By Popular Demand

I suppose I will give a bit of detail on what's been taking up much of my time until lately. As for the length, I make no promises. Anyhow, I'm taking three classes in this BU L.A. Internship Program. They just wouldn't let me out of them. They are useful classes, but after successfully completing my degree requirements, it is annoying to have superfluous (so far as grades are concerned) classes have an influence on whether I receive my degree. Though they are three in number, the classes are not taking up all that much of my time right now because I've been neglecting the work I should be doing for them.

My internship at Muse Productions was the biggest time draw. It involves faxing, taking calls, making calls, printing and copying screenplays, and many other general office tasks, including reading material that is in development. That last bit is what got me involved with Mama Black Widow.

Mama Black Widow is an adaptation of a novel of the same name written by the notorious pimp, Iceberg Slim. It essentially tells the tale of a sharecropping black family that moves to Chicago in the 1930s, believing it to be a promised land. Things are not as the family imagines, and they are faced with tragedy of many kinds by their tale's end. The book has its faults, but the underlying story is sound, and the roles have great potential for actors to showcase their emotional range.

I logged 72 hours (there could have been and probably were more that I neglected to log) of work outside of my regularly scheduled internship time preparing reference books for the screenplay adaptation. For this, I broke down the screenplay by scene, which characters appear in that scene, a brief description of what transpires in the scene, and in which chapter and on what page said events appear in the book. I, then, pulled pages from a copy of the book's manuscript and highlighted the portions of each page to show what was used in the screenplay. The collections of pages were labeled with screenplay scene heading and screenplay page number and collected with the breakdown table, highlighted pages, and a copy of the screenplay into a binder for reference.

It was a good bit of work, but I do know the story very well now. All I have left to do is figure out how to list this on my résumé.