Category: TV/Film Stuff
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Dorm Disorder
What Boarding School After Dark Really Looks Like Television has been getting the boarding school story wrong for fifty years. I know because I lived in one for ten. Here is what those scripts are missing — and why it matters who tells the story. Girard College, Philadelphia — Lights out, 1987 Ten seconds after…
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Where Are the Black Women?
Hollywood celebrated a landmark year for women on screen in 2024. Black women were largely not in that room. Here is what the numbers actually say — and why the industry’s pipeline excuse is a lie it invented for itself. Read more about it on my Substack: https://erikasellispr.substack.com/p/where-are-the-black-women
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Cecil B. Moore, MLK, and the March Nobody Made a Movie About-But I am!
In the summer of 1965, the longest sustained civil rights protest in American history happened in Philadelphia — and Hollywood has never told the story. That ends here. Read all about it on my Substack: https://erikasellispr.substack.com/p/cecil-b-moore-mlk-and-the-march-nobody
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Kidnappers
Hi, wanna laugh-read my short film Kidnappers on my Substack page: https://open.substack.com/pub/erikasellispr/p/kidnappers?r=bm4gz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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The Wall That Will Not Fall
Before I became a writer, I lived behind a ten foot wall– inside one of the most dramatic untold stories in America. It’s time to tell it. There is a ten-foot stone wall that runs around 43 acres of North Philadelphia. It was built in the 1800s, and for most of the twentieth century, it…
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Tuner Made Me Want to Go Back to the Theater — And Here’s Why That Matters
I’ll be honest — Tuner wasn’t on my must-see list. It looked interesting enough, but nothing was pulling me to the theater. That changed the moment I watched the trailer and realized the main character has hyperacusis. For those who don’t know, hyperacusis is a rare disorder that makes normal, everyday sounds feel painfully loud…
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Where’s My Snoopy Hoodie? The Gendering of Geek Culture in Retail
Last week I bought a Snoopy hoodie from Macy’s. Simple enough, right? Except it wasn’t simple at all — because I didn’t find it by browsing the women’s section. I found it the way I always find things like it: by doing a broad, general search and hoping something surfaces, because retailers have decided that…
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A graphic short story:
SHORT FICTION · DARK SCI-FI · AVAILABLE ON AMAZON Aunt Winnie By Erika S. Ellis What happens when the woman paid to steal children from their families decides one of them is worth more than the paycheck? Aunt Winnie is a dark, cinematic short story about a twenty-year government black-ops veteran, a gene-splicing operation hiding…
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Stop Calling It a “Black Film.” Is God Is Is Just a Great Film.
I’ll be transparent: I went into Is God Is knowing almost nothing about it. The preview suggested a revenge film. Two women with a score to settle. That was enough for me. I didn’t read the synopsis. I didn’t know it was adapted from an Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway play. I didn’t know this was writer-director Aleshea Harris’s…
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Why I Write About Outsiders
When I look at the stories I keep returning to, one thing connects almost all of them: outsiders. People searching for identity. People hiding secrets. People trying to survive systems that exploit or misunderstand them. People caught between worlds emotionally, socially, politically, or even literally in the case of some of my sci-fi stories. I…
