It’s a Girl Thing
‘Now girl, this is the part when Angela brings the young boyfriend from Jamaica home to the barbecue to meet the family at Suzzanne Douglas’ house.” Publicist Anna Fuson leans into her whisper as if telling tales out of school--blacktop rumor at its best.
October rages on above us --all sun and humid hubris so below the raised wooden deck is cluttered with undulating, flip-flop shuffling and tank top-clad folk. Adjacent to the action, long wooden tables sit laden with brightly hued melon cubes, paper plates, salads, buns, condiments, sandwiches, a tin basin with ice cream and soda.
There’s a real ‘Q going, curling out hickory-flavored smoke to accompany all that real live summer-style heat to keep the mood aloft.
The only element that peeps this “party’s” authenticity (or lack thereof) is the jams: the abrupt stop and start of Parliament-Funkadelic’s perennial last dance party ride--”Flashlight”--squiggling (for art’s sake) out from a ledge-resting boombox--just as it gets good. Braids stop flying, fingers stop popping, the dance floor cracks to green-light/red-light attention--time collapses to a halt: like having a party trapped in a jar.
“And Angela . . . oooh,” Fuson quickly self-corrects “I mean, Stella’s, ex-husband, is there . . . who, oh no! He did not just do the robot!” Fuson words get swallowed in a cascading giggle. “He is too wrong! No wonder why she divorced his butt! Anyway, her ex is jealous of this cute young thing! And she doesn’t mean for everybody to meet her boyfriend. She just wanted to drop her son off and get back to the house, you know, for well . . . you know . . .”
Um, we know.
At least a couple million of us have an inkling.
Those are the mighty many who picked up--or borrowed a dogeared copy of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” catapulting it to the bestseller list--Terry McMillan’s loquacious gush of a novel, the glancingly autobiographical follow-up to her blockbuster novel-turned-event, “Waiting to Exhale.”
“Stella” is purposefully stepping its way to the big screen this Friday, with Angela Bassett in the title role, along with Whoopi Goldberg, Regina King, Douglas and newcomer Taye Diggs as Stella’s fresh and fawning seducer. The hope is that this lightheaded and in-love McMillan vehicle will serve to bowl over the “Waiting to Exhale” audience with its own seductive powers.
Somehow, despite its lengthy and prominent perch on the various bestseller lists, the incantatory power of “Waiting to Exhale,” when it came to the screen, seemed to catch much of the media unawares. But those who were already dyed-in-the-wool McMillan thumpers--affronted by the shock--could have predicted the rush to the ticket booths: They came in twos and threes and sometimes boisterous groups of 14.
When it was all said and done, “Waiting to Exhale,” directed by Forest Whitaker and written by McMillan and Ron Bass, grossed more than $67 million for 20th Century Fox. Its success created a precedent of sorts: that thoughtful, stylized, character-driven black dramas (or romantic comedies) sans guns and gangstas could strike a chord. So one might imagine the pressure on first-time feature director Kevin Rodney Sullivan to follow in those rather sizable footsteps.
Much of the success of “Exhale” owes a tremendous debt to McMillan’s own sister-circle signature style of storytelling: her perfect pitch and golden ear and reliance of heart and voice to propel a story. There is a particularness and currency about her characters--professional black women who reject or reconfigure any modern mainstream mold or sepia-toned racialized pigeonhole set before them.
This isn’t to say that the subject matter is an afterthought. There is something about McMillan’s work that is ready-made, comfortable, easy to ease into. And it isn’t just about shading or spicing dialogue with a dash of authenticity by employing an intermittent rotation of “go girls,” uttered by stock “sistah friends” shouting “amens” from the corner. Just as McMillan’s brand name-quoting characters could suss out a knockoff a mile away, then talk about him a mile longer, the same goes for her readership who can easily cut a crass imitator down to size.
As one Internet fan curtly tapped out on her keyboard: “I am to the point where I will not read a book again with a cartoon character on the cover anymore. The [Synthia Saint James] cover worked for Terry and that is fine but I wish publishers would get off the bandwagon.”
They want the real deal--and so elaborate measures have been taken to preserve that unmistakable watermark.
Though McMillan swears up and down this will absolutely be the last time she lends her efforts to big screen self-adaptation, Sullivan, on the other hand, hopes his first effort will make eloquent of her swan song.
So this is why on this blazing hot late October 1997 afternoon in the middle of Pasadena’s genteel, tree-laden Craftsman bungalow area, when Fuson winds a reporter, visiting Fox brass and on-deck extras through miles of cable secured by duct tape, soda-studded ice chests, children and adults reclining on quilts and crocheted blankets strewn across the sun-bleached back lawn to a cool patch of shade, it all feels far less like a film in mid-production muddle than someone’s rather low-key family barbecue--with all of its awkward surprises and petty dramas.
Between takes, Sullivan glimpses the footage on the video playback. He studies the bouncing party images on a hooded screen. Bassett, glowing with self-possession, despite take after take, looks cool in her yellow tank and faded jeans, her long braids pulled back from a feline face. She stands facing Diggs, who is playing the 20-year-old Winston, who thaws the big-city-hardened heart of the cool and otherwise reserved Stella Payne.
With a budget in the neighborhood of $24 million, the film was shot last fall in Southern California locales such as La Canada Flintridge and Pasadena, which will stand in for the lush San Francisco Bay Area settings of the novel. Production ended in December with the final leg wrapping up in Montego Bay, Cape of Good Hope and a day in Negril, Jamaica--20 days in all. “We’re using the beach at one place, the pool at another and a vista at the third,” Fuson explains, in an attempt to re-create McMillan’s resort stay.
“It’s a very different film,” says Bass (who shares screenwriting and executive producing credits with McMillan), comparing the phoenixes rising from the relationship rubble of “Waiting to Exhale” to the steady spiritual resourcefulness of “Stella.” “This is a love story--it’s quite a different film.”
The biggest challenge, all have agreed, was ushering the story from novel to script and ultimately storyboard form. McMillan constructed the novel around Stella’s voice--the text more a stream-of-consciousness jazz riff than straight narrative that read like a hot-phone-wire confession to a best friend.
So, among the lengthy list of directors with whom producers met with, it was Sullivan (whose past credits include the critically acclaimed HBO docudrama “The Soul of the Game,” as well as director credits on episodes of “I’ll Fly Away,” “Knight Watch” and “Cosmic Slop: Tang”) who arrived at his meeting armed with everything from photographs of what Stella’s home should look like to ideas of retooling the role of Delilah (Goldberg), Stella’s best friend and confidant, who exists only as an afterthought in the novel.
“The first version wasn’t very good, I was still too close to it,” McMillan readily admits. “[The book] was still hot off the press. We needed somebody else with some fresh ideas. Kevin was very articulate and very excited and he seemed to have the connection.”
That’s because there truly was one. Sullivan is not a man cowered by McMillan’s blunt takes on some of the more ugly realities of male-female relations and has been a fervent McMillan fan since the publication of her novel “Disappearing Acts” in 1989.
“The truth hurts in life, and she’s not afraid to say that,” says Sullivan. “It’s also why her stuff is so funny. And what’s funny is what’s real.”
Sullivan wanted to be careful to preserve all that is at once warm and prickly in the prose--what makes McMillan McMillan: “I didn’t want to lose anything. But I sort of felt that in the book and in the [screenplay’s] first draft Stella was always looking for a touchstone,” he explains. “Characters were introduced, then dropped. There was no consistent girlfriend. The sisters weren’t on the trip with her. When I read the book, I thought: Delilah. There’s somebody there. There’s a character there. . . . [I wanted to] create an exterior life for Stella and give Terry an opportunity as screenwriter to do what she does best--have some girlfriends in the movie.”
It is, however, what lies beneath the racy tidbits and piquant repartee of the surface story that Sullivan wanted to mine and underscore. Its heart is about going against convention, and is what attracted Bassett to the role.
“I liked the aspect of the older woman/younger man, the love affair, this reawakening that she goes through,” says Bassett, who has gone from the duped, then dumped, and ultimately duly restored Bernadine in “Waiting to Exhale” to the free and footloose Stella.
“In society, we rarely see it. I tried to remember films in which that was the story line--where there’s not this, ‘He must be using her for something’ thinking. Where instead you think, ‘These people really care for each other.’ A few come to mind, but it wasn’t a happy ending. ‘The Graduate.’ ‘American Gigolo.’ ‘Harold and Maude.’ Yet it does happen, and it happens in so many configurations--but we act as if there’s something about it that makes it abhorrent.”
This is the ultimate power of McMillan’s prose. Say what you will about the depth/breadth/literary aspirations of her work (the comparisons to Toni Morrison’s literary reach and her more “populist” themes work McMillan’s last nerve) but one thing is for sure, she tells people stories, unambiguous plots, sunk deeply in the present, to an often neglected audience . . . themes and circumstances that have resonance and relevance in her readers’ lives.
“Underneath that dialogue,” says Bass, “Terry makes very telling and moving emotional points without getting sentimental. These are people who are both true to the African American experience and also true to the general audience’s cultural experience and Terry can do it without having black people say, ‘Oh, this is phony. This is white people’s problems.’ Instead, everyone says: ‘That’s me!’ What happens when you fall in love with someone who is inappropriate? This is a story that says love comes when it comes--there is nothing more inappropriate than walking away from real love.”
It is that sort of intricacy that most in the cast thirst for: What the actresses point out is that it gives them a chance to play a range of black women who aren’t often seen on film and particularly in an ensemble cast setting.
“I love my character,” says Regina King, bare leg crossed over bare leg, sandaled foot waving in the heavy air. She’s taking a break with Suzzanne Douglas under the shade of one of the oaks that spreads across the front lawn of the wood-framed home the crew has occupied like ants on a hill. Douglas and King play mirror-opposite sisters: Douglas is precision and perfection, obsessed with all things surface and artificial, while King plays Stella’s younger cut-it-down-to-bite-size sibling, Vanessa.
“She’s hootchie, but not quite ‘Booty Call,’ ” King deadpans, cracking an imaginary wad of gum. Then she flashes thoughtful for a moment. “In my last movie [“Jerry Maguire”], my role was more serious. This one I can have a little fun with. She’s the kinda tacky girl that everyone knows . . . you know . . . and you eventually gotta love her.”
But it’s not stereotype stock. McMillan’s composites allow for complexity, King explains.
“What’s beautiful about the writing is that when you do a film like this it makes you feel like you are being responsible. The film deals with real issues, like families don’t always talk to one another; siblings fight. The same things happen in white families happen in black families. They’re life issues, conflicts. Everybody has a drug addict, a problem relative, some scandal.”
“In the past there’s been so much limiting our visions and our hopes,” says Douglas. “I was just becoming so pissed off with the images out there. But because of the arc, because of Kevin Sullivan, because of Terry’s story, this makes a difference, can be part of a continuum with our literature, with our art. There is a responsibility to be careful with our characterizations.”
Sixteen young women line up on the sidewalk fronting the bungalow’s vast lawn: A set of twins with retainers poured into matching black-and-white-striped Lycra coordinates; another duo with waist-length twists in brightly patterned sundresses; still another pair of girlfriends in ultra-short shorts, and a bringing-up-the-rear pair in pleated miniskirts and stacked heel sandals. These wide-ranging regular gals, all African American, gather around a tall man in a black outback hat and shades who carries a clipboard and projects directions above their excited chatterings. These women, part of the aspiring extra pool, have come out in hopes of finding either their head or, at the very least, their busily working fingers included as part of a scene (ultimately cut from the film), where Stella gets her hair braided in anticipation of her Jamaican holiday. It is key in her articulation of independence, it telegraphs her transformation of self.
Self-definition--rather more precisely unmitigated self-declaration, and the transformative powers of such--is not just what the film is about, but what this kind of project can be about.
For all of its lighthearted moments, snappy characterization and machine-gun wit embroidered within the story, this project--as “Waiting to Exhale” was before it--has been a parable about the sticky mechanics of race and its assumptions, divisions and borders--on screen and off.
“There were a whole bunch of [white] people who don’t go see the other black films because they don’t think that there is anything in it for them,” says Bass. “But when they see certain scenes, feel certain emotions, the difference between what is an African American film and what is a general film narrow.”
Producer Deborah Schindler got a window on just how particularly difficult this process was when she was first shepherding “Waiting to Exhale” to the screen.
“I thought the press was guilty in asking, ‘Will white people go see this?’ as if you can’t label it, you can’t understand it . . . It’s not only who turns out to the movie, but look at the people involved behind the scenes. What I’m proud about is that it created a dialogue,” says Schindler. “So let’s move forward.”
Fact is, adds Fox vice president of production Elizabeth Gabler, who fought on Schindler’s behalf for “Exhale,” “We knew we had a really good movie. Focus groups supported that. There’s something heartbreaking to me that there is a shortage of films out there that deal with these subjects, that have dialogue that’s like group therapy.”
But, Schindler adds with a measure of hopefulness, “It’s a different Hollywood now.”
One would hope.
Nonetheless, all of it is beginning to wear on McMillan. The comparisons and projections, the rewrites the re-rewrites. “I’m just through with Hollywood,” she says rather matter-of-factly in her trademark flat rasp. “I mean it. This is the last time. I’ve promised myself. I hate to waste my time.”
McMillan assures that this has little to do with the particulars of this project or personality conflicts, and everything to do with her career as a novelist. “Writing a screenplay . . . takes a different kind of energy--especially one based on something that I’d already written. I was really tired of writing by committee. . . . I can only do one thing at a time--and I figure I need to get back to doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I hate to use the word--the C word--crossover, and that’s what the studio thinks about.”
And that’s true--the focus is trained this time on how to expand, with an eye on the European market, positioning the soundtrack (featuring the tropically infused Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, as well as Meshell Ndegeocello, Mary J. Blige and Wyclef Jean, not “Exhale’s” Babyface and Whitney Houston), and how to best utilize names like Bassett’s and Goldberg’s that carry with them an international reputation.
But in terms of Hollywood market-share plotting, what gets lost in this high-pressure preoccupation is the quality, not quantity, of black story.
“The Hollywood marketing machine is usually a step behind the curve,” says Sullivan. “ ‘Boyz N the Hood’ makes a lot of money, now let’s make a bunch of movies about boys in the ‘hood. The fact that people were surprised that ‘Exhale’ or ‘Soul Food’ did so well says something. There has been so little variety in black cinema, and that’s just part of that Hollywood cookie-cutter mentality.”
McMillan hopes that amid all of this that the public will demand a better product, that this recently “found” audience should not be pummeled but cultivated.
“I think that with ‘Soul Food’ and ‘Eve’s Bayou’ . . . they sort of have a clue now, as to what to do and the fact that there is an audience.” But even then, she says, a lot of it is going to take thinking outside the box. “I mean I wish more people would have gone to see ‘Eve’s Bayou.’ It’s a beautiful film and we don’t have very many films by African Americans that are cinematically and aesthetically and philosophically as moving and as powerful as that story, regardless of how static the critics thought the film was. You can go to Europe and see films like that all the time and they don’t say that. But because we’re black and nobody is getting shot and chased and there’s no drugs and not a lot of cussing, then all of a sudden we have, ‘It’s a little slow.’ ”
The responsibility trapezes back to that grass-roots support, McMillan’s loyal constituency voting with their pocketbooks, realizing, like Stella, that they can help to tailor and shape the images available for consumption.
“Like my mother,” says King. “She never goes to the movies. She hadn’t been for seven years. Then she saw ‘Waiting to Exhale’ and ‘Soul Food.’ I mean, what happens is you forget what’s not out there. We can go to the movies to praise together--to get something out of it. Not just to shake and hug. It’s just like church. You don’t go just to wear a hat.”