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Meet Brendan Whitt of The OPAL Beatrice Creative Company in North Hollywood

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Brendan Whitt.

So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the Hough neighborhood on the east side. It’s like any hood in America. We had riots in the 60’s that left the neighborhood a shell of itself. And we’re in the Rust Belt, so yeah… I grew up less than a 20-minute walk from The Karamu House whose first writer in residence was Langston Hughes, a writer I look up to and draw my moniker “Young Langston” from. Rita Dove is from Akron, Toni Morrison was from Lorain, and Steven Caple is from Cleveland. There’s definitely something in the water with my city and writing.

Personally, I’ve always had this love for stories, especially T.V. and movies. I remember being a little kid in the mid and late 90’s and watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network for hours on end. I went outside and played sports like most kids do but watching TV has always been one of my favorite leisure time activities. I remember getting home on Fridays after I took my spelling and math tests, then I had to go to daycare for like 3 hours before my mom got off from work. I would get home and watch Nickelodeon or Cartoon Cartoon Fridays and then the first hour of Adult Swim before I crashed out (I was only ten). Writers and creators like Gennedy Tarovsky, Clasky and Csupo, and Brendon Small were the first people I can remember knowing their work. And the classics like Chuck Jones’ stuff too. Cartoon Network used to play EVERYTHING back then. The main reason I started watching Home Movies at 10 was because the character had the same name as me (different spelling), a single mom, and a little sister. I’m Black but I could definitely relate to that character in some ways. When I got older, my tastes diversified more into History Channel and A&E before they became mostly reality TV. I loved that show Shootout.

Then The Lord of The Rings trilogy came out when between 5th and 8th grade for me. Peter Jackson was the first filmmaker that left a true impression on me as an aspiring writer. I would reenact the Battle of Mordor three times a week. Just imagine this little Black kid in the hood playing with army men in his room, pretending they’re orcs or human or elves or whatever. I’ve always had this eclectic taste with film and TV. I can watch Paid N Full and Menace to Society, then turn around and binge Bleach or Attack on Titan before I switch over to Mad Men. I fucking love TV and all the types and varieties there are. I don’t have to be boxed in to watch any particular genre or niche.

So I grew up watching and consuming all of this media, and one day in 8th grade my English teacher Ms. Connaughton gave the class an assignment where we had to write a short story. So I gave it some thought and came up with a war story of sorts. I wrote first-person account of a soldier who fought in a snowball fight. It was based on this epic ass snowball fight between the 5th and 4th-grade boys at my elementary school. It was winter, obviously, and the plows had to clear out the parking lot. So they pushed all of the snow up against the playground. The playground sat in this raised box full of wood chips. It was pretty big. So some boys started throwing snowballs, then some more boys threw some back. Before you know it, it was a full-fledged snowball fight. In my short story though I was taken prisoner and had to endure torture until my squad mates rescued me and the other POW’s. It’s the typical fabricated war story. I think Dreamworks would love that animated story, don’t you?

So then, Ms. Connaughton and this other teacher Ms. Forman entered me along with about seven other kids to participate in this competition called Power of the Pen. It was this national short story competition for kids in the 7th and 8th grade. First was districts. A bunch of schools from the area participated. The competition was held at the Cleveland School of Arts in the old torn down building. They have this beautiful new campus now. We had to rotate between three different rooms where each kid had to write a story based on a prompt. It was almost like taking an SAT or ACT. We go through the rounds then the judges dismissed us to lunch while they tallied up scores or whatever. All of us students from these different local schools crowded back into the CSA auditorium as they read off the winners. 8th place goes to…, 7th place goes to…, 6th place and so on. Then they get to 1st place “From Horizon Science Academy, Brendan Whitt.” Now my goofy ass just sat there in my seat. Ms. Connaughton and Ms. Forman and all of my classmates looked at me like “Dude they just called your name.” I was in shock the entire time. I never knew that I even had a talent. And for me to find out that way is still crazy to this day.

After that was when I caught the journalism bug freshman year of high school. My school didn’t have the budget to run a proper paper so instead we just learned the basics of journalism, how to write a story and all of that jazz. I ended up really getting into journalism and kept writing in some form or another all through high school even though the industry was beginning the downslide that it’s in now. I was the typical teenager so I wasn’t hyper-focused but I never stopped writing. Fast forward to senior year of high school and I met my mentor Rhonda Crowder.

Rhonda is a big dog back home. She writes and edits the Who’s Who Black Cleveland directory, she, runs an editing and business writing company, she writes freelance all over the place, she runs a literacy non-profit in Hough. She’s a fucking G. At the time, she was still a staff writer at The Call & Post, a historically Black paper back home in Ohio. I interned with her during the summer of 2009 where I really honed my skills. I first got published in the Call & Post in 2009 when I was a freshman in college. My next big breakthrough was during my last year of undergrad.

One summers me and my now wife were walking around the Cleveland Museum of Art when I had this vision of Black kids playing baseball in the middle of a street in 1940’s New York. I went home and started crafting this honest and quiet but very sharp kid named Thad. He became the main protagonist in my first novella A Summer In Harlem. I released it through Amazon in September 2013, same day Drake dropped Nothing Was the Same coincidentally. Right before I graduated in May of 2014. That same year was when I read Screenplay by Syd Field and decided that Screenwriting was going to be my thing. I had the skills to craft a story, now it was all about learning a new format to tell one. From there, I’ve been publishing books and short stories and writing pilots and features ever since.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s definitely been a struggle. Whenever you decide to make a discipline of art your passion and career, you’re going to struggle. Especially when you come from where I come from, a single-parent household in a city like Cleveland. 2015 was by far my roughest year. I couldn’t find a job post-graduation so I was stressed about that. Then I ended up getting an infection between my vocal chords and tonsils which resulted in me having to get a tonsillectomy. That was a painful 2-week recovery. Then running a business isn’t cheap nor easy. That’s something I struggle with to this day. Finishing my B.A. and M.A. was so easy, but finding work can be so hard. My main obstacle right now is marketing. I can do it and I know some tactics but I don’t have a budget. That’s killing me right now. If I had a budget, I could do more. But no sense in complaining right? Gotta get up and make a way.

The OPAL Beatrice Creative Company – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
So, in 2013 while I was working on A Summer in Harlem I got the idea of running my own business. So I decided to start The OPAL Beatrice Creative Company. It’s named after my paternal grandmother Opal Beatrice Whitt. My company right now specializes in producing Brendan Whitt’s work. My books, short stories and scripts are all products of OPAL. I want it to become a household name like Penguin Publishing meets A24 Productions. I’ve been reading about how studios close deals so when my time comes, I won’t be super ignorant to stuff. I’ll still be lost but I’ll have some form of a map so to speak. OPAL wasn’t officially incorporated until 2018. I produced a no budget Indie titled You Gotta Be Woke and a short documentary, Under the Tent through OPAL and I plan on releasing my next novel this fall through OPAL as well as a short documentary about my late granddad Wilbert Whitt. I’m even curating an art show back home for next year. OPAL is just a creative house that’s going to do a lot one day. Our slogan is “Keep chippin’ away at that marble block until it becomes a statue.” I live by that.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
That has to be when I did my first staged show. In 2017, I had just finished my first year of grad school. I interned at this non-profit called Literary Cleveland where I worked under one of their founding members Lee Chilcote. We held this competition where people all over the Cleveland area submitted poems, short stories, essays, songs, all types of stuff for a competition. So we compiled the best work into a reading script for a staged production. So I used the same formula that summer except with my own work. I reread A Summer Harlem, now almost four years old, and picked out my favorite excerpts. I put them all into one script then started working on the production. I only had like 3 or 4 hundred dollars to pull this thing off. So I found local talent, poets and actors, to read the sections. Then I tapped a saxophonist by the name of Brittany Atterberry to help me with the music. So I had Brittany, her drummer and keyboardist, along with four poets and actors all on stage. The readers read their sections while the three-piece band played behind them. I had like 70 people packed into this bar enjoying the show, clapping, laughing. I felt like a young Tyler Perry bruh. I even sold some books that night. That was when I knew I was still going down the right path. The footage is on YouTube. The sound is pretty bad but it’s up there.

Pricing:

  • A Summer In Harlem – $12.99
  • When the Crows Come Home $8.95
  • Camp ’67 – $12.99
  • The Love of Passion or The Passion of Love in A-Minor – $10.98

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Accidental Clicks- Artwork by Cassie Blotzer, OPAL Logo designed by Dakarai Akil, All other artwork was created by Brendan Whitt

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