Alas, the road to fame and fortune is precarious and uncertain for even the most talented of us seeking to make our mark in Hollywood. There are long stretches of discouragement and opposition along the boulevard of broken dreams. Industry veterans K-Tusha Croom and Nick Ramos know this as well as anyone, via personal experience and through the strivings of their peers. Their combined backgrounds prompted them to create a platform to serve the entertainment community, using the rational that, in Croom’s words, “…the right support system can ignite or stall someone’s career.”
And so, within the last year, they formed Morementum Entertainment. Conceived to encourage creative professionals not to give up in their quest for occupational fulfillment, its name is a play on an informal mission statement of “more passion, more creativity, more momentum,” in the quest for personal growth. Envisioned as a kind of “TED Talk” (referring to the series of global conferences on a variety of subjects), the company recently held its first seminar on Oct. 24 at the Los Angeles Film School on Sunset Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood.
Headlining the seminar were prominent actors Raz Adoti (whose credits include “Amistad,” “Black Hawk Down,” and “Resident Evil”), and iconic Bill Duke (“American Gigolo,” “Deep Cover,” “Menace II Society,” and “Predator”). The event was divided into two separate presentations, with each man sharing his own personal memories about the struggle to survive and flourish in an inhospitable business.
Adoti alternated his talk with antidotes about his working relationships with bigwigs like Steven Spielberg (“… you don’t get a sense of who he is until he starts working”) and who shared a secret to his film technique with the emerging actor (by revealing that he purposely arrived on set “half prepared” to ensure an element of spontaneity), and the harsh realities of the profession (“… there’s gonna be a lot of no’s’”).
He buttressed these hard truths with the declaration that “… the feast makes the famine worth it!”
Duke started his talk with a clip from “American Gigolo,” and his portrayal of a gay pimp that was considered quite daring for the time (1980). His nearly 40 years as an actor/director gives him remarkable insight into the prerequisites of both (directing takes as much organizational aptitude as artistic ability), undertaking projects to, in his words, “give voice to the voiceless” (in his 2011 documentary “Dark Girls”), and the hurdle of breaking out of being typecast as a large Black man (“sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t”).
He shared a personal trauma of his early struggles as an actor on the streets of New York that has never appeared on the Internet, or any media this writer has scrutinized. During one particularly harsh stretch of inactivity in his career, he sought solace in the refuge of narcotics, including LSD and its attendant side effect of “flashbacks.” During one memorable episode, he became convinced that the CIA had deployed a poison gas cloud to dispatch him. As he wandered the streets to evade it, it descended lower and lower, forcing him to hug the sidewalk to get away. Finally, he was reduced to crawling on his belly, before collapsing in a pile of rubbish in front of his apartment, where he passed out.
When he awoke an hour or so later, he realized he had struck rock bottom, and there was nowhere to go but up.
Duke was comfortable enough to reveal this tragedy in the safe environment that Morementum strives to provide. Ramos started his own career with a leap of faith because he bought a one-way ticket West upon his graduation from Ohio’s Bowling Green University. Along the way, he has endured his own trials and tribulations.
“There’s really no such thing as ‘over night success,” he reminds any industry hopefuls.
He, in turn, encourages other aspirants to overcome their fears by providing a milieu to free them from others being overly judgmental.
“I’ve been where you’re at,” he says.
“A friend of Croom and Ramos defines a “hot” artist as one who has attained a level of being “honest,” “open,” and “transparent.”
Morementum Entertainment endeavors to help those seeking to achieve this desirable plateau by staging a series of seminars and workshops, tentatively starting in 2016. If you’d like to know more, go to their website at mme.tv, or contact them through their email at info@mme.tv, or by telephone at (323) 380-6097.
