Who Gets the Greenlight: Hollywood’s Stamp vs. My Own Opening Shot WIDE SHOT: A Hollywood boardroom. Suits at a polished table. Scripts stacked like bricks.SFX: A rubber stamp slams down — THUNK. One sound decides which stories live, and which die. CUT TO: Silence. For us, there was no sound. Only doors closed. This country banned Black love until the late 1960s. Whole families erased by law. At the same time, Hollywood enforced the Hays Code, a rulebook that banned interracial romance on screen. Even when we loved in real life, the screen said we didn’t exist. Our Stories on...

The Spark They Stole: Hollywood’s 115-Year Head Start and Why Independent Media Matters When people think of Hollywood, they imagine red carpets, flashing cameras, million-dollar sets, and the glamorous lives of stars. But the real story of how Hollywood began is not glamorous at all. It was about control, exclusion, and ownership. And from the very beginning, Black filmmakers and Black stories were pushed to the margins — erased, mocked, or distorted. Today, when I’m building my own independent media company, Kayatick Styles, after a 12-hour truck shift, I can’t ignore that history. Hollywood’s head start wasn’t just financial. It...

What It Really Takes to Build an Independent Media Company Building an independent media company means sacrifice, grind, and vision. Here’s the real cost of creating outside Hollywood’s machine. The Fantasy of a Media Company (Hollywood Illusion) Say “media company,” and people picture Hollywood.Paramount. Disney. Red carpets. Spotlights. They imagine billion-dollar budgets and executives sipping champagne behind tinted windows. They see celebrities smiling at premieres, assuming the entire industry is dripping with power and money. That’s the fantasy. What people expect when they hear “media company”: Paramount, Disney, Fox, ABC Red carpets and celebrities Big budgets and luxury Endless resources...

Dear 25-Year-Old Me, I see you. It’s another Tuesday night, and you’re sitting in that gray cubicle under buzzing fluorescent lights. The hum from the AC blends with the soft clack of your keyboard, but your mind isn’t on the spreadsheet in front of you. You keep glancing at the clock in the corner of your screen. It’s 8:47 PM. You still have two hours left on your shift, but your thoughts are already in the studio. The beat you’ve been working on has been looping in your head all day, and you can’t wait to lay down that verse....

Why I’m Telling Stories the Industry Refuses to Show Erased, Twisted, and Sold Back to Us For most of Hollywood history, Black stories were either erased or twisted to fit someone else’s agenda. In the early 1900s, white actors wore blackface to portray us as buffoons—unintelligent, lazy, clownish. Those portrayals didn’t just block Black actors from the screen, they branded us with caricatures that still echo today.   When Black performers finally did get roles, they were often boxed into one-dimensional archetypes: the maid, the gangster, the absent father. Hattie McDaniel made history as the first Black actor to win...