For the Love of Money

  ACT I: Cynthia Moore prepares for her intricate plot of payback to several Hollywood businessmen who have led her astray for three years of her acting career. She jots down their names for the last entry in her diary and puts it in an envelope to be sent to Detroit, Michigan. She calls her mother long distance in Detroit to let her know that she’ll be sending home an important package which is to be left unopened, regarding legal film matters. She orders an open, one-way plane ticket to Detroit. Then she calls Peter Dalvin, a sleazy, wanna-be, Hollywood player, and sets a date.

  CYNTHIA: (over the phone) I need to get high.

  PETER: (smiling) Me too. Where do you want to meet?

  PLOT POINT I: Cynthia’s date with Peter is all about gathering information on the real players of Hollywood. Peter knows it all, and he likes to talk, especially when under the influence. However, at the end of the night, he gets no love, while Cynthia leaves to begin her next level of the plot. She meets with a young and hungry screen-writer, David Bassenger.

  CYNTHIA: (grinning) I have a blockbuster story for you.

  DAVID: (cynical) Oh yeah, well, so does everybody else.

  CYNTHIA: (confident) Trust me. And make sure you stay in touch.

  ACT II: Every Hollywood player is into something that they need to hide, shady dealings and extra lives, and Hollywood is a small town. One by one, Cynthia wields her plot up the ladder, exposing the dirty laundry of each player, and causing them paranoia, while they lose out on big-money deals, have family problems, suffer public embarrassment, and ultimately deteriorate in their loss of omnipotence.

  PLAYER #1: (to his wife) Honey, it’s a lie. I love only you.

  PLAYER #3: (to Player #2) Did you tell the media about my therapy?

  PLAYER #2: (responding) Why would I do that? I’m not perfect either.

  PLAYER #4: (hysterical) What the hell is going on around here?!

  PLOT POINT II: Peter, still pissed off that Cynthia didn’t give him any, catches on to her plot, and threatens to inform everyone involved unless she cuts him in on the deal.

  CYNTHIA: (playing innocent) What are you talking about?

  PETER: You know that I know, and I want a piece of this deal.

  CYNTHIA: What deal? Are you high again? I think you need some help.

  PETER: Don’t fucking bullshit me! I want in, or I’m talking!

  ACT III: Player #1 and Player #2 both confront Cynthia after Peter gives them the scoop. Peter then threatens to go up the ladder to Player #3 and Player #4, the much bigger prizes, unless she cooperates with him. Player #2 is also interested in her ultimate scheme. However, Cynthia won’t be denied her revenge, nor her payday.

  CYNTHIA: (to Player #1) I could call your wife and straighten everything out if I could afford the phone call.

  PLAYER #1: (eager) How much will it cost me?

  CYNTHIA: Fifty thousand.

  PLAYER #1: That’s a hell of a phone bill.

  CYNTHIA: How much is your marriage worth, less or more?

  Player #2 confronts her with subtle threats of violence:

  PLAYER #2: (as calm as a killer) It’s a very dangerous game to play with people’s lives, Cynthia. Very harmful things could happen to you.

  CYNTHIA: Harmful things have always happened to me in Hollywood. Sometimes you need to write them down just to keep your sanity. I sure hope my mother doesn’t open my diaries at home. It’s still personal. And I wouldn’t want her thinking the wrong things about our business.

  PLAYER #2: (thinking) Shit! She’s untouchable!

  RESOLUTION: Peter needs to be eliminated to protect Cynthia’s plans. With the money that she’s paid to save the marriage of Player #1, she buys the services of a transvestite hooker from Detroit (who loves to get high), and hires a local cameraman to catch Peter in an embarrassing act of sleaziness to shut Peter’s damn mouth. Cynthia then cuts a hush deal with Player #1 and Player #2, the lower end of the pecking order, to sell a screenplay based on the secret lives of the big boys, Player #3 and Player #4, to be written by David Bassenger. All of the little guys, except for Peter, get a healthy payday from a big, insatiable film company. The media falls in love with Cynthia Moore and her award-winning chutzpah, but she has all intentions of using her plane ticket for home. Bye-bye Hollywood.

  I read my screenplay through and absolutely loved it, but writing a first draft was only a first draft. I had to do research on other produced films that had similar plots to my own to figure out how to create an exotic spin and have my story stand out from the rest. I also began to think about black women stars to play the role. In the meantime, I sent a copy of the draft to Susan to see what she would think about it. She called me back close to midnight on the same day that she received it.

  “Tracy, I swear it, if I can’t sell this screenplay, I will quit the business!” she told me. “This is great! Oh my God! It wouldn’t let me go to sleep. I can’t wait to shop it!”

  I was excited that she liked it, but I was also a perfectionist, so I had to slow Susan down.

  I said, “Wait a minute, I’m not really finished with it yet. I want to make sure that it has a spin that’s different from other screenplays.”

  Susan said, “It reminds me of The Player, starring Tim Robbins, but it’s three times the fun; it’s got more action, twists, and players involved. And I just adore Cynthia’s last line, ‘No comment.’ It’s like a cool way of saying, ‘Screw you, I’m rich now!’

  “The audience will love that,” she said. “Now we just have to think of a black woman lead to attach it to. What do you think? Halle Berry?”

  “No,” I told her immediately. “She’s already starred in The Rich Man’s Wife, and I didn’t particularly care for that movie.”

  Susan said, “Yeah, I know what you mean; it just didn’t roll over well. It was kind of flat and laboring, but that’s not the case with your script.”

  I said, “Well, still, let me do some research before you start to shop it. I have to think everything through first.”

  She agreed to it. “Okay, but please don’t make any major changes. It reads great as it is!”

  I hung up with Susan, and then I couldn’t sleep. She was really excited about my screenplay. It felt good to still have someone in my corner. However, writing the script was only the beginning. Pitching it was a whole separate ball game, and getting the actual green light was another. So the big question was: How long could I hold on to my artistic integrity?

  $ $ $

  I needed to get some outside opinions on my screenplay, but I couldn’t trust anyone in the business anymore, so I asked Kendra to read a copy of my script and tell me what she thought. In the meantime, I rented at least two female-led movies of seduction a night, doing comparisons and contrasts to my script. The first thing I noticed was that the other female leads were mostly murder mysteries or cop thrillers. In fact, I really couldn’t call Led Astray a seduction movie at all, because I didn’t have any sex in it. The sex had happened in the back story before the plot.

  When Kendra got back to me after reading the script, she broke it down with the quickness.

  She said, “Tracy, this is an excellent screenplay, but Hollywood isn’t going to make this. This is more like an independent film. You know why? Because they’re not going to allow a black woman to make a fool out of them like this, and then put it out as a movie.”

  She said, “This exposes all of their own dirt, and it’s not a comedy.”

  She had a point. I didn’t even think of it that way, I was just writing from the heart.

  “They’re gonna ask you to turn it into a comedy, you mark my words,” Kendra told me.

  I laughed at the idea. “Kendra, there is no way in the world that I could turn this script into a comedy.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Watch.”

  I joked, “Here you go with your radical stuff again.”

  Kendra said, “Tracy, Led Astray is radical. Trust me! White people are only used to black movies that they can ignore,
or black stars acting like clowns in action comedies.”

  I was speechless. Kendra was telling me the truth. White people just didn’t get it.

  She joked and said, “You better go talk to Spike Lee about this script. He’s about the only one who would produce it. It’s like a Girl 6 gets her revenge.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it? I didn’t even think about that movie. I guess because Girl 6 was in New York.”

  “She came out to Hollywood at the end.”

  “And she still wouldn’t take her clothes off for the camera,” I remembered.

  “Well, how about using her for the role? Theresa Randle, right? That would be a natural for her,” Kendra suggested.

  “Yeah, but how many people even saw Girl 6?” I argued. “It didn’t do that well at the box office.”

  “And, I’m sorry to tell you, but Led Astray won’t do that well either. It’s an independent film,” she insisted.

  I told her, “Susan read it and said that if she can’t sell it, she’ll quit the business.”

  Kendra broke out laughing. “Poor Susan. She was off to such a good start.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I asked, “Wait a minute, are you saying that it’s no way we can get this film made?”

  Kendra backed down from it. “You know what, Tracy, I wish you the best of luck on it, because I would love to see a movie like this. It reminds me of Pam Grier’s movies from back in the seventies.”

  “What about Jackie Brown?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, your script reminds me of that one too. But that Tarantino guy can produce anything he wants. His films have an independent feel to them too.”

  “So, maybe I need to pitch mine that way, using Jackie Brown and The Player as my hook films. You’re supposed to connect your movie to others that did well at the box office.”

  “Yeah, well, in Jackie Brown, Pam Grier had a white boy to help her out.”

  “But she led him into it. Cynthia has people to help her too,” I commented of my protagonist.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Well, we’ll see then.”

  I asked, “Okay, enough about me, what’s been going on with you and Louis?” I had finally gotten the guy’s name out of her. He was an architect from Suitland, Maryland, and a graduate from Bowie State University. No wonder they clicked so fast; they had that Maryland state connection. Kendra wouldn’t tell me much more than that though.

  She answered, “Like your girl in the script said, ‘No comment.’”

  She was getting a little ridiculous with her no-talk, no-jinx rule.

  I said, “Are we that bad in black relationships where we can’t even speak openly about our satisfaction with a brother? You’re obviously satisfied with Lou, as you call him.”

  “Hold on to your love, girl, that’s all I can say,” she responded to me with a chuckle. “I’m not gonna sit over here and brag about anything.”

  “I didn’t ask you to brag, just to talk about it.”

  “For what? I know what I’m doing.”

  I laughed it off and said, “All right then, be that way.”

  She was right. I was just being nosy for my own satisfaction, but Kendra’s love life was none of my business. So when I hung up, I felt like having some male company over. I called up Coe again. I trusted him the most, and he wasn’t as complicated as other California brothers and the Hollywood types that I had dealt with.

  “Hello,” a familiar voice answered his phone, but it wasn’t Coe’s voice.

  “Reba?” I asked. I was shocked, but I kept my cool about it.

  She took a deep breath and said, “What are you calling Coe for, so you can come up with a show idea for him too?” She handed the phone over to him before I could respond.

  Shit! I cursed to myself. Reba and Coe had been around each other, but I was so damn busy trying to make movies that I had hardly noticed any chemistry between them. If she was answering his damn phone, then obviously they had found some. A single man doesn’t let just any woman answer his telephone.

  Coe came on the line and asked, “What’s going on? You have another role for me?” I guess that he didn’t care about the rumors of me being a backstabber, and I had obviously become all business to him.

  “No, no new roles,” I answered. “I was just calling you to see how you were doing.”

  “I’m doing all right. I have a few model shoots coming up for Pelle Pelle and FUBU.”

  “That’s good. Those designers are really getting out there.”

  However, our conversation was stale. Coe Anawabi had moved on from me for good, and with Reba of all people. I guess I was being made to pay for doing her wrong. I took a deep breath myself and decided to ask him about her.

  “So, are you and Reba a couple now?”

  He paused and didn’t want to say it. “Well, you know . . .”

  Fuck! That was all that I needed to hear. Damn it hurt to lose him to Reba like that! Why was I still sweating a younger guy anyway? I doubted if he had told her anything about us. It would have been too much of an awkward situation for all of us. Reba just figured that I was cool with Coe like I was cool with a lot of other brothers in Hollywood, or at least before she started spreading rumors about me.

  When I finished my short conversation and hung up the phone with Coe, I had a long thought about my lack of a love life, or lust life as the case may be. If push came to shove, I was sexy enough to go out and get the best dick on the market, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had already gone through that in my younger years, and it didn’t do anything for me then, so why would it do anything for me at age twenty-seven? Nevertheless, sex was a part of mental and spiritual health, it really was.

  I sat there in my townhouse and flipped through my notepads of poetry, looking for a pick-me-up and found a gem called “Life” that I had written in my graduate school years at Hampton:

  “There’s no sense in

  fussin’ ’bout no rotten milk

  when you still got a cow.

  “And you can never freeze

  in no shabby house

  whenever you got strong lovin’ inside.

  “And even if

  you ain’t got no man

  you still got what they want.

  “All you have to do is

  open up your front door and

  them niggas’ll zoom right in

  like flies

  sniffin’ the apple pie.

  “That’s real, girl.

  That’s life.”

  I smiled and read the poem a couple of extra times, deciding to get right back to what I came out to California to do, not to find a man, but to become a star. My man had left me for another woman anyway ... and then he asked me to be his number two.

  $ $ $

  I had no real reason to change anything in my first draft of Led Astray, because there were not that many screenplays like it, so I went ahead and had it registered with the Writers Guild association. However, my girl Kendra was right on the mark when she talked about the difficulties of trying to get it produced. Susan and I attempted to pitch my screenplay for the next couple of months, and everyone liked it, but the studios didn’t know what to do with it. To hell if we were going to sell it to anyone without any guarantees on it being made. Sometimes a studio can buy or option a film project only to bury it, and then you’ll never see a green light.

  We had the creative vision wars with everything that Kendra predicted. I won’t name any film company names, but the meetings went like this:

  Studio A asked, “Can you make it into a comedy? You know, like a Hollywood Shuffle kind of thing? That was a fun movie. Maybe even Whoopi Goldberg would like this. We could sell it as The Get Back. What do you guys think about that? It could be Whoopi’s next big hit. That would really put you on the map as an A-list writer.”

  Studio B asked, “How about you team her up with a mentor or something, a white girlfriend who can really walk her through the do
ors of power? I mean, how is she going to even get close to these people? She’s cunning, but not that cunning. You need to mix up the plot more to make it realistic. And while you’re at it, she could use a few sex scenes, at least three. These kind of films don’t work well without any sex involved.”

  Studio C said, “This is a great script! We love it! But let me ask you something. Why does she have to be black? This happens to every woman in Hollywood. I don’t see this as a black vehicle. Let’s sell it to a larger audience. We could get Demi Moore in it. This seems like her kind of movie. If we got Demi Moore involved, we could make it happen for you. I mean, really, who’s gonna compete with Demi Moore from the black community? You have to think about your career, and not the racial politics.”

  Susan sure got a new education after that. She could see my point about race and integrity clear as day. She said, “I can’t believe this crap! A Whoopi Goldberg comedy? And a black woman can no way be this intelligent, right? Hell-lo, a black woman wrote the screenplay. I guess she’s supposed to fuck her way to the top, like every other woman. That’s realistic, right? Yeah! And how come a white person always has to show up and save the day? This is such bullshit!”

  She was learning just how powerful racism was in America. I don’t even believe I had ever heard her curse before. I was pissed off about it at first myself, but after a while it became comical to me. I had heard about the horror stories of script changes and Hollywood simply not getting black movies, but damn! When you come face-to-face with it, it’s enough to spin your head in a full three hundred and sixty degrees like The Exorcist. It was really wild!

  I told Susan to calm down and just keep hunting. We knew that we were onto something. A lot of the producers and studio people actually like me. They were shocked to see a young, unknown black girl with such a hot script. They just wanted to see how quickly we would bend. In the meantime, I had two out of six of my spec scripts produced for television, both on ABC for thirty thousand each. I mean, I still had to pay my damn bills, right?