Latest / Lydia Nicole's Acting Smarter Now Podcast / How Bentley Kyle Evans Went From PA to Running Mutiple TV Shows

Transcript

How Bentley Kyle Evans Went From PA to Running Mutiple TV Shows · Lydia Nicole's Acting Smarter Now Podcast

• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's not what you know, it's who you know.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started watching TV shows, and I would go, I think I'm gonna try to write an episode of that.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Fear was the one thing that stopped me from being everything that I could be.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Acting Smarter now.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Today we have the most amazing young mogul in Hollywood, people.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I can say I knew him when, because I can.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So please put your hands together.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Help me welcome Bentley Kyle Evans.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have so much to ask you, but the first question I want to ask you is how important are relationships in entertainment industry?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: I like the fact that that's the first question because that is the most important thing element to the entertainment industry.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Not just in entertainment and most businesses, I would say, but in entertainment especially, relationships are everything.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: I have made every move that I have made in this business via relationship.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was not because of education, it was not because of uh, well, saying things, degrees and things like that.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was because of relationships and how those relationships were nurtured.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would have to say it is the single most important element that you can have is your relationships in this business.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Used to be a Rolodex.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, however, however, you keep those names and numbers and stay in touch with people, it is the most important thing that you can possibly do.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you are the poster boy for relationships because when you started, you did not know anything about the business.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But you and Tommy Morgan bogarded your way onto the Hollywood shuffle set, and history was made between the two of you and all the people that we had on the set.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's important for people to understand how vital relationships are in this business.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned it.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's more important than education, more important than your knowledge.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: As an artist, the first thing is relationships.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think people really understand that.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't understand the currency of relationships.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about in the beginning?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because you came in not knowing anything, which I think is fantastic because in those days, that's what we did, right?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: We just came in not knowing stuff and we figured it out as we went.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's a little bit different, but there's still elements of that same thing.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: What was a couple of things that you brought in with you regarding understanding what was going on with relationships?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'll say this.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, growing up in LA, uh, you know, Hollywood was in our back our backyard.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: That was our playground.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: But most people that grew up in LA never get into the entertainment business because it's just too cliche.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so we just kind of go around it and do other things, and people come here to make it.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: For me, being popular in high school and just in the neighborhood in general helped me understand what relationships were all about.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: I understood the currency of a relationship because on the playground, everybody wants to be around the popular kid.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so you want to get to know the popular kid so that now you have this relationship.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the same thing continued into the parlay, into Hollywood, into the entertainment industry.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me, knowing the value of the relationship is what I did bring into it, not knowing if that would ever really um translate into anything in the entertainment industry, but it did.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And by way of Tommy and a few other people, meeting Mr.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Robert Townsend was the most important move that I've ever made in this entertainment industry, period.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Bar none.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm saying that he is the most important person in my career, period, because he started the ball rolling.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: From that introduction and that relationship, I was able to grow tentacles to reach out to the Wayans family and the Martin Lawrences and the different people like that.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it just was a snowball effect.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Robert was the snowball in my relationship to get to where I needed to go and where I plan on going.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So just knowing that, I knew that once you got in there, personalities are infectious.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew that I, one thing that I do know, I do have a personality, a decent personality to get along with people.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew that if I just, you know, would just come in and be myself and allow people to come to me because they're drawn to me because of the personality, that would probably be my best asset.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I brought to the game with myself.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I knew once I get in the door, all I got to do is learn now, because again, the relationship's important.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not what you know, it's who you know.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: But once you get in, now it's about what you know because you've you've already used the who you know to get in.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: All right, now you're on stage.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now what do you know?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I had to do a lot of learning and adapting, and a lot of it was me pretending.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was uh emulating other people.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And they always say you got to fit in till you get in.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would just emulate what the other people were doing and what the other guys were doing.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll say this, even in my directing to this very day, I still emulate what I watched Robert do on Hollywood Shuffle, the way he says cut, the way he says action.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was it stuck with me all these years later.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Having known you back then, what I would also say that is part of your superpower is you are a quiet giant.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like you come into the room and you, it is not important for you to be noticed.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that that was probably a really big selling point for you with with the people that that we were connected with.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is that first of all, you're a tall drink of water.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: So um that you already stand out, but you're not trying to stand out.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the difference, you know, that your height made you stand out already, but you weren't trying to be, hey, I'm here, what are you doing?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: You were very observant and you listened, you know, and I think that that is crucial, you know, because uh a lot of times people come into Hollywood and they want, you know, they want to be famous and they want to be and and they have to let themselves be known with everybody, but that really wasn't how you came in.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: If I remember correctly, Tommy was more gregarious, you were more laid back, you know, you were more laid back, you know, and and so um uh I I think that that you know that that has served you.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I know you talk about your superpower being patient, and I and I can see it in how you show up.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like you know your time is coming, you don't have to rush things.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I appreciate that.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, thank you very much for that acknowledgement.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's very important.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I want to talk about you as a kid being this dreamer and and just daydreaming because people don't understand how important that is for an artist.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, for me, I always felt a certain level of intellect.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: I always felt like I am intelligent, I think.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: But what was not important to me was school.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I say that is because, you know, I wasn't necessarily interested in the subject matter that was being taught in the classrooms.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Some things I was drawn to, but some things I weren't uh I wasn't uh drawn to whatsoever.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so I knew that my parents had instilled a certain level of uh dignity and and intellect in me.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew that I could, you know, maneuver through pretty much anything.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um one of the biggest problems that my mother had with me, she used to always say, Son, you're bringing home C's and you're bringing home D's sometimes.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not that you can't do better, you're somewhere else.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say, Yes, mom, I'm dreaming.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the teachers used to always put that in the notes.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: He's a daydreamer, wonderful kid, very nice, um, gets along with others, but he's a daydreamer.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And because I could be in class and I would just be staring out the window.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking of the fantasy, the where anywhere else that I could be, but in this classroom, because I felt like the classroom was a cage.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like because we're able to see beyond this building that we're in, I want to be out there flying free.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't just one particular thing that I would dream about.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was a bevy of things.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: I just loved dreaming.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: I loved imagining.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: I loved imagining myself in a different planet or with different clothes on, or, you know, I just imagined so much in my lifetime, uh, in that early part of my life, that I just went with the dream.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: And my mother would say, Son, you're dreaming again.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're dreaming.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say, Mom, what's wrong with that?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know what I was saying.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: But that's it was like, that's that's part of it, isn't it?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Aren't we supposed to dream bigger?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: But because my parents were raised in a time uh where it wasn't about the dream.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was about how do you survive, how do you get a job, how do you you get that education, and and the best thing that you can be is a lawyer or a doctor.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And but they couldn't see the bigger dream.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't blame them for that.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't fault them because they loved me and they didn't want me to be some dreamer that's on the street somewhere, but didn't be wasn't able to really conquer uh what it takes to get a job and become present in that world, but that wasn't for me, and I knew it wasn't for me.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the people around me at the time, they weren't like me, and I knew they weren't like me.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And some were, but some weren't.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, when a lot of my friends went off to college, um, I was stuck.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know where to go.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: What do I do?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I never stopped dreaming.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, when I when I met my people, is what I call them, is is the day that I stepped on set of the Hollywood shuffle.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: That was the day that I met my people.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: I said, these are where the dreamers that are like me are.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now, and I met them at a level before they blew up where we could talk about these dreams, and I felt so at home.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: But as a kid, even in school, fear was the one thing that stopped me from being everything that I could be.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what I mean by that.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: In school, I wanted to be a part of the theater programs, uh, the choir, and all that kind of stuff.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: But because where I grew up, I grew up around a group of people, a group of guys that were like, that wasn't you could not do that.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: You were not gonna be in theater because you would get teased, you would get beat up, uh, you know, like real gang members went to school with me and stuff like that.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you couldn't be in that marginalized group of people that are in the theatrics.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they would laugh at you uh about that.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I chose to kind of put that on the back burner, you know, suppress that that feeling of wanting to be theatrical and showing my uh personality and the talent that I felt that I had within.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I suppressed it.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to do that, but I was dreaming the entire time.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I I tell my mom now, I joke with her now.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: My mom's 87 years old as we speak.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I tell her, I go, hey, mom, this was the dream.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes, shut up, boy.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going, but this was what I was dreaming.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm living my dream.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I truly can say that I am live literally living out my dream.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: It hasn't come exactly the way I dreamed it.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Some it it has hurdles and still hurdles that we have to jump over now.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's pretty much the dream has always been present and it's always been important to me.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I'm living the dream.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Actor, are you tired of being tired of being tired of being tired?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your pictures aren't working, you're not getting into auditions, your agents aren't calling you back, or worse off, you can't even get an agent.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if that sounds like you, if it sounds like you are at your wit's end, that you just feel like all is lost, you don't know what to do, come and join us at the Acting Smarter Circle, where we are a community of actors who help other actors.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I am your guide and your coach to help you with a plan, strategy, and your branding.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are interested and you're tired of being tired and ready for change, come and join us at ActingSmarterCircle.com.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're waiting for you now.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you got into Hollywood Shuffle, you got your SAG card, and for people to understand that there was no money in Hollywood Shuffle.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you and Tommy were relegated to doing PA.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And back then we didn't even know that's what it was, but that's what you were doing.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Robert was really good enough that everybody who worked on the project got to have a line or two so they could be in sag if they weren't.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if they weren't sag, they got a paycheck.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you weren't in SAG, you got a paycheck and you got to be Taft Heart lead, or at least be ready to be Taft Tart lead.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And for people who don't know that, that means there are two steps before you get in the union.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: The first step is you got to get a union job.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second step is once you get that union job, then you have a period of time that you can officially join before the next job, or they're gonna take all your money from you.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: You you're gonna join no matter what.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna take your money, but they give you the opportunity to pay it up front so they don't have to take it.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: So now you're in SAG.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're starting to do little bits of you know, little pieces of work here as an actor.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're starting to move, but you meet Martin Lawrence, and you guys form a bond, and he opens the writing door for you.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us how that happened.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, there there were a lot of elements that got me to that point.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you gotta give credit where credit is due.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I got my very first agent because of Kim Wayans, and of course I met Kim on the Hollywood Shuffle set, and Kim introduced me to uh uh my first agent, and they started sending me out on these auditions.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I had no acting experience, as you know, very little.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: I just had this SAG card and you know, basically a rep that would get me in on these auditions.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, I had this different look.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was six foot two at the time.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um I look like a baby, I'm 167 pounds or something like that.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had this look, and they were always looking for basketball players and these shows and movies and stuff.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I would always get sent out on these basketball players uh for these black basketball player roles.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I couldn't play basketball, but I, you know, I started booking jobs, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Just because of the look and watching people on TV, I figured out what the acting thing was all about as far as doing, you know, basic comedy and stuff like that.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then I go for an audition at NBC uh for a TV show called A Little Bit Strange.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a pilot that they were doing at uh at NBC and Tapacaroo, and a few other people were executive producers of it.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I go in for this audition, and when I walk in, I see all these people that I had grown up seeing on TV in the waiting room for these different roles.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I go in, and the only person that was reading against me was a guy named Martin Lawrence.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew who he was because he had already been on What's Happening Now.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so at that time, you know, you didn't see uh black kids on TV too often.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like I he was a polarizing figure as far as I knew.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so he introduced himself to me and said what role he was up for, and and I said what role I was up for, and of course he was, you know, very cool.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And hey man, look, good luck, good luck.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even realize that I had bypassed all the steps that actors normally take to get to that moment because when I came in for the audition, I was actually screen testing.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they had already gone through a bunch of different actors to get to that point.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And Tapakuru was Martin's manager, so it didn't hurt that he was at the at the front of the line.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they bring me in as somebody to kind of challenge what Martin is doing.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the character called for somebody that was my type, a tall, wiry kid that kind of looked, it was like playing uh Herman Monster in the monsters, because that's what the show is the strange family.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: But so it was it was written with my type in in mind, but Martin had the he had the personality, he had the experience, and he had the manager that was an exec producer.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it ended up working out in his favor.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: He gets the role, and that's where we meet, and we become fast friends from that point.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, the rest is the rest is history, the rest we'll talk about.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I I want to stop for a second and and just share with the audience who Topper Carew was, because during that time, Topper was an important figure in Hollywood.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he was one of the few black TV producers.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: He had done Righteous Apples, he had done DC Cab.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was doing projects.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know when he started managing, but I know he started off as a producer.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Righteous Apples was something, it was on PBS.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: I remember uh auditioning for that a bunch of times because there weren't a lot of parts for people of color to work on.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so Topper was one of the few people that we had access to that we could, you know, that he wasn't too far removed from us.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Topper was an important figure, and he would then go on to help create Martin.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: So now you you and Martin meet and start talking.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think it's important for people to know how this relationship started.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, you know, it was it was like one of those things, lightning in a bottle.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: It happened at the time it was supposed to happen in this room where we met.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And Martin was new in town, basically.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, he's living in an apartment with no furniture, you know, probably no couch, no nothing.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's new in town, and I grew up here, so I had the luxury of still living at my parents' home.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think I invited him over for Thanksgiving or something, and he and he showed up.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he had no other family out here, so I became somewhat his family.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and we still call each other family to this very day.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so from that point on, we just stayed in touch.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're starting we start playing basketball together on the weekends and stuff like that.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I'm not a basketball player, I'm putting it out there, but we played, and and I that's where I'm I met Tommy Ford and uh Tommy Davidson and all these different people that I would meet through Martin's lens.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so from that point, you know, just just having that friendship, we would tell each other about auditions and different things that were happening around town.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew this is a very important relationship that I must foster.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just innately, I knew that this is something that I have to, I have to really nurture this relationship because I feel like this guy is so different from me.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: He's going places and he knows he's going places, and I'm going with him because he just had that vigor and that personality that you just knew, hey, this guy's not to be stopped.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: He's a force to be reckoned with.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew that, and I just, you know, said I'm gonna attach myself to this guy.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So now we start auditioning for other things.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'll run into him at house party, uh, at audition for house party.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: He ends up getting one of the leading roles.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: I end up getting a small role in that movie.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first movie that I was ever in that my speaking role didn't get cut out.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so then we start talking about this project that Keenan Wayans is doing, uh, Keenan Ivey Wayne's uh this uh show.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Called Hammer Slammer Slade.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a uh it was derived from I'ma Get You Sucker.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he took these characters and made it into a TV show for ABC.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so Martin and I went in and we auditioned for the roles that Damon Wayans and Kadeem Hardison played in the movie.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And lo and behold, Martin and I booked those two roles.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're two buddies already.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're playing these two characters on this show for ABC.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the show did not get picked up.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: It did air on ABC, which was big for the neighborhood.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: I could tell everybody, watch me on ABC.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it died very fast because Keenan was more uh invested in Living Color.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so it didn't get his attention, the attention that it deserved.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: But Martin and I had that connection there again.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then from that point, we're still just hanging out.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: He invites me to a Clippers basketball game.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: I remember like it was yesterday.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: This was let's let's go back.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: This was probably about 91, 1991.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to a Clippers game.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: And on the ride, he tells me about um that he's doing a showcase, stand-up showcase.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time I was trying to get my feet wet and stand-up too, but I didn't have the I didn't have the guts.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: I did not know that.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, being around Keenan and Robert and watching those guys, and I just wanted my shot.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'm gonna do it, but I never had the heart to do it.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: I tried it, but I never had that thing.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like when I was on stage, it was a very lonely place, and I didn't like that feeling.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't like the feeling of being lonely and everybody looking at me.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: I still don't like that to this very day.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I pivoted from that.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, Martin is telling me about this showcase and that they want to do some sort of TV series around him.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, what is it?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: He says, I don't know, but they want to do something.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Hey man, well, that's great for you.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so he says to me on this ride, hey man, look, we're boys, so I don't want to hear because it's gonna happen for me.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to hear out in lookout for my boy.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm telling you now, if there's anything you want to do, like audition for any other roles or whatever, I'm giving you that opportunity now to tell me.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: I said, nah man, you know what?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to do something great for me, I want to be a writer on that show.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Oh, what?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: I said, a writer.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And his exact words was, he said, Benley, I don't know anything about that world, man.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's, you know, that's the white boy's world.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how you're gonna do that.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, If I if I have an opportunity, I can do it.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote some things and I want you to check them out.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: So he says, All right, I'd like to read some stuff.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I presented him with three scripts that I had written.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think I had written a Cosby Show Spec.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think I had written a few different spec scripts, and I wrote this original piece called Just Me and the Boys.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: How did you know to start writing spec scripts?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think uh this step is really important that we talk about before we get into this next piece.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: What was going on in you that you were like, I think I could write?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And and that you started writing on your pad.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: What was that?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think what prompted me to realize that I think I can write something is after Hollywood shuffle, I started kind of like paling around with Keenan and kind of like just being a runner for him.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I would go to Keenan's house and watch him sit at his kitchen table with a typewriter and type scripts.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going, how do you do that?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, it's what you think in your mind, you come up with and you put on paper.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going, so you actually sit there and write the words that he says, yeah, that's what, you know, that's what it was all about.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I told him that I wondered how Robert had written Hollywood Shuffle.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Yeah, well, you know, we wrote it together and we we just sat down and just talked about our ideas and what we thought, which the ignorance in me didn't even realize that actors really use a script.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: They they're not just coming up with these words, they're using a script.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew just by watching him that I could do it if I because I had an imagination.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started watching TV shows, and I would go, I think I'm gonna try to write an episode of that.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: But did anybody tell you, you know, if you want to be a writer, write a spec script?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because at that time, that is how you got in the door with a spec script from a current show.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: So at the time I had never even heard the term spec script, which is short for speculative script.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: I had never heard that term before.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know what that was.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: All I knew was that I had been going on auditions and I started booking roles, and I would keep the scripts and I would read the scripts.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of started learning the structure of a script, you know, what an act break is, and and I would ask questions and I and I started learning what these different transitions in the scripts were, and why is this here?
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: And what is this INT?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, interior.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why is I started asking those questions, and then came there was a software that had come to market called Scriptware.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it came out somewhere probably in the late 80s, where if you had a computer and you installed the floppy disk, there were these prompts that it would just prompt you.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it made writing a real script a lot easier for us.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, now we have Final Draft and several others.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: But at that time, this was the industry standard that people were adapting.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I started learning that.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: I had bought this computer from a friend of mine that worked in Music Plus.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: He probably stole it.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I had taken all my little savings and I bought this computer, which was huge.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: My mother thought I was crazy.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I invested my money in this software, and it just kind of taught me the breakdown of what these scenes were.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Still, I had never heard the term spec script.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: I still didn't know what that was until later on, much later into my career.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't have anyone prompting me to tell me to do it.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was just something I figured out.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: I figured it makes sense to have a collection of scripts that one day you can show.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I did do something that I thought was interesting at the time because I started asking around who writes the scripts for like Cosby Show and stuff like that.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, well, that's in New York.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, but there has to be an office where you can get a Cosby show script.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I did the research and found a place where I could get a Cosby show script.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they sent me one.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so, of course, I looked at the breakdown of how it was written, how many pages, and still not really understanding the way that a story is supposed to be structured, but enough to say, hey, I could put my expression on paper as well.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I had a mother that could type.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: So um I would write stuff on a notebook paper, on a notebook uh pad, and I started writing scripts, and then I would hand them, hand them to my mother, and then she would script them for me, put them in script format.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew that at that point in time I had something.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if they were good or not, but I will say the one spec script that I had, just me and the boys, was good enough to catch Martin's attention, and he was blown away by the fact that I had sat down and actually scripted and pinned the script, and that he could look at it and go, You did this?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, wait, wait.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: You created a world.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: You you did your original, you created a world that was, even though you had done the spec scripts, you had shown him you had uh imagination.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had because I what it was was again, all my friends were leaving and they were all going to school and they were all going to these uh fabulous HBCUs down south and in DC and stuff like that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought, you know, what if I write a script about uh a guy that goes to an HBCU, but he's so silly and so irresponsible that he doesn't get his housing in order.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: So he gets into the school by the hair, by the, you know, by the skin of a feet, right?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: But then he gets to, he gets down south to Georgia, to Atlanta, and he has nowhere to live.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: So he ends up taking this job, running this group home, and it's just me and the boys, and these these were wayward kids.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, where I got the idea for the group home was when we were doing I'ma get you sucker, when I was Keenan Standing on that movie, we shot at a group home.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: First time I had ever heard the term group home.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I met these people that owned the building, and they had all these boys that were living there.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I asked them, how does this work?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they told me what that was all about.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And there were brilliant minds, brilliant kids in this in this group home.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: They were just displaced.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, if I merge my experience of not going to college but wanting to go to college, and and they this guy ends up living with these these kids kind of supervising this group home, it could be a great script.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of like Charles in charge, in a sense.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: With uh Scott Bale.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I wrote that version of that and I handed it to Martin and he flipped.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: He went crazy.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: He called me and said, Benley, tell the truth, man.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Did you write this?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Man, I wrote that.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Come to my house right away.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I go out and he says, Whatever I do, man, you got to be my writer.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: So now I'm going, I got this badge of honor here.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, he's just pinned me with a badge of honor.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Okay, cool.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: So he starts telling me about these meetings that he has set up.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, I got one on Monday.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to 20th Century Fox.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going, going to the Fox Lot?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we drive on this Fox lot, and I'm blown away by everything I'm seeing in these hallways.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's it's it's 20th Century Fox.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we get to this meeting room, and um, there's a secretary there, and she says, Mr.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: Lawrence, they're waiting for you in the conference room.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Your friend here can have a seat and wait for you to come out.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, sure.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Martin says, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's not waiting out here.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's coming in the meeting with me.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: He's my writer.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Martin doesn't know at the time, he doesn't know how the game really works.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that so then she says, okay, so we go in, and of course, you know, the the creator of Martin is in the room, John Bowman.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he hadn't created it yet, but he's the future creator of the show, along with Topper, along with Chris Albrecht from HBO and all these Fox executives, and they're looking at Martin like, Who the hell is this guy?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Look, if he can't stay in here, I'm leaving too.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, Okay, well, he can stay, he can stay.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was a very bold move.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh they started asking me questions like, What have you written?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: What let's let's hear your resume.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I was like, um, well, um, I don't really, you know, um, I don't know how so the the bottom line, what we learned in that meeting was that it doesn't work like that.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: And they had already had somebody there that they wanted Martin to meet, and that was John Bowman.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: But Martin made it uh very clear that whatever happens, if there's a show that's gonna come from this, Benley has to be a part of that writing team because he has a distinct voice and he has my voice.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, when it happened, I was added to the team.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now it didn't happen that easy.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted to bring me in as a writer's trainee, a WGA trainee, which I don't even know if they still have those, but uh where you know you come in and you're kind of an apprentice, right?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they tell you to be in the room, but very little and you're just learning.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: And Martin said, nope, we ain't doing that.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: He's got to be a writer on staff, and that's just what it's gonna be.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they and they made me an offer to come on Martin as a writer.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what happened shortly thereafter was I booked a recurring a recurring role on Doogie Hauser.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, remember Doogie Hauser?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: I booked this recurring role on there, and one day I couldn't be in the writer's room because I was doing the uh I was taping.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and when I got to work later on that afternoon, Martin says, Where were you earlier?
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I was doing Doogie Hauser.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, hmm.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the deal, Ben.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: You asked for this.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: I gave you an opportunity and you asked for this.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: You asked me to do this for you.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to go do Doogie Hauser and still do the acting thing, that's cool if that's what you want to do, but you can't do both.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: So either you're with me or you're with over there.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that day, that was the day that I quit acting.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was the day that I hung up my I hung up my acting cape, and I said, I'm all the way in as a writer, and I'm gonna learn and be the best writer I can be.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that was that's that's that story.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about you being in the writer's room, because now this is new for you.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're in the writer's room.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Are you the only person of color?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there was myself, there was another young, uh, young uh brother named Benny Richburg.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Benny had come from The Fresh Prince.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: He came, he had a very similar experience to mine on how he broke in.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: He and Will were friends in Philly, and he came to LA to get a change.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he actually did start out as a writer's trainee and then moved his way into the writing.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: So when Martin was putting together the team or helping put together the team for his show, he was looking for young black writers.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Benny was the only one around town.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, he stole Benny from the from the Fresh Prince uh writing staff and brought him over to this show, which Benny wanted to come anyway.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it was myself and Benny, and then there were at that time, I think there were 10 writers the first season, and it was myself, Benny, Myra J, who is a comedian.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, comedian, fabulous.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Topper was managing her as well, so he got her in that writer's room, and then it was another uh uh guy named David Wyatt, and so we were the the the core four.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: We were the young, you know, black writers in the room, and then all the other guys were, of course, we know what their uh skin tone was, but they wouldn't allow us as first-year writers to be in the room a lot because we were lower-level junior writers, so we would have to sit in our offices and come up with cold opens that would never get used, and they would say, create a joke bank, make jokes and put them in this in folders, and if we need them, we'll use them.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: You were practicing in the bullpen.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was practicing in the bullpen.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then what happens is Martin starts getting scripts down on stage, and he's going, This ain't it.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: This ain't my voice.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Billy, what's going on?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm telling him, hey man, they won't let us in the writer's room.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he came up and said, Oh no, no, no, no, we ain't doing it like that.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, all the writers are gonna be in the writer's room because they all have a voice.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Martin was the one that kind of shattered that whole glass wall of not being able to come in the room.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he made sure that we were there because our voices were valuable.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: I started learning, it was the greatest thing for me because I started learning from these veterans, these comedy vets that had written for uh Lucille Ball, that had written for so many different shows.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: Saturday Night Live is where John Bowman came from.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started learning from these vets, and they couldn't get rid of me because I was a sponge and I was, you know, I was glued to Billy Van Zant's uh side, and and whenever they went to lunch, I wanted to be with them.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to be with the the lower level writers that are you know going out splurging on on things because they got a new check.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, no, I want to go with them.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where are they going?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to the commissary.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just learned.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: I just I sponged off of those guys and I learned what it was.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know anything about the money.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea what writers made as a for a living.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: I told Martin, which he got mad at, but I told him one day, I love this so much, I would do it for free.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: I probably would pay them to be in this writer's role.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Don't say that anymore.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: But he basically was uh telling me you got a self-worth and you gotta you gotta realize what it is and don't be afraid of your gift.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: You had mentioned nurturing relationships earlier.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to talk about that because at a young age, for you to know that you have to nurture the friendship.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're in Hollywood.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: People don't nurture friendships, they're using friendships or they're using connections as friendships.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, oh, you know, so-and-so is my friend, and you ain't never sat at the table with me.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: We have never eaten together.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know your family, I don't know anything about you, but you're calling me your friend.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: How did you know at that age, because you were in your 20s, that this was an important relationship that you really needed to put time in, that you really needed to invest in.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's where a great father in your household comes to play.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is my dad and I didn't have the type of relationship where we would go outside and throw the football and throw the baseball.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't have that.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: But we did have the kind of conversations where we talked about money and we talked about occupations and we talked about life in general.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: And my father was this very gregarious guy that got along with everybody.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody wanted to know Ben Evans, right?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I grew up watching him walk in banks and go to the front of the line.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I grew up watching him be charming in a restaurant and get the waiters or the waitresses to give him something that wasn't on the menu.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: I watched him do things that I found very, very interesting.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I watched the way that he engaged with people and his relationships were everything.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember him telling me, you know, the very house that we live in, I got because I knew the president at the bank and it was a foreclosure.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they called me and said, Ben, I got your house.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: He said, everybody didn't have that relationship, especially being a black guy in the 1960s and 70s.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: He said, but they would call me because they liked me.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew that it's very important to be liked in this walk.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: We gotta be liked.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're liked, everybody wants to be around you because they want to know why people want to be around this person.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody likes him.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I watched my father, I just watched him maneuver through a world of people in a time where people weren't too kind to black people.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I used to watch him, and so knowing that, I realized that it's very, very, very important to have relationships to get you indoors that you could never get in yourself.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't something that was calculated, it was just something that was I learned through osmosis, just being in the mix, and I watched how people treated him.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I wanted that same feeling.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's all I really know.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's like that's all I know is to be treated special because they treated my father special.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I love the way that felt.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then getting into the Hollywood game, you start seeing the way they treat stars and stuff like that.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, that's kind of cool.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: I like that, you know, and um, you know, not being a very egotistical guy, but of course, everyone has an ego, and you you kind of like the star treatment sometimes.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I know that I just knew that fostering these relationships was very, very important early on and how I did everything, how I, you know, how I was on the playground, how I was in the little league games.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was more important for me to be friends with everybody on the team than to hit a home run.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that you got you got to get in the mix, and these people gotta like you, and you gotta deal with a lot of different personalities.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes you got to check your ego at the door because just because you may want to say something, you may want to lash out at somebody, but you got to know how to listen instead of talk uh at specific times.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be able to read the room, is what they say.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a level of discernment that you have to have when you're dealing with other people.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: And more important than anything, patience.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: Patience is sometimes you just want to grab somebody by the neck, but you can't.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be patient and realize they're going through something that I'm not dealing with.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just gonna be patient with them until we can have a happy medium.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: I want to do a little sidestepping here to talk about your parents because as you were talking, I'm thinking they came out of Jim Crow into the beginning of the civil.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: Rights.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they're very like that's you know, that's how I grew up.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Coming out of Jim Crow into civil rights, understanding that we had to excel.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: We had to be the best of the best.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: We couldn't fool around.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't have time.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: I remember as a kid, always hearing, you know, you have to work twice as hard as everybody else.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: You have to do more than everybody else.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: If they do 10 steps, you gotta do 20.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you get you can't complain.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so having your dad, especially during Jim Crow time, because if it was the 60s, we were in it, and black people, people of color were not really being taken serious as equals.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: They were second-class citizens.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact that your father understood how to nurture relationships and how to use it to his advantage and make sure that everybody felt comfortable with him, I think that is extraordinary.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: I had a play dad who taught me that it was nice to be important, but it was important to be nice.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that you brought that to the table and you continue to bring that to the table.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: And your mother saying you're a daydreamer wasn't because she was trying to rein on your parade.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: She was looking at the reality of where she came from and how being a daydreamer was could cause collateral damage, you know.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just wanted to say that because somebody who's very young may go, well, what's wrong with her?
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: But she was trying to protect you.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: She was trying to make sure that you um had the right steps to go where you needed to go.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: And being that mother, she's like, I'm not gonna let my baby go down this way.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I I I just wanted to bring that in because I just think it's it's really part of the conversation that is extraordinary that we have to have.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that you had a mother and father at home, and that you came from a community that was knitted, you know, and and when we talk about people of color, I have to go here.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, I have to go here right now.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: When we talk about people of color, a lot of times people think, oh, they're from the ghetto, they're from this.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: They, you know, your father was a real estate man.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that um that they were upwardly mobile at a time when that wasn't really paid attention to, and it and it was kind of like your parents were kind of unicorn at that time, but that they were in a community, and and a lot of people may not know the history of Baldwin Hills, of Windsor Hills, of LaDera Heights, that it was the the wealthy, well not well, well, some of it was wealthy, the the black community because they couldn't go anywhere else.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so they built a community of upwardly mobile people.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you weren't, you know, you might have been near Crenshaw, but you weren't in Crenshaw.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and and I just I just wanted uh to acknowledge that because you you came from a different uh breed of people who cared about you, who cared about your your reputation, who cared about your career, who cared about you showing up as a man, not a black man, but as a man.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I just, you know, I'm sorry, I had to go on the soapbox for a minute.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: But so now you are, now you're in the writer's room, now you're you're you're writing, you're learning, you're observing from these OGs.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the next step for you?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I, you know, of course, I made that commitment that I was going to focus my attention on writing and you know, get out of the acting altogether because it was just a distraction.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I looked at writing as being safe.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: I remember being in the writer's room, and and one of the writers said, he broke down an equation.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: He said, for every every one performer, there's at least five to ten writers.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: So if you choose the writing, you're pretty much in a position to where you'll always have a job as long as you can still imagine.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I liked that.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was very cliche, but I liked it.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I'm gonna use stick with that, I'm gonna use that.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started then learning what the trajectory was for a writer in this business.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know what the levels were, what a story editor was, and a co-producer and a supervising executive.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't know those levels.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I'm so green in the business, but being there in within one year's time, the first season of Martin, I pretty much had it down pat.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: I knew, okay, now I know the game, and now I'm gonna play the game.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the game was to emulate these other writers, to to emulate, like I would look at the way that they would pitch jokes, and I would go, hmm, let me grab my chin.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: You pitch a joke like I love it, I love it.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was art imitates life, right?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, well, hey, listen, you know, and that's what it was.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, hmm, how do I I want to look important in this room?
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: But then I started getting to the point to where I knew what my self-value was in the room because I knew that a lot of these older white guys couldn't write jokes for Martin, who was a 26-year-old black guy from the hood.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: So then it, you know, I would say, uh, John, no, no offense, but he wouldn't say it like that.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: He would say it like this.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then I became myself and Benny, we became the resident uh go-to guys for the black lingo, right?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then we started really realizing our power base in the room because they would come to us and go, hey, we want to do this character.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, nah, he ain't gonna do that, but he'll do this.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: And once we all jailed, I realized my value in that room.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: But now it was like, what are the levels?
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: What are the steps?
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously in a writer's room, it kind of works like in school.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: You go from you get uh promoted from first grade to second to third to fourth.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that the next step for me was to become a story editor.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: So tell us what is the difference between just a writer in a room and the story editor.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: So by the time I become a writer in the writer's room, a lot of those titles kind of faded.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: They they they they kind of didn't have a meaning anymore.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: But at one point in time, when people were writing on typewriters and they were writing by hand and stuff like that, there were story editors that would take what the writers were writing and hand it off to a story editor, and then that person would take out all the words that didn't need to be there and really edit these ideas into a script, and then they would hand them off to the writer's assistant that would then create the draft of the script that everybody's gonna be reading the next day.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it had a meaning to it at that time, but by the time I came in, it was just basically another title that meant you were higher than a staff writer.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I started out as a staff writer, and then I went to uh I skipped story editor, I went to executive story editor, as a matter of fact, uh, which was just a slightly higher title than story editor.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then I realized the next progression was to go from there to become a co-producer and then an actual producer, and then the next level was supervising producer, then co-executive producer, which in my mind I was going, oh, I'll never get there.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, to be a co-executive or an executive producer, oh man.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: And how long did it take you to get there?
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was the co-executive producer by season four.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was 28 years old, and I was the showrunner of a network television show, which is unheard of.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: At that time, it was really unheard of.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: A black kid, 28 years old, and he's the showrunner.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that didn't happen at that time.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: So there was there was not a lot of there was no social media, and I didn't have a publicist.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: So of course nobody really knew my name.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the black people in Hollywood knew your name.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's I mean, uh, so even though we didn't have social media, we had uh the phone calls, people calling, you know.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Bentley's on Martin, Bentley's doing this, Bentley's doing that, you know, because the community was small and still is small.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is a small community.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I just wanted to say that because everybody knew who you were.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: By that point, everybody knew that you were the man on Martin.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and but with that came a lot of responsibility that I wasn't ready for yet because I didn't understand that now being this showrunner, you got to make some decisions that you didn't have to worry about as a writer, just as a lower level writer.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: Everything's coming to you.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: They want to, you got to pick the colored drapes that are on the set.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: You got to pick what the writers are eating for lunch, you got to pick all these different things.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're going, whoa, whoa, I'm 28.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is a lot of responsibility for a kid, right?
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so I but I took it on and again, I just emulated what I saw before me.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, how would John do it?
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: How would how would Samart Williams do it?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I just gotta be like them.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: I I ran the room just like they would run it.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, guys, time to take a break.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I just did what they did and until it just felt very natural for me.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was the the progression of going from staff writer to showrunner uh within just you know, after three seasons, which is crazy.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um now I marvel at it because I can't believe that happened, but when it's happening to you, you don't realize that it's anything special.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then by season four, the end of season four, every every company in Hollywood wanted to do a deal with me.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I ended up going with Warner Brothers, but every they were courting me from everywhere.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was like I was the hot new thing in town.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go to Jamie Foxx?
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, yeah, well, I ended up going, I ended up inking a deal with Warner Brothers, and uh, but I was still under contract for Martin.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so what ends up happening is the way that it worked was once I signed the deal with Warner Brothers, they knew that I still had a year on my contract.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: But because it was HBO, where where we did Martin, HBO was owned by Warner Brothers.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they made an allowance for me to do this deal, and they didn't think that I was gonna develop the first year.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: They thought that I was just gonna kind of just sit on the deal, and then maybe in my second year after the Martin show is possibly over, then I would develop something.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the very first thing I do when I get to Warner Brothers, I look at their roster of talent and I see Jamie Foxx's name.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I had met Jamie a few times.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't friends, but we were friendly.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, You got to get me a meeting with him.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: I need to do a show for him.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, I know.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's we already have him assigned to a showrunner, and uh they're they're already working on something.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Yeah, but you gotta you gotta let me sit down with this guy.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I sit down with Jamie, and when we first sit down, I don't know if the meeting was that great because Jamie was very quiet in the meeting, but that's just Jamie's nature.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: Jamie, if he doesn't know you, he's not gonna give you a lot of energy, but he's studying you and he's he's just brilliant like that.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm, he sounds like somebody I know.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: At least I'm probably a little more talkative than he is.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: But when Jamie's on, he's on.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: I obviously you know that when he's performing, he's going all the way in, but he's very reserved outside of that.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so he he uh after the meeting, I thought, hey, he's he's not feeling me.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I blew the meeting, and my agents are like, no, no, no, he's it's quite the opposite.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: Go back, he wants to meet with you again.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so we sit down and we start coming up with this idea for the Jamie Foxx show, which Jamie came up with the idea.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: He was the one that came up with the hotel and and creating this world of these characters and stuff like that, because that's just the way his mind works.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, What else?
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, You gotta figure that out.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: So at that point, we co-created this TV show that did a hundred episodes, and yeah, so that's when how I ended up there.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was running both shows at the same time.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't even 30 years old yet.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was, I was, I had the the duty of being at Warner Brothers half the day and Universal the other half of the day.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Luckily, they were right across the street from each other, so you know, but it was uh it was quite a dance.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so people know you as the writer, showrunner, the man.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about the studio owner now.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, because you did something that is again, I'm I'm seeing you as a unicorn.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not many people would invest in their own studio.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me the evolution of that.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_00: Was that something your father spoke to you about, or you just like that was just something that was in the back of your head, like, I think I would like to have my own studio.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: So again, you always got to give credit where credit is due.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember there was a time early on in the career where Robert Townsend started his uh studio called Tinsel Townsend.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember playing in Hollywood, and I remember going there and going, yo, this is this is incredible.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is how you want to do it.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now comes the reality.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: All these years later, Hollywood stops knocking at my door.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're not calling me like I think that they should be calling me.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: After we finished the Jamie Foxx show, you know, here I am, maybe 32 years old, something like that.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not getting those calls because they got rid of UPN and they got rid of the WB, and Fox had integrated their programming and they weren't doing African American themed shows anymore.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so here I am in a position of not really getting those calls.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're looking at these younger writers that are coming in, the Mara Brock Aquilles of the world, who I helped foster her uh career and so many others.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm not getting these calls.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: So now I'm going, what do you do now?
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, what did I do?
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: I got with a friend of mine, uh, a friend of mine, Trenton Gums, and he had an idea for a movie.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we ended up shooting an independent movie that I put some of my money into.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: I invested in this movie, and we went to the Caribbean, we went to Jamaica, and we shoot this independent movie ourselves.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was taking a book out of Roberts Page.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna shoot this movie.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably not the greatest movie, but we're gonna shoot it.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: We got very little money, and we're going to do it.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we did it.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so at that point in time, it was like, now what do we do with this movie that we shot?
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have to figure out how to get it distributed.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we ended up writing, producing, directing uh this movie, three of us, myself, uh Trenton, and his brother Desmond.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: We ended up writing, producing, and directing this movie, and then we did our own distribution.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: We ended up distributing the film ourselves directly from our computer to the movie theaters, and which was a big feat at that time.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: Still is pretty much, and so, but we didn't have a choice, and then once we got distribution in the Caribbean, then we started going to these markets that you start learning about.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: You start learning uh, what is NAppy and what is uh AFM and what is the Cons Film Festival, uh, cons can, some people say it, however they say it.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what is all this stuff?
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Sundance.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so you start going and you figure out, oh, this is where the buyers come and the agents are.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we ended up getting ourselves an international sales agent for our show, our movie Rood Boy, is what it was called.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so then we ended up doing deals all over the world.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: We ended up getting Rood Boy into, I think we got into 10 different markets all over the world.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_01: I remember going to Spain and seeing the movie on DVD in the store, and I'm holding it going, I got a picture, I'm going, look, we're in Spain.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we didn't make much money on it, but it gave me the bug.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: It made me understand hey, we got to be independents here.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as far as the studio itself, well, that's a different story.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: I when I did my first independent television series, which was called Love That Girl in 2009, I didn't have a place to shoot it.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started going to the studio lots trying to figure out how I could get a sound stage for cheap, and nobody bit.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so we found the guy that owns the Roscoe's and chick, Roscoe's chicken and waffles, Herb Hudson.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: He had a stage on Pico, and he said, You guys could use this as your stage.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but let me backtrack for one second.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: Rafael Sadiq, who's one of my dearest and closest friends, had a recording studio, music studio.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: So he allowed us to shoot the first four episodes of Love That Girl in his recording studio in like a garage.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: We had to just clear it out and we made it into a makeshift studio.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was very small, very small place, but it worked for what we were trying to do.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's your that's a long, drawn-out story, but we were able to do that.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: But then after we do these four episodes independently of this show, now we get a pickup from TV1 and they need more episodes.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have anywhere to shoot them.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_01: Raphael's recording, uh, he's recording all these wonderful artists uh in his studio, so he doesn't have time for us to be there.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: So we find this place with Herb Hudson on Pico.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: He lets us shoot some episodes there.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was a raggedy place.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure there probably were uh mice and rats running around at night when we left, I'm sure.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: But still, he said it's a place and we can get it cheap and we can do it.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we did it.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: So then it was time to move out of that space because what I call the element started showing up.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: All these different people, gang members, and stuff started showing up, going, you know, trying to shake us down.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted to say, How much, you know, how much you paying for this?
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you need some protection.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like, uh-oh, we gotta go.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so my friend Trenton says to me, Hey man, we don't need any of them.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't we find our own space and start our own studio?
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, You must be crazy.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Listen, that's how they do in the recording industry.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_01: They they get a building, they make it into a studio, and they record there, and they get the the network, they get the uh record companies to pay them to record their albums in their own facility.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, that makes sense.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it was really the brainchild of him, of Trent, to convince me that we should start our own studio as opposed to trying to go find someplace else to pay somebody else to get them rich.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's fatten our own pockets up.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's the that was the the beginning of it.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then we started figuring out how we could do our own projects, and then if we wanted to rent it out to different producers along the way, we would do that.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_01: But that's that was the the the process, the thought process be uh behind putting together our own studio and then realizing that we're more than just a facility.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: As a studio, we are we can do the same thing that Warner Brothers can do.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_01: We can do the same thing that Universal and any other other others could do.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: You can just you can create content, own it, copyright it, own it, and now go license it out, just like any other studio does.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we're more than just a studio in the business sense of having a facility where we shoot things as a soundstage.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're a studio in that we're a company that provides content for networks to eat off of.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's how that came about.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I love it.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_00: I love the studio.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: We got to shoot in there uh when we were doing a pilot for BET.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and amazing.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was amazing.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_00: I remember just telling Robert, this is Bentley's, this is Bentley.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_01: That was the greatest full circle moment that I that I ever had, one of the greatest that I've ever had in this business.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's been a few of them, but The when Robert came and called me up and said, Hey man, I want to shoot at your spot.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I probably cried when I got off the phone with him because I was like, my mentor gets to see what I've built and what I've become.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that was like a moment in time that I'll never forget.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then the crowning jewel was he just wrote a foreword for my book that I'm gonna be coming out with.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, full circle moments are everything.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about this amazing book.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: I got to read uh some of it.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: And what first of all, what made you decide that you wanted to write a book?
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: I guess just to have another item in my uh multi, in my um multi-hyphen.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do you say that?
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh add another hyphen to your already long title.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to add another hyphen, but truthfully, I felt like I had something that I wanted to say.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: I had read a book that an artist by the name of Kashef had written about the music industry.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine, Kashef.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_00: Kashef.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, great book.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: On the business, yes.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_00: On the record business, yeah.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: On the record business.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I remembered I was at some at one point I was trying to dip into the record business a little bit.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's a whole different story.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I read his book.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, there's nothing like that that exists for people breaking into television and film.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so I want to write kind of like a guideline of how to break into the film and TV business and what it's all about, but use my own personalized story to weave the reader through so that they would understand that this is a not just some pie in the sky story.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_01: This really happened to this guy.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have any tragic story or anything like that that happened to me, but it's a real human story on how somebody could make it in this industry to the top of the food chain with no formal education, no knowledge about anything that has to do with uh with the business itself, and still make it in a very relatively short period of time.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to share that experience of the ups and the downs that I have had in the business and how that you can come out on top if you just focus your attention on doing something positive.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I just wanted to share that story, came up with the blueprint for it, and I call it the Hollywood Blueprint because it is a blueprint on how you can make it, but make your own blueprint because I took Robert's blueprint and turned it into my own, and that's what he told me recently, too.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_01: I took my I took his blueprint and said, Thank you.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_01: I uh it's like you handed me the baton, and I took it and created my own reality, my own blueprint on how I want to do things.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that put it, I put it all in the book because I got tired of people asking me questions.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: How do you do this?
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Billy, can you take a meeting with me?
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do we do this?
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going, now I could just say, Hey, read the book.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna have an audio version of it, I'm gonna have all that stuff.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: So read the book and you don't have to ask me anymore.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right now you are on you're working on Varnell Hill, the Varnell Hill show.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Varnell or Vernell?
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Varnell.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Varnell Hill show.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so how has that been after having left Martin and bringing that character back?
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was challenging in that, first of all, you got a character that made two guest appearances on Martin when we were doing the Martin show.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so, how do you now create a new world for this character 30 years later?
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that became a challenge on how do you do that?
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Do people still remember the character?
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And if they don't, how do we introduce this old character to a new audience?
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you had all those different elements that you were trying to create.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, you've got a lot of other voices that are, you know, kind of giving you what their opinions are and their thoughts.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I, and you know, you respect everybody's opinion and thoughts, but it's like now I have to deal with these people that weren't there when we created the original character.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a challenge on getting them to entrust the uh the fact that I would be able to deliver this show.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then Tommy Davidson, the this is years later.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: He's never he hasn't played this role in so many years.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_01: So now trying to get him to remember the beats of this character and why it worked back then, and but now he's evolved, and how do you go with the evolution of the character?
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: So all these elements came into play.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a group of writers who've never written for this character, and they have to take my word for it, or go back and watch the episodes of how we make this thing work.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so you create this new world, you create a room full of writers, you get people that you trust their voices, and you say, Hey guys, let's cook.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's see what we can come up with.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how that was born.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then you you got to convince now you got to convince Paramount and and BET that you have a hold on this thing, and you can make this thing into a show and to believe in you, and give me those, give me that money so I can go make this show.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a challenge, and it took uh for me, I understand they had been working on the series for uh a few years before I got involved.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_01: But then once they brought me in to add my perspective to the show and turn it into what I felt would work as a series, they had been working on it for maybe three years.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_01: But once I came in, we worked on the show for about a year developing, and we were shooting the following year.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I got it to the Green Late, the Greenlight uh space and got them to entrust us with a budget, and uh the rest is playing on Paramount Plus right now.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and we need people to watch it and we need people to watch it.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Roxanne Reese, who I love, that's my girl.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Kim Whitley, you have a lot of wonderful people on that show.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_00: How has the writing experience and overseeing it been for you?
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because now you're not in your 20s.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you are a full-grown man, you have children, you you own a studio, you got all this stuff going, and you're coming back, almost going back into time a little bit with this show and having to bring it forward.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: How does that feel to you?
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because I've been, you know, over the years, I've been exercising my muscle of writing sitcoms.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_01: I never stopped.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Even after the Jamie Foxx show, I think I've created probably seven TV shows or something like that that have gotten on the air, that I've done my own distribution and got them on.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I never really stopped doing that.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's still second nature to run a show, but the I won't say the problem, the challenge is again, you're trying to get new writers up to speed, up to where you are and how you're thinking, and how fast you can move, and how fast you can run through these scripts and stuff like that.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that was the the challenge as far, and of course, you don't have the same energy you used to have.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: I I used to feel like, hey, look, we ride all night, we used to spend the night here, right?
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: And to perform the morning.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_01: What time is dinner?
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to be listening to the hell out of here, you know.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't have the capacity for those long nights.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when we were doing Martin, we used to sleep at the studio all the time.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Jamie Foxx, I can't tell you how many times we spent the night in the writer's room.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, but here we haven't had to do that a couple of times on some other shows, but on the Varnell Hill show, no, we had a regular schedule.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it wasn't that wasn't difficult.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Again, now I'm the head of the Varnell Hill show, but I still have to take certain orders from Martin, who is one of the executive producers and somebody that I respect so much that I'm still listening to him, and I have to take uh his notes and I have to take B.E.T.'s notes and stuff.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, and then I have to think for myself as well.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like a hodgepodge of things.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_01: You you put them all together and you just make it work.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like even Roxanne's character, she wasn't in the original, any of the original drafts of the script.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: But as we're writing, I get a phone call from Martin and he goes, Hey, Ben, you gotta find something for Roxanne Reese.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going in my mind, I'm going, we we too, we're too far in.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_01: How can I do that?
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, I don't know, but you figure out something.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_01: I go to the writer's room and I go, look, Martin wants Roxanne, and so we just came up with the idea of she's a writer's assistant, but she's the oldest writer's assistant in Hollywood because she never made it as a writer, but she's the greatest writer's assistant ever.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_01: She still uses a typewriter and cigarette, and she's still another cigarette.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And a cigarette.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So and you know, it became one of the funniest characters we have on the show.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was like one of those things where it's like, how do we write for her?
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it just popped off the page.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing I'll say about Martin, Martin has always had the greatest instinct when it came to character development, characters and having these great ideas.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: He always knew if something was missing, throw something else in here.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_01: But what, Martin?
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta figure that out.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm giving you the gym.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Take Roxanne and put her in here and figure it out.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we did, and we got magic with her character.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to ask another question, and this has to do with having to take notes from the star or the creator, the other creator, and the studio and how to be diplomatic, knowing what to use and what to discard.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, so remember we talked earlier about having discernment and learning at a very early age how to read a room.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you have to, it's you, it's a it's a dance that you learn.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to learn how to do things in a very diplomatic way.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_01: And when you learn how to walk that walk, you usually can get what you want if you appease the other party, the other party that you're dealing with.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you know the personality of a person and you know, okay, they don't like when you say this.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is a this is a a trigger for them.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_01: Don't don't use the trigger.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then and then on the other side, if we're coming this way, you do it the way you do it.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of times it's you make the other party feel as if it's their own idea.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_01: It works.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_01: It works because at least they know that you're listening to them.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: You still put your spin on it, but you make them feel like it's their idea.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Then they're more invested in it and they trust you more.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's been one of the things that has gotten me through the years of being in the entertainment industry, making people understand that I listen, I'm patient.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna be the big giant six foot five man that I am and stomp in a room.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna be diplomatic about it.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that's pretty much how you deal with them, how I've been able to deal with them.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, actor, where are you gonna be in 90 days from now?
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna be with that same old headshot that is not getting you anywhere?
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_00: That same old story that it's everybody else's fault while you're not booking?
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or even worse, depression, because nothing is happening for your career.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me help you.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because in 90 days from now, you can have a whole new set of pictures that are built on your brand.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a list of agents that actually would fit what it is that you sell and a plan to have a more prosperous career.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I cannot book you, but I can make you bookable.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are ready, willing, and excited to change your circumstances, come and join us at ActingSmarterCircle.com, sign up and get started.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're a weekly community that helps actors get in gear and get the career that they deserve.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And bringing your children into the family business.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_00: You you've had your son work with you, your daughter work with you.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, your daughter, is she into acting or is she behind the scenes?
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_01: She does both.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the crazy part about it is first of all, I never wanted it for either one of my kids because of the rejection that happens.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_01: And like my mom did, you you love them, so you don't want them to have to go through that.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then you figure, hey, I've provided a wonderful place for you to live.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to private school, you can go do this, you can go, you don't have to do this if you don't want to.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And both of them learned at a very early age that they did want to be involved in it.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so my son expressed interest first, and so, you know, I helped him get uh involved and got him on one of the shows that I would that I was doing that I created.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_00: This was family time.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Family time.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he ends up doing eight up, eight, eight seasons uh of the show with me, and he learned the craft.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if he took it as serious as I would have liked to have, but why would he?
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's growing up in a mansion, he's growing up with a silver spoon in his mouth.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't know what the struggle is.
• 1:23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, you know, we saw a little bit of the struggle.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Not not I didn't see a real struggle.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in in Black Beverly Hills, but I saw enough to know that there's a struggle there.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_01: My daughter was a whole different story.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_01: She is, she's a unicorn, she's she's 101.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_01: I can just say that.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: She taught herself how to play the piano.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_01: All you have to do is tell my daughter she can't do something, and now she's got to prove you wrong.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: She can, she'll challenge you at every every angle.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_01: She uh she's a writer, she learned how to write by reading my scripts.
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started reading her scripts, and I was like, who is this person?
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Her imagination is far more advanced than mine was at that age.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And she's sharp, she picked it up very fast, but then what surprised me was her ability to act.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_01: When she told me she wanted to act, I was like, oh God, please, everybody wants to act until I saw her do it.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_01: She does characters, she can emulate people.
• 1:24:18
  SPEAKER_01: Again, she taught herself how to play the piano with no lessons.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_01: She's one of those people that she sees it and she'll do it.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And she's incredible.
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them are incredible as far as being talented.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I think that my son is, he has to figure out exactly what it is that he wants to do with the business.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Where my daughter, she's out of here.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_01: She already knows she wants to be on SL and she has that kind of talent.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_01: She really does.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_01: She can write, she's learned how to produce, uh, she can direct, she's stubborn as I don't know what, so she's a probably a great director.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you just you want the best for them, but it's a very challenging business right now, and I hope that they're able to express what they want to express before the business changes or possibly gets phased out as we know it today.
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think it'll get phased out, but you know, change is is always happening, and we just have to figure out how far ahead we are.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to say something, because you mentioned your daughter uh being able to do characters, and you were talking about you put down acting, but the truth is, Bentley, Kyle, Evans, you are really good with characters.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_00: You are good at mimicking characters.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: You you may not get to do it all the time, but I've I've watched you in interviews, and you you will embody uh Martin, you will embody certain things, you know, you you can um mimic people really well.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I just wanted to say that because you may be writer, producer, uh studio mogul, but you still are actor.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: At some point I may have that screen.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_01: I might.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_01: You never know.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_01: You just never know.
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_01: The people always ask me, how come you never put yourself in any of the shows that you create?
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, because I don't want to be a distraction.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I want it, I want to let the people that are doing it do it and not feel like that, you know, that over-bearing person that, you know, has to have himself in the scenes and stuff like that.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's I I guess it's just a way of maybe it's still fear.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_01: It maybe there's still an element of fear behind it and that I have to get over.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm challenging you to go take an acting class or an improv class.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to be on stage, front, center, naked, or even a stand-up class.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do that thing that scares the poop out of you.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I'm I'm definitely afraid of that.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I'm not gonna do it.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Do it, do it, do it, Bentley.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I I I want to ask you, where do you want to be in the next five years?
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about the the business is changing, it's evolving.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Elements of it are changing.
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_00: We got AI coming in, but I still think, you know, with every new technology that shows up in this business, the thing that is still true is that we always need people to tell stories.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And even with AI bringing these artificial actors, we still need real talent.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So in in five, ten years, where do you see yourself being?
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_01: So ordinarily, ordinarily, I would say you may or may not believe this, but I would say retired.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_01: But oh, okay.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Ordinarily I would.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I love this business so much, and I love being creative, retirement's probably not gonna suit me.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I feel like I want to be in a position to uh as a studio owner to be able to, you know, run a studio.
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I want to be in a position more so on the business side, even like I'm at the point now to where I don't even feel like I really want to write and produce stuff anymore.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, knock on wood.
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still gonna do that for as long as I can.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_01: But now I'm more so invested in the in the business of in show business, selling shows, being in the business of owning something and going out and getting it distributed, even if it's something that I didn't come up with.
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be more so involved in that business.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be on the speaking circuit, uh, lecturing.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I am gonna have to take that improv class so that I feel comfortable doing it.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be, you know, speaking at universities and speaking at corporate events and being someone that is very relevant, that has something to say, has something to promote for other people as well, to help them promote their products and helping people realize their capabilities and their dreams and helping them shape them.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know if that comes by way of being a motivational speaker.
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not really sure, but I'm just gonna let it just be what it naturally becomes.
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think once the book comes out, the doors will open up for that.
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are a motivational speaker in the fact that you're telling your story, which is motivational, which is, you know, you give us hope.
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, you you are showing Hollywood from a different camera lens, right?
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_00: From a different vantage point.
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because you went from the bottom up.
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_00: You started, you know, you're part of the old, almost like if we were talking the whole the old Hollywood system, you would be a great case study.
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_00: You worked in the mail room and you moved your way up to the president of the studio.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_00: That is a real story.
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_00: That is your story.
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not, I know somebody who did this, but this is your life.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_00: You you did it.
• 1:30:32
  SPEAKER_00: You were able to go from a PA up to the showrunner to owning a studio.
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Not many people have that story.
• 1:30:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know what, though?
• 1:30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the funny thing, and I can say it with all honesty.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: I still don't feel like I have impressed myself.
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_01: I don't feel as accomplished as it looks like when you read it.
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_00: You are impressive.
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you feel like it or not, God opened incredible doors for you.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're that scripture.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_00: God makes a way where there is none.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_00: You are an example of that scripture.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_00: He made a way for you where there was none.
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_00: He opened the door for you to go from down here to here to here to here because he imbued in you the ability to honor people, to listen to people, to respect people, you know, and that to me opens many doors where talent sometimes doesn't.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people in Hollywood get so frazzled, you know, I'm talented, I'm this, I'm that.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but you don't care about humanity.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_00: You don't care about your brother, you don't care about what's going on with the other person.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: That is what you bring.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_00: You care about people, you care how they do, you put them before you.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_00: That is the best hero that we could have.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And whether you feel like it or not, that is you.
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is what you contribute.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what a gift to be able to go to colleges, be they um, you know, uh HBCUs or or the mega colleges, and just share with young people, hey, I was a dreamer, I am still a dreamer.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I know is that relationships is the best currency and the best skill set that you can have to get you into rooms.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then you bring in talent, but you are you're the blueprint of it.
• 1:32:44
  SPEAKER_00: You are the living example of what that looks like, you know.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_00: So whether you feel like it, brother, or you don't feel like it, that is who you are.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you just have to own it because you are leaving a legacy for your children and hopefully their children and their children.
• 1:33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't have a lot of heroes in Hollywood that we can look up to, and you are one of them.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I just I just want to lay that on your lap, let you sit with it for a while.
• 1:33:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you have done the impossible.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_00: You have done the impossible.
• 1:33:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's one thing to be a writer on a show, okay, I'm gonna move up to head writer, I'm gonna be the uh the showrunner of the show, but you have you came from the bottom.
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_00: You have worked your way up and you did it by being kind, by uh just being uh someone who loves people.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you could have been very competitive with Martin in the beginning and never had had that relationship.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so you you are a unicorn.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_00: Your daughter's in unicorn, she got it from her dad.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I appreciate that.
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_01: That means I mean it means a lot.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_01: And again, sometimes you just have to reflect.
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and one thing about me, I never slow down enough to reflect and really think about what you know, what God has done for me.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I really sometimes you really sit back and you just uh you have a moment or something and then you get occupied with something else.
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And now we got social media and everything else to just keep your mind frazzled.
• 1:34:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I never really take the time to just sit back and just think uh unless I'm telling a story or something like that.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, people are are are very impressed with it.
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I like that, but you know, realistically, you're sounding like your mother right now.
• 1:34:45
  SPEAKER_00: You better stop it.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_00: You better stop it.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, what I was gonna say is my mother, my mother is the only person that I've ever really tried to impress.
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_01: She's the only person that I felt like I want to impress her.
• 1:35:01
  SPEAKER_01: And she's the type of woman that if she says, I'm thoroughly impressed, she knows that'll stop me from trying to impress her.
• 1:35:10
  SPEAKER_01: So she's never gonna give me 100, but she's gonna give me 95.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_01: She's gonna say, I'm proud of you, keep going, but she's never gonna go, that was brilliant, because she knows that'll that'll take away my momentum.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll feel like, whew, okay, I can stop now.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: So she's gonna keep me guessing.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_01: She's never gonna give me that 100% rah-rah as the biggest cheerleader, but I know she's the biggest cheerleader.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you have made an impact in this community.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_00: You have made an impact in our Hollywood.
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to uh just commend you and tell you how excited I am to see you go to the next chapter, which is taking your book on the road, speaking to young people, encouraging them, empowering them to live their best life because you have done it, and you have done it as a happy man, as a man who comes with love.
• 1:36:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's no um you don't have that icky um energy to you that sometimes we meet people in this business that you know they're slimy.
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_00: You come with love, you you you truly resonate God.
• 1:36:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and for people who have been fortunate enough to be in your studio, that comes through.
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh man, this is cool.
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_00: It it feels good, and it's a reflection of who you are.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I just want to say, thank you, Bentley Kyle Evans, for being a role model for us and for showing us how to do um this industry better and leaving it better than how we found it.
• 1:36:58
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_00: I so appreciate you.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And hey, my acting smarter people, don't go anywhere.
• 1:37:09
  SPEAKER_00: I have another great interview coming up for you right now.