An excellent article I found in Entertainment Weekly is below...
I especially love the fact that Ms. Brown has enough self love and respect to refuse Hollyweird's ridiculous notion that Halle Berry of all actresses should play her in a screen adaptation of her life. They looking NOTHING alike. A far better choice would be either Tichina Arnold or Kerry Washington. There are so many talented and attractive dark-skinned women of color in Hollywood who are just itching for a chance to be noticed in a big budget film. And the powers that be continue to (or at least that's the way it seems) give most scripts to either Halle Berry, Thandie Newton (two actresses who I do respect and appreciate) or their "type". As if "light-skinned"/biracial women are the physical representation of black American women as a whole. What a damn lie and everyone knows it. But I know it's all about casting someone who can bring the biggest draw from a cross section of the general (and international) public. Because of the medias conditioning of the masses, these days that apparently comes down to mixed race women (although convienently never acknowledged) representing black women.
O.K. I'm off my soapbox. Enjoy the article. It's truly a story of triumph against the odds.
PIECE OF CAKE
Quote:
Cupcake Brown wants a piece of James Frey -- The ''A Piece of Cake'' author lets loose about how the Frey scandal could affect her new memoir by Karen Valby
It would seem that James Frey and Cupcake Brown have a lot in common. Both overcame crack addictions and wrote memoirs about their fights for sobriety, both published their books under the vast Random House umbrella, and both have enjoyed welcomes into the mighty bosom of Oprah Winfrey. Last fall, a gushing Oprah made a star out of Frey by inducting A Million Little Pieces into her book club; back in 2001, O magazine singled out Brown — an abused foster child at 11; a gangbanger, prostitute, and drug addict at 14; sober lawyer at 41 — as a ''Phenomenal Woman,'' leading to a book deal of her own.
But then in January, the Smoking Gun tugged at a nagging thread of Frey's fantastical story; a furious Oprah pulled it tight around the author's gulping neck; and Brown, whose memoir, A Piece of Cake, had already shipped to the printers, is left having to convince people that she's really nothing like James Frey at all. (One bit of luck: Brown says the best-selling author never responded to her publisher's requests for him to blurb her book.)
''I'm angry about the whole Frey controversy,'' Brown says. ''All my life, since I was 11 years old, I've been saying, 'These people are beating me! I'm being abused!' And nobody would believe me. And now because of this guy, people might not believe me again.'' Brown's never read A Million Little Pieces, but she heard about his terse anthem — ''Hold On!'' — for struggling addicts. '''Hold on' to what!?'' she remembers thinking. ''If you're drinking and using, all you got is dope and booze and you're probably a liar and a thief. What the f--- you want to hold on to that for? You've destroyed your family relationships, you got no-good two-faced friends. What the f--- you going to hold on to?''
Brown, a 12-step veteran who celebrated her 16th year sober in October, doesn't feel any sympathy for Frey's fall from grace. ''A friend of mine used to say, 'If you're a drunk lying son of a bitch and you get sober, but you don't work any steps, don't make any changes, don't peel away those layers of your onion, well, you're just a sober lying son of a bitch. And that's how I see Frey. He's just a sober lying son of a bitch.''
Brown lives in a charming three-bedroom house in Oakland, Calif. She's not married and she doesn't have any kids, besides ''my son,'' her spoiled cat, Squirt, that she rescued from a pound two years ago. Brown loves the color purple. Her living room walls are purple, and so is her velour jogging suit, her toenails, the iridescent balls in her double-pierced ears, and the beaded collar around Squirt's neck. Ask her if the deal for A Piece of Cake made her a rich woman and Brown spits Pellegrino back into her purple wine glass. ''Ha!'' she barks with laughter. ''Ha! Let me remind you that you are in the hood. This is a nice house on a nice street, but go one block to the right and you can buy some weed and probably get a ho.''
Trust this woman when she warns you off of certain neighborhoods. Born in San Diego, Cupcake Brown (so named after the delivery nurse misunderstood her mother's dazed plea for a cupcake and entered it on the birth certificate) was dumped into the foster care system after her mother died of an epileptic seizure. Horrified by the relentless physical and sexual abuse, Brown hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where she started running with the local Crips. ''To this day, I haven't felt that kind of love and camaraderie,'' she says, almost wistfully. ''The thing about a gang, all you had to be was down. In AA, if you get drunk, we're gonna leave your ass alone. But in a gang, they don't care if you're drunk, loaded, crippled, blind. But, yes,'' she sighs, ''it's an unhealthy kind of camaraderie.'' After Brown was shot in a drive-by, a social worker returned her to the foster home where at six months pregnant, she'd been beaten up so badly that she miscarried. (Her readers should prepare themselves for an onslaught of tough, ugly scenes.)
Brown's innocence long lost, she spent 14 years in a haze of tricks and crime, escaping into a desperate high of crack, booze, LSD, cocaine, and anything else she could score. When she was 25, Brown woke up one day behind a dumpster in San Diego with no shoes on her feet. After trudging 60 blocks to the law offices where she worked as a legal secretary, she finally told her boss she needed help, and he checked her in to a nearby rehab center.
''She was like a frightened cat,'' says Venita Ray, a Houston-based attorney who met Brown at one of Cupcake's first AA meetings in San Diego, and has been one of her sponsors ever since. ''She was so frail, so tentative, amazed that people would take the time to talk to her.'' Brown, scared but determined, leaned hard on her new support system. (She relapsed at 69 days clean, but dug in deeper to the program.) Clearheaded for the first time in her adult life, she decided that there was no good reason that a girl without a high school diploma couldn't become a lawyer. So Brown spent over five years at the community college's night school before transferring to San Diego State. She got into law school, holding down four part-time jobs while taking a full class load. ''I worked my ass off,'' says Brown proudly. ''Nothing was given to me, and I mean nothing.'' After she passed the bar exam in 2001, one of her professors convinced her to share her story.
Realizing that many of her memories were clouded by drugs, Brown went back to all of the people in her life who could help verify her past. When she'd finish a chapter, she'd send it to Ray or a cousin from the gang or her beloved ''Daddy'' (her mother's ex-husband Tim Long, who wasn't her biological father and so couldn't save her from the foster care system). In 2002, she hired a private investigator, paying her $50 an hour out of her own pocket, to further corroborate her story. ''But I thought everybody did that!'' says Brown. ''I thought everybody knew they had a responsibility to get it right.'' Her publisher, Crown's senior vice president Steve Ross, is grateful his author took such pains. ''It's certainly made us a lot more comfortable moving forward,'' he says. ''It's interesting to have this new light shone on the genre of memoir, but we're hoping the distinctions [from Frey] speak for themselves.''
Another distinction between the authors (and most hungry writers in general) is Brown's reluctance to let Hollywood get its hands on her life story, despite her ICM agents' urging. ''People might figure, 'Oh, she just wants the money. Take this money, go away, and we'll do what the hell we want.' But I want to control who plays me.... Everybody's saying it should be Halle Berry — who I love, don't get me wrong — because she's the big black thing. But if you read my book, you know that I hated my dark skin. That was one of my hardest lessons, being okay with Cup, loving my skin. Somewhere out there there's a little girl who's real dark and she's reading my book and she's thinking, 'Yep, I'm dark and I can be pretty too,' and then she sees the movie. 'Okay, you were good enough until you got on the big screen, and now you had to be light-skinned?' It'll sound like I'm talking a bunch of bull! So I am adamant that there will not be a light-skinned woman playing me.''
With the movie deal temporarily on hold, Brown instead is saving her energy to defend the details of her story. Her friends, though, are working hard to remind Brown that she doesn't have to feel she's heading into another street fight. ''I don't think she has to defend the truth!'' says Ray. ''If she focuses too much on trying to defend her story, she will miss out on the primary purpose of the book. I'm really trying to get her meditating and breathing through this so she can focus on the triumph of her story.''
Today, Brown makes a good living, $165,000 a year, as a litigator at the white-shoe San Francisco firm Bingham McCutchen. Recently, three partners sat down in the firm's shiny 26th floor conference room overlooking the bay to sing her praises. ''Most lawyers, by and large — we come from the same stratosphere of society,'' laughs partner David Balabanian. ''Now, Cupcake did not grow up in a family that had a stock portfolio or knew what a mutual fund was. I said to her once, 'To judge a person's life is not by how high they've risen but how far they've traveled to get there.' And by that standard she beats everyone here at the firm.''
''Sometimes I walk through my office and I just say, 'Thank you, God!''' says Brown. ''Every once in a while, I do get ungrateful, I'm not going to lie. You know, 'I should have a Mercedes, not my raggedy-ass Toyota!' But then I remember what it was like not to have a car and having to walk for miles.''
In the future, Brown hopes to parlay her legal experience into working as a child advocate, fighting to change the foster care system. And she's still hoping to meet Oprah one day. ''Unfortunately, I think Frey has really screwed it up for the rest of us in the memoir world,'' she sighs. ''But I'm going to just throw it out there and trust God. She doesn't have to pick it for her book club. If she just says, 'I know this great woman, we're going to do a two-minute interview, and then throw her in the back,' that'd be absolutely great.''
And finally, unlike Frey, Brown's not planning on writing another book. ''I don't see a sequel,'' she laughs. ''Being a lawyer is boring as hell!''
An excellent article I found in Entertainment Weekly is below...
I especially love the fact that Ms. Brown has enough self love and respect to refuse Hollyweird's ridiculous notion that Halle Berry of all actresses should play her in a screen adaptation of her life. They looking NOTHING alike.
Yes they do look alike, we all look alike to a lot of people. You haven't figured that out yet? I once was compared to Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Larry Fishburn, LL Cool J & Shemar Moore all in the same moment. Doesn't make sense.
A far better choice would be either Tichina Arnold or Kerry Washington. There are so many talented and attractive dark-skinned women of color in Hollywood who are just itching for a chance to be noticed in a big budget film.
I agree.
And the powers that be continue to (or at least that's the way it seems) give most scripts to either Halle Berry, Thandie Newton (two actresses who I do respect and appreciate) or their "type". As if "light-skinned"/biracial women are the physical representation of black American women as a whole. What a damn lie and everyone knows it. But I know it's all about casting someone who can bring the biggest draw from a cross section of the general (and international) public.
Angela Bassett is also one that got a lot of mainstream parts.
Right, that last stament is actually what it's all about. I believe in 'correct' representation. As much as possible. I thought they could have at least made Denzel look more like Malcolm X (skin tone & eye color) Denzel does favour Malcolm though. They made brown skinned Halle in to a passible house slave (QUEEN) I also don't like when Italian parts are played by non-Italians, or just because someone has dark hair. This happens a lot. Real Italians won't get the part, but tend to be offered only cop, criminal/mafia parts.
Because of the medias conditioning of the masses, these days that apparently comes down to mixed race women (although convienently never acknowledged) representing black women.
Unless it's in comedy or science fiction. Then the rule goes out.
O.K. I'm off my soapbox. Enjoy the article. It's truly a story of triumph against the odds.
PIECE OF CAKE
Quote:
Cupcake Brown wants a piece of James Frey -- The ''A Piece of Cake'' author lets loose about how the Frey scandal could affect her new memoir by Karen Valby
It would seem that James Frey and Cupcake Brown have a lot in common. Both overcame crack addictions and wrote memoirs about their fights for sobriety, both published their books under the vast Random House umbrella, and both have enjoyed welcomes into the mighty bosom of Oprah Winfrey. Last fall, a gushing Oprah made a star out of Frey by inducting A Million Little Pieces into her book club; back in 2001, O magazine singled out Brown — an abused foster child at 11; a gangbanger, prostitute, and drug addict at 14; sober lawyer at 41 — as a ''Phenomenal Woman,'' leading to a book deal of her own.
But then in January, the Smoking Gun tugged at a nagging thread of Frey's fantastical story; a furious Oprah pulled it tight around the author's gulping neck; and Brown, whose memoir, A Piece of Cake, had already shipped to the printers, is left having to convince people that she's really nothing like James Frey at all. (One bit of luck: Brown says the best-selling author never responded to her publisher's requests for him to blurb her book.)
''I'm angry about the whole Frey controversy,'' Brown says. ''All my life, since I was 11 years old, I've been saying, 'These people are beating me! I'm being abused!' And nobody would believe me. And now because of this guy, people might not believe me again.'' Brown's never read A Million Little Pieces, but she heard about his terse anthem — ''Hold On!'' — for struggling addicts. '''Hold on' to what!?'' she remembers thinking. ''If you're drinking and using, all you got is dope and booze and you're probably a liar and a thief. What the f--- you want to hold on to that for? You've destroyed your family relationships, you got no-good two-faced friends. What the f--- you going to hold on to?''
Brown, a 12-step veteran who celebrated her 16th year sober in October, doesn't feel any sympathy for Frey's fall from grace. ''A friend of mine used to say, 'If you're a drunk lying son of a bitch and you get sober, but you don't work any steps, don't make any changes, don't peel away those layers of your onion, well, you're just a sober lying son of a bitch. And that's how I see Frey. He's just a sober lying son of a bitch.''
Brown lives in a charming three-bedroom house in Oakland, Calif. She's not married and she doesn't have any kids, besides ''my son,'' her spoiled cat, Squirt, that she rescued from a pound two years ago. Brown loves the color purple. Her living room walls are purple, and so is her velour jogging suit, her toenails, the iridescent balls in her double-pierced ears, and the beaded collar around Squirt's neck. Ask her if the deal for A Piece of Cake made her a rich woman and Brown spits Pellegrino back into her purple wine glass. ''Ha!'' she barks with laughter. ''Ha! Let me remind you that you are in the hood. This is a nice house on a nice street, but go one block to the right and you can buy some weed and probably get a ho.''
Trust this woman when she warns you off of certain neighborhoods. Born in San Diego, Cupcake Brown (so named after the delivery nurse misunderstood her mother's dazed plea for a cupcake and entered it on the birth certificate) was dumped into the foster care system after her mother died of an epileptic seizure. Horrified by the relentless physical and sexual abuse, Brown hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where she started running with the local Crips. ''To this day, I haven't felt that kind of love and camaraderie,'' she says, almost wistfully. ''The thing about a gang, all you had to be was down. In AA, if you get drunk, we're gonna leave your ass alone. But in a gang, they don't care if you're drunk, loaded, crippled, blind. But, yes,'' she sighs, ''it's an unhealthy kind of camaraderie.'' After Brown was shot in a drive-by, a social worker returned her to the foster home where at six months pregnant, she'd been beaten up so badly that she miscarried. (Her readers should prepare themselves for an onslaught of tough, ugly scenes.)
Brown's innocence long lost, she spent 14 years in a haze of tricks and crime, escaping into a desperate high of crack, booze, LSD, cocaine, and anything else she could score. When she was 25, Brown woke up one day behind a dumpster in San Diego with no shoes on her feet. After trudging 60 blocks to the law offices where she worked as a legal secretary, she finally told her boss she needed help, and he checked her in to a nearby rehab center.
''She was like a frightened cat,'' says Venita Ray, a Houston-based attorney who met Brown at one of Cupcake's first AA meetings in San Diego, and has been one of her sponsors ever since. ''She was so frail, so tentative, amazed that people would take the time to talk to her.'' Brown, scared but determined, leaned hard on her new support system. (She relapsed at 69 days clean, but dug in deeper to the program.) Clearheaded for the first time in her adult life, she decided that there was no good reason that a girl without a high school diploma couldn't become a lawyer. So Brown spent over five years at the community college's night school before transferring to San Diego State. She got into law school, holding down four part-time jobs while taking a full class load. ''I worked my ass off,'' says Brown proudly. ''Nothing was given to me, and I mean nothing.'' After she passed the bar exam in 2001, one of her professors convinced her to share her story.
Realizing that many of her memories were clouded by drugs, Brown went back to all of the people in her life who could help verify her past. When she'd finish a chapter, she'd send it to Ray or a cousin from the gang or her beloved ''Daddy'' (her mother's ex-husband Tim Long, who wasn't her biological father and so couldn't save her from the foster care system). In 2002, she hired a private investigator, paying her $50 an hour out of her own pocket, to further corroborate her story. ''But I thought everybody did that!'' says Brown. ''I thought everybody knew they had a responsibility to get it right.'' Her publisher, Crown's senior vice president Steve Ross, is grateful his author took such pains. ''It's certainly made us a lot more comfortable moving forward,'' he says. ''It's interesting to have this new light shone on the genre of memoir, but we're hoping the distinctions [from Frey] speak for themselves.''
Another distinction between the authors (and most hungry writers in general) is Brown's reluctance to let Hollywood get its hands on her life story, despite her ICM agents' urging. ''People might figure, 'Oh, she just wants the money. Take this money, go away, and we'll do what the hell we want.' But I want to control who plays me.... Everybody's saying it should be Halle Berry — who I love, don't get me wrong — because she's the big black thing. But if you read my book, you know that I hated my dark skin. That was one of my hardest lessons, being okay with Cup, loving my skin. Somewhere out there there's a little girl who's real dark and she's reading my book and she's thinking, 'Yep, I'm dark and I can be pretty too,' and then she sees the movie. 'Okay, you were good enough until you got on the big screen, and now you had to be light-skinned?' It'll sound like I'm talking a bunch of bull! So I am adamant that there will not be a light-skinned woman playing me.''
With the movie deal temporarily on hold, Brown instead is saving her energy to defend the details of her story. Her friends, though, are working hard to remind Brown that she doesn't have to feel she's heading into another street fight. ''I don't think she has to defend the truth!'' says Ray. ''If she focuses too much on trying to defend her story, she will miss out on the primary purpose of the book. I'm really trying to get her meditating and breathing through this so she can focus on the triumph of her story.''
Today, Brown makes a good living, $165,000 a year, as a litigator at the white-shoe San Francisco firm Bingham McCutchen. Recently, three partners sat down in the firm's shiny 26th floor conference room overlooking the bay to sing her praises. ''Most lawyers, by and large — we come from the same stratosphere of society,'' laughs partner David Balabanian. ''Now, Cupcake did not grow up in a family that had a stock portfolio or knew what a mutual fund was. I said to her once, 'To judge a person's life is not by how high they've risen but how far they've traveled to get there.' And by that standard she beats everyone here at the firm.''
''Sometimes I walk through my office and I just say, 'Thank you, God!''' says Brown. ''Every once in a while, I do get ungrateful, I'm not going to lie. You know, 'I should have a Mercedes, not my raggedy-ass Toyota!' But then I remember what it was like not to have a car and having to walk for miles.''
In the future, Brown hopes to parlay her legal experience into working as a child advocate, fighting to change the foster care system. And she's still hoping to meet Oprah one day. ''Unfortunately, I think Frey has really screwed it up for the rest of us in the memoir world,'' she sighs. ''But I'm going to just throw it out there and trust God. She doesn't have to pick it for her book club. If she just says, 'I know this great woman, we're going to do a two-minute interview, and then throw her in the back,' that'd be absolutely great.''
And finally, unlike Frey, Brown's not planning on writing another book. ''I don't see a sequel,'' she laughs. ''Being a lawyer is boring as hell!''
Yes they do look alike, we all look alike to a lot of people. You haven't figured that out yet? I once was compared to Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Larry Fishburn, LL Cool J & Shemar Moore all in the same moment. Doesn't make sense.
Now that's just sick!lol And for it all to happen at the SAME TIME. That's too much... I don't think you really favor those guys. And you ESPECIALLY don't look like Wesley Snipes. The only thing I can think of is, people of the opposite "race" (whatever that is) tend to mentally categorize out group members according to age - sex of course - and level of attractiveness which is culturally dictaed. Judging from your avatar, you look to be tall like Shemar Moore, and around the same complexion as him, LL, and Larry Fishburn. They are usually portrayed as being attractive in film. Maybe that's why you were compared to them even though there's no real resemblance? I bet you get compared to Will Smith a lot too.
Of course I've also been compared to women I feel I don't really resemble that much. They've been attractive and close enough to my type so although I've found it amusing at times, I've never been offended because the comparisons haven't been SOOO completely off the mark and out there.
You know, people of color do it to white people too sometimes. My husband was once compared to Justin Timberlake by a group of screaming black teen-aged girls downtown. We were CRACKING UP! Aside from being white, tall, and having blonde hair there is no resemblance what so ever!
I bet Asian males get Jackie Chan, Pat Morita and Bruce Lee alot. Simply because of non exposure in the media.
Quote:
I also don't like when Italian parts are played by non-Italians, or just because someone has dark hair. This happens a lot. Real Italians won't get the part, but tend to be offered only cop, criminal/mafia parts.
TRUE. I don't know if you watch 24 or not (my husband and I are 24 freaks and can't get ENOUGH OF IT) but Edgar Stiles (Louis Lombardi) was recently killed off.
You just know the next time you see that man he's going to be playing the role of some dumb mob hitman... Or he'll be the comic relief. I'm truly going to miss his charecter. It's rare indeed when an overweight Italian is portrayed as being respectable, intelligent, and law abiding.
Joined: 15 Oct 2005 {Posts: 76 } Location: Chicago, IL
Posted: Wed 10 May 2006 06:50 Post subject:
Quote:
TRUE. I don't know if you watch 24 or not (my husband and I are 24 freaks and can't get ENOUGH OF IT) but Edgar Stiles (Louis Lombardi) was recently killed off.
That show is an addiction! Seriously, I look forward to Mondays JUST because 24 is coming on.
Quote:
Yes they do look alike, we all look alike to a lot of people. You haven't figured that out yet? I once was compared to Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Larry Fishburn, LL Cool J & Shemar Moore all in the same moment. Doesn't make sense.
See, those are the times when I make a sarcastic comment like, "Exactly what drugs did you put in your system today?" That's just...nuts.
Quote:
I bet Asian males get Jackie Chan, Pat Morita and Bruce Lee alot. Simply because of non exposure in the media.
Yes that happens a lot from what my Asian friends tell me. They're dad is always Pat, if they're good-looking and athletic they're Bruce, if they're average-looking and athletic they're Jackie. On occasion Russell Wong gets thrown into the mix. Quite honestly I do a happy dance when I actually see an Asian on television, and an extended version if they're playing against stereotype. Happy day!
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I once was compared to Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Larry Fishburn, LL Cool J & Shemar Moore all in the same moment. Doesn't make sense.