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Getting to Know “Lovers and Friends”

A standing-room-only crowd of fans greeted the cast of the popular lesbian web series Lovers and Friends when they attended Black Pride in Washington, D.C., this past May. Cast members were stunned that after only four months online, the show had made so many hard-core fans.

“They were actually calling us by name, which was amazing to me,” said cast member Nicole Pina, who has become something of a local celebrity and sex symbol in South Florida where the show is filmed.

“The response we got was phenomenal,” she said of the D.C. crowd. “I guess it was the first taste of stardom that we got. We walked into the room expecting to see five, 10 people, and we walked in and there’s about 300 to 400 people there that paid 15 dollars a piece to view our show.”

The show’s fans span the globe. “We receive feedback from so many different countries,” said Charmain Johnson, the show’s writer, producer and director. The emails come from everywhere, from Australia to the Bahamas, “but above all England. We receive a lot of feedback from the U.K.”

Johnson and several of the show’s cast members recently chatted with AfterEllen.com about their experiences working on the groundbreaking web series.

The Lovers and Friends Show, Johnson’s brainchild, premiered online in January. Set in South Florida, it follows the everyday drama-ridden lives of a core group of six multiethnic lesbians of color and their friends and lovers.

Tori (Nicole Pina) is fun-loving, easy-going character who is having an affair with her boss. Dre (Shakelia Tharpe) is the brash gigolo, a butch player with a stable of women at her beck and call. Lisa (Kendal Starr) is a “good girl” femme and medical student who falls for Dre. Kai (Marlaina Law) is the sweet and lovable butch knight in shining armor. Mercedes (Christy Rodriguez) is Tori’s married-with-children boss, and Yasmin (BeBe Brunswick) is the outspoken political activist of the group.

Johnson, a Miami native, is no newbie to creating film and video projects focusing on women of color. Although Lovers and Friends is her first episodic effort, the 20-something graduate of Florida Atlantic University has been working creatively for several years. Her first feature-length film, Seeking Sam, told the story of a young woman who runs away from home when her secret affair with her brother’s fiancĂ©e is revealed.

In 2005 she was a finalist in Black Entertainment Television’s RAP It Up screenplay competition. Her entry, Secrets, tells the story of a couple dealing with HIV.

Johnson was inspired to create Lovers and Friends when she and her co-producer, Kay Greene, attended Atlanta’s Black Pride celebration last year. She had a rough concept of the show already but had shelved it. She was so inspired, however, by the artists she met in Atlanta that she dusted off the script and began to shape it into a web series when she got home.

She started with just three characters: Lisa, Kai and Dre. Lisa was based on the person she feels her parents wanted her to be – a prim and proper education-minded young lady.

She wrote Kai as the love interest, “the nice guy.” And Dre was Johnson’s alter ego.

“Dre represented the villain,” Johnson explained. “She could get away with doing a lot of things that not a lot of people could get away with doing. She’s a stud and she didn’t care.”

After she began getting a script into shape, Johnson and Greene brainstormed about how they should present the show. “We decided that we really wanted to do something that was online that could reach a broader audience, so we went with that,” she said.

Johnson said she revels in the fact that since the show is on the internet and on DVD, “there is no real censorship about what we can say and what we can talk about. We don’t have some network saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you can’t say that.'”

She quickly added, “That isn’t to say that we wouldn’t like to have a network.”

When asked if any of the criticism that people have for The L Word played into how she crafted the show, she made sure to stress that in no way was she trying to replicate the Showtime series, but that she wanted to tell stories that reflected women she knew. She wanted to show viewpoints and lives that were not present on The L Word, as the characters of Lovers and Friends reflect the mixture of cultures in South Florida.

Judging by the number of views and comments about the show on YouTube, the online community Downelink (which is part of Logo, AfterEllen.com’s parent company) and the show’s website, Johnson has undeniably fulfilled a craving in the lesbian community. Fans leave comments that range from heartfelt praise for the show’s existence to raves about “how fine Kai is” or rants about how “Dre is such a dog.”

The cast members are equally enthusiastic about their participation the series. “What really attracted me to the show [was that I] would be able to work with so many talented and powerful women,” said Rodriguez, who serves as the assistant director in addition to playing the closeted boss having a tryst with her employee Tori.

Left to right: BeBe Brunswick, Nicola Pina, Christy Rodriguez, Kendal Starr, Marlaina Law, Shakelia Tharpe

Rodriguez was headed to California to focus on her acting career when Johnson asked her to work on the show. “Next thing I know, I’m in the show assisting directing, and I haven’t been happier,” she said.

Kissa Jo, who plays a “nasty, bitchy” character named Sasha, said was also headed to another locale when she auditioned for the show, but she had a “gut feeling” about the project and dropped her plans to move.

“I saw the first episode and I was so impressed,” she gushed. “I saw so much potential, and it was like finally someone is doing something instead of just talking,” she said of Johnson’s ambition and drive to actually follow through with plans to create the show. “In California I had a free ride for school and just refused to leave because I just truly believe in this project and that it’s going to be big one day.”

For Tamar Sabb, who plays the character Deirdre, participating in the show has political implications. She said she “gets tired” of watching TV and seeing characters whose lives are alien to her.

“I mean I love The L Word, I love Queer as Folk, but I couldn’t relate to anybody on that damn show,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing to see people that I know and that I can relate to on the screen knowing that we’re online, that there’s someone in California watching, that there’s someone in the Caribbean watching it.”

The enthusiasm the cast has for their characters was clearly detectable in their voices when they talked about their roles on the show.

Law, who plays Kai, said she loves portraying an innocent yet flirtatious jock butch character who also can “carry out a good amount of drama.”

The handsome Tharpe, who plays the two-timing Dre, said that the thing she likes most about her character is her confidence and “that she doesn’t care about what people think about her.”

Rodriguez also cited confidence as the best asset of her character, Mercedes, but admitted that one of the best parts of her role is that she gets to work with sexy Nicole Pina.

Pina, who was cited last month as one of the “hottest women of color” on AfterEllen.com, is just happy the show is on the map. After she received the accolade for her attractiveness she called her mother, who gave her a slap-in-the-face reality check and told her, “Don’t let it get to your head.” Pina said the praise was “amazing” and “unexpected.”

Johnson and Greene are astounded by how quickly the show has achieved a cult-like following online. The D.C. event was the first time she received feedback from fans in person, and she “really got the understanding that wow, this is bigger than just emails. It was just a shock.”

Greene said she “didn’t know we’d be this far already.”

While they are ecstatic about the success they have already experienced, they still have to contend with obstacles in raising funds and getting the show more exposure. They plan to hit more festivals, including Jacksonville Black Pride (Aug. 8—10) and Atlanta Black Pride (Aug. 9—Sept. 1).

But for Johnson, by far the most difficult issue in producing the show is “money, money, money.”

While the first episode is available in its entirety on YouTube, the subsequent episodes only have previews available online. Reminiscent of the early distribution for the black gay television series Noah’s Arc, full versions are only available for purchase on DVD and can be ordered from the show’s website. Green would love for fans to continue to show their support by buying DVDs to supplement the show’s budget.

“We need all the support that we can get so we can keep going,” she said. “It allows us to be another alternative to what’s already out there.” She is an advocate of supporting indie entertainment in general.

“Let’s not let other people decide what we should watch,” she continued. “Let’s support ourselves.”

For more on The Lovers and Friends Show, visit its official website.

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