Dona E. Bowens

OK, so here’s what had happened. I have this friend, Heather, who makes documentary films. So Heather’s sitting on a conference call one day and listening to a woman named Talitha Watkins, who at that time worked for the behemoth talent agency called CAA. CAA represents, well, errrybody. As my one actor friend in the biz put it to me, “Oh CAA? They make their own weather.” Yeah.

So, Heather on the conference call, hears Ms. Watkins say that she’s desperately looking for funny Black writers…even better if female. “And I thought of you,” Heather wrote me in an email with all of Ms. Watkins contact information. “And she says she reads scripts as they come across her desk,” Heather informed me. “So send her a script!”

If only I had a script to send. I had bookoo ideas but no script. Here’s why I had no script. Because scripts require a special script writing program that costs hundreds of dollars AND is about as user friendly as trying to use a crocodile to mow the lawn. This ain’t the Flintstones, but my capacity to white knuckle my way through learning new tech is stuck back somewhere in the stone age.

That script-writing program baffled me at every turn. Thank god I didn’t buy it, just downloaded the 30 day trial and got myself frustrated within 30 seconds. I tossed the script aside in favor of my short stories, novels, essays and poems that don’t be needing no fancy computer program.

Years passed. The script kept haunting me. I had stories to tell that I could see being great for the screen. But that goddamn script-writing program kept hemming me up. Enter Heather again. (Bless her.) During one of our many conversations about creating and blah, blah, blah, she told me that back in the day, when she was in film school, no one used that script-writing program.

“We wrote in Word,” she said. “Write it the old-fashioned way.” Well, duh!

And so, that’s what I did. And once I got going, it took me eight days from the first keystroke to the final period—and I had a ball writing it. Cracked myself up writing it. I’ll share with you what they call the logline—a script version of “The Elevator Speech.”

Barcelona Bounce: A TV Series

Logline

Debbie and Alice, two sistas from the middle of America, expatriate to Barcelona, Spain where they thrive on booze, boys and all things bohemian. What does it mean to be Black, American, female and abroad? With the legacy of Josephine Baker to inspire them, Debbie and Alice are on a mission to find out.

I laughed my way through 10 episode ideas and wrote the pilot. I went over it as much as my patience would allow me to…then I got about the business of tracking down Ms. Watkins.

She wasn’t hard to find. While I dwaddled writing everything but the script, Ms. Watkins had left CAA and moved on to head up the agency created by Issa Rae. If you watched Issa in HBO’s Insecure you know she’s one hilarious bitch. I thought my shit is going to be just the thing she’d be into. A comedy about sista’s abroad? Let me know if you’ve seen that. And I can promise you that being Black and abroad is a whole different animal compared to being White and abroad. (You’ll have to wait for the series to find out just how different.)

Anyhoo, I submitted my script, which I was now calling a “treatment,” to Ms. Watkins at Color Creative. My cover letter explained Heather and the conference call while she was at CAA and humor and I’m funny and I’m so funny that I wrote my script in Word just to be different. Then I hit send and sat back.

In the meantime—I won’t go into the details to spare you the boredom, I had another person in the biz read the script and he thought it hilarious with “a lot of energy.” So I knew I had something.

So I waited some more. After 9 months passed with nothing, I resubmitted. Now it’s been just over a year and I’m ready to get this script in front of some other eyes—but I don’t know how. It’s not like literature where you just blast your short story out to a few dozen literary magazines and cross your fingers. There’s not a slush-pile read by interns who might choose your piece.

I wanna be in pictures and I don’t know what step to take next. I know about the casting couch, is there a writing couch I need to spread myself over because I’ll do it. I swear I will. Sista’s trying to buy a house. In short, if you have ideas for which turn I need to take next, well don’t keep it to yourself, damn it!

Thanks 😉