Character Exploration - Sandra: A Protagonist Reflecting Black Womanhood

I have never had more fun getting to know a character than I had with Sandra.  In most of my other scripts and stories, we see a snapshot of a character in a specific place at a specific time in their life.  You build backstory and reveal things about the character throughout, but there’s something that’s beautifully freeing to get to know a character as she gets to know herself over a number of years.  

I have written so many drafts of No Lies Told Then and I am sure the number easily exceeds fifty.  To some it would be a frustrating process, and there were times it was, but it was all a necessary part of the process.  It gave me the opportunity to get to know these characters, especially Sandra.  There are scenes that were written, then deleted, but it allowed me to discover little things about her that helped me create a more complete human being.

I love Sandra.  I’d like to think she would be my sister friend in real life and we would get together weekly over wine to discuss all that’s wrong in the world and how we would fix it.  Quite simply, she is real to me and I honestly believe I was only a vessel used to tell her story.

On the surface, Sandra is the epitome of the narrow idea of how successful black womanhood appears:  striking, confident, well-dressed, well-mannered and “articulate”.  As the author of a popular book series, she should be on top of the world.  Yet, she is far from fulfilled.

She has responsibilities.  There’s her mother who sacrificed so she could succeed.  Her readers who propelled her to superstardom levels in the literary world.  There’s the editor whose success is directly tied to hers.  With a deadline rapidly approaching, and so many people nipping at her heels, she is barely holding it together.

I wanted to peel back the layers of this character to reveal her private struggles and turmoil.  She had dreams for her life, and made choices in the short term that have long term consequences.  She’s trapped and while the world envies her, she’s just a vulnerable, insecure woman who is lost.  What she sees in the mirror is the result of a lifetime full of mistakes.  

I don’t think Sandra realizes how unhappy she is until a chance encounter propels her to reflect on her life, the decisions she’s made and how she arrived at this place in her life.  I think we all have that moment, whether there’s a catalyst or not, when we wonder, “How did I get here?”  Throughout the film, we’ll have the opportunity to watch how she arrived at her crossroad, but more importantly, we’ll see the outcome of her realization.

When I talk to people about Sandra, I say she is all of us.  Her struggles in life are what we all experience; it’s our collective story told through the eyes of one.  She wears a mask.  When it is removed and she faces herself, there she finds No Lies Told Then.

Character Exploration: George

The mysterious painting that's central to George's character...

Fun fact:  I often imagine an actor’s voice in my head when I write.  It helps me find the character’s pitch and consistency in their speech pattern.  In this case, the voice of choice was George Clooney.  I named the character “George” so I knew which voice to listen to in my head.  The name stuck.

I once shared an early draft of No Lies Told Then on a screenwriting website where writers post their work for other writers to review.  The feedback was invaluable in helping me flesh out this character, and it was interesting to read some of the perceptions of George even though I was deliberately vague about one thing I particular.

Before the feedback, George was a handsome, charming, successful and wealthy author.  However, several people pointed out he needed to be more than those things.  They were right and that’s how he became a British expat and acquired more talents; he needed traits other than the obvious to make the protagonist and audience fall in love with him.

He is purposely mysterious in the beginning.  He’s the man we meet in the bar who says all right things and oozes confidence and sex; the perfect potential one night stand.  He’s the fun guy who doesn’t have a care in the world and possesses the unique ability to make every woman who enters his orbit feel like she’s the most important person in his life.  He has perfected the art of saying everything yet nothing at all; always the life of the party and a nurturer in his own way.  It’s something that works very well for him for most of his life.  

Like Johnathan, there are some things I’ve known about George since day one and the most important is the influence of a key figure from his past.  I knew she left him wounded, perhaps fatally, but the who, what and why couldn’t be revealed too early.  In our own lives, it sometimes takes years to understand how our past has left us scarred, so in that way, George is like all of us.

George may look like a man who has it all together, the reality is he is anything but; he is coming apart at the seams.  His lonely existence works for awhile, but when Sandra enters his life as a woman who is his equal in every way, he begins to question if the way he has lived all these years is the path he wants to continue to travel.

Just as Sandra must take her own journey to discover who she is and what she wants, George must do the same.  To move forward, he has to rid himself of the demons of his past.  As an audience we experience his “ah ha” moment with him.  I never expected him to have this moment, but his role in the ending evolved so organically, his story couldn’t remain unfinished.  

Lemonade, No Lies Told Then and Fighting the Pressure to be Perfect

Being broken doesn't take away from being beautiful and wonderful 

The myth of the perfect woman is one of the most widely told and believed lies that’s also dangerous and likely to cause harm to the psyche. In fact, it goes against every single rule of self-love, self-acceptance and healing. The perfect woman never cries, she never lets her emotions get the better of her; she doesn’t ruffle feathers and she never has moments where she seriously doubts or questions herself. In essence, she’s this put together entity with the ability to go through life without letting heartache affect her or without wanting to yell, scream and smash a few cars with a baseball bat named after a condiment. Here’s the thing though - this woman does not exist, she shouldn’t.

She’s not the ideal we should chase. Perfection is a flawed construct because it does away with self-expression, which is so important if we want to be happy and healthy. As women and people of color the pressure to be perfect is sizable - we have to work twice as hard because we have to jump so much higher to meet the standard. As Black-ish recently tackled,  the pressure to be perfect also comes from the need to represent the minorities since the flaw-flashlight sometimes shines a lot brighter on us than it does on others.

Black women are followed around by the ratchet label and we often try combating it by making sure we’re dangerously perfect. We’ll avoid speaking out, avoid showing emotion even when it heals us and take everything in stride when we’re aching inside. Yes we’re strong, but the expectation of strength is sometimes so unnatural it feels like reaction is a punishable offense to the image of perfection.

Part of our beauty as women is our wonderful ability to be strong without being hardened, to be polished and glorious without being completely without flaws. From the outside we make it look easy, but there are times when we struggle to hold it all together and we allow ourselves to feel everything because it helps us heal. What I appreciate deeply about Lemonade was the celebration of healing through the brokenness by getting in touch with, and diving head first into each and every part of our emotions. When we walk through our emotions the way it was intended, we learn that anger leads to a necessary confrontation with pain which ultimately leads to an acceptance that comes with deeper self-knowledge and a broader capacity to love and appreciate ourselves and others.

I consider myself an advocate for emotion - because it’s never been a bad thing to me. I’ve seen so much healing lost in the “not gon’ cry” narrative, which leaves us with a world of people carrying hurt brimming to the top with no outlet or chance to face it. To be honest, most of us face the dark more than we’ll ever dare to admit, and in these moments - logic isn’t enough. Intuition, denial, anger, apathy and other emotions are needed during our worst times. We can’t accept the view that expressing these emotions in a healthy way is doing too much. Moreover, emotion is the mother of creativity, a fact that quickly dawned on many as Beyonce’s emotional expression whiplashed our senses and feelings last week.

Our protagonist Sandra learns that there’s power in delving in those deep, dark crevices of fears and pains because it brings a level of self-expression that often creates magic. After writing books that many saw as perfect, she writes No Lies Told Then from everything she found in those dark corners and she’s transformed by that outlet. I’ll never accept being told that I have to be perfect to be a good woman because that’s a blatant, disrespectful lie. What perfects me isn’t the ability to emulate a Stepford Wife; what makes me good is the bold knowledge that I’m made powerful by expressing my emotions. This expression won’t always be neat and pretty - sometimes it calls for ugly cries and painful words and I’m more than okay with that. I have no intention to be perfect - I just want to bask in the full experience of being me. As we all grow older we learn that being good doesn’t mean being perfect. It’s a lesson Beyonce is learning with us, and she provides a powerful soundtrack for each lesson.

What Channing Dungey's Appointment Means for ABC (and its viewers)

Diversity has been injected into every Hollywood conversation, and no casting or hiring stone has been left unturned. Every ear and eye is currently focused on the leaders of the entertainment world as the world awaits real change in Hollywood’s lopsided representation of the racial and gender spectrum. For any company, network or brand feeling cornered by public outcry - putting a minority in a position of power is a good fix that can also look like a quick fix.

Minorities question whether these moves are being made on merit alone, or if they are attempts to win them over. Some are of the opinion that appointing a black woman would surely silence the critics so that Hollywood can skirt through and get back to inequality as usual. It can look like a shallow way to solve a deep rooted problem, like changing the shop window display without the changing the products inside the store. There’ve been many appointments that play to this tune - appearing to step towards change but ultimately not moving forward at all. The promotion of Channing Dungey to President of ABC is not one of these appointments.

Why now, some people ask. The unfortunate consequence of being a minority at the moment is that the motivations of hires and appointments are not considered pure or seen as products of real merit and hard work. It’s so easy to see African-Americans who rise in Hollywood as the proverbial band aid on an ugly bloody wound - a view that is equally prejudiced by the way.

In all honesty, ABC needs Channing Dungey right now more than ever. Her appointment is a win for all people who give a damn about the quality of network television. ABC, whose parent company is Disney, is a network so powerful and influential we couldn’t count the households that gather around it every single day. It has a great responsibility to its audiences so it’s only fair for changes to be made when their products start losing their impact and millions of viewers.

When we watch glitzy TV show promos showing Olivia Pope in a fierce red coat, we forget the very evident fact that ABC is in crisis. Scandal has lost its must-see status and millions of women who once saw Olivia Pope as a shining example of #blackgirlmagic are left scratching their heads wondering where she went. How did a character that symbolized feminine strength become a caricatured, cliched shell? How did one of TV’s strongest women become a flip-flop? When we start playing the blame game and pointing our fingers at the creators of the show, we’re also forced to look beyond them to the offices where deals are brokered and TV show plots are approved for broadcast. These are after all the people who make the real decisions about what makes it to our screens.

Ever since Scandal’s early success, and the subsequent conversation about television’s racial spectrum, many networks began racing each other to be the fresh, new provider of a diverse offering. It wasn’t just a race to have characters of color anchoring shows - it was a race to own the media conversation and get the hype that comes with it.

ABC let the hype go to its head and forgot that people weren’t just watching Olivia Pope because she was black, they were watching because she was compelling and black. With the way things have crumbled, it’s become clear that quality factors in the loyalty of people of color.

Dungey’s appointment matters, and not because it’s an interim solution. It matters because it shows that ABC has its ears to the ground and has heard the vibrations of disgruntled viewers, who know they deserve better. She played a key role in the development of Scandal and had a hand in the incredible success of its first seasons. Her promotion is good for the Shondaland show because right now what it needs is a champion to save it. It’s important for ABC because she can put her foot down and steer the network back to its responsibility as a global influencer in entertainment. They’ve seen the crisis and have called in a qualified and capable fixer.

The Oscars ARE a Smaller Symptom of a Greater Disease, Here's Why

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When the 2017 Academy Awards roll around, this year’s show will be highlighted as the one that went too far, or didn’t go far enough for diversity. Possibly, next year will be different - more black films will receive nominations and we’ll look back on the last two years as a period that provided the much needed push for change.

On the other hand, 2017 could be just like 2016 and like right now there’ll be #OscarsSoWhite outcry, more calls for a boycott and more lists of who was snubbed will be published. This will undoubtedly dominate the media and inevitably steer away from a more important discussion, and the greater cause for concern - the deep inequality that governs how many black films are developed, made and distributed paling in comparison to the behemoth that is white film.

In Hollywood, white films are the default, so you’ll hardly hear of a shortage production companies, studios and distribution companies wanting to get involved in a project. Black film, on the other hand, is still somewhat seen as a gamble or a niche market that can get by with fewer releases. The fact that we can only come up with 4 or 5 black movies and actors that were snubbed sums up the whole problem – if we were making the great strides we so desire to make, wouldn’t there be 20+ black films that could have been considered? As Whoopi Goldberg put it, “Let me tell you what the problem is: it’s not that the people doing the nominating are too white, the problem is the people who can be helping to make movies that have Blacks and Latinos and women and all that—that money doesn’t come to you because the idea is that there is no place for Black movies.”

If there’s no place for black movies, who created that issue? It can’t exclusively be an issue with Academy, because right or wrong, the awards are a reflection of the status quo. By the time we reach Oscar nominations, many checkpoints would have been crossed. Trying to just correct the awards is like trying to repair a huge product flaw at the end of the assembly line. Successful repair means examining the raw materials, the machinery, the process and the practitioners, and the same applies for Hollywood. The awards are easy to attack but the problems run far deeper. Consider the Academy Awards as a small indication of a wider problem.

The Academy Awards are a fishnet filtering in tiny openings whatever the net let through. The scarcity of black films filtering through is a direct result of what’s in the water in the first place - very few opportunities. This won’t change until we take a deeper look into the actual processes of filmmaking.

Maybe, the idea of boycotting is being applied to the wrong part of the problem. Instead of boycotting the awards, how about boycotting the industry and setting up our own autonomous filmmaking behemoth to rival the one that exists and hasn’t done enough for us? Black owned studios and black owned production companies could turn the tide for the thousands of black projects that have never seen the green light. It could be exactly what is needed to get these projects to the screen. Don’t let the “there were no good black movies this year” narrative fool you, there is plenty of black made brilliance but Hollywood doesn’t look in that direction as often as it should, and maybe our mistake is waiting for them to.

“Imperial Dreams,” a film starring pre-Star Wars John Boyega is one such project which struggled to find a distributor. Hopes are, with his “Star Wars” star power, it will finally find its way to cinemas. It just goes to show that what’s lacking isn’t the material, but rather the opportunities for the material to get made and handled in the same way white films are.

The barons of cinema, the ones we imagine sitting in a cushy office somewhere pulling the strings, have been served well by the system as it stands today. And while we continue to cry #OscarsSoWhite, we’re still in the same position. The move forward requires the whole industry to take a leap forward, and that means every single aspect of it. While the conversation about the Oscars needs to continue let us not forget that the problems begin way before those nominees are announced.