by Omar Tyree
He held Susan’s face in his hands and kissed her forehead before he hugged her.
She said, “Uncle Eddie, this is Tracy Ellison from Philadelphia, one of the best upcoming screenwriters in the business.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You’re tall,” he said, as if my height were about to knock him over. I stood almost eye to eye with him.
“Yeah, the height is in my genes,” I told him.
He hugged me and asked us both to sit in the chairs before his desk, while he sat on top of it between us. Three of the walls in the small study were stacked with fine wooden shelves that were filled with books. Behind his desk was a huge window with a clear view of the mountainside, the moon, and the stars.
Mr. Edward Weisner looked at me again. “Did you say your surname was Ellison?”
I nodded and said, “I don’t know if I’m related to Ralph Ellison though. My father doesn’t know the whole family history, so maybe I’ll do some research on it one day.”
He nodded back to me. “Ralph Ellison was a great man, a man of dignity and character.”
I nodded again, not really knowing what to expect from him.
He nodded back to me. It was a rather awkward meeting.
Suddenly he asked, “So, Tracy, what is your dream film idea? Do you have one yet?”
First I looked to Susan, who only smiled at me. Payback is a bitch! She had me on the spot.
I answered, “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Find out,” he said, “because if you don’t know, then no one knows.”
I figured it was an ambiguous question. A “dream film” could change every year. Maybe it was his test question to all new hopefuls in the business, and it looked as if I had failed.
As if he were reading my mind, Mr. Weisner said, “Tracy, every film that you do should be a dream film.”
I smiled, agreeing with his point.
He went on and said, “You write every film as if it’s your last, because you never want to save anything when the inspiration of your people is at stake.”
Did Susan set my ass up for a lecture, or did her uncle always spit out advice like a professor? Nevertheless, the man had my full attention.
He said, “You have to believe that you can somehow make a difference. Maria Sanchez had eight children, and a husband who passed away before her oldest son was fourteen. And today, all eight of Maria’s children have earned college degrees.”
He paused a moment to make sure that I understood his point before he started back up again. Susan didn’t say another word.
“We all get opportunities in life, Tracy, no matter how big or how small. But the question we all have to ask ourselves is this: Am I going to take that opportunity, and if I do, then what am I going to do with it?”
He was a dramatic speaker using emphasis for clarity. All I did was nod and continue to listen to him.
“You have to have a passion for whatever it is that you decide to do with your life. And to live your life without passion,” he said, “is like not really living at all.”
Susan smiled and said, “Tracy has plenty of that. She’ll speak her mind on anything. She even has her own book out, and she writes some fabulous poetry too.”
I guess that Susan wasn’t that mad at me because she was damn sure pumping me up.
Her uncle looked and asked, “Oh really?”
“It’s sort of a novelized memoir book based on her coming-of-age in Philadelphia during the 1980s called Flyy Girl,” she told him.
I didn’t consider Flyy Girl as the kind of book that he would be interested in, but my poetry could stand up against anyone’s.
Her uncle nodded. “A fly in the buttermilk, to stand out against the mundane, the exceptional against the average,” he commented. He said, “And the great Jewish American poet Allen Ginsberg said the poem itself was his way of speaking out and telling the truth.”
I nodded and finally decided to speak up myself. “I like Ginsberg’s poetry. He makes it exciting to read,” I commented. Just like I do, I thought to myself.
“Of course he does; he was passionate about the art,” Mr. Weisner responded. “And what you always want to remember, Tracy, is this: Those who create for the love of the art, are consistently getting better, but those who create for the love of money, those guys are forever getting worse.”
$ $ $
“So, what do you think about my uncle?” Susan asked me on the way back to my townhouse in Baldwin Hills that night.
I smiled and said, “He wasn’t what I expected.” I had some apologizing to do.
Susan said, “You expected to meet some snobbish old man who barely spoke a word to you, right? A man who would judge you every second that you’re there, and talk about you as soon as you leave?”
I hesitated to admit it, but I had to.
“Go ahead, Tracy, say it. That’s what you expected, right?” Susan coerced me.
“You’ve made your point, Susan,” I finally responded to her.
“I’ve made my point about what?”
She wanted a full confession out of me. I grinned and said, “I apologize for the assumptions. Your uncle seems like a nice guy. He understands things.”
Susan shook her head and smiled to herself. I knew not to read her wrong anymore. She was indeed good people, rich or not.
“And I’m sorry about my assumptions with you,” I added. “But you heard what your uncle said, right? All of your ideas should mean something to you. And you can’t compromise that. Just like I’m not going to compromise my show.”
Susan grinned, understanding my point. “You’re right,” she said. “I jumped too far ahead of myself on that. So I apologize to you as well. And we’ll just keep shopping your original idea until we find a place for it.”
She had learned her first big lesson as an agent, and she knew not to take my ideas too lightly, because I was not a sellout. However, her uncle had inspired me. I wasn’t even thinking about television shows anymore. I was thinking about writing my first “dream film.”
I chuckled about it. I asked, “Does he always give lectures like that, or did you set me up?”
Susan laughed out loud. She said, “He taught film studies courses at USC, nearly a half century ago, before he got into the film business himself. Now he has these flashbacks of his teaching days whenever he gets around young people. I guess that I’m a little used to that by now.”
“Mmm hmm,” I responded. “So you did set me up for that.”
$ $ $
When I sat at home by myself that night, I couldn’t sleep. I thought about the whole money game verses art, in film, music, sports, everything. It was very easy for a person who never had anything to be led astray by the money. The hunger does it to you; the American hunger for excessiveness. You just want it all because they tell you that you can have it. Some people will even kill for it. So I wrote two poems that night, “Blood Money” and “Love/Money.” After that, I came up with a screenplay idea dealing with a sister who comes out to Hollywood, gets caught up in the confusion of it all, and is basically led astray herself. I wrote a poem about that subject as well, “Led Astray,” and I figured that the title would also work well for the screenplay, Led Astray, the feature film. Before I went to bed that night, I wrote down the beginning and the ending of the script.
The beginning: A jaded, twenty-something black woman makes several phone calls to Hollywood agents, directors, and producers from her drab apartment in East Hollywood. On all of her phone calls she gets the same runaround: “We’ll get back to you.”
She sits next to the phone, lights up a cigarette, and takes a small drink, plotting: “I’m gonna find out a way to get these motherfuckers. All of them!”
The end: The same black woman smiles, looking healthy and uplifted as she leans over a piece of white legal paper with a pen in hand. She signs over the rights of her Hollywood story to a film company for two and a half million dollars.
Afterward, the media ask
s her, “So how does it feel to be a brand-new millionaire?”
She stops and thinks to herself, holding their attention for a long television close-up. Five different stations all push and shove, desperate to capture her first words for their own network ratings. She smiles and answers, “No comment,” and slips on designer sunshades to walk away from it all in the bright afternoon sunshine.
A Declaration
Us
black
WOMEN
have to realize
when we KNOWS our shit!
Us
black
WOMEN
have to realize
that NOBODY can TAKE IT away!
So, these
black
MEN
have to realize
that we DESERVE our respect!
And these
black
MEN
have to realize
to PROTECT their pearls!
Need I say more?
I THOUGHT not!
So let it be written,
and PUBLISH IT!
Copyright © 1991 by Tracy Ellison
April 2000
I sat down with the screenplay to Road Kill in front of my computer that Thursday evening and began to retool the entire script. First, I had to give my girl Alexis a lot more lines, with cool, sharp, urban wit. I had to rewrite the action scenes to add more weapons, fast reflexes, surprises, and street smarts to replace the wrestling, kicking, crawling, and all of the obvious setups. I think we’ve all seen enough of the bad guys falling through windows, or up against broken broomsticks and sharp hooks, and carrying on. Those tricks were as old as bloody panties, and they all needed to be soaked, scrubbed, dried, and sometimes thrown the hell away! So I tossed that stuff out of the script completely. I also tossed all of the flashbacks to explain my character. I would let her words do it.
For example, to explain why she’s so damn tough, I’d have her say something like, “Actually, I should have been born a boy, but that doesn’t mean I eat pussy. I like to be the one being pleased. Deeply. But if I was a man, then I’d be the one doing the pleasing.” That way, there would be no confusion about her sexual orientation. She’s straight.
To explain how she became a Special Units agent, she’ll just say, “I was qualified.” After you see her kicking ass, who’s going to doubt her? I did away with my character showing extra sympathy for the abused women. Leave it to a man to write some ignorant shit like that! Feeling a connection to the horror of sexual abuse is a given. Alexis could reveal that empathy with one long stare and a nod. So I deleted all of that sympathy shit too. My version of Road Kill would be a hard-core, psychological, action movie, driven by a black woman! I wanted the screenplay to be off the hook, off the chain, and off the damn pole when I was finished with it!
I added an inch-long scar to the left side of my character’s neck that would run from behind her ear and stop at her jawline to add a little depth. She hides it with makeup when she’s undercover. I added a scar right below her panty line on the right side of her abdomen. To explain the scars, she simply says, “I survived it.” I also wrote in a black man and a club scene to the script. I figured that Alexis is still a woman, so she would want to get her groove on like any other woman. I would have her meet a brother at a club, and he takes her back to his place and tries to get a little rougher than what she wants. So she kicks his ass and nearly kills him, just to send a message out to all of those brothers who are used to getting away with that date rape shit!
It took me until Sunday afternoon to make the script perfect, or as perfect as I could make it. I printed it out from my disk and took it to a nearby Kinko’s to have five copies printed and bound.
“Hey, aren’t you Tracy Ellison Grant from Led Astray?” the copy guy asked me. He was an early twenties heartthrob for white girls, tall, dark-haired, and handsome. I bet that he wanted to be in pictures too.
I smiled at him and said, “Yup, that’s me.”
He nodded and smiled back at me. “I loved your performance. You’re a heck of a talent.”
“Thank you,” I told him.
He started my print job and asked me if Road Kill was my next big film project. I told him that it was.
“It sounds pretty interesting. I’m just going by the title.”
“Well, you’re the audience. You, your gang of buddies, and all of your girlfriends; the early twenties crowd who like edge and plenty of surprises,” I said. “The Blair Witch Project crowd.”
He grinned and nodded. “Cool.”
When I left, I stopped off at a carryout for some Chinese food, and even they noticed me.
“Hey, you’re, ah, Tracy Ellison Grant,” the cashier said to me. She was a young woman in her early twenties as well. Maybe she was a college student.
I smiled and gave myself away. The young woman turned and said something in her native tongue to an older woman, probably her mother, who approached me at the counter and nodded with a smile.
“I like ya’ movie,” she told me with a fixed smile.
I couldn’t help it; I felt great when I drove back home that Sunday evening! Stardom wasn’t all bad, especially when people appreciated your work.I arrived at home and checked my answering machine before I ate my hot and spicy chicken and shrimp platter. My girl Kendra had called me and left a message. She and her new husband, Louis, were expecting their first child in October. I was happy for her.
I called her back before I ate.
“Hey, fat belly, I’m back in town. What’s going on?”
Kendra laughed and said, “I am hardly fat.”
“You’re gonna be,” I told her, “especially if you’re having a girl.”
“You believe that stuff?”
“Yeah. My mother said that she was much fatter with me than she was with my brother,” I told her. “And my girl Raheema was heavier with her daughter.”
“Whatever,” Kendra said. “So how was your trip back home?” she asked.
I took a deep breath and sighed. “It was full of ups and downs, girl. Full of ’em. I even found out that one of my best girlfriends from college married a white man.”
“Get out of here! From Hampton? Do I know her?”
“No, she went to Cheyney State, outside of Philadelphia, when I was back in high school.”
“Oh. Well, what did you say about it, because I know you had something to say,” she assumed.
“Actually, I was kind of in shock. I didn’t know what to say.”
“Get out of here! You always have something to say.”
“Well, I tried to let her know that nothing is perfect with any man, especially those on the other side of the color line, but she said that she was happy with hers and showed me pictures of her two daughters. They even have African names. So what could I really say? I just have to get over it.
“I’ll call her up soon and talk to her,” I added. “She told me that I shouldn’t expect to treat her any differently, so I’ll call her up and see if that’s true.”
“I know you will,” Kendra said with a laugh.
“Well, I just wanted to call you back,girl, because I’m about to eat over here.”
“What are you having?”
“Hot and spicy chicken and shrimp.”
“Chinese food?”
“Yup.”
“Hmm, it sounds good, but I don’t know what I can eat nowadays. Sometimes I smell stuff that I used to like, and I feel like throwing up on the spot.”
I laughed and said, “Well, that’s all a part of pregnancy, so I hear, because I’ve never been pregnant.”
Kendra didn’t respond to that. She said, “Well, let me go and let you eat, and I’ll talk to you later on in the week.”
Before she hung up I told her that I was up for a big lead in a psychological action film.
Kendra stopped and said, “I’m really proud of you, Tracy. You just didn’t come out here to squeeze your way onto a couple of se
ts, you came out here to run the show!”
“Well, you know how we do it in Philly. We always go for the gold,” I bragged.
Kendra sucked her Baltimore teeth and said, “Here we go with that again.”
I chuckled and said, “All right then, I’ll talk to you later.”
I hung up the phone, got out a big plate to eat my food, and sat down in front of the thirteen-inch television set in my kitchen to watch the entertainment channel. They were interviewing Halle Berry. She was still doing her thing in Hollywood, and she was still up and down with her love for the brothers. I couldn’t feel sorry for her, because she was working her career like a charm. I did think about myself though. I was on my way to turning twenty-nine, one year away from thirty, with no permanent man.
Suddenly, a chill ran up the back of my spine and struck my brain.
“Damn! Thirty, with no family!” I mumbled to myself with food in my mouth. I couldn’t talk the bullshit that there were no available brothers out there either, because I had close friends who were happily married.
I tried to keep eating and block it out of my mind. I thought about Kiwana again. Halle Berry had tried out the other side of the color line too, to get her Dorothy Dandridge role. Plenty of sisters were crossing the line. Could it happen to me in two or three more desperate years? I doubted it. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any men, I just had a hard time telling myself to stay with them while being committed to doing my own thing. Was it my fault for being a woman heavily into her own career? If it was, then that was too damn bad. The real brothers were into their careers, and no one seemed to have a problem with that. Thirty years old wasn’t the end of the world anyway, so I finally did succeed in blocking it out. I had a script to turn in.
$ $ $
After turning in three copies of my completed script for Road Kill to The Don at his office that Monday morning, Susan took her copy, and I kept two for myself, including the original printout.
Susan called me at home that afternoon and said, “It looks like you had a field day on this thing. I might have to ask for a million for the script alone now,” she joked.