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A Little Girl Talk with Stacey Holman
By Carla Robinson
You never know where your blessings will come from. When Stacey Holman needed
money to complete her NYU thesis film, her family held a round of
fundraising back home
in Ohio. But even after several such endeavors, the writer/director still didn’t have
the cash to start the cameras rolling. Then came the day her mother reminded her to call
an elderly family friend who’d asked to be kept abreast of Holman’s project.
When Holman finally spoke to her, the woman wanted to know how much money was needed.
Holman went ahead and gave her the figure, fifteen thousand dollars, and what followed was
a shocker. Without missing a beat, the woman asked, “Who do I make the check out
to?”
Thus began Girl’s Talk’s journey from script to screen. The sixteen-minute short
played at the Shero Film Festival, where it won third place in the festival’s
competition. Girl Talk is about McKenzie, a twenty-something painter who attends monthly
book club meetings with her girlfriends. She’s caught in the murk between artistic
realization and sacrificing her dream in favor of “a real job,” and during the
club gatherings, real life seeps in amid the fiction. McKenzie’s friends offer
support, but what’s refreshing is that each encounter with them forces her to reckon
with herself and push forward in a new way.
The desire to build a story around a book club stemmed from Holman’s childhood, when
her mother belonged to a reading group. She remembers being profoundly impacted by the
meetings. “It wasn’t the books that interested me, but that these women with
different opinions and backgrounds came together to talk. And this was during the early
seventies, when there wasn’t a plethora of Black literature like there is
today.” When the time came for Holman to make a film, she wanted to create something
that captured the essence of the interaction she’d witnessed in her mother’s
group.
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Courtesy S. Holman
Stacey Holman |
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Holman isn’t finished giving voice to
stories like Girl Talk. She’s currently working on a feature-length screenplay that
chronicles the lives of three Black women who have made a pact to start living their
dreams before their impending thirtieth birthdays, or else. Holman likes to create
characters who are walled-in by their own choices, giving audiences the pleasure of
watching them grow up and claw their way out.
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It’s true that her stories tend to be contemporary
ensemble pieces, not unlike Terry McMillan and her army of clones, but Holman wishes the
comparisons would end there. “Waiting To Exhale was not a film, it was a
sunset…. The women’s whole lives revolved around men. You can’t have an
ensemble cast with just that. There are variables that come into play when you are
involved in relationships - your finances, your family. All this stuff has a cause and
effect.” Holman is confident that she’ll get to direct her new script, since
she’s a believer in “putting it out in the universe.” As Girl Talk proved,
chances are good that the universe will answer in the affirmative.
M
July 2001
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