Script File

WATU-WAZURI...BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE - Rise of the $3 Billion Dollar Black Hair Care Industry and The Incredible Three

“Watu-Wazuri...Beautiful People” captures the constant chaos three Black CEOs face in running multi-million dollar corporations. Conflicts with employees, stealing product formulas with street values in the millions, manufacturing woes, betrayal, and the entangled and complex lives they live with wives, side-chicks, a cocaine habit and troubled kids. Then, there is the threat they all brace for, in the fight from takeover by big white conglomerates who want control of the $3 billion dollar Black hair care market. It’s only the tip of the iceberg of what goes on in the life of a 1970s man with the luxury of money, power and position, and the threat of women rising.

  • Gretchen Ratcliff Sawyer
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Student, Television Script
  • Number of Pages:
    64
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes
  • Abraham Polonsky Critical Writing Award
    Burbank
    May 4, 2018
    Critical Writing
  • Mike Curb School of Cinema at CSUN, Fall 2017
    Northridge
    December 28, 2017
    Dean's List
  • Mike Curb School of Cinema at CSUN, Fall 2018
    Northridge
    December 28, 2018
    Dean's List
  • Mike Curb School of Cinema at CSUN, Spring 2019
    Northridge
    May 19, 2019
    Dean's List
Writer Biography - Gretchen Ratcliff Sawyer

Gretchen Ratcliff Sawyer is a writer, screenwriter, literary visionary and winner of the 2018 Abraham Polonsky Prize in Writing at CSUN. In 2019, her critical essay on James Baldwin's I Am Not Your Negro was published in the literary journal KAPU SENS, and her essay on Hollywood, Black Writers: Leveling the Playing Field was published in the literary journal CAPTURED. She is a proud alumni of CSUN’s Mike Curb College of Cinema, Television and Arts CTVA.

As a writer and screenwriter, Gretchen creates original works, adaptations, rewrites and script editing, and provides outstanding script coverage. She writes comedy and drama for film, TV and web series. As a novelist, she writes compelling fiction and is working on her first romance novel entitled "Look For Me In The Sunset".

In 2016, Gretchen stepped fully into her purpose by taking her writing to the next level. She boldly downsized and left Corporate America to return to CSUN as a full-time student. Now that she has graduated, she is approaching the industry in a robust and diverse manner that demonstrates her ability as a wordsmith and creator of content for multiple platforms and audiences. She writes comedy for film and TV that features diverse and dynamic women heroines and super hero girls. She writes drama for film and television that tells compelling stories that focuses on Shakespeare’s flawed human. Gretchen is currently shopping a comedy web series; an African American teen comedy, coming-of-age feature film and a riveting African American themed 1970s TV drama series.

Gretchen will continue to explore story-lines of friendship and betrayal, sickness and healing, sickness and death, rags-to-riches, riches-to-rags; comical self-reflection; trajectory climbs to power and devastating falls from grace, as these conditions make-up the synthesis of what it is to be human.

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Writer Statement

"Writing is like a symphony. It has highs and lows that peak and drop down deep into the belly of our imaginations and emotional psychology."