Sending the script to her agents felt like running into a brownstone's stone walls. Thankfully, during my years at
Billboard
, I'd had contact with Latifah's manager, Shakim Compare, a shrewd brother who'd grown his business alongside Latifah's career. He read the script, passed it to her, and, after some anxious weeks of waiting, set up a meeting with her at a San Fernando Valley recording studio.
My producer, Shelby Stone, and I cooled our heels in the studio's rec room, munching on pretzels, watching an NBA game, and knocking around balls on the pool table. All the while I'm in my head practicing the same speech I'd been rehearsing on the plane ride cross-country. It was passionate and intense, and proved totally unnecessary. Soon as we sat down at a patio table Dana said, “I know this woman,” and that she wanted to play Ana Willis, the character based on Andrea. I was so intent on my little rap that her words, at first, flew right past me.
Not long after committing, Dana and my sister began talking on the phone, finding kinship in their shared astrology sign (Pisces), knowledge of Brooklyn streets, and sharp senses of humor. I don't know everything Andrea told Dana. The details didn't matter to me. What was crucial was that my leading lady and my sister came to an understanding of the character's motivations. Those talks gave Dana the tools she needed to build Ana Willis's world.
Andrea, along with Jade and her husband, Les, were regular visitors to the set. On the days she didn't stop by, Dana often asked about her. For Andrea, having an artist of Queen Latifah's stature play some version of her smoothed over any lingering nervousness about the project. For Dana, having Andrea around gave her a tangible touchstone to build the character upon. The genius thing was that Dana never imitated Andrea. In fact, she tapped into her own history in Brooklyn (where she'd hung out quite a bit as a teenager), and in several improv scenes, crafted dialogue that made Ana Willis different from both herself and Andrea yet still grounded in the film's rough reality. Her Screen Actors Guild, NAACP Image Award, and Golden Globe wins are all testament to Dana's magnificent performance.
My mother's voice would also be represented in the film. Anna Deavere Smith, who played my mother and is famous for her ability to imitate accents in her marvelous one-woman shows, interviewed Arizona extensively. One of the best-liked scenes in
Life Support
features Anna's character scolding her granddaughter, played by Rachel Nicks. It works powerfully, because much of that dialogue came right from my mother's mouth. There's nothing like the voice of a mother telling a child to do right to resonate with audiences.
Casting Queen Latifah was the easiest aspect of preproduction. Making Queen Latifah's schedule work was the hard part, since she had rehearsals for the movie of
Hairspray
looming, an R&B vocal tour, and sundry personal appearances already on her calendar. Because our window of opportunity with her was small, we only had a twenty-day shooting schedule, plus five weeks of prep. So there was no room for error on my part. I had to be prepared, and I had to be decisive. I also had to make sure I hired reliable department heads. Being at the center of all those decisions was new to me, and often quite challenging. Plus, I had to cast the rest of the movie at the same time, including actors to play fictional versions of my mother, my nieces, and my brother-in-law. Amazingly, it all came together, and in fact, the actual shooting was a blessed experience. For example, our able line producer, Mark Baker, got
Life Support
offices at Steiner Studios, a recently opened production facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard not far from Fort Greene. That meant that throughout preproduction, and even on a couple of shoot days, I could walk to and from work, giving me essential moments of calm during very densely packed days.
As I've observed throughout this book, my hometown has always nurtured me, giving me an endless array of things to write about. With this film, it was my turn to give something back and capture Brooklyn's dingy majesty. The borough was changing seemingly every day as we were shooting. The gentrification that began in Park Slope and Cobble Hill had spread to my 'hood Fort Greene, as well as to Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights. The ripple effect of monied, mostly white refugees, along with the impending construction of a score of high-rises in downtown Brooklyn, was raising rents, pushing blue-collar families out, and, in many ways, was changing the feel of large areas of the once hardscrabble borough into a place safe for lattes.
I wanted to capture some of the character I grew up with and found some unlikely touchstones. In the kitchens and dining areas of Jewish homes in Parkside, Jamaican homes in Crown Heights, and African American residences in Prospect Heights we found a remarkable sameness: big wooden breakfronts, ornate and unused display dishes, lace tablecloths, fruit-filled glass bowls, and plastic furniture covering as far as the eye could see. Some particular combination of economics and aesthetics had rendered hundreds, if not thousands, of Brooklyn homes with the same furniture and attitude. While my characters were black, they were also the working poor, just like members of the borough's other long-standing tribes, so the design of the kitchens and dining areas in
Life Support
reflected that particular unity of lifestyle.
My favorite exterior symbol of Brooklyn's ugly beauty was Atlantic Avenue, one of the borough's major thoroughfares, which runs from downtown all the way into Queens. Atlantic isn't as internationally known as Flatbush Avenue or as architecturally rich as Eastern Parkway, but I was born at a hospital on it in 1957, and for years, as I took taxis out to JFK airport, I'd seen corners and structures on Atlantic that would look great on film.
The corner of Nostrand and Atlantic in Bed-Stuy became a key location for
Life Support
. We shot outside of the Yemen Grocery Store there, as well as at a Chinese take-out spot down toward Fulton Street, and then around the corner on Atlantic at the fancifully named (and foul-smelling) Hatlantic Recording Studio. The most poetic shot in the film, beautifully framed by my director of photography, Uta Bresivitz, was a long shot of Ana Willis dragging her ever-present wheelie cart underneath the tattered tracks of the Long Island Rail Road, not far from the Atlantic Avenue hospital where I was born.
Equally pleasing was to find that Birdel's, the record shop I used to visit with my mother in the sixties, and that I later traveled to as a reporter to document the “Rapper's Delight” phenomenon in '79, was still in business; it can be seen in deep background in several Nostrand Avenue shots. Joe Long, now in his seventies, was still selling musicâCDs, vinyl, even eight-tracksâwhich was a wonderful connection of my past to my present.
I wasn't always aware of how connected I was to some of our locations. We were using the exterior of a technical high school a few blocks from Atlantic when Andrea walked up and reminded me that back in the seventies this institution was called Alexander Hamilton High School and we'd attended Model Cities classes there. This same building was the scene of my education in newspaper nuance almost forty summers earlier.
The most important Atlantic location was a private school located next to the elevated section of the avenue in East New York. Turned out the school was run by the ex-husband of a woman who had worked with my mother in Brooklyn schools for decades. Soon as I heard that I really wanted to shoot there. But the deal was sealed when I went up on the roof. From up there you could see the Tilden projects in the distance, a tall cluster of sixteen-story buildings where I'd lived my childhood.
In the last scene of
Life Support
, the film's emotional climax, where red balloons are released in honor of friends who've died of AIDS, the Tilden projects and all of Brownsville is visible. It was a long, hot, exhausting day shooting on that roof in late June 2006. But I did it joyfully. It felt like my life and work had, at least for those hours, come full circle, that those two threads of my life had been weaved into one thick tapestry.
The last thread was music. Maxwell's live version of “This Woman's Work” had haunted me since I first heard it on
MTV Unplugged
. Kate Bush's lyrics and Maxwell's spellbinding vocal connoted all the feelings of love and vulnerability associated with childbirth and parenthood. Even from the script stage of
Life Support
I knew this song was the perfect accompaniment for the rooftop scene.
I'd known Maxwell since before his first album was released. He'd contributed a sexy, wordless vocal to the music that supported my first serious short film,
To Be a Black Man
, a decade before. Making Maxwell's participation even sweeter was that the suave crooner was from East New York himselfâanother Brooklyn homeboy in thrall to music and the search for transcendence. Stuart Mathew-man, the bandleader for Sade and someone I first met back in '85, not only scored
Life Support
but had worked with Maxwell on
Black Man
too. The circle was complete.
Just as the decision to write
Life Support
reclaimed my sister for me, the process of directing the film reconnected me to the streets and thoroughfares that had molded me. It was that connection that allowed me to direct the actors, edit the film, and choose the music with great clarity.
Life Support
isn't a true story. I took liberties with the characters, situations, and conflicts within my family to create a workable drama. All the lessons I'd learned in my writing career came to fruition on the film. And the fact that I wasn't a character in the story had a profound effect on me, liberating me from any self-consciousness about the material and allowing me to focus on making a film about black women, a group as consistently unrepresented and abused by filmmakers (black as well as white) as any in cinematic history.
In terms of our real life story, I wish I could report that all's well that ends well, but, after all, we're talking about family. The tensions between my mother and sister continue, and I imagine they will linger until death do them part. Ma taking custody of Ebony and Leigh was a breach of the mother-daughter bond that may never be closed. Andrea still resents it; Ma still resents having to do it. It is the manifestation of a war of wills that's not gonna end just because I made a movie about them. Movies are finite; life flows on.
Andrea can still irritate me too. But now it's just normal sibling tensions, not painful, deep-seated, or hateful. I didn't know quite where my interview with her would take me, but I do know this: Whether the script had become a movie or not, it definitely brought my sister and me back together. Now she helps decorate my apartment. I have Thanksgiving with her, Les, and Jade. I go to picnics with them. I support her. She supports me. After all these troubled years, I have a sister again.
FAMILY REUNION
It was a warm June evening out in the suburbs of Newport News, Virginia, a once sleepy southern town that in the twenty-first century had boomed with mixed residential development, big-box department stores, and high-tech businesses such as Symantec. I sat outside an Olive Garden in the middle of a sprawling strip mall, holding a small red beeper that would light up when our table was ready. My mother sat across the walkway from me on a green iron bench alongside the reason we were all here: my eighteen-year-old niece, Leigh, who was graduating from high school the next day. Her father wasn't there, but we tried to ignore that fact. Helping in that process was the man sitting next to me, Van, father of my oldest niece, Ebony, who, in the strange alchemy of father-daughter relationships, was actually closer to Leigh than he was to his own daughter. Ebony was in our little circle too, standing a bit to the side, seeming anxious for this dinner to be over. Andrea sat on another metal bench with Jade, who clung lovingly to her mother.
My father came up the walkway alongside his brother James George. They were a pair of short, compact, tough, light-skinned southern boys who had taken very divergent paths since leaving Newport News for good in the late fifties. After serving in the Korean War my father married my mother and moved to New York City. Uncle James had stayed in the service, traveling around the world and moving patiently up the ranks.
By the eighties he was a lieutenant colonel working out of the Pentagon, and in charge of administering the Army's gigantic PX system. After leaving the service he'd started a successful computer business in the D.C.-Maryland area. All through that time he'd been married to the same woman, and had a boy and a girl. He looked fit and prosperous, despite bypass surgery a few years earlier.
Nelson Elmer, the older of the George boys by two years, never had a career, though he'd traveled widely during his peripatetic life. I could probably count the times we'd hung out during my life using my fingers and toes. In fact, as he walked toward me I couldn't remember the last time we'd had a real conversation.
Both my father and uncle wore stylish light-colored summer suits. My uncle had more hair, while my father's balding pate was shaped like my balding pate. I hugged my uncle. I shook hands with my father. Then I noticed that he was missing a lot of teeth. It was hard to believe that a man who'd been careful, almost vain, about his appearance would allow five or six of his front teeth to fall out and not be replaced. He'd been working as a security guard over the last decade. Putting it all together it meant that Nelson Elmer probably had little or no health coverage. Ergo, he had no way to fix his teeth. I tried not to focus on his mouth, which is hard when a man missing a bunch of teeth is talking to you. The nasty irony of this moment was that we were all there to celebrate the fact that Leigh planned to study dentistry in college. All weekend family members would make jokes about getting cheap dental care, or even investing in her sure-to-be-lucrative practice. Yet her grandfather walked around with a sad mouth that everyone noticed and no one had the heart to ask about. Whatever discomfort I had being around him was dissipated every time he spokeâwhich was often. Still, Elmer wasn't a bit self-conscious.