What is ELLIES?
The manifestation has been put into the universe:
ELLIES will become a multimillion-dollar franchise and a beacon to Black women all over the world. 🌍
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What is ELLIES?
ELLIES is a humorous tale set in a Feminist Afrofuturist utopia run by Black women that gets invaded by aliens. 🚀
It's fun! 🙆🏾
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Why ELLIES? Why now?
Watch this video to find out.
Also, you can read the transcript underneath.
Questions? Suggestions? 🤔
Tell me in the comments below. ⤵️
Transcript:
GENESIS:
Six seasons and a prequel movie.
That is the initial vision for ELLIES.
As stated throughout the rest of this application, ELLIES is an hour-long sci-fi dramedy for professional women ages 30-40.
Here is the logline:
When an unexpected visitor arrives in her city, maverick senator Athena Napoli must stop the colonizer before he invades the entire country.
ELLIES is a series about what happens when Black women run everything.
Why Black women specifically?
Black women remain the most educated demographic in the United States, yet Black women only earn 68% of what non-Hispanic white men do. (Thought Co., “Black Women Are the Most Educated Group in the U.S.”, https://www.thoughtco.com/black-women-most-educated-group-us-4048763.)
As a group, on Earth, we are currently overeducated, underemployed, overlooked, and undervalued.
But in the country of Elle, in the year 2222, there are no shackles, there are no strings. Elle is designed for us and by us, a radical, feminist, democratic socialist environment where Black women live our best lives.
And so does everyone else.
CREATIVE VISION:
Senator Athena Napoli (42) runs this show. Her campaign for Prime Minister of Elle is the engine that keeps the first season of ELLIES in forward motion.
Athena’s foil, antagonist, and eventual confidante John Charles Carter (36) drives the B story. This Mission Specialist of the Knoxville space cruiser wants to rebound from his unexpected landing on Elle and return with his crew to Earth immediately.
These two emerging leaders spend the season’s 13 episodes inextricably linked; neither of them can achieve their respective goals without the other. But once Athena and John Charles both succeed, they discover their adventure has only just begun.
After the battles fought, lost, and ultimately won over the next five seasons of ELLIES, the cap on this epic journey is a prequel film: the story of the Divine Nine. This group of Black women from Earth’s African diaspora founded Elle one hundred years prior to the series pilot. It was a secret mission. The nine were fed up with their place in the world, the misogyny, the degradation, the genocide. These resilient souls reached out across the universe, a neighbor heard their siren song, and the women packed up and left for a new world, Vores Hjem. Once they determined their refuge was safe, the women called back to Earth for their sisters, families, friends. An exodus of a hundred thousand, kept hush hush.
INTENTIONS:
As a woman of any color, I don’t get to have a major media franchise designed with me in mind, a multiplatform universe created for me by people who look like me and think like me for my entertainment, for my validation as a worthy economic demographic. I don’t get a Star Trek, a Star Wars, or even my favorite sci-fi franchise, The Twilight Zone. Not only do those properties have almost no stories centered on Black women, but they also have almost no stories centered on characters who are not white and male and straight and able-bodied all at the same time. Nonwhite people make up the majority of Earth’s citizens, so where are the platforms for our stories?
I complain, and I create solutions. I have been publishing books and producing web series and writing short stories and cobbling together screenplays and directing films since 2002. But I cannot solve the problem of media representation on my own.
On my social media profiles In January 2022, I put the following manifestation into the universe: ELLIES will become a multimillion-dollar franchise and a beacon to Black women all over the world. Like Robin Thede stated about her award-winning series, it is not called “The” Black Lady Sketch Show; the title is “A” Black Lady Sketch Show, hoping that hers will not be the only one on air. I want other Black women across the globe, across industries, to read and watch and share ELLIES with other women, and say to themselves, “Yes, I can.” I can write my own story. I can build my own business. I can run for office, and I can win.
ELLIES exemplifies what is possible for Black women, if we have the freedom to simply be. It is not a request for other people to give us power; it is a statement about the utopian society we can create if we harness our existing power together, without the intertwined constraints of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
Ergo, I repeat: ELLIES. Six seasons and a movie.
Let’s do this.