For the Love of Money (16 page)

“Let's just say that looks are not a major requirement for
me
like it is for
some
people we both know.”

I laughed and said, “Whatever. You have to think about your kids.”

“Oh, trust me, I do.”

“Okay, well, you don't have time to hear my story, but just let me read this poem to you that I just wrote.”

She paused and said, “Okay.”

I responded, “It's
not
going to kill you, girl. Just hear me out.”

“Read it already,” she pressed me.

“Okay, here it is, but I just want you to know that I'm still working on it.”

“Revision is always good, now let's hear it.”

I read it to her with all of the politics involved and the repetitive flow from the title, and Raheema just breathed over the phone.

I asked, “So what do you think?”

“I think I might want to use that in my future classrooms,” she told me. “Maya Angelou, look out! That piece was
phenomenal
!”

“Aw, go 'head, girl, you're exaggerating,” I said with a smile. I was glad to hear it though. I added, “You can use it, just as long as you tell them where you got it from.”

Raheema said, “Do you actually think that I would ever use one of your poems and not give you credit for it?”

“I'm just making sure,” I told her.

“You are a mess.”

“Yeah, whatever. Now go on out with your smart, patient, handsome, unselfish date, and don't do anything that
I
wouldn't do.”

“Don't you mean to say don't do anything that you
would
do?” she teased.

I just smiled and said, “Bye, Ra-Ra.”

She said, “Isn't your birthday this Friday, September six? What are you doing, something that
I
wouldn't do?”

“Look, girl, it's just another year for me. That'll be my first day of taking a crash course on screenwriting. So I'll be starting the education of my new career on my birthday.”

“Well, knock 'em dead, Tracy. Knowing you, I'm
sure
that you will.”

I hung up the phone and thought about my first class on how to write screenplays. I began to think of how I could make the Crenshaw driving incident into a scene in a film just like it had inspired me to write a poem. I wondered how much of screenwriting would be the same way, coming up with an idea off of something that happened to you, and expanding on it to make it come to life up on the big screen for everyone else. The theory made perfect sense to me. I guessed that I would soon find out, but first I had to tell Kendra about my day.

When Kendra arrived at home, I was waiting for her to pick up that line and hear me out.

“Girrrl,
let me tell you what happened to me
today.
You were
absolutely
right...”

$   $   $

When the Hollywood Film Institute said
crash course,
that's
exactly
what they meant. I paid three hundred dollars (which included the price of several
screenwriting books) for two days of instruction to help me figure out what the hell I was doing. We started early in the morning and had classes up until night with several breaks in between.

I arrived bright and early at the film institute in West Hollywood still terrified of driving out in LA. Since I knew that I would be early, I took my notepad with me to look over my Crenshaw-inspired poem again. I had an extra notepad with me to take down everything I could on screenwriting from the crash course.

I read my revised poem to myself, rewritten with all of the perfect words and dramatic breaks for mass appeal in performance
or
on paper. Some poems are no good for performance, just as others are no good for print. I wanted my poem to stand up in both forms.

I had to go to the bathroom right in the middle of reading it, so I went to search for the restroom. When I returned to my desk, I realized what I had done. You
never
leave your creativity unattended. A good creation is worth more than money, and there was a dark-haired white girl reading my shit when I returned. At first I thought she was about to take it, but then she saw me coming and tried to pretend as if she was only noticing that someone had left something there.

“So what do you think about it?” I asked her with a grin. I knew she had read it.

She turned and asked, “Excuse me?”

She was attempting to play the innocent, but she had no idea who she was dealing with.

I said, “My poem. I saw you reading it. What do you think about it?”

She was dressed in casual gear with tan khakis, Banana Republic style. I was dressed casually myself in blue jeans.

She smiled and said, “It's very good. I like how you use the title as your dramatic point with repetition.”

“Yeah, I try to do something different every time.”

“So you're a poet?”

“I don't really call myself one. I just do it, you know, like the Nike commercials.”

She laughed and said, “My name is Susan,” and extended her hand to me.

I looked clearly over the top of her thick brown hair with my superior height and shook her hand. “I'm Tracy.” This girl must have stood about five foot two
with heels.
I just
loved
being tall, and I had to let her know that I was confident with it. I figured that I had to use
some
kind of an edge out in Hollywood. I would be out of my league out there. It was brand-new territory for me.

“So, I guess we're, ah, here to learn how to write scripts,” she said out loud and took a seat in the desk to the right of mine.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I responded to her.

I stared up at the huge blackboard at the front of the room, thinking how ironic it was for me to go from being a student to a teacher and back to a student again. However, that was life. When you step it up, sometimes you have to start it all over.

“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.