When Tembi and Attica Locke were kids growing up in Houston, they sat on their grandmother’s orange and red shaggy carpet and created games to play.
There was a “shop” where various transactions were conducted. I had a “family”. The sisters represented her two different families who lived across the hall in a luxurious New York apartment complex. They let their imagination run wild and came up with different scenarios to pass the time.
“We play all these story games,” Attika said in a joint video interview with her sister earlier this month. I found myself through
they still play together. But this time, the whole world can see the results. Together, they premiered “From Scratch,” a Netflix exclusive series based on Tembi’s memoirs of love, loss, food, family and Italy on Friday. Attica is the first show her runner for a great novelist (“Bluebird, Bluebird”) and screenwriter (“Empire”). Best known as an actress, Tenbi (“Never Have I Ever,” “Eureka”) will serve as her Executive Producer for the first time.
Suddenly they were a team again and together they created the world.
“I could be alone, but it’s so nice to have someone to share memories and experiences with,” Attika said from her home in Los Angeles. (Thembi joined the call from a getaway to the mountains just outside the city.) “The way you speak is shorthand, and no one on earth makes me laugh more than my sister.”
It’s not an easy story. In 1990, when Tembi was 20, she moved to Florence, where she studied art for a year as part of an exchange program from Wesleyan University. While there, she fell in love with soulful Sicilian chef Salo. We both felt the same way. After a whirlwind courtship, they began living together in Los Angeles while Tenbi pursued her acting career.
It hasn’t always been easy, especially for young immigrants. But they knew how to grind. they worked hard. And they had each other. They also had a fairytale wedding at a villa overlooking Florence.
Then tragedy. Salo was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer. he fought He recovered from time to time, but eventually he died in 2012. Tembi put their story between the covers in his 2019, reflecting on heartache but also focusing on love, family reconciliation, and resilience.
“The story has all the flavor profiles,” Tenbi said. Etc., I hope you leave the series thinking differently about your life and honor your loss.
The road to the screen began shortly before the publication of the memoir. In 2018, Attica was about to start a job as a writer for Hulu’s limited series “Little Fires Everywhere,” produced by her Witherspoon production company Hello Her Sunshine. Attica visited the office and read her script of the pilot, which was locked. When she finished, her Hello Sunshine executive, Lauren Levy Neustadter, asked if she had any ideas for future projects. Attika gave her all to her sister’s book.
“Lauren was a little suspicious,” Attika said. “She was like, ‘Your sister… OK.'” ” Amami brought up the topic.
“I think you were still in the parking lot at the Hello Sunshine office when I got the call from you,” she told Attika. I did this.I pitched your book.I was amazed.”
A week or so later, the sisters were both on Hello Sunshine figuring out how to bring the book to TV.
That meant figuring out what needed to change to tell a compelling story on screen. In the series, Tembi is Amy played by Zoe Saldanha and Saro is Reno played by Eugenio Mastrandrea. Amy’s sister, Zhora (in theory, Attica) is played by Danielle Deadweiler, who also plays Mamie Till in the new movie Till. When writing the script, her sisters made Amy a gallerist and art teacher instead of an actress.
The sisters who lived through the source material had to find a balance between respecting the facts and telling good stories. increase. “I didn’t witness them in person, but I used them to create scenes on screen,” she says Tembi.
Reliving such an emotional era can be overwhelming. I will “We check in on each other and protect each other,” Tenbi said.
Saldanha watched all this with admiration. “It was wonderful to see Attika protect her sister, but I also saw their fragility and vulnerability,” she said in a video interview. I opened my mind to relive the moment.”
Three and a half years apart, Tembi and Attika are always good friends. “The Rock sisters were a force,” said Patrick Huey, a close friend from high school and a hospitality job in Palm Springs. He said Tembi, who was in his class, would drive him and Attica to school in a 1971 Toyota Celica.
The car was a gift to Rox’s father, a lawyer, from a client who was unable to pay the bills. Every day, the sisters would leave the keys in the ignition and the windows closed, hoping that someone would steal the keys and take them out of their hands. Every day they were disappointed.
“I mean, the key was in the ignition and no one took the car,” Huey recalled.
Huey, who was close to both sisters and attended an idyllic Italian wedding, remembers Tembi as the most popular girl at Aliev Hastings High School, the star of the school’s drama program. was in the 1st grade when I was in the 4th grade, but we had a relationship as peers.
“Even when we were kids, they always had this amazing sisterly love and friendship and respect,” Huey said. I found it easy to get lost in. But Attica never allowed it, and Tembi never allowed it.”
The two sisters remember going to their local art house theater to see Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986).
Amami: “You were too young, but I took you.”
Attica: “It was clever and perfectly black. That’s what made me want to work in film storytelling”
Tembi: “That was when I saw black actors on the screen in a way that I only saw when I watched old movies like Shaft and Claudine on TV with my dad. It was formative for both of us.”
This kind of shared experience kept the sisters close. Surviving Salo’s illness and death brought them closer together. Now potentially millions of people see It makes sense to tell the story together so that we can
“The thought that we might have to cry because it was a stressful day that day – and also make each other laugh really, really hard – is a blessing,” Attika said.