Boss Lady (6 page)

I was just curious to know where the black stars did their thing.

Kendra said, “Oh, there's definitely black parties. We just don't have as many because we don't wrap as many movies as they do. You know what I mean?”

I nodded to her. Hollywood was white America's biggest invention, and I would not soon forget that.

By the end of the wrap party I was worn out, and it was only eleven o'clock. However, spending a few hours with those people was quite enough.

I leaned back into the black leather seats of our stretch limo, alone with my cousin, and Tracy went right at me.

“You see how this game works?” she asked me.

Did I ever. I just nodded to her. One Hollywood party like that was all it took.

“And you think you can handle this on a regular basis?”

I wasn't so sure anymore, but I was still willing to try.

“I mean, won't it be different at a black party?” I asked her. I had never been surrounded by that many white people before. Or at least not in an intimate setting.

Tracy answered, “A little bit. But at the white parties, at least you stand out. I've been to black parties where everybody's waiting for Denzel Washington to show up. And he won't show until the party's nearly over. So what fun is that?”

“What about the younger stars?” I asked her.

“What younger stars? The television people? Nobody gets excited over them,” she told me. “They're all trying to get into movies.”

I was confused a minute. Was my cousin telling me that we really didn't have any stars in black Hollywood? Because I would have been excited to meet a few.

She read my confusion and said, “Understand this, Vanessa, if you understand nothing else about fame and stardom. There are
really only two levels in this game: stars who are in projects, and actors and actresses who are trying to get into projects. And you're only a star when you're attached to something. That's how fickle this business is.”

“But what if you leave Hollywood and do movies back in the cities?” I asked her. I was thinking about her shooting a
Flyy Girl
movie back home in Philadelphia. Everyone talked about that at home. It would be an urban hit. No question about it. All Tracy had to do was find the right people to put in it.

My cousin smiled at me and said, “I can see exactly where you're going with that. And I've been discussing the
Flyy Girl
project, believe me. But first I have to prove that we have a big enough urban audience to green-light a
Flyy Girl
film.”

I said, “But we would see that movie two and three times if it came out. Everybody says that. All you have to do is shoot it and advertise it.”

“I wish it were that easy,” my cousin told me. “But to do it right, it would still take more than independent money.”

“How much would it cost?” I asked her. I was sure that with the huge budgets that I read about in Hollywood movies, that they had the money out there to shoot
Flyy Girl.
What was so hard about getting it?

“It would cost us about twenty million dollars,” Tracy answered.

I thought about it and said, “Will Smith gets that all by himself.”

“Yeah, but not for black movies. He doesn't even do black movies anymore. He's, like, the science fiction king.”

She was right. I just laughed at it. Will Smith was like the only black person in the past five movies that I saw him in.

“So what kind of budgets do they give for black movies?” I asked my cousin.

“Generally between eight and sixteen million, and those are for proven all-star casts. And usually, you're dealing with comedies, not dramas. And
Flyy Girl
is definitely a drama in an age group where we don't really have stars.”

“What about if you use all rappers and singers?” I joked. They were stars.

Tracy said, “That's exactly my point. We would be shooting in the dark. We don't know if we can invest twenty million dollars in unproven
talent. That's what rappers and singers are when you put them in movies. It's not automatic. They really have to make it work.”

I said, “Well.” I didn't want the conversation to end. There just had to be a way to make
Flyy Girl
happen.

Tracy grinned and said, “Let's save this argument for another day.”

But I had no idea how many days I had left.

I said, “Tracy, I know this is a big decision for both of us, but I really want to be here. I mean, I dreamed all my life of being in this position, and I don't want to just come out here and lose it. I mean, I could help you in whatever you would need me to help you with. I'm learning how to be a good assistant. I'm learning how the Hollywood game works. And remember, I'm only sixteen now. So if you keep me around the right people, I'm real confident that in a few more years, with more experience under my belt, I'll be a real asset to you. I mean, I promise you that.”

We were cruising through Hollywood, dressed to impress and sitting in the plush leather seats of a black stretch limo. You think I wanted to give that up so easy? No way!

Tracy just leaned back in her seat and stared at me. Then she smiled.

She said, “I had already made up my mind that I would let you stay here, Vanessa. I just needed to make sure that you really wanted to. Because this is not a passive decision. Hollywood is not about just being there, it's about working it. Plain and simple. So if you wanna stay out here and help me, then get yourself prepared to work.”

I said, “I can do that. That's what I want to do.”

Tracy nodded her head and said, “Aw'ight then, little cousin. If you really want it, you just remember that you asked for it.”

 

The Boss Lady

B
y the spring of 2003, I was a second-semester freshman studying media relations at UCLA. I was still hanging in there and learning the ropes of the Hollywood game, and freelancing as the personal assistant of my celebrity cousin, Tracy Ellison Grant. However, her shine in the film world was no longer as bright as it was in the book industry. I was involved in the majority of the interview and fact-checking process when Tracy wrote her sequel book,
For the Love of Money,
with author Omar Tyree, and the book set the market on fire as soon as it was published.
For the Love of Money
hit the
New York Time'
s bestsellers list in a week and went on to win an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. But
Road Kill,
my cousin's second feature film, tanked at the box office. It pulled in a mere twelve million dollars after the production company spent close to thirty million to produce it. Tracy followed that up with an ignored film called
Jump-start,
about a con woman who finds a change of heart when she adopts a younger cousin, who loses her single mom to a drug overdose.

The films were not that bad, actually. The reviews were even balanced. Some critics liked them, other critics did not. No one hated the projects or lambasted Tracy's performances in them. I just don't think that many people cared. You had to give the people what they wanted, and at the time, I guess no one wanted to see a black woman vigilante in an action flick, or a black woman play a change-of-heart wheeler-dealer. Or maybe no one wanted to see Tracy play those roles.

Tracy and I talked about it from different angles.

“J. Lo and Halle Berry are getting press more for their lifestyles than their film careers, if you really look at it,” I assessed to my cousin.

“And that role that Halle won the Oscar for, I mean, I hate to say it, but that was some raw stuff she did in that movie.”

Tracy grinned and agreed with me.

“You got that right. She outdid me with that one.”

We were eating strawberry ice cream with our feet up on the coffee table in the living room while we watched
Entertainment Tonight
on the floor-model television set. And we finally had enough furniture in the house to stop visitors from joking about echoes.

Tracy said, “J. Lo has won a couple of weekends at the box office though.”

“She just came out on the right weekends,” I commented. I wasn't trying to hate on her, I was just stating the facts.

I said, “In the long run,
Led Astray
will make you just as much money or more than J. Lo's and Halle Berry's films. It was just well done. And it's racking up the rentals now at Blockbuster.”

“What about
Road Kill
and
Jump-start
?” my cousin asked me with a smirk.

I smiled at her with ice cream on my tongue.

“You can't win them all,” I answered.

We laughed about it and kept talking.

I said, “But I know one movie of yours that would blow everybody out of the box.”

Tracy looked at me, took a deep breath, and sighed.

“Here we go with that again.”

“I mean, you know it's true,” I argued. I was talking about none other than
Flyy Girl,
the movie. Or even
For the Love of Money
for that matter. After they had read and fallen in love with the book, Tracy must have gotten at least ten emails a day,
every day,
from inner-city girls begging to have
Flyy Girl
made into a movie.

Tracy asked me, “And who could open the movie in my role?”

“Meagan Good is real hot right now after
Biker Boyz,”
I answered. “She could do it. Or Beyoncé's little sister, Solange Knowles.”

I had already done my homework on it. I had a whole list of black girls who were moving up the ranks in the entertainment world, who were still teenagers or could still pass for one.

Tracy grinned, realizing I was prepared to defend my argument.

She said, “Meagan is okay. I don't know about Solange, though. I mean, I hear she wants to get into the entertainment business, but you know how it is with the lesser-known family members. It just doesn't seem to work. It seems like the Wayans and Baldwin brothers are about the only ones who can get away with that.”

“Well, let's go talk to Meagan's people then. We don't have to use Solange. She looks closer to you though.”

I was just ready to do it. We were all out there in Hollywood already. What was the big holdup?

Tracy said, “Susan and I have already discussed the project with several producers, and none of them seem to get it. It's just too many unknowns involved for them to want to finance it.
Biker Boyz
was jam-packed with known stars, and it still tanked.”

“But it did wonders for Meagan and Derek Luke,” I noted.

“Yeah, but neither one of them can open a movie, Vanessa,” my cousin argued. “What did Derek Luke do for
Antwone Fisher,
even with Denzel Washington co-starring and directing it? Nothing,” she answered for herself.

“It was up for an award at least,” I argued. I said, “And I think it depends on who they're trying to open a movie for. If you asked urban teenagers, they'll go see them in the right film every day of the week, just like they did for John Singleton's movies. But if you're counting on these stuck-up–behind Hollywood people to see it . . .”

My cousin cut me off and said, “You sound just like a college student. I used to be the same way when I was at Hampton. You get up in college and all of a sudden you think you can just up and change the world.”

She was halfway laughing at me.

I said, “Well, isn't that why we go to college in the first place, to be the next wave of movers and shakers?
You
did it. I mean, you're out here in Hollywood now, and a lot of girls look up to you. They may not have agreed with all of the things you did, but they love the fact that you represented the urban reality so well, and that you survived it. And they just want to see that representation on the big screen.”

“And you think I don't? Some things just take more time, Vanessa,” she argued.

My cousin had a point of course, but I was already on a roll. I said, “What about when Spike Lee was doing all his New York movies? I mean, if we need to leave starstruck Hollywood and go back to the streets to get it done, then that's what we need to do.”

I had put in overtime doing research on black films, while renting and watching them all. I had gotten gung-ho about the entire filming process.

Tracy said, “That was a different time back then, Vanessa. Independent films were a lot easier to be picked up for distribution back then. But now we have a lot of those same films going straight to DVD instead. Is that what you want to happen to
Flyy Girl
? I know I want a theatrical release myself, and not some underground rental sleeper. What's the point in waiting all of this time to do that?”

She stopped me in my tracks with that one. I wanted to see
Flyy Girl
on the big screen, too, in a breakout blockbuster weekend, with teenaged girls lined up all across the country. I just felt that urban American girls deserved our own breakout film. We needed our own
Boyz n the Hood
and our own
American Graffiti. Flyy Girl
was it.

Before I could get out another word on the subject, Tracy's cell phone went off. She looked down at the number before she stood up to answer it.

“Hey,” she answered while walking toward the kitchen. That's all I needed to know. It was her “friend.” That's all she called him, and she had been “friends” with him for over a year. But she never let him stay over at the house. She even used me as her excuse to keep him at bay. I would have liked to have lived on UCLA's campus, but Tracy had gotten used to having me around the house with her.