BIBR spotlight: Tina Andrews.

Tina Andrews, writer, producer, playwright, screenwriter and actress, has a new title--award-winning author. This past February, Andrews won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Literary Work for her book Sally Hemings: An American Scandal--The Struggle to Tell the Truth, the follow-up project to the television miniseries she wrote and coexecutive produced for CBS in 2000. With competition from Quincy Jones for Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, Andrews says she was surprised that she won.

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, Andrews phoned me from her Malibu home to share the news the morning after receiving the NAACP award. "I'm feeling great," she said, "I was so sure that Q [Quincy Jones] was going to win. When I arrived at the awards, everyone was congratulating me. At the time, I had no idea my book had won," said Andrews, who arrived late to the awards ceremony.

The book chronicles Andrews' 16-year effort to make the Sally Hemings' story a reality. From now on, says Andrews, she will write the book first, then do an adaptation for film or television.

In 1984, Andrews took a train across the country from Los Angeles to Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Abemarle County's Blue Ridge Mountains. While on a docent-led tour, Andrews inquired about Sally Hemings. She was given a brief statement that seemed more like an afterthought when compared to the accolades ascribed to Jefferson. She returned home and began writing Sally's story. Initially, Andrews wrote the Sally Hemings story as a play entitled The Mistress of Monticello. After receiving positive feedback and audience suggestions during a 1985 staging of Mistress by the Chicago Dramatists Workshop, Andrews decided to turn it into a screenplay. The screenplay was originally titled Monticello: The Memoirs of Sally Hemings.

Screenwriter turned novelist

Known more as a screenwriter, Andrews has written scripts, including the 1998 Warner Bros. release Why Do Fools Fall in Love (originally titled The Frankie Lymon Story) and the CBS miniseries Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, which she also co-executive produced. She is currently working on a miniseries based on the life of Coretta Scott King, and The O.Z., an updated hip-hop version of The Wizard of Oz.

After writing Sally Hemings: An American Scandal--her first book--Andrews admits she enjoyed it more than some of her film and television projects, "because you're going to see my exact intent [in a book]." With film or television, she says, you don't have control over what gets included. "If viewers should happen to see a film or a television version of a book that I write, and it is slightly different, then you'll understand why, because I will have set up everybody with the Sally Hemings project," says Andrews. "To be honest, I'm not necessarily going to write books with the intent of them being something else. I may write books that end up just being books."

Dealing with writer's block 

Andrews keeps the same routine when writing screenplays or novels, and she is always working on something. She is known to have up to 11 windows open on her computer screen so that when she is blocked on one project, she can move on to the next. "That way, I am writing at all times, because the moment you take your mind off the problem, and move on to something else, in the middle of that other thing, suddenly a solution will come to you. You have to allow yourself to completely move out of the project."

In terms of control, it's not uncommon in Hollywood for writers to see their work on the cutting room floor, or have their original work drastically altered before it hits the big or small screen. She acknowledges that the only time a writer has control over a project is when they are writing.

"As a screenwriter, when you are in front of your computer, you are God. When you're in front of your computer writing a screenplay, you are God. When you're in front of your computer writing a book or a novel, you are God. Even in the book world you've got an editor," she says. "Who is going to say, 'You know what, you're redundant here, take this out. We all go through a process in which we lose control, but you lose more of it with screenwriting," she continues. "Screenwriting is by committee. Know that going in."

Andrews admits that writing screenplays are harder than writing novels because screenplays must fit a particular format; writing a novel does not. "If you want to spend three or four pages on a character's thought process--what they had on, what they were feeling, what they were tasting, how it reminded them of an incident weeks ago--you can do all of that in a novel," says Andrews. She says she chooses her subjects based on what she feels passionately about, which at times can be a blessing and a curse. She is a voracious reader, and can be inspired from simply flipping through a magazine and seeing a picture. In fact, the idea for her next project, which she lovingly refers to as the "red paint" project, came to her while looking at several photos in an article. She thought there was a story there, and researched the character in the picture for the project, which she is currently turning into a novel and screenplay.

Finding inspiration

"I didn't know anything about it," says Andrews of the "red paint" project--the details of which she won't disclose. "I didn't know anything about it. And I know a lot of people didn't know anything about it. So off I went running."

She is driven when working on projects that she creates herself. However, when studios hire her to work on screenplays, she sometimes tends to drag them out. "You know, at some point down the line, you can lose interest. So I have to be very careful."

These days, she has more opportunities to do the projects she likes. Not surprisingly, Andrews writes women characters--particularly black women--very well, something that is rare in Hollywood. And she tends to be attracted to projects where there's a major role for a woman. "Frankly, we as black women are underserved in the film market and certainly underserved in the television market, particularly middle-class, black female characters," says Andrews.

Publishing versus TV and film

As for how blacks are represented in publishing, Andrews is a bit more sanguine. "We--meaning African Americans--are reading more than we ever have. And we are reading everything," she says. "I am grateful that we have a lot of authors now thinking in terms of books, and a lot of people actually buying those books. And then, of course, with Oprah celebrating reading and celebrating books there are more of us reading now than ever before." But she adds, "There are a lot of books that seem to be of one particular genre, that seem to be very popular because everybody is trying to be like one writer or two writers who are very successful. So a lot of the books are cookie-cutter versions of a previous book. That's the same thing that's happening to us in the movie business," she continues.

"What I would love to see happen in both industries is for there to be more innovative approaches to writing. Writers must use their imaginations to find more innovative ways to tell stories, because readers certainly use their imagination when they're reading. As far as I'm concerned, as long as we're reading, that's the best news there could be."

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal--The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story is now available from Malibu Press as an audio-book on CD, performed by Tina Andrews. See BIBR's audio review on page 26.