For the Love of Money

  “Well, I have to take some acting classes this month, and in the meantime, a lot of the sister actresses out here are stirring up the bullcrap about me being selfish, and ruining things for all of them.”

  Raheema chuckled. “Stick to the writing, right?” she asked me.

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you remember how many girls couldn’t stand you when we were younger?” she asked me.

  I smiled. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “‘That cat-eyed so-and-so thinks she’s all that,’” Raheema mocked.

  I smiled and wiped my tears.

  She said, “But you know what, Tracy? They never stopped you from being you, no matter what they said.”

  I said, “I remember when I used to give you advice, but now it seems like I’m always the one looking for strength.”

  Raheema laughed. “That’s the way of the world; things go around and keep turning. In the next ten years, I may be calling on you again.”

  “So, I guess I just go ahead with my plans to take acting classes and get this role then.”

  Raheema paused for a second time. “I know you don’t need me to tell you.”

  I laughed while loosening up.

  She said, “I knew this day would come. You’re revolutionary, Tracy, and you don’t even know it. I keep telling you that you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. And when you’re finished, you’ll have another story to tell.”

  I asked Raheema how her family was doing with the new baby girl and everything, and when I hung up with her, I thought for the first time about writing a sequel to Flyy Girl. However, first I had to take care of business and succeed at what I was doing in Hollywood. Because if I did not succeed, there was no way in the world that I would write a book about my failure. Who wants to read that? We had enough sob stories in our history.

  $ $ $

  I was right back in the UCLA Extensions program to take two separate classes on acting, one focusing on the fundamental techniques, and the other focusing on performances for the camera. They both began in late January and went up until April, so obviously I would have to do a screen test for Led Astray in the middle of my training in order to stay on schedule to begin shooting the film in April.

  The fundamentals of acting had to do with relaxing nervous energies, concentrating on your performance, using your memory of events, your emotional recall of how those events made you feel, then improvising with the character’s tasks, text, and delivery. I thought about all of that and smiled my ass off. I had already done all of that stuff in my poetry performances. Shit, I could basically teach the fundamentals of acting myself. The best poetry performances were all about confident delivery and controlling your audience with a complete range of different emotions, charm, anger, fear, victimization, seduction, inspiration, and everything else. So I felt totally at ease in that class. The movie Slam had won the Cannes Film Festival award and was a winner in the Sundance Film Festival, smoking up the screen from coast to coast on the strength of poetic delivery and improvisation.

  After learning what the fundamentals of acting entailed, I felt that the role of Cynthia was in the bag for me. The second acting class, dealing with the camera skills, became my main focus. How could I control the camera, knowing that it was there, and pull it into me and away from everyone else? I wanted to seize the lens and hold it hostage like a prisoner of war. In the meantime, I went ahead and bought Spike Lee’s Girl 6 from the video store, starring Theresa Randle, to study her delusional solos with the camera. Girl 6 was a tremendously underrated film. I guess only performers who understood the passion involved in art and life could actually get it and love it as much as I had learned to.

  Nevertheless, my character, Cynthia Moore, in Led Astray, would push her way past the delusions of revenge, and put real plans into action. I could not perform for the camera, I had to possess the camera and make it believe in me and want to follow me wherever I go. So I stayed up for most of the night before my first performance, a grocery scene skit at the small Los Angeles theater where we met for three hours of class.

  $ $ $

  I was up third for my performance with the camera that day, which was good, because I had a chance to watch at least two performances before me.

  The setup was that a man bumps into a woman at a grocery store, she tells him to say excuse me, he apologizes, and then they strike up a conversation while walking through the aisles.

  The first man and woman team interpreted their skit with humor. They were both young and white, and a romantic comedy fit them, so it was a good performance that was believable. Our instructor said so himself. They did it a couple of times and were dead-on with each performance.

  The second man and woman team was a young sister and another young white guy. The sister interpreted her skit, first with irritation, and then with intrigue, which was corny as shit, and that made the white guy look bad too. If a man irritates you, you’re not going to turn around and become interested in him in the next three seconds. The sister obviously didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She had no consistency.

  Our instructor said, “Work on it!” and they did it three more times.

  As I waited for my turn, with another white guy who appeared to be nervous while watching the mixed couple ahead of us that was fucking up, I decided that I was not participating in the skit for the class, but for Cynthia and Led Astray. If my partner couldn’t follow me, then to hell with him; I had ulterior motives.

  When it was our turn, I took a deep breath, located the camera, and went into my approach.

  “ACTION!”

  I walk forward with deep thoughts on my mind, like a daydreamer. The guy bumps into me. I stop and raise my hands with my ten fingertips meeting in a pyramid.

  “Excuse me . . .” I pause in the middle of my sentence and work with my hands, trying to keep my concentration on deep thoughts and not on the person in front of me, because I have shit to do. “Could you please watch where you’re going.” I’m not irritated, I’m just busy.

  “Oh, I’m sorry about that,” he says.

  I walk ahead, dropping my hands slowly as I respond, “Of course you are,” but I never look at him. He is not at all important to me.

  He follows me up the imaginary aisle. I know he’s coming, but so what?

  “Look, ah, would you happen to know where any great parties are around here?”

  I finally look him in the face and read his smile, but I’m not smiling; I’m trying to figure out what to do with him. Can I use him in some way? Maybe, maybe not. I decide not and keep walking.

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” I tell him.

  He follows me around the invisible corner of the aisle. “You mean a fox like you never parties?”

  I take in his words and grimace with just a hint of a smile, while shaking my head. I’m thinking,This fool doesn’t know me. So I keep walking ahead, but now he has my attention so I move slower. He has broken my train of thought. One more word wins him a short conversation.

  “Okay, well, I guess you don’t party then,” he says.

  Now I nod my head and stop, turning to face him again. “What kind of parties are you into?” I may know something after all, depending on what his answer is.

  He smiles at me again and says, “Any kind.”

  I finally smile back at him with my own thoughts on the matter. I might be able to use him after all.

  I point with my right index finger, low at my stomach and nonthreatening, to motion with as I speak. “I’ll tell you what? You give me a contact number, and when I find out something, I’ll let you know.”

  He nods his head, pleased with it. “Well, all right! That’s what I’m talking about!” He writes his number down while I think about a million other things on my mind, paying him no damn attention. I’m thinking,Why am I wasting my time with this guy? I can’t use him for anything. Who does he even know? He’s asking me shit!

  He snaps me back to attentio
n when he finishes writing.

  “So, you’ll call me, right?”

  I take the number and tell him, “Sure,” while on my way out.

  He says, “Don’t forget.”

  I walk out of the imaginary door and make a move to toss his phone number in an imaginary trash can, but then I stop myself, thinking,Hollywood is a small town. Maybe he does know someone. So I take another look at his name and phone number before I slip it into my purse and walk away.

  “CUT!”

  Our instructor said, “Excellent interpretation! And I don’t know who you are, lady, but you definitely have something on your mind. You’re planning to use him for something. You just have a whole lot going on there. You have so much on your mind that you never bothered to buy anything.”

  I laughed it off and said, “Actually, I forgot.”

  He said, “But that’s okay, it worked. You sure had me interested.”

  He addressed my partner and said, “And you hung right in there with her. ‘You mean a fox like you never parties?’ That was good. You may have some ulterior motives yourself. This one looks like a good murder mystery to me.

  “And ‘What kind of parties are you into?’ I loved that line! Now that’s improvisation! Let’s see if you two can do it that well again,” he told us.

  “By the way, what is your character’s name?” he asked me.

  I kept a straight face and answered, “Cynthia. Cynthia Moore.”

  “And what are you thinking about up there, Cynthia?”

  I smiled and answered, “Just some things.”

  He laughed and said, “Yeah, well, just remember to buy something this time.”

  From that moment on,Led Astray was money in the bank.

  $ $ $

  Susan and I called Jonathan Abner at his office in late February to tell him that it was time for our screen test. He agreed to it, and we all met at a small studio lot in Culver City where Jonathan introduced us to Danny Greene, a forty-something, hands-on kind of guy who was just starting to gray around the edges of his dark hair. He looked like a real player to me. He wore a Giorgio Armani suit, expensive shoes, an attractive silk tie, and he looked confident and secure, a wife and three kids secure.

  He extended his hand to mine and said, “Pleased to met you, Tracy. I’m Danny. I’m very interested in this screenplay that you’ve written. You know why?”

  “Why?” I asked him.

  He spoke with his hands like an Italian. “Well, I’m a little new in the business of Hollywood like you are, and I’d like to fuck the big guys too, but if we’re gonna fuck ’em, we have to fuck ’em right. So show me how.”

  Everyone broke out laughing but me. I had already begun to slip into character. I did it off of instincts. After all, Cynthia hated the players, so she had no time to be flattered by them.

  I said, “If you take your time, then the fucking comes naturally.”

  Danny felt my words. “Okay, okay,” he said with a grin. “You’re gonna read with her for the camera, right Johnny?”

  Jonathan nodded and handed me the side sheets that he had chosen from my screenplay. One was the dinner scene with Peter Dalvin, and the other was a later scene with Player #2. Both scenes were sitting down, so a couple of production assistants gathered a table and two chairs. I handed the side sheets back to Jonathan and nodded as I sat down in the chair.

  Danny laughed and said, “She doesn’t need the lines, she wrote ’em! We need to hire more writers who can act. Maybe that’ll be our thing. Especially if they look like you do, honey.”

  I turned and smiled at him, a controlled smile from Cynthia.

  We had two cameras, one in my face behind Jonathan, and one behind me that was pointed in Jonathan’s face.

  “All right, ACTION!” Danny yelled himself from in front of a video monitor.

  Jonathan glanced down at his side sheets and did his lines.

  “So, you decided to stick around in Hollywood a little longer?”

  I smile and lean back, slow enough for the cameras to follow my lead.

  “Yeah, maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with the right people out here.” I stare momentarily with my eyes so that “Peter” could read me.

  He nods. “Now we’re talking. What took you so long to figure that out?”

  I lean against the table on my left elbow, placing my chin between my left thumb and index finger, while making sure not to cover my face from the camera behind me. My eyes wander blankly through the room, reminiscing as I speak.

  “I guess it finally hit me when that asshole over at Agency One screwed me over.”

  Peter laughs and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, offering one to me. “Yeah, Player #1 is a real come fiend. He fucks everybody. Then he brags out in public how much he loves his wife.”

  I smile, mischievously, as we light up our cigarettes. “Well, he isn’t any good at it. Now Player #2 at Studio One, he knows how to make a woman feel the burn.” (I hadn’t filled in all of the details on names yet. I figured we would do that in production with the actors.)

  Peter frowns. “You screwed that asshole?! He’s such a fucking brown-noser. He has his nose so far up Player #3’s ass, I don’t see how he can even breathe.”

  Peter accidentally puts his cigarette out in his water. “Shit!” He lights up a new one.

  I grin, continuing with my web of deception as I take a deep puff and blow out the smoke.

  “He talks about Player #3 as if he hates him.”

  Peter says, “Yeah, he hates him and loves him like a wife. ‘Honey, don’t fuck me so hard, please!’” he jokes with a laugh.

  I chuckle and add more kerosene to the fire. “From what I hear, Player #3 is married to Player #4 from Studio Two in that way, two old and freaky guys.”

  Peter laughs hard. “You’ve been getting around out here.” He puts out his second cigarette and says, “Look, enough about these other fucks. Let’s just talk about me and you, back at ground zero. Now you still want to get high?”

  Peter’s dick is hard for sex and drugs right as the food reaches our table.

  I smile at the waiter and wait for him to leave.

  “I thought that you were high already,” I comment to Peter.

  He smiles and says, “Just a little, but you’re not.” He tosses a Benjamin on the hot, untouched food. “Let’s go.”

  Peter stands up.

  I sit still and stroke my plate with my right index finger, sucking the food from it with a nod. “Mmm, that tastes great.”

  Peter smiles, ready to come in his pants while he waits for me.

  Danny Greene yelled, “CUT! Jesus Christ, Johnny! Do you want to play this part or what? You’re beautiful! And Tracy . . .” He lost his words and just stared at me. “You were born for this part! She’s a natural, a black Linda Fiorentino. What do you guys think?” he asked the two cameramen.

  They both nodded. “Yeah, that was great stuff.”

  “And great eyes.”

  “Great everything!” Danny told them. He said, “Johnny, I think we have a movie to make.”

  Susan sat there and beamed at me, sucking it all in. When we walked out and chatted amongst ourselves, she took a deep breath and said, “You’re amazing! You’re absolutely amazing! I’ve been with ten-year professionals who have never blown producers away like that!”

  I just smiled. I asked, “So what about the business side?”

  Susan paused. “I’ll have to sit down and come up with something really creative. This is your first film, and you don’t want to walk into it too cheaply, but since we’re all thinking low-budget here, we can’t ask for the cow either.”

  “As long as we get more than a pig,” I joked.

  Susan smiled. “Oh, we won’t get a pig, I can assure you of that. We want at least a big, clean turkey, with plenty of leftovers. That’s the key to this deal, leftovers.”

  I asked, “Leftovers meaning what?”

  “Back-end residuals. Don’t you get a royalty
payment on your books?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s what we want to focus on here,” she told me, “gross points from the studio. So if the movie does well at the box office, even if they only paid you five hundred thousand to star in it, you can make some real money through the back-end points. That’s the advantage of going with smaller studios. They have to bend over backward sometimes to stay in the hunt for good projects.”

  I nodded. Residuals sounded rather complicated and legal to me, and I didn’t have Yolanda on my side anymore to look over the paperwork.

  “Do you have a lawyer to make sure that we don’t get screwed here,” I asked Susan jokingly.

  She looked at me and asked, “I thought you had a lawyer already?”

  “I did, but now I don’t.”

  Susan said, “I don’t really secure contracts on my own, that’s what the agency is for, to make sure we cover each other’s backs. We have plenty of lawyers who go through the contract before you even see it.”

  I looked and said, “So, in other words, I was paying my lawyer for nothing.”

  Susan paused. “Well, I wouldn’t say that, because it’s pretty smart to have checks and balances wherever you can. Not saying that I would do anything to harm you, but we could both miss something. And I’m just being honest with that.”

  I nodded. In other words, I needed to get another damn lawyer just in case.

  $ $ $

  Susan came up with a deal that would split a million dollars between my screenplay and my starring in the film, but the butter on the biscuit was the gross points. She was going to ask for ten percent on the strength of how much I would be involved in production. Included in that were rights for cable, network, and video sales, as well as foreign rights if we were ever able to cross overseas with the film. So if we made a measly ten million dollars alone, I would have another million coming before we even went to cable, network, or video. As long as the movie continued to sell, in any capacity, I would have checks written out in my name for it.