SCOTT: How did Sistas In the City begin its life?

TINA: What happened is that I had a conversation with Michael Jenkinson a year before this whole thing began. And he, at the time, was an executive at Fox. And naturally in the course of doing business, if you are a writer/producer, you will then meet with studio executives who may want to be in business with you. And you talk over a few ideas and this and that. So he and I had had lunch, and I talked about a few things that I was interested in doing, one of which was--I don’t want to use the word “indictment”--but one was an essay of my opinion in terms of how Sex and the City is sorely lacking in any ethnic persuasion whatsoever. I couldn’t understand how--and not only Sex and the City, but also Friends. How do you do a piece that takes place in New York City, and you have four to six white people who have absolutely no meaningful interaction with anybody of color.

SCOTT: Which is rather amazing… so how did you go from that to Sistas?

TINA: Well, I said, “I really would like to do a piece that has to do with four black girls and their relationship with each other, their family here, their boyfriends, their jobs, that kind of thing. And I want it to be a realistic, middle-class, black, female driven piece.” He called me back in about a year, but I wasn’t able to do anything, because at that point I was in the throes of the Sally Hemmings mini-series. And of course I had a book coming out on why that mini-series was so successful. So I wasn’t even available to start on any new projects for another year. In that year, Michael Forman formed Urban Entertainment. He called me and said, “Remember when we were talking about that idea? Well, I now have an Internet company, and we have been using--utilizing animation. And it’s all been male-driven. And I’m using A-List writers, and I was wondering if you would perhaps like to work with your concept. And you can do it in animation, and you can do it on the ‘Net.”

SCOTT: That’s a pretty nice invitation.

TINA: Well, it was great because we had been trying to work together. So I said, “Well, wow. That’s cool.” Because then you can work out whatever kinks on the ‘Net and any problems that would pop up on the project. You’ll be able to see in animation in four-minute segments. So I thought that was a really good idea. It’d be quick. And he says, “We’re doing it in slots of ten.” So I told him then that I could commit to ten, because of my film schedule. So that’s what I did. And he was the one that encouraged me to push the sexual envelope. Because, of course, if it were left up to me, middle-class girl from Chicago that I am, it would have been a little tamer than what you see on the DVD. Trust me. ‘Cause my mom said, “What are the people at church going to think of you?!!” So I said, “Well, just tell them I’m giving the right side of my brain.” So, yeah, so that’s how it actually came about. So I came up with the characters who are compilations of friends of mine, some of whom know who they are, and recognize themselves in characters, and some of them don’t.

SCOTT: Now, they’re not the same friends who--on the DVD, are in the round table?

TINA: What I did is I mixed it up enough that no particular person is any one person. So no one would necessarily be able to recognize--unless you know my friends. And also, two of the characters are composites of my old Chicago friends, who I see when I come back into town. So I put together these four characters and their character traits and how they dress and how they act. And I wanted them to be different from each other. And I also wanted to make sure that I had a representation of at least one Lesbian, because for some reason we don’t see any black Lesbians on the air, ever. And then, of course, after I had done this, then of course that series, The Wire, came out. I was looking for ways to introduce to audiences a cross section, I thought, a fair, at least, representation and cross section of black female multitude. So that’s how it came about.

SCOTT: Your animated segments, especially on the DVD, are very sexually frank.

TINA: When I go to movies, and you look at love scenes--generally movies that are directed by men, you’ll almost see every single thing on the woman’s body, and you won’t see the guy. You’re lucky if you get a butt shot. But guys are very reluctant to do full frontal nudity in film. And yet they let a woman do that in every love scene. So I remember saying that at least for this animated series, if we’re going to go for it, everybody’s going for it. We’re going to see everybody’s everything, or we’ll see nobody’s anything.

SCOTT: How about the styles in which the characters were realized?

TINA: I was very specific about the way I wanted to women to look in terms of coloration and hair texture. I thought that was very important, that if we’re going to show African-American women, some have straight hair, some have kinky hair, some have dreads, some have Afros. One is in flux; she doesn’t know whether she wants to have either/or. Some will have blond tips. I wanted to make sure that we had a differentiation in hair color and types. And also the coloration of the women. And so what happened is that they started to draw sample. And they just kept drawing and submitting until we signed off on the four women. The one that was the most difficult, interestingly enough--and it was really interesting--the character that they had the hardest time accessing was the Lesbian character. And I thought it humorous that the only description--if the description of her is simply “Lesbian”, it was very interesting, those first couple of characters that came back to me as drawings for her. Because they made her unattractive. They made her very, very, very heavy-set. They had her in flip-flop shoes with big toes. In some guy’s estimation, this is what a black Lesbian looks like. And I’m thinking, “Okay. The three girlfriends that I have who are gay don’t look like that.” Again, I did not want to pander to stereotypes.

SCOTT: The dialogue sort of jumps right off the screen in the series. Like I said earlier, I thought it was very sort of not holding back. And sometimes that’s the best type of entertainment. But it especially works, I think, with these characters, because they do have so much to say, and you want to hear them say it. And they say it, and it’s wonderful.

TINA: Now I will say that I am kind of known for my--what has come to be known as banter between black women. Which is why in the earlier part of my writing career, I was a dialogue polisher. I mean, they would call me--for instance, if a script--and just to give you an example, Sister Act II. Sister Act II was written by two white guys. And Disney called me up and said, “Tina! You got to do something about these kids. They don’t sound....” And then it was so funny, ‘cause they’d say “They don’t sound black.” And so I’d say, “Okay, well, what does black sound like?” ‘Cause we sound like--you know, we’re across the board. We sound like a lot of things. And they said, “Well, you know. They don’t have that urban thing. And they don’t banter amongst each other the way, we have read your scripts to have people banter.” So I understood immediately. I didn’t want to have to try to articulate what it was. And so I did that film.

SCOTT: What’s the future of the project?

TINA: Well, Sistas in the City, will be a live action feature film, which will then become my directorial debut. And it’s also going to be very musical. Now I am changing, however, the occupation of two of the girls, because for a feature film, it now occurs to me that two of them have the same occupations as two of the Sex and the City girls. So I’m going to change one of the occupations, so that the girl--the Tamika character--so that her deep desire.... We’re going to have her--she’s going to work for her boyfriend’s parents’ hair products company, but once she leaves, what she really wanted to do was be an animator. And the beauty of the animation thing is it gives me an opportunity to continue to use the animated characters in a live action film.

SCOTT: Will the feature film be a sequel to these ten short films on the DVD?

TINA: No. It’ll be based on the characters, obviously. And you will see things that are in the ten episodes. Some things in those episodes you’ll see in the feature, because of course, that’s who they are. For instance, the lead girl, the Tamika character, who’s boyfriend, she feels, is a Mama’s boy. That’s obviously going to be in the feature film. The fact that Mercedes kind of sleeps around, and that she’s an artist, and she’s gotten a deal from an art dealer to expose her work somewhere, and should they pose nude: that’s a question that’ll come up also in the feature film. The fact that Jordan is such a Daddy’s girl, and she’s got access to Daddy’s credit cards and to the BMW and to this, that, and the other--and then she breaks in and her heart is broken when she discovers that her father is not faithful to her mother, that’s part. So some of those, some of those aspects out of the ten animated episodes will be reflected in the live action piece.