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Thursday, March 20, 2003

By L.A. Johnson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Move over Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda! Make way for Tamika, Mercedes, Jordan and Athena! They're the four black women friends in the animated, buppified, Chicago-based "Sex and the City" parody "Sistas 'N the City."

The brainchild of award-winning Hollywood screenwriter-producer Tina Andrews, "Sistas 'N the City" started out as 3- to 5-minute animated shorts on the UrbanEntertainment.com Web site in 2000. Ten episodes have been bundled for sale on VHS ($14.95) and DVD ($19.95) beginning Tuesday.

"I have this thing about watching television and not necessarily seeing black female representation," says Andrews, the series' creator and executive producer. "I was particularly irked by a show that's on cable that features four white women who have no interaction with anybody of color, and they live in New York City."

That's a criticism also often leveled at most "Seinfeld" episodes and Woody Allen movies.

So, "Sistas 'N the City" became Andrews' answer to that when the folks at UrbanEntertainment.com approached her.

"When the opportunity arose for me to create an animated comedy series exploring the lives, psyche, concerns and peccadilloes and sexual escapades of four African-American women, I jumped at it," says Andrews, who attended New York University's famed film school. "There's a void on television in representations of black love and black sex, especially from a female perspective."

Andrews has created a buppie -- black yuppie -- world in which friends meet at trendy clubs for drinks, work out at health clubs, grapple with career struggles and search for true love.

Tamika is a career-driven publicist with a mama's- boy boyfriend.

Mercedes is a painter-sculptor-visual artist and blue-eyed black woman who almost exclusively dates white men.

Jordan is a law clerk and bona fide BAP -- Black American Princess -- with bourgeois parents who have Lawrence Otis Graham's "Our Kind of People" sensibilities.

Athena is a lesbian neo-soul singer.

"Tamika is closest to me, but there's a little bit of Mercedes and a little bit of Jordan in me, too," Andrews says.

VHS and DVD extras include an interview with Andrews, a no-holds-barred discussion about sex, men, relationships and careers among Andrews and three of her real-life girlfriends, and an interview with underground rapper Medusa, who provides the voice for the character Athena. Actress Dawnn Lewis of "A Different World" fame does the voices for Tamika and Mercedes, and actress Marci T. House does the voice of Jordan.

Though it's unrated, it's as risque as its distant HBO cousin and contains brief animated nudity and sex, strong language and adult situations. Andrews jokes that the characters -- based on people or composites of people in her life -- come from the repressed part of her brain.

"They're wild and profane, and I'm neither of those things," she says via telephone from New York, where she's working on several projects. "I'm a middle-class girl from Chicago.

"When your R-E-A-L life is like that, your R-E-E-L life has got to be more exotic," she adds. "I'm like the boring housewife who writes those racy novels."

Some have been surprised to learn Andrews wrote "Sistas 'N the City" because she's more known for writing serious, historical and political biographies, socially relevant screenplays and script doctoring.

Andrews wrote and co-executive produced the miniseries "Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal," which won a 2001 Writer's Guild of America award for best original long-form television script. She is the first African-American woman to win such a WGA award. The miniseries also won a 2001 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Television Movie, Miniseries or Dramatic Special.

She also co-wrote and executive produced the miniseries "Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis," and her very first writing venture became the script for the film "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" based on the court battle among the three wives of '50s singer Frankie Lymon. Andrews also punched up the scripts for the films "Sister Act II" and "Soul Food."

"Just do the kids and Whoopi," she laughs, remembering what they told her on "Sister Act II." " 'Leave the white characters alone. We got another guy to do that.' "

Andrews wrote the book "Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story," which includes the screenplay and the story of how it took 16 years to bring it to the screen. The book also garnered her a 2002 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work -- Nonfiction.

So, "Sistas 'N the City" has been a fun departure from her usual writing rigors.

"I was very keen on making sure that we had four different-looking black women because I wanted to represent as much of female black America as we could and make sure they were middle-class characters," Andrews says. "So, if they didn't have money, they were broke, not poor."

Another UrbanEntertainment.com animated series, "Undercover Brother," became a full-length live-action feature film starring comedian Eddie Griffin. And "Sistas 'N the City" is headed for the big screen, too.

"It's going to be a live action film, and I'm going to direct," she says.

Andrews is working on that screenplay and finishing up the script for a four-hour Coretta Scott King miniseries. She's writing a CBS television drama series for rapper-singer-actress-producer Queen Latifah titled "Mali Anderson" and turning her movie "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" into a Broadway musical..

She also plans to write a one-woman show someday. Andrews started out as a dancer, actress and playwright. She played the role of Ermengarde on Broadway in the Pearl Bailey-Cab Calloway version of "Hello, Dolly!" and in the national touring company.

Andrews also was half of the first interracial couple on daytime television as Valerie Grant on "Days of Our Lives" in 1977. Public reaction to the story line was so negative, her character was written off the show. She had small parts in films such as "Conrack" and "Carny." She also appeared in "Roots" and later collaborated with Alex Haley on an eight-part PBS special "Alex Haley Presents: Great Men of African Descent." Haley died before its completion, but Andrews considers his counsel and encouragement invaluable.

"Just the way life has been for the last seven years, I'm just eternally grateful," says Andrews, who through writing was able to pull herself out of bankruptcy years ago. "I know what it's like to have been without work and lost everything I built up."

Today, she has a place in New York and a home in Malibu that she shares with her "incredibly cute and wonderfully supportive" husband, documentary filmmaker Stephen Gaines, their dogs Shaka, Nugget and Peanut, and 30 Koi fish.

"You could not have told me 15 years ago that I wouldn't be acting for my supper," she says. "Today, 100 percent of my income is derived from my writing."

Anyone with a particular dream or goal, anyone who knows there's something they're equipped to do should just take the plunge, she says.

"If it has been placed in your mind, if you think you can act, write or be the best executive -- you can," she says.

If it's writing only a sentence, paragraph or page a day -- the way Terry McMillan and John Grisham wrote their first novels -- that's just fine.

"Just do what you can do, but do it," Andrews says. "No excuses."