The cost of opportunity
WHEN I WROTE MY FIRST MOVIE SCRIPT 10 YEARS AGO WITH A CLOSE FRIEND, he and I argued about whether or not the main characters should be Black. I believed then that we wouldn’t be able to sell a movie with Black protagonists.
Things are different now. In the past few years, while publishers, film studios, streamers and networks have shown a surge of interest in Black stories, I’ve sold a book, Black Magic: What Black Leaders Learned From Tragedy and Triumph; a movie, One and Done, a story about a Black high school basketball phenom who commits a crime and resuscitates his dream at a historically Black university; and a television series, How to Survive Inglewood, about a suburban Black teenager who comes of age and comes to terms with his people after his parents’ ugly divorce.
See a pattern? I don’t go out pitching only Black projects. But it’s clear that today, the word is trendy in media marketing and boardrooms. It’s a buzzword. Blackness has become its own niche vertical for highbrow liberals. And within that vertical, there’s a window of
