Coli Sylla’s TV Pilot, Porter won the Grand Prize for the most recent Creative Screenwriting TV Pilot Screenplay Contest. It is a critical drama that tackles racism through the prism of Colin Porter, a third generation Civil Rights Attorney whose personal demons and lust for wealth jeopardize his reputation as America’s fearless champion in the fight for racial equality.
Coli Sylla is an award winning screenwriter dedicated to creating content that is culturally and socially relevant. Born in Philadelphia, but raised in Lome, Togo West Africa to a devout Muslim father and strict Christian mother, his upbringing was nothing short of unique and would later come to inform his work. We caught up with up about his resonant story.
What inspired your story of Porter?
Porter was inspired by the state of mental health in this country specifically as it relates to black men, specifically Colin Porter.
When Colin’s prism is bombarded, we see the colors of trauma, greed, hope, anger, anxiety, courage, intelligence. The sum of these colors make up who he is, though who he is cannot be defined by a single hue. He doesn’t consider himself a victim of trauma because he hasn’t yet acknowledged it so there’s no healing there. The moment anyone expresses concern for his mental or emotional health his actions and responses are to ratchet up the output and go even harder.
The Porter we meet is a very practiced and polished man that believes his own hype. He’s seemingly in control at all times expressing little to no emotion. His ability to disassociate serves him well, but is a result of undiagnosed, unregulated mental health challenges he is oblivious to when we meet him. His heightened anxiety dictates every move he makes. Every decision or choice is a result of exhaustive preparation, calculation, and desperate efforts to shield his truth from the world. Colin is in a constant state of Fight, Freeze, or Flight. His truth, as he sees it, is his greatest vulnerability and must be hidden at all costs.
What is your personal connection to the story?
My personal connection to the story goes back to 2011 during early development of Porter. Before evolving to the character he is today, I created him as the embodiment of who I wanted to be. In a sense I created a personal hero for myself. He was and in many ways still is unapologetic, fearless, and wholly committed to the advancement and uplifting of misrepresented and marginalized communities.
Back then as a man, as a writer, I had yet to really own my place in the world. Nor had I owned my voice as a writer. As the national climate on race continued its boil, I grew angry and more fearful than I had ever been. I felt powerless, so I gave power to Porter, I felt selfish for pursuing my dreams as a writer while communities of color suffered, so I gave Porter a sense of conviction and desire to serve.
As his character evolved, I shifted my focus to themes and characteristics that would add to his complexity. I wanted to address certain social issues that impacted black families and black men. I wanted to create a world of characters that were as flawed as they were heroic.
How does this stand out from similar stories about civil rights abuses?
Porter outright isn’t about the fallout or outcome of any particular civil rights abuse as much as it is about how he manages to leverage the pain and anguish these cases cause. Audiences won’t spend episodes moving back and forth from a law office to a courtroom spending a few scenes at home with Porter staring into a mirror before miraculously going into the world bringing about convenient resolutions.
When we take his desire to be an agent of change, to be a motivator and activist and entangle those desires with his identity as a black man in a constant and heightened state of anxiety and conflict within himself and the world, you get clarity entangled with confusion, chaos with harmony, light in darkness, many of the opposing forces we as members of society encounter.
This complex perspective will play out in every single inch of the story. Every scene, every setting plays a key role. I don’t ever want to take away from the gravitas of real civil rights violations that occur day in and day out. What I hope to add to the national conversation around equality, fairness and justice is to present a realistic portrayal of what it looks like for an attorney that not only represents victims, but who himself is a victim of a society that constantly devalues his worth.
Are the characters based on real people?
They have to be, it’s really tempting to draw up characters leaning on societal or cultural stereotypes to fill their backstory. With the content landscape changing as fast as it is, the demand for realistic and less predictable characters is high. Porter’s characters are based on what I call a Character Trinity which is:
A) Characters based on real people
B) Characters inspired by real people, and
C) A mix of personalities of real people that form a single character.
In the pilot, Colin and Anthony visit the grave of a character named Troy. He was perhaps one of the most important influences in Porter’s life and there’s a rich backstory there. Troy, is based on my college roommate who died of a massive heart attack before my eyes. Troy had such an impact on my life after his death. He passed over twenty years ago, but in my mind it feels like it just happened, I can never unsee the night he collapsed, I can never clear my head of that traumatic experience and the only way to truly preserve his memory is to immortalize him in a story. His death was a triggering event that helped put me on a path of discovery in terms of mental health management.
Why did you choose to tell your story through Porter’s point of view?
I wanted an apex, Type A leader who speaks for those who’s voices have become whispers among a cacophony of voices yelling the same thing, “Our rights have been violated, no one is listening, no one is helping!” I also wanted to use his point of view to show a vulnerability that he is constantly at war with.
Through Porter, I can raise the volume on the whispers of black men, the whispers of fathers, brothers, sons, and uncles while at the same time presenting them as realistically as entertainment will allow, wonderfully flawed and wonderfully human.
Society fears black men, with that fear comes oppression, lack of opportunities, lack of resources, efforts to ensure that we stay in our place or in a prison. We take measures to appear as non-threatening as possible. We fear police just as much as police fear us. There’s a narrative about the black man that penetrates popular culture, a narrative that has infiltrated the African-American community and has labeled young black boys before those young black boys can label themselves. Porter exists in these realities, he wrestles with them, becomes them, and overcomes them.
What drives Porter’s actions?
Porter’s pedigree is rooted in social activism, his socio-political intelligence developed under his father, Kwame Porter, a sitting judge who got his start as a civil rights attorney. Justice to Colin runs deeper than achieving equality, Justice to Colin is an ability to provide hope and possibility out of impossible situations. Justice is his unrivaled ability to take down Goliath over and over again while getting intoxicated off of the perception that he is a hero of a moral and just cause. Fame is the side effect of justice’s success.
Every time he takes a stand or gets behind a cause, he propels himself further to the forefront which feeds the fame. He is a social and moral exhibitionist. The higher the stakes the larger his audience, the larger his audience the greater his influence, the greater his influence the higher the cost. In this series, he will in fact pay the cost.
What are Porter’s personal demons?
Fear and shame are perhaps two of his greatest demons. What is interesting is the responses and reactions they elicit. We are introduced early on in the pilot to a compulsive behavior he uses to cope with shame and fear. It’s an act that kicks off a series of compulsive behavioral responses to triggering events.
For Porter, great success begets a profound fear of failure, to him, fear is failure, failure is a setback and setbacks are shameful. For Porter, anything that triggers shame triggers his compulsion to cope through sex. Porter’s sex scene in the beginning was done because I wanted to visually explore what uninhibited sex would look like in terms of its use as a coping mechanism. Hypersexuality is incredibly complex and can be explored in many ways, which I hope to do.
He also battles chemical dependencies that are borderline addiction. His system is so poorly regulated he relies on and abuses prescription strength medications as another way to cope. The danger for Porter lies in the enjoyment of the high these drugs bring.
Another one of his greatest personal demons is the trauma he experienced in his developing years.
Describe Porter’s moral compass?
With the bulk of Porter’s values established during his upbringing through examples his father set forth, he passionately values courage, having the bravery to speak up and speak out even when he knows he won’t have the popular opinion. As a youth, he valued integrity, compassion, honor, respect, and forgiveness, values instilled in him by his mother Gloria Porter.
As his life evolved, so did his moral compass. He develops a strong sense of self-preservation; the importance of protecting himself and his agenda at all costs became anchored in his psyche.
When we meet Porter, we meet a man who has just experienced a huge blow to his moral compass, self-preservation shifted to responsibility when he is thrust into the role of protector of a son he doesn’t have a relationship with, and a family unit bordering on dysfunction.
Why did you choose Texas and Philadelphia to set your story?
I started in the south because of the its dark place in history in terms of racism and civil injustices. The journey to freedom has its roots in the south. Also, the lynching of Jesse Washington and the savage manner he was paraded through Waco led to my decision to set the stage in Texas. Texarcana was chosen, in a sense, as neutral ground to distance the narrative from the actual cities these atrocities occurred. I also chose Texas because of the sense of pride across its minority communities. Communities such as Grand Prairie where African-Americans thrive and continue to thrive.
I used to host a podcast called Where I’m From, a show about Philly’s famous, and not so famous neighborhoods, and the stories of those who inhabit them. I chose Philadelphia because that’s where I arrived when my family moved from Africa. It’s definitely the part of Porter that borrows from my life.
Lastly, Philly is a big union town, lots of proud blue collar workers and passionate sports fans. It’s also a city in need of resources, support, and opportunities to uplift minority communities and provide fair and equitable opportunities to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. Philly is a microcosm of the United States and the city Porter selects to build his practice.
What research did you do?
Research for Porter began in 2011 when I came across a book entitled The Wire: Truth Be Told by Rafael Alvirez.
I remain a huge fan of David Simon’s storytelling. I reached out to one of the show’s staff writers Rafael Alvirez and informed him of my intentions to write a show that would captivate and shed light on many contemporary issues much like The Wire did with drugs, crime and a broken police force. In his response, he wrote, “Remember, the magnetic pull of clichés and stereotypes is bigger than anyone realizes, so demand that your characters be flesh and blood…” Alvirez’s words struck a chord and I dove in.
I repeatedly watched the Peter Bogdanovich interview with David Chase discussing the evolution of Tony Soprano and the series, The Sopranos. I made sure to drill in my head the importance of character. From there, I had an idea about a man with immeasurable talent and abilities who grapples with demons on a dramatic scale. The concept of Porter was born.
Initially Porter was a corporate exec battling racism from the inside of SND Corporation, but that really wasn’t doing it for me, so I continued to research ideas and people. I recall watching a press conference led by Civil Rights Attorney Ben Crump and my creative mind went manic. Honestly, to watch him speak, the bravery, the unapologetic tone, the staunch passion for defending the rights of the powerless, I knew at that moment what occupation Porter would take up and I was also intentional in not modelling Porter after Crump.
I listened to speeches and talks given by historical figures from Baldwin to Garvey as well as local heroes that had an impact on my development in terms of my knowledge of self. I researched humans, and the human condition, our motivations, our desires. This research was done to introduce a theme of mental health, I looked at various diagnoses and symptoms in order to decide what can translate on television. I studied different mental health disorders such as Bipolar 1 and 2, generalized anxiety disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, and juvenile maladaptive aggression.
Toni mentions to Porter that she doesn’t want Jovan’s parents to find out about Coach Thomas yet because there’s a chance they’ll exploit the situation as a money-making opportunity. How often might this really occur?
There’s a song called The Marathon Continues. It’s a tribute to Nipsey Hussle by rapper J. Stone. In it he says “I hope your opportunity survives the opportunist.” That line really struck a chord with me and applies to her circumstances. Jovan is thrust into an incredibly difficult and traumatic experience and from a high level, she becomes a symbol, an opportunity to shed light on the countless women who are sexually objectified and victimized by predators like coach Thomas and his associates. How often might exploitation by opportunists occur in times of tragedy such as Jovan’s? I would go so far as to say it occurs more than we know.
Jovan came up through struggle, she relied on her athletic prowess to get her out of the toxic environment that was home. The tragedy is that besides Toni, she doesn’t have a family structure to lean on and find refuge because her family is suffering from their own trauma that prevents them from being responsible loving parents. Hurt people, hurt people.
Whatever the outcome of Jovan’s case, her parents will ultimately learn what has happened, but Porter will ensure that they will never be in a position to exploit her situation. Knowing what we know about Porter, does he then become the opportunist or is he a champion for her rights?
How does the season arc of Porter play out?
Season one of Porter will bring the colors of the prism into focus as we continue to explore the fallout from his return to Philadelphia where he does his best to manage both his personal and professional life. As a result of the unannounced visit to Anthony’s school, a contentious custody battle ensues and an order of protection is taken out against him drawing a line between he and Krystal. Through these events, we’ll explore the African-American family dynamic in a state of dysfunction. A large part of the national conversation around Black mental health is the acknowledgement of fractured families existing in a cycle of unrest and the overall impact it has on the members of these families. I want to explore that.
We’ll unpack the conflict between Porter and his father over the Cliveden case. Porter uses the media and public perception to squeeze the financial life from SND Corporation making them an example of the magnitude of change that marginalized communities can bring under the right leadership. As the back and forth of the settlement process begins, Porter’s brash arrogance in the public eye fuels his father’s deep-seated resentment toward him and the way he carries the family name in the civil rights arena.
As he grows in popularity, the media begins a deconstructive expose of his private life when a scathing article brings into question his sincerity and authenticity. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the threats toward his family continue to become more prevalent and real. His bonds with Butchie and Horse will be tested when they enact the code of the streets to identify and confront Porter’s extortionists forcing him to distance himself from childhood friends who swore loyalty to protect him.
Describe your writing voice and process and how it informs the stories you want to tell.
Dramatic, graphic, polarizing, and character-centered. My voice and individual style stem from conflicts within myself. My writing process requires frequent check-ins and often times before I begin writing a script, I write in my journal. Not about the story I’m about to tell, but about my feelings, where I am emotionally, mentally, and physically. What’s bothering me. What intrigues me. Where do I see growth. Where can I grow.
If I feel myself writing in my journal to an audience, I’m not ready to write. If I find myself afraid to write without reservation or afraid to be honest because my words may be judged, I’m not ready to write. The inner conflict that I mention is the desire to write unapologetically versus the anxiety and difficulty of expressing my true self in the world I create. To reach a level of unapologetic writing took years to develop and I discovered it writing Porter.
This is how my voice informs the stories I want to tell, by starting first with simple journaling to put my feelings to a page. I extract those feelings and translate them into character traits.
My voice inspires me to tell stories that involve heavily layered, real characters with rich and complex backstories navigating a world that does not always conspire to support them.
