by Omar Tyree
She smiled. “No, I think I know how you are by now, Tracy, and you’ll say anything that comes to your mind, but I will give you a serious warning: Do not even joke like that to the press.”
I looked at Susan and said, “Shit, I wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, my people need to think more in regards to their own money issues instead of complaining about other people. You know how many black celebrities died penniless? Too many! And it was all because of their own lack of good money habits.”
“Well, that won’t be you. If you die broke, then I’ll die broke. And I mean that.”
I looked into Susan’s eyes and she was dead serious. I knew her well enough to know it too. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was depositing my money in her bank account. My finances were all up to me anyway, and I was sure that Susan would say something to me if I began to spend money on Mike Tyson–like shopping sprees.
I said, “Okay, you’re right; he gets fifteen percent. Now what about the five hundred thousand? Do you think that’s too much?”
Susan grinned and said, “Well, since I don’t want to sound greedy like a J-E-W, we can offer him your two million.”
I broke out laughing again. “Two million of your money,” I snapped.
She said, “Well, you know, I was just being a stereotypical B-L-A-C-K. I just love throwing money away. Take me to the nearest clothing or jewelry store,” she cracked.
“O-o-o-kaaay,” I responded. I smiled it off and chuckled, but I sure felt the burn.
Susan asked, “You’re not offended that I said that are you?”
What the hell could I say? “No, I’m not offended,” I whimpered.
“Good, because if you’re gonna dish it out, then be prepared to take it back.”
I smiled and nodded. “That’s why I like you, Susan, you tell it like it is, just like I do.”
She stood up and said, “Well, I’ve had good lessons from you. Boldness is growing on me now. So, I’ll send this proposal and offer out right away and see what happens.”
$ $ $
When my first reporter arrived from Movie Life magazine, a dark-haired Italian woman named Jackie Perrotta, I showed her in and planned to be as lighthearted as possible. Who really cared about cultural and political views of an actress anyway? I planned to give the people just what they wanted, the hype. I was sure that Jackie already knew the figures on my new contract from reading The Hollywood Reporter or the Daily Variety. So I just went wild with the interview.
She said, “So, Tracy, you’re obviously beautiful. You could make tons of money by just being pretty on the screen. But now you’re going to do a big-time action movie. Is that what you want to do, or are you just trying something different?”
I answered, “Are you kidding me? I’ve wanted to kick a guy’s ass real good all of my life. Haven’t you? They’re such assholes!”
Jackie laughed her behind off. I guess I caught her off guard with it.
“Yeah, I’ve had a few,” she admitted.
“I know you have. Have you dated exclusively Italians?” I asked her.
She shook her head and said, “No.”
“Well, so far, I’ve only gone for brothers with the gusto, you know,” I said, grabbing at my crotch, à la Foxy Brown. “But if these white men keep offering me these Robert Redford deals, I don’t know how many more I can turn down before I break out and say, ‘SHOW ME THE MONEY!’”
Jackie could barely ask her questions because she was laughing so hard. “Well, is it true that it’s increasingly difficult for a black woman of your stature to find a suitable man?”
I looked around in my big, beautiful, and relatively empty California home and asked, “Do you see one? What is he, invisible? TY-RONE!” I stood up and screamed for affect. “DAR-NELL!” I yelled up my stairs. “POOOKAAAY!” I hollered toward the back porch.
“Oh my God!” Jackie commented. “You’re an absolute riot!”
I didn’t think much at all of that interview, and that’s not because I didn’t like Jackie or Movie Life magazine. It was their job to give the people what they want, and the people didn’t want education, they wanted entertainment.
When my second reporter arrived, a young East Indian woman named Pascha Shiam, I was pleasantly surprised. She was darker than me with long, straight, jet black hair that black American men would damn-near kill for on a sister! Since I was already in a silly-behind mood, I went straight for the jugular.
“So, Pascha, have you ever slept with a black man?”
“Excuse me?” Her eyes nearly popped out of her head.
I asked, “You know, have you ever jumped bones with a black man before, like Denzel Washington in Mississippi Masala? What do y’all call boning in India anyway?”
She was too embarrassed to answer me.
“I’m supposed to interview you,” she said with a laugh.
“Well, I haven’t boned an East Indian man. Are they fairly large downstairs?”
Pascha laughed some more before she pulled out her tape recorder.
“Can we get you on record too? Tell me about the size,” I pressed her, “when the tape is on.”
She said, “I’d rather not, but the size is normal.”
“And what does normal mean?”
She put her face in her hands, still embarrassed by me. She said, “I guess around six inches.”
“You actually measured them?” I asked her.
“No, I read that somewhere.”
“Are you sure you don’t have a little nine-inch ruler in your bag, Pascha?”
“I swear to you. I don’t.”
Pascha told me that the interview for Fade In: was a straight Q&A. That caught me by surprise as well. Once she told me that, I got rid of my silliness real quick.
“This is a straight Q&A?” I asked her just to make sure.
“Yeah.”
“With all of the background information up front?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Well, shit, is this a cover story?” Fade In: usually used the Q&A format for their cover subjects.
Pascha said, “They haven’t really made up their minds yet, but I heard the editor asking about seeing if we could get some photos of you on the set, so maybe they are.”
“But this is far too early for that. Road Kill doesn’t come out until next summer.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know until it happens.”
I was getting excited for nothing, because it couldn’t have been a cover story. You would know that well in advance. Nevertheless, there was no way in the world that I would allow myself to sound like an idiot for a straight Q&A interview, so I changed my entire tone.
“Okay, let’s do it then.”
She clicked on her tape.
Q: “You had an unusual start as an actress where you were actually a television writer first. Was that the way that you planned it, to move into screenplays and then acting?”
A: “No, I actually had no plans on that at all. I knew I wanted to write screenplays eventually, but the acting thing just sort of happened for me. I was told that most writers don’t look like I do. But this whole Hollywood merry-go-round, for me, all began with my lack of fulfillment teaching English in Philadelphia. So I figured that it would be natural for me to start with the writing, and then one thing led to the next.”
Q: “Did you find that your educational background made it easier for you to succeed, or was it something that had very little to do with the creative process?”
A: “Oh, I like that question. Thank you for asking. A lot of people assume, particularly in the African-American community, that education and creativity don’t necessarily mix. But the more you know, the more you have to be creative about. For instance, I write poetry, and I’ve written poetry since my senior year of high school. And as I received more education, my poetry became more complicated, and more inspiring. I look at screenplays the same way. You can’t write what you don’t know. That’s why creative people tend to s
tand out, because they know more and they use what they know to their advantage. And I’m not saying that a person who never went to college cannot succeed in this business, I’m just saying that it was a straight arc of success for me because I did have that educational experience to know what work needs to be done to get there.”
Q: “However, plenty of young people in Hollywood have education from various film schools, and their arc is still not as fast as your arc was. In your opinion, what made your talents stand out, or was it as simple as luck?”
A: “Well, luck is never that simple, because you can luck up and destroy your career if you’re not prepared for it. When I first arrived out here in California, every young writer I knew was talking about the famous Shane Black story of success too fast. And it can ruin you just like that. But I think that my special talent is just plain hard work. I’m always thinking about new ideas, and I follow my heart, just like with my poetry. So when other people say, ‘You can’t do that’ I ask, ‘Why not?’ and do it anyway. I’m bold like that, and I’ve always been that way.”
Q: “How different is the acting from the writing?”
A: “It’s very different, and very similar. The difference, of course, is the feeling. You have to feel the role and almost become possessed by it. In writing, you have to think the role. What would this person say? What would this person do? But then there’s some feeling in the writing as well, feeling out the entire rhythm of the activities involved, and in acting there is some thinking involved, particularly when the feeling tells you that something is wrong in the script. And you have to be confident enough to speak up about it. So with Road Kill, I made a lot of changes to the original screenplay as an actor and as a writer.”
Q: “Will you write more of your own vehicles to star in in the future, or will you read other scripts and tailor them to fit your specific needs?”
A: “Both. Because I know there will be stories, specifically as an African-American woman, that Hollywood will not write. So I will have to write those stories myself. Then there will be roles like this one in Road Kill, where an African-American woman will not be a consideration for the part, and I’ll have to force my way in, but it will not always be about tailoring the script, because if someone writes a strong generic role that does not need to be touched, then I will feel the honesty in that and play the role as it was originally written.”
On the last question for the Fade In: Q&A, Pascha asked me to give any final words of advice or encouragement to aspiring writers and actresses of color.
I said, “I wrote a poem while teaching in the Philadelphia public school system called ‘Ignorance Is Bliss’ to explain the commonality of people who don’t seek out information. And it’s a short poem where I wrote: ‘Ignorance is bliss / because real knowledge / is painful. And who really wants to wake up / and do nine to five / when lazy dreams can be so / pleasant?’ And it basically means that answers make you work. So as long as you can say, ‘I didn’t know,’ you have an excuse not to do anything. And in the business of Hollywood, of course, many people would love to be stars, but then when you tell them that they have to take step one, two, and three, a, b, and c, dot your i’s, cross your t’s, and remember your commas, they say, ‘Well, what’s the other way to become a star?’ And there is no other way. Because pure luck, like I said earlier, will lead you astray and have you strung out for the Hollywood fame with no real skills to survive in it. So I would say to always seek out information and be prepared to accept the workload involved.”
$ $ $
I felt uplifted after the Fade In: interview. I must have thanked Pascha four or five times for her great questions, and I apologized to her for my ignorance from when she had first walked in. However, once I sat down and thought about it, I asked myself, “Now how many black people are going to even read Fade In:? I need to have a great interview like that in a black magazine.” Problem was, many black magazines seemed more concerned with the entertainment value or the money aspect and not the educational value. The Fade In: Q&A spoiled me to the possibilities of my own voice. So I nodded to myself and made a decision. “From now on, if it’s not a Q&A, then I’m not doing the interview. Because I have no time to waste for other people’s editorials determining who I am and what I stand for.”
Lucky Like Me
You step up.
I step up.
You choose your number,
and I choose mine.
Then we both become
blind
as our numbers
bounce, bounce, bounce,
smack, slap, POP
in the box.
Then
SSSOUP!
My number shoots up,
and I win the prize
that you still
hope for.
Sistah,
my life,
and yours
should be much more
secure
than a
damn
lottery!
Educate
yourself
and your number,
like mine,
shall rise
regardless!
Copyright © 1999 by Tracy Ellison Grant
Early 1999
When Black Hollywood found out that I had a movie deal on the frying pan, and that I was about to take acting classes to prepare for the lead role, the shit hit the fan again. I guess that I was just the girl who everyone loved to hate out there.
Reba Combs called me up first, and we weren’t even on speaking terms anymore. I had heard through the grapevine that our Southern pilot show idea had turned into something called Peaches and Cream, about a black girl and her white friend who ends up moving in after her parents are killed in an airplane crash. That was exactly the kind of transformation that I was afraid of. They had turned a realistic, Southern perspective into something wholly unimaginable. You mean to tell me that a Southern white girl wouldn’t have any other family members to take her in. Child,please! However, that was Hollywood for you, banking on a fish-out-of-water story.
Reba asked me, “You wrote a role for yourself? You can’t even act. Are you even a member of the Actors Guild? Why would you do something like that? You are really a trip,”she huffed at me.
I said, “Reba, I don’t have the part yet, but they asked me to try it, so I’m going to try it. It’s as simple as that.” The girl went ahead and hung up on me again. I couldn’t believe it!
I called her ass right back, and she either wouldn’t answer the phone, or she hadn’t called me from her apartment, the apartment that I helped her to get. In fact, she was still working off and on for the smaller network shows because of me. Even the new pilot show that she was still in development for was all because of me trying to help her ass out! Boy, she had something coming when I finally caught up with her! She had gotten on my last damn nerve!
I called Coe’s apartment to see if she was over there.
“Hello,” he answered.
“Is Reba over there with you?”
“Yup.”
“Let me speak to her.”
“Hold on.”
I waited for only Coe to return to the line. “She doesn’t want to talk right now.”
“Well, tell her to grow the hell up!” I snapped. “And I plan to be out here making movies in Hollywood for a while, so she should be very careful about making enemies on account of pettiness.”
Coe said, “All right, I’ll tell her.”
I was tempted to ask him how he felt about it, because I knew she had told him. However, I was too pissed off to stay on the phone, and that was just the beginning of it. The bad buzz about me was even beginning to travel to family and friends back at home.
My mother called me up and said, “Tracy, what’s going on out there? We’ve heard that you’ve been in fights over shows and carrying on.”
“I wasn’t fighting over no damn show, Mom,” I responded rather tartly. “People need to get the facts stra
ight.”
“Well, what are the facts?”
“The fact is, we got a lot of petty-ass people out here!”
I heard that people were saying I would continue to set everyone back if I played a role that was damaging to “professional black actresses.” They hadn’t even given me a chance. They all needed to grow the hell up! Of course, there were some sisters who called me up and said, “Go for it!” It wasn’t all bad. Nevertheless, you had others who were only trying to stay close to me in case I didn’t work out in the role. Jonathan Abner must have received thirty-something phone calls with sisters trying to sabotage me and push their way into the role, which was highly embarrassing. We looked like a bunch of slaves begging to be sold at the auction.
You would think that I would be at one of the happiest points in my life, but that wasn’t the case. I was only human, so I was getting tired of fighting all of the nonsense out there. So I called my girl Raheema, long distance in New Jersey, with tears in my eyes, tears of anger, hurt, and disappointment in my people. All I had tried to do was push ahead with my creativity, and I hadn’t stepped on any toes to do so. I had done nothing but try to help people, yet I was being called a traitor because I had an opportunity to play a lead. That’s all that it was, an opportunity. I thought that opportunity was supposed to be the American way and the American dream, but I guess it was not, because quotas were in full effect, and they were driving my people crazy!
I asked, “Raheema, are you busy? You’re not, umm, breast-feeding or anything right now are you?” She had just had her daughter, Lauryn. Time was really flying by on me.
She paused. “No, I’m not breast-feeeding. What’s going on? Is everything all right?”
I guess she could hear the instability in my voice.
I said, “I haven’t told anyone at home about it because nothing has been finalized yet, but I completed a screenplay called Led Astray that we have on the table, and they’re giving me an opportunity to play the lead role.”
“So what’s the problem?” Raheema asked me calmly. She knew that there was one from reading my solemn tone of voice.
