Script Doctor’s Specialty Emerges

It’s one of those horrific, insane, absolutely wonderful stories about a screenwriter’s lot in Hollywood.

This big-budget studio movie needs a little work, and so a couple of writers--and William Morris only knows how many before them--are called to the proverbial rescue.

“Robert Harling and I were both brought on to doctor up the same project,” Tina Andrews recalls, referring to the writer of “Steel Magnolias” and “The First Wives Club,” whom she’d never met. “Robert was told to doctor up the white stuff and I was told to doctor up the black stuff.” It seems the powers-that-be didn’t want the two ethnically diverse writers to talk, much less meet to work on the dialogue they were supposed to goose up. “I mean, sometimes the white characters and the black characters did talk, and to each other!” Andrews says.

Eventually, Harling and Andrews managed somehow to hook up and exchange phone numbers. So what was the name of this color-delineated movie gig?

“Oh, we don’t need to go there,” replies Andrews, who knows all too well the small-town politics of Hollywood.

For reasons of talent, historical significance and sheer workload, Andrews is the screenwriter of the moment--and that distinction despite some mixed reviews for her first produced script, the Frankie Lymon story “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” (Review on F8.) The Warner Bros. film, directed by Gregory Nava and starring Larenz Tate as the tragic 1950s R&B; singer, may sink fast or swim well beyond Labor Day, but no matter: Andrews’ suddenly mega-career is brilliantly programmed to sail right into the next millennium.

There’s her original thriller screenplay, “Trauma,” for Fox 2000, set to go before the cameras later this year, with Angela Bassett in the lead. She’s currently adapting Benilde Little’s buppie novel “Good Hair,” the vehicle for her directorial debut, with New Regency producing next year. And then there’s “Dreamgirls,” the long-awaited screen adaptation of the Michael Bennett musical that has tantalized filmmakers and yet defied them ever since it hit Broadway in 1981. Finally, Joel Schumacher is directing for Warner Bros., David Geffen is producing, and Andrews just finished the script.

Seated across from her husband, Steven Gaines, in their Mediterranean hacienda high above the Pacific in the Malibu hills, Andrews recalls the offer to do “Dreamgirls.” The big scene transpired inside the Bat Cave at Warners.

“Joel was directing ‘Batman and Robin,’ and I’m brought in,” Andrews recalls. “There’s black lighting and fog and [Arnold] Schwarzenegger and all these people are on the set. And then the tallest man I’ve ever seen in my life comes out, and he says, ‘Oh, I love your work, I love your scripts. This is going to be just so wonderful!’ And we hugged and. . . .”

The only thing is, Schumacher remembers the incident a tad differently. After a brief prelude of “Tina lights up the room” talk, the director is uncharacteristically restrained when he admits, “I wasn’t familiar with Tina until I met her. I didn’t know what her reputation as a screenwriter was.”

Bill Gerber, then co-president of Warners, gave him a couple of Andrews’ scripts. “ ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’ and one other,” Schumacher says. “I don’t remember.” But he liked what he read “enormously.” There had already been meetings with several established writers about the difficult, long-stalled musical project.

“But it was clear that it was only Tina,” he says. “She knew things about the Apollo Theater and R&B; at that time, from 1962 to 1972, which only an insider would know.”

And since “Dreamgirls” is about a Supremes-like group from the 1960s, who better to adapt the musical than Andrews, who is black and female and, to be frank, not exactly born yesterday.

“Mmmm, we don’t need to go there either!” she says in the same upbeat, firm tone.

Definitely, Andrews is younger than Gloria Stuart of “Titanic”-resurrection fame, but her show-biz success story is just as inspiring, improbable, overdue and odds-defying--only more so.

Like Schumacher, most Hollywood insiders didn’t know Andrews’ work, despite a nearly 15-year career of writing spec and commissioned scripts, not getting her work produced, and then doctoring screenplays with somebody else’s name attached. She laughs when asked about her own heretofore under-a-bushel-barrel rep in Hollywood.

“They wanted me to do sister-girlfriend-type dialogue,” she says. “I’m asked to flesh out relationships between African American women, to make the interaction between those characters funny and realistic, to come alive off the page.”

Andrews has made more than a decent living polishing others’ work. She and her husband recently purchased the vacant lot next door, and soon their “Malibu middle-class house” may lose some of its charming coziness when it expands southward into what is now a vegetable garden. As the sun sinks into a foggy haze beyond the raccoon-raided koi pool outside, Andrews only once displays an emotion akin to resentment, her speech uncharacteristically clipped.

“I didn’t get my credit,” she says of her work on last fall’s hit “Soul Food.” “I loved that movie. Listen, if not for [its success], I probably wouldn’t have gotten my shot at the director’s chair coming up.”

Andrews started out as an actor, and while she says that career has only “slowed down,” not stopped, it can’t compete with the writing and directing opportunities. There are still occasional calls to audition, but as Andrews tells them, “You know, I’m just getting ready to go to a meeting with Joel Schumacher, so no. I don’t want to go up for the popcorn commercial!”

If the writer ever gets around to putting to floppy disk her own life story, the acting years--1973 to 1983--might be titled “The Auction Block.” As an extremely youthful New York University drama major, fresh from Chicago, she first got cast as a young child opposite Jon Voight in Martin Ritt’s “Conrack.” (It filmed in 1973-74; Andrews claims she was 18, so anyone interested in her age can do the math.) Later, she played the part of the young Kunta Kinte’s girlfriend Aurelia in “Roots.” Less memorable, in every aspect, was her turn in the 1980 film “Carny.”

“She was Sugar Reef,” Gaines chimes in, “and taught Jodie Foster how to strip!”

Andrews’ hands fly up in mock exasperation. “That’s why I’m a writer!”

She says that role--”I didn’t strip, but they put me in this little get-up”--showed her the ripple effect of a performance, especially when her churchgoing father scolded, “If that’s what you have to do to sustain yourself as an actress and you can write, then you need to write--or answer phones.”

On the positive side, Andrews played “Days of Our Lives’ ” Valerie Grant, one half of the first interracial married couple on a daytime soap opera, from 1975 to 1980. Andrews can’t forget that initial audience response: “Stop kissing! No more kissing!” she cries.

Eventually, Valerie Grant came down with this bad case of a college scholarship and left her white husband (played by Richard Guthrie) to attend Stockholm U. “Valerie met this black Swede and that was the end of it,” Andrews says with a roll of the eyes.

Looking back, the former soap star can now wax philosophical. “It didn’t work,” she says of that groundbreaking stint. “Later, there were other soaps where it did. So it always takes that person with the machete to chop down those weeds, and when you look back, you’ve created a road behind you.”

In 1984, Andrews married Gaines, a manager of stand-up comedians, whom she had met several years before at a party. That was also the year she finished her first script, “The Frankie Lymon Story.” Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video was airing on MTV, and she got this brainstorm: “He should do films and be a movie star like his pal Diana Ross!” The script went to Jackson’s people on a Friday, she recalls, “and on the following Monday morning I was told no.”

“It was so funny,” Gaines says. “We’d Xeroxed a photo of Michael Jackson in performance and superimposed it over Frankie Lymon’s body. As if that would help Michael get the concept.” To dress up the manuscript cover, the couple even commissioned a graphic artist to print the name “Frankie Lymon” in the style of the Hollywood sign. Andrews admits, “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

No matter--Morris Levy of Roulette Records owned Lymon’s music, and wasn’t interested in selling anything to anyone who cast himself as the villain of the piece. So the project was held up until Levy’s death in 1990.

However, if ever Hollywood gets around to making “The Tina Andrews Story,” it’s this next part that will need drastic rewriting, because who would believe it? “And after two years,” Andrews continues, “the Roulette Records catalog came under Rhino Records, and Stephen Nemeth, who was now the head of production for Rhino Films, used to be in the mail room at the William Morris Agency at the same time my agent, Rob Carlson, was also in the mail room when my script was circulating. Stephen then asked Rob, ‘Didn’t you have a client who used to have a Frankie Lymon script, because we own the music now.’ ”

Andrews immediately reworked the script, giving the biography a “Rashomon”-style narrative that told Lymon’s story from the contrasting viewpoints of the singer’s three spouses. Considering its comedic tone and many hilariously bitchy one-liners, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” might as well be called “The First, Second and Third Wives Club.” Indeed, some critics have found the film’s humor too broad, considering Lymon’s early death from heroin addiction, but the three actresses who star in the film aren’t among them. They’re ready for more Andrews zingers.

“Tina is the black woman’s voice,” says Vivica A. Fox (low-life Elizabeth in “Fools”). “She can say, ‘No, this is the way we really would have said it. No, it didn’t quite go down like that.’ ”

“It was comforting, having a black woman writer, which is not something I’ve experienced much in this business,” says Halle Berry (glamorous singer Zola). “If we [actresses] had issues with the script, we’d go to her and she’d get it.”

“Tina can’t write quick enough. We need more Tinas,” says Lela Rochon (proper schoolteacher Emira). “Frankly, I was surprised the script was written by a black female, because usually it would be polished up by Ron Bass or whoever,” she says, referring to “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” which Bass co-wrote with novelist Terry McMillan.

Andrews and McMillan are definitely on Hollywood’s shortest list. As for other African American female writers with major (even semi-major) studio productions to their credit, Suzan-Lori Parks (“Girl 6”), Millicent Shelton (“Ride”), Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”), Nicole Jefferson (“Party Over Here” at Paramount/MTV) and Veronica Webb (“Ghetto Fabulous” at Fox) seem poised to get their shot in the near future.

In Tom Eyen’s book for the stage musical “Dreamgirls,” the Curtis character (based on Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr.) is demonized, a caricatured villain who leaves one woman, Effie, to make Deena (the Diana Ross-like character) the star.

Andrews says she worked hard to get inside the man. “Bad guys can be great characters, but they’re only great if we see what makes them human. With Curtis, I wanted to show why he developed the music and these girl singers, and why their look was so important, and why he drops Effie for Deena. The audience must see that he’s struggling with something within him that’s vulnerable. That’s what I’ve done with Curtis.”

Another character, in her “Good Hair” script, wasn’t so lucky. Gaines told her, “You’ve got a black transvestite in here, and he shouldn’t be in the piece unless one of the other black men has redeemable qualities.”

Out went the cross-dresser. At moments such as these, Andrews phones the producers to say, “Guys, you won’t be getting the script tomorrow.”

Gaines is mildly bemused by Hollywood’s current penchant for populating its films with black men who wear women’s clothes. Andrews, on the other hand, acknowledges a certain debt to her brothers in high heels. “I have some black transvestite friends who’d like to see themselves on screen and shown in a positive light,” says the wisecracking writer, who’s been known to throw a few “Miss Thing” salutations into her work.

Regarding her affection for that expression, Andrews has to laugh. “I’m not sure of its origin,” she admits. But two days later, during the “Fools” press junket at the Four Seasons Hotel, the writer asks Vivica A. Fox all about it. After all, Fox’s character is the one who flings just those lines in “Fools.”

The actress doesn’t miss a beat. “Miss Thing is gay,” she says. “And Miss Thang is black!”

As sister-girlfriend dialogue goes, Tina Andrews couldn’t have written it better herself.

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Robert Hofler is an editor at Variety.