For the Love of Money (54 page)

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 doors 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.”