Boss Lady (43 page)

She said, “Shit, I think I like Alexandria after dealing with the rest of them. At least she went ahead and fought for what she wants. But I can see it already, it's gonna be us against them all the time now. And you know who the kids are gonna like more?” my cousin asked me.

I smiled and said, “Us.”

“Exactly. Even when her fake-ass sister gets married and has kids, they're gonna want to be around our family. Fake-ass assholes.”

I sat up and smiled in my bed.

Tracy took a breath to calm herself down. She was all hyper again.

She said, “All right, girl, I'm going to bed. You do whatever you think you need to do for this meeting on Tuesday, but I'm just letting you know that these meetings happen every day. So learn what you can from it, and get ready to set up for the next one.”

*  *  *

I was anxious for the next thirty-eight hours, at the end of which, I would have my first face-to-face meeting with a Hollywood studio executive. I would finally get to see, up close and personal, how it all worked. The meeting was set for 2:00
PM
Tuesday, at the Wide Vision Films studio lot in Culver City.

I got phone calls from all of my girls before Tuesday, and I let them know that I would be in on things and taking good notes. So I arranged for us all to meet at the Flyy Girl Ltd. office on Wednesday for my meeting report and strategy. Attendance was mandatory.

I even got a call from Anthony about seeing him again. I told him that I was still sore and rather busy, but to stay on standby for the end of the week. He laughed and said he liked my style again.

I told him “Of course you do” and went back to work.

*  *  *

When it was showtime on Tuesday, I was dressed in my full Flyy Girl Ltd. gear: my lime green pants, the lime green baby-tee, and the lime green hat and high-heeled shoes. I wanted to really stand out in an office space without having to say anything. I would let Tracy and Susan do all the talking so I could study the responses. Then I would make my counterpoints or speak when asked.

I flipped through
The 48 Laws of Power
again for more information on how to execute in this first meeting. I was ready to attack with several of the first laws that fit: Law 3, Conceal Your Intentions; Law 4, Always Say Less Than Necessary; Law 6, Court Attention at All Costs; Law 8, Make Other People Come to You—Use Bait If Necessary; and several other laws.

I walked out of my bathroom to meet Tracy downstairs for the

ride over to Culver City in her black Mercedes, and she looked me over and smiled.

“You're taking a page out of my book, hunh?” she asked me. “You're showing up ready.”

I said, “Well, if they won't pay attention to what comes out of my mouth, then maybe they'll pay attention to what they see.”

“But then they'll only want to see you and never hear you,” my cousin warned me. She was dressed in a gray business suit and looking more executive.

I said, “If it gets the deal done, it gets the deal done. I just want to make this movie. I'm not gonna be in it anyway.”

Tracy smiled and said, “That's what I first thought when I started shopping scripts out here.”

I said, “But you still have more personality than me for an actress. Most of my moves are made mentally, not physically, so I wouldn't translate well in film.”

“Not if you come dressed like you are now. You'd definitely translate on-screen,” she teased me.

I smiled back at her and said, “We'll see.”

We stepped into the car; Tracy put the top down so the wind could jet through our hair on the way over to Culver City. It wasn't a long drive from Marina Del Rey. They were both on the west side of Los Angeles.

While she drove, I felt cocky enough to slap my right arm up on the door. You should have seen all the male drivers who usually paid me no mind, starting to look my way. Other women were checking me out, too, admiring my colorful spunk, I guess. Even Tracy noticed it.

She said, “There's something different about you now. Did you get some recently?” she joked.

I grinned and shook my head. “I've been reading those Zane books,” I told her. I didn't know yet if sex could change your outlook or not, but I wasn't willing to admit to my cousin that I had gotten laid. Especially on account of being angry at her for stringing me along on the
Flyy Girl
project.

She said, “Oh, yeah. Those things,” and turned up her nose.

Tracy was ultra discreet nowadays after having so much of her racy teen years documented. Even Zane was a mystery. So she wrote the books and remained detached from them, while making a fortune from the hidden, freaky secrets of women's sexual fantasies that included my own.

We arrived at the low-key studio lot at Culver City where Susan was already waiting for us in the parking lot.

I stepped out of the black Mercedes in my high heels and lime green getup, and immediately caught everyone's attention.

Susan spotted me and nodded her approval. “Great idea. I like that.”

She was wearing a dark green business suit herself.

“I see we're both thinking about money,” I joked to her.

She said, “Yeah, your bright, new money, and my dark, ugly, old money.”

“They all spend the same,” I told her.

“They sure do,” Tracy added.

As we walked toward the front doors of this ordinary-looking light blue building for my first Hollywood meeting, Susan said, “You know, your outfit reminds me of when Tracy first started taking these meetings with me years ago.”

“I told her that at the house as soon as I saw what she was wearing,” Tracy commented.

“But I'm not trying to be an actress,” I told them both.

“Nor was Tracy,” Susan reminded me. “Everyone forgets now that she was a writer.”

Susan opened the heavy glass door and held it for us to walk through. And as soon as I walked in past the office cubicles inside the building, it seemed that all eyes were on me.

“Looking good,” one white man said.

“Thank you,” I told him.

Tracy looked at me, smiled, and nodded. Then we strutted into this tiny room in the far corner of the building.

“Hey, Louis, good seeing you again,” Susan greeted a short, balding white man in a light blue tennis shirt. He looked very casual and nerdish.

He was all enthusiastic about seeing Susan. He walked out from behind his desk to shake her hand.

“Hey, yeah, it's been a minute,” he told her. Then he focused on my cousin Tracy. “And there's our girl.” He blushed. “
Led Astray
is still doing well for us in DVD.”

“When is it gonna buy you a new building?” she joked with him.

“Hah, soon, soon,” he told her with a laugh. He even hugged Tracy. That was love and much respect.

There were only two chairs in front of his desk, so I had nowhere to sit. Behind his desk to the left was a tall bookshelf of stacked movie scripts and a few books. On the bookshelf wall behind us was the same. There were various picture clips and film posters covering the walls around the room. One of them stood out, a poster for a film called
Wanted.
It looked like a dark-edged love story. A
Fatal Attraction
reversal with the man chasing the woman.

“And, ah, who's this, our
Flyy Girl
?” Louis asked in reference to me. He was already jumping to conclusions. I considered that a good thing.

“She could be a lot of things,” Tracy spoke up for me. “Her name is Vanessa Smith, another Philadelphian.”

Louis nodded and asked me, “You're not related to Will Smith are you?”

“Could be,” Susan filled in. “You never know. A lot of cousins don't find out they're related until they have those big family reunions sometimes.”

“But you're not related to him from what you know of?” he asked me specifically. I guess he wanted to see if I could talk without Tracy and Susan speaking for me.

I said, “Would it get me more opportunities if he was my first cousin, or no? I'm still trying to decide on where I want to go with that,” I told him.

I was taking Tracy and Susan's lead on bullshitting the man.

He laughed again and said, “Good answer. You guys have coached her well. So, you're still not telling me if you are or aren't Will Smith's cousin.”

I had no idea they would spend that much time on me after just walking in the door. So the pressure was on for me to keep the bullshit going.

“Let's just say I have a job to do first, then we can talk about who
I'm related to,” I told him. “And if I do well, I'm related, but if I don't, then I don't want to bring anyone's name down. I mean, I know how important a person's name is in Hollywood. Names are everything out here.”

“Yes, indeed they are, especially when you start talking about the big bucks people,” he told me. “Will Smith is big bucks people.”

“So, her name is a good thing?” Tracy asked him.

He frowned and took a seat back behind his desk. Tracy and Susan followed suit and took their seats, leaving me the only one standing.

He said, “Actually, there have to be plenty of Vanessa Smiths, it's a very common name. I was just making the connection to the Philadelphia Smiths.”

“I would be Vanessa T. Smith,” I commented. “They didn't get a chance to say that.”

He nodded. “Vanessa T. Smith?” He was running it through his mind.

“Or maybe just Vanessa T.,” Susan added to him.

He nodded again and raised his index finger. “I like that even more. So, the big question is, is she our ‘Tracy' from
Flyy Girl
?” He looked specifically at my cousin when he asked it. He said, “By the way, I read the script and it's fabulous. You did another fabulous job.”

“Thank you,” she told him. “But can you see Vanessa T. in the lead role, or do we need a
Biker Boyz
Meagan Good in the lead, and then move Vanessa T. over to a ‘Raheema' role? And with Vanessa T. being from Philadelphia, she can coach any- and everyone on the roles.”

He nodded and said, “Yeah, the girl in
Biker Boyz.
Meagan Good, is it? And she was the main girlfriend.”

“Exactly,” Susan told him.

It sounded like Louis was bullshitting himself. I bet if I showed him some pictures, he wouldn't know Meagan Good from Shaniqua Jackson. And if he didn't really know who Meagan Good was, then how would it matter?

He finally cut the bullshit and said, “Well, that's a casting issue anyway. We'll get to those decisions when we need to. But the problem I'm having right now is with the script. I mean, it's a great script, no doubt about it, but what kind of budget are we talking here?”

He looked at Susan for that question.

“Can we do a coproduction deal with another studio possibly?” Susan asked him.

“Well, sure, we can get in bed with someone on this if we can work out all the right terms. But who's really shooting urban-girl movies right now? I mean, not for theater. And not for this budget. You're talking a ballpark figure of twenty-five million dollars here. So even if we did a split deal down the middle, you're talking twelve-point-five that we won't see a dime back from until we double it.”

He searched for an explanation from Susan or Tracy.

But I did the math myself and could no longer hold my tongue.

I said, “This movie will do far more than twenty-five million. John Singleton did fifty-four million with
Boyz n the Hood
with no cult following. This book has thirty years of cult following.”

“Yeah, but John Singleton had Ice Cube, Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding Jr., the popularity of West Coast hip-hop, big guns, and Columbia Pictures behind him.”

“Well, we can build our own group of stars, too,” I argued. “A lot of those people were not big names yet. They became big names after the movie.”

“Yeah, but they had a big studio behind them and a mega marketing campaign,” he countered.

I said, “Well, anytime you make a movie from a book, you're going to have an added campaign coming from the book industry. Simon and Schuster would definitely back your marketing of this movie, because they're going to sell more books behind it.”

Louis looked away from me and at my cousin Tracy. She and Susan had not intervened yet to stop my arguments. It all happened so fast that I don't believe they could have stopped it if they wanted to.

He asked Tracy, “How many copies of the book have you sold? Can you get me the numbers?”

Tracy nodded and said, “That's as easy as a phone call.”

Louis looked back at me and nodded with a slight grin. He said, “You remind me of a lot of young fiery starlets. They come in with their hearts afire, and they usually stick to it long enough to win. Tracy was that way herself,” he commented.

“You have to be that way in this industry,” Tracy stated.

“In every industry,” Susan added.

Louis continued to nod. He said, “Now that doesn't mean that you'll be able to get
Flyy Girl
done here. It's just too expensive. But we'll see what we can do. Maybe we can get, ah . . . Lil' Kim or Queen Latifah involved,” he commented. “They're both hip-hoppers.”

Susan agreed with him and said, “Yeah, we have a lot of different names and ideas to run through.”

I decided to hold my tongue at that point. I was forgetting the laws of power that I had studied. Arguing with the man was not going to secure us a film deal. And he was right. We needed a bigger studio. He was already trying to think of marketing gimmicks to make the film happen. And shooting
Flyy Girl
with gimmicks would make it cheap, cheesy, and disappointing for all of the girls who believed in the book and would die to see the movie.

I had nothing against them, but Lil' Kim and Queen Latifah did not fit the
Flyy Girl
script. Period. End of story. The man was only trying to name-drop with them because they were both popular at the moment.