia.”

  Granted, Reba had no Southern accent from what I could tell.

  “Did you have an accent when you first moved out here?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “A tiny one, and that was the first thing that I got rid of.”

  “But now you’re telling me that we need more Southern stories.”

  I took a sip of my water and let her think about the hypocrisy. She smiled again.

  “I see what you’re saying, but you know how Hollywood is: they can typecast you into playing only Southern roles if you have an accent.”

  “So you turn it off and on when you need to,” I told her.

  She took a bite of her grilled cheese sandwich.

  “You’re saying all of this because you’re a writer; you get to create things. I want to bring those creations to life with my acting.”

  “But what I’m trying to tell you is that if you have nothing to bring to life, then you have nothing to offer anyone. You can’t see that?” I asked her. “There are thousands of white writers writing for white people, and in order for me to be able to write for you, as my sister, you have to at least guide me on what kind of things you would want to be in.

  “And not just anything, but something that you would like to star in with a passion,” I told her. “Now, since I don’t know much about the South, what would be the most logical thing for me to do if I wanted to write about it?”

  Reba shrugged her shoulders. “I guess you make a visit and do research, right?”

  I looked at her and asked, “Make a visit? For what? You’re sitting right here in front of me. You can’t tell me anything about Georgia? You think one of these white writers is going to take a trip to Georgia to write for you?

  “Forget about it,” I told her. “Better yet, if someone wanted to write a script about Philadelphia, do you think I would tell them to take a trip to Philadelphia? Hell no! I’d tell them, ‘If you want to write about Philadelphia, then talk to me, and I’ll tell you all about it.’”

  “Yeah, because you’re a writer,” Reba responded. “And you get paid to do that.”

  She still wasn’t getting my point. I said, “So what? You’re more than just an actress, Reba. That’s where your problem is. You’re a human first; a black woman from the South, and you need to validate that perspective wherever you have to. You’re not some faceless person.”

  “You remember Boston Commons?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, I liked that show,” I told her. “It was young, hip, and different.”

  “Well, what happened to that?”

  “They didn’t give it enough time. But it happened, so their perspective was validated.”

  Reba smiled at me as if she knew better and went back to eating her grilled cheese sandwich. I guess we just had two different perspectives about the business.

  $ $ $

  I wasn’t hanging out much with Kendra or Susan anymore, so we had a girls’ get-together at my place just to catch up on things. Kendra was busy teaching California kids and entertaining her new man, I was busy developing new script ideas, and Susan was good and happy about something that I had no idea about.

  I joked, “What, you found a new man too, Susan?” I was picking with Kendra. She was still with the guy she had met at the club that night in September. She was keeping it to herself because she said she didn’t want to ruin it by counting her chickens before they hatched.

  “No, it’s not a man,” Susan answered. “I just got bonded in the state of California to be an agent. All of my dues are paid, I have plenty of references, and now it’s time for me to start going after talent and getting them deals.”

  I nearly swallowed my tongue. In all of the time that I had spent with Susan, I had no idea that she was putting in dues to be an agent. The truth was, I didn’t really want to investigate what she did.

  “Well, congratulations!” Kendra told her from my living-room sofa.

  I was still speechless.

  Susan looked at me, and I looked at her and wondered if she wanted to ask me what I was thinking she would, to represent me, even jokingly.

  “Oh, well,” I mumbled, just to fill the empty space. It was an awkward moment for both of us.

  “So, are you gonna represent Tracy now?” Kendra asked Susan. Kendra seemed to be the only person in the room with the courage to pop the question.

  Susan chuckled nervously. She said, “Well, I don’t know. I was thinking of starting at the bottom somewhere, not at the top.” She was flattering me.

  I smiled and still didn’t say a word. Had Susan been playing me all along, while I tried my hardest not to play her? I was confused about the whole thing.

  “So, what agency do you work for?” I asked her for the very first time.

  “You didn’t know that?” Kendra asked me. She looked at Susan and said, “The California Entertainment Agency, right? CEA?”

  Susan nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  I explained to Kendra that Susan and I never really talked about our professional careers with each other. Kendra frowned at that too.

  “Why not?” she asked, still confused by it. “I thought it was obvious that Susan was going to represent you. I thought you two were both waiting for her to be able to do her thing.”

  Obviously, Kendra had asked Susan plenty, and the entire revelation presented thick air that we needed to cut through. Susan started cutting the air first.

  “Well, I didn’t really want to impose myself on our friendship like that,” she said. “If it happened it happened, but I felt comfortable with Tracy because she never once bothered me about it. Other friends of mine were constantly asking me, and that made me feel uncomfortable, as if they wanted to use me in that way.

  “On the other hand, I never really brought it up to Tracy because I didn’t want her to feel the same way about me, that I was using her friendship so that I could represent her in the future.”

  Kendra nodded. “I can see that,” she said, “but business is business, right? And Tracy needs an agent.”

  I guess it was all on me after that. I stopped and said, “I’ll have to think about all of this, you know, because this really caught me off guard.”

  Susan held up her hands in surrender and said, “Wait a minute, I didn’t say that I was asking to represent you, Tracy. You’re under no obligations from me. I’m still your friend.”

  I couldn’t think straight for the rest of that night. I called Kendra at her home at one o’clock in the morning, and she had to teach the next day.

  Kendra said, “What’s the problem, Tracy?” She knew I wouldn’t have called her so late on a weeknight unless something was disturbing me.

  I said, “You know why I never asked Susan what she did? Yolanda Felix told me she was the niece of a big-time Jewish movie mogul out here named Edward Weisner, and I didn’t want to make it seem like I was getting next to her to use her connections.”

  Kendra burst out laughing, even in her sleepiness. “I knew you were thinking something like that. I just knew it! You’re always trying to gain your own credit for everything.”

  “That’s a good thing,” I told her. “Yolanda made me seem villainous for even talking to Susan, and the girl was just cool. You see how Susan is, we both get along well with her.”

  Kendra said, “Well, I got news for you, Tracy. Grow up! Business is business. But if you ask me, Susan seems a little too cool to be a good agent. I mean, Yolanda seems more like the agent type to me. Susan may not even be able to get you any good deals. You’ve been doing fine so far by yourself.”

  “Yeah, so far, but I’m about to start creating my own show ideas and getting back into writing screenplays soon, so I’ll need an agent for the real numbers game,” I responded.

  Kendra paused and grew quiet on the phone. “Wel
l, it’s your call, girl. I’m not in Hollywood.”

  I hung up with Kendra and thought to myself that night for a few more hours. I had been doing just fine by myself with negotiating television scripts, but there wasn’t much to negotiate. The going rate was ten thousand dollars a script, and a split fee for a cowrite. It wasn’t as if I was writing for any major shows where I needed an agent to push for higher pay, or at least not yet. So I guess that Susan had come along at just the right time for me. However, I didn’t want to give her ten percent of my pay for work that I knew I could already get for myself. That was part of the reason why I didn’t have an agent; I was already pulling my own strings with a strong Rolodex. If I agreed to give Susan a try as my agent, it would be only for new work that she was able to get me, if we could actually do something like that. Maybe the people at CEA would not allow her to work that way, with a partial contract on me.

  I called Susan at her Santa Monica apartment that next morning to discuss my plans with her. First I asked her officially if she even wanted to represent me.

  “Yeah,” she said convincingly enough. She knew how much work I had gotten for myself, she knew that I could write, and she knew that I had been working hard and would continue to work hard. I just had that kind of workaholic drive in me. Blame it on my Virgo sign, because I never knew how to sit around and do nothing.

  I said, “Okay, well, here’s the deal: if I sign with you, it’s only going to be for new work and higher pay than what I’m getting now. I don’t think it would be fair for you to get ten percent of what I already established for myself, but for the things that you get that I haven’t been able to, it’s yours.”

  Susan said, “Traditionally, the work of an agent would be to continue to service old, present, and new contacts so that you wouldn’t have to, but I understand your predicament. So what we’ll do is make a short list of the contacts that you would like to keep on your own, and then we’ll go from there so that we’re not bumping heads. However, when and if you decide to renegotiate any old or present relationships with a new business understanding, then I’ll be capable of stepping in for you.”