For the new Netflix series, Tembi Locke joined forces with her younger sister, Attica, a successful novelist and TV writer, to adapt her own memoir.
When Tembi and Attica Locke were children growing up in Houston, they would often visit their grandmother’s house in Lufkin, Tex., where they would sit on her orange-and-red shag carpet and make up games to play.
There was “store,” in which various transactions would take place. There was “family,” wherein the sisters represented two different families that lived across the hall from each other in a fancy New York apartment complex. They let their imaginations run wild, coming up with different scenarios to pass the time.
“We would play all of these story games,” Attica said earlier this month in a joint video interview with her older sister. “And then somehow we found ourselves through our adult professions checking in with each other.”
They’re still playing together. This time, however, the whole world can see the results. Together, they created “From Scratch,” a Netflix limited series, premiering Friday, that is based on Tembi’s memoir of love, loss, food, family and Italy. Attica is the showrunner, a first for the accomplished novelist (“Bluebird, Bluebird”) and screenwriter (“Empire”). Tembi, best known as an actress (“Never Have I Ever,” “Eureka”), is executive producing for the first time.
Suddenly they were a team again, creating a world together.
“I think you can go it alone, but it’s very nice to have somebody with whom you have this shared memory and these shared experiences,” Attica said, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. (Tembi had joined the call from a getaway to the mountains just outside the city.) “You have a shorthand way of talking, and there’s nobody on earth that makes me laugh as hard as my sister does.”
It’s not an easy story. In 1990, when Tembi was 20, she moved to Florence to spend a year studying art, part of an exchange program from Wesleyan University. While there, she fell in love with Saro, a soulful Sicilian chef. The feeling was mutual. After a whirlwind courtship, they started a life together in Los Angeles, where Tembi pursued her acting career.
It wasn’t always easy, especially for the young immigrant. But they knew how to grind. They worked hard. And they had each other. They also had a fairy-tale wedding in a villa overlooking Florence.
Then, tragedy. Saro was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer. He fought. He rallied at times but ultimately died in 2012. Tembi put their story between covers in 2019, reflecting on the heartache but also focusing on love, family reconciliation and resilience.
“The story has all the flavor profiles,” Tembi said. “There’s the bitter, but there’s also the sweet. I hope that viewers will leave the series perhaps thinking differently about their own lives, maybe what they want from their relationships, be they romantic or familial or with a close friend, and that they also honor their own losses.”
The road to the screen began shortly before the memoir was published. In 2018, Attica was about to start work as a writer on “Little Fires Everywhere,” the Hulu limited series produced by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. Attica visited the offices to read the pilot script, which was under lock and key; when she was done, the Hello Sunshine executive Lauren Levy Neustadter asked if she had any ideas for future projects. Attica gave the full pitch on her little sister’s book.
“Lauren was a little dubious,” Attica said. “She was like, ‘Your sister … OK.’ But she loved the title, and I guess I did a good pitch because she asked to read it.” Tembi picked up the story.
“When I got the call from you, I think you were still in the parking lot of the Hello Sunshine offices,” she said to Attica. “And you were like: ‘Hey, so I did this thing. I pitched your book.’ I was flabbergasted.”
A little more than a week later, both sisters were at Hello Sunshine, figuring out how to bring the book to television.
That meant figuring out what had to change to tell a compelling story for the screen. In the series, Tembi is Amy, played by Zoe Saldaña, and Saro is Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea. Amy’s sister, Zora — theoretically, Attica — is played by Danielle Deadwyler, who also plays Mamie Till in the new movie “Till.” In writing the screenplay, the sisters made Amy a gallerist and art teacher instead of an actress, thinking it would be distracting to see Saldaña, who has been performing onscreen for more than 20 years, going on auditions.
Having lived the source material, the sisters had to find a balance between respecting the facts and telling a good story. For example, stories that Saro told Tembi about his family are dramatized in the series. “I didn’t witness those things firsthand, but we used them to create scenes onscreen,” Tembi said.
Reliving such emotional times could be overwhelming. For some scenes, Attica would gently tell Tembi that she didn’t need to be on the set. Tembi would do the same for Attica. “We would check in with each other, and we would protect each other,” Tembi said.
Saldaña watched all of this with deep admiration. “It was beautiful to watch how protective Attica is of her sister, but also to see their fragility and how vulnerable they are,” she said in a video interview. “They opened themselves up to relive moments in their lives that were just unimaginable.”
Tembi and Attica, separated by three and a half years, have always been close. “The Locke sisters were a force,” said Patrick Huey, a close friend since high school who works in hospitality in Palm Springs. He said that Tembi, who was in his class, would drive him and Attica to school in a beat-up 1971 Toyota Celica.
The car was a gift to the Lockes’ father, a lawyer, from a client who couldn’t pay his bill. Every day the sisters would leave the keys in the ignition, the windows down, hoping someone would steal it and take it off their hands. Every day, they were disappointed.
“I mean, the key is in the ignition, and nobody would take the car,” Huey recalled.
Huey, who remains close to both sisters and attended that idyllic Italian wedding, remembers Tembi as the most popular girl at Alief Hastings High School, a star of the school’s theater program. Attica was a freshman when Tembi was a senior, but they related to each other as peers.
“They’ve had this amazing sisterly love and friendship and respect always, even when we were children,” Huey said. “I could see how it would be easy for a younger sibling to get lost in the older sibling’s shadow. But Attica would never have allowed that to happen, and Tembi would never have allowed that to happen.”
Both sisters remember a formative trip to the local art house theater to see Spike Lee’s first feature, “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), the story of a young woman (Tracy Camilla Johns) juggling three lovers.
Tembi: “You were too young, but I took you anyway.”
Attica: “It was artful, and it was unapologetically Black. That was the beginning of me feeling like I might want to have a career making stories for the screen.”
Tembi: “That was when I saw Black actors on the screen in a way that I had only seen when we’d watch old movies on TV with dad, like ‘Shaft’ or ‘Claudine.’ It was formative for both of us.”
This kind of shared experience kept the sisters tight. Living through Saro’s illness and death only brought them closer together. Now, telling that story together, for potentially millions to see, only makes sense.
“The idea that on a given day you might need to go cry because it was a stressful day — and then also make each other laugh really, really hard — it’s a blessing,” Attica said.
"story" - Google News
October 21, 2022 at 12:46AM
https://ift.tt/BgaoFmC
In ‘From Scratch,’ the Locke Sisters Tell a Story of Love, Loss and Food - The New York Times
"story" - Google News
https://ift.tt/Y956OTl
https://ift.tt/jcoPVK6
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "In ‘From Scratch,’ the Locke Sisters Tell a Story of Love, Loss and Food - The New York Times"
Post a Comment