Bobby: I’m from Hammond, Indiana, a small town right near Gary, Indiana, and I’ve had my eyes set on Los Angeles. I remember one day looking at a basketball game, and it was snowing out and Chicago is right next to Hammond, Indiana. It’s like twenty minutes away. It gets really, really cold, and I remember looking out the window during the half-time of a UCLA basketball game. Women were walking around in bikinis. This was during the winter in Los Angeles. I said, “Mom, is that like now?” I was like ten years old. “Is that now?” She goes, “Yes, it doesn’t snow there.” I said, “Well, I want to go to that school.” It wasn’t the fact of the bikinis. It was the fact that it wasn’t snowing during the winter. I had my eyes set on it as an early kid, and I ended up at UCLA. So, I went to UCLA, and also USC. I got my degree from SC in Communication Advertising. So, at the football games, I’m right on the fifty year line between UCLA and USC. So, I ran track for UCLA, but all the time I was dabbling in entertainment from the acting world, too. Once you come to Los Angeles, if you have anytime of entertainment bug you, acting is one of the arenas that you jump into. So, I started to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, too, and then I found myself in these classes with just thirty, forty people, and no one would see you but the instructor. So, I started to do stand-up comedy. I went through that circuit with the Comedy Store, the Improv, even in Chicago, I went back to the Comedy Room, Comedy Cottage, just various comedy clubs all around, and since there’s so many comedians in Los Angeles and New York trying to break out, you had to go to other cities to make money. If you stayed in Los Angeles trying to do comedy, what would happen is you’d make fifty, twenty-five, maybe seventy-five dollars a night, if you’re lucky. So, I did the college circuit. One day, I actually met Robert Townsend at the Improv, and we kind of hit it off. We would see each other at clubs and stuff, so we’d talk, and he’s from Chicago also. So, one day he called me up and said, “Hey Bob, do you want to do my film this weekend?” I said, “Yeah, how much do I get paid?” He goes, “Nothing.” “Okay, well, let’s go. Let’s do it.” As the new person on the block, you always look for opportunities. So, a lot of times you do stuff for free in order to get in the door, and then move on to the next level. Once you show your worth and your value, then people will see that. That movie was Hollywood Shuffle, and as you know Hollywood Shuffle went on to be this genre cult classic, which they even show it in a lot of film schools around the country. That was actually with Anne Marie Johnson and the Wayon Brothers, Damon Wayon and Johnny Witherspoon, a ton of people. Johnny is a great guy. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been a comedian. He has a great spirit about him, and he just loves to do stand-up, and loves the work. Well, success is when opportunity meets preparation. You have to be prepared. So, you start out early preparing. It doesn’t matter what feelings. You have to prepare. It’s like knowing all the software, knowing it backwards and forwards, knowing your business plan. Actually, my acting led to directing, which led to film-making and producing. So, the college is actually coming into play now. You don’t have to go to college. It helps tremendously, but if you don’t go researching and finding out whatever it is, you have to live that world, whatever it is. I always tell people, “It’s always good to volunteer.” If you want to be in manufacturing or whatever, just go volunteer somewhere. With the economy as it is now, not too many people are going to turn down a volunteer. So, once you show your value and your worth, then they see that, and they’ll put a number onto that, but you’re also getting experience. Let me back up to what I was saying before is preparation. You have to really prepare so people can see you shine, and I think everyone should be like this, but to my African American brothers and sisters out there, it’s another little thing I’d like to say is that you have to be better than your counterparts. If you have, say your white counterpart who is good, and you have you who is good, they may look at you differently. So, you have to be twice as good to even be considered equal. I’ve experienced that on a number of occasions, and so, I have to do better to even be considered even with them. If you have a three o’clock appointment and you show up at three o’clock, you’re late. You’ve got to show up early to be on time. You have to all your Ps and Qs, everything is just on target. I do proposals and stuff for films. When I do films now, I think of something, I write a treatment, and then after I write the treatment, then I have to write the script. After I write the script, then I have to put my package together. My package is the business plan, but the package is also your production entity, your producer, your writer, your director and your stars. You have to know the business behind the show business, or you have to know the business behind any business that you’re trying to start. You have to know that world. So, even if your business plan is in your briefcase, you can just articulate it at will. So, when they ask you questions, you bam, here’s the answer. Here’s the answer. Now, you can’t BS people. The bottom line is if you don’t know something, you can’t BS them. My answer if I don’t know a particular thing, it’s like, “Well, I’m going to consult my attorney on that, but I’ll get right back with you,” whoever the expert in that area of that question is, and I’ll be right back with you. I treat everything like a tennis match. Once you throw me a ball, I’m going to give it back to you immediately. You’re never waiting on me. I’m always waiting on you. So, whatever you need from – if you need schedules, you need budgets, whatever it is, boom back at you. Now what? I think when you show that, the people will – see, there’s a lot of people who don’t do that. I’m successful in getting the gig because I’m always giving them what they want in a timely fashion.

Raven: When preparing for anything, what are some things that you can throw out to us bloomer men and women, what are some other keys to get them out of that unstuck position so they can move forward?

Bobby: That’s an interesting question because I was talking to this guy once and he says, “Hey, Bob, where’s the most talent and dreams and aspirations held? What is the most value? Where is that located?” Then, I say, “Give me some more information.” He goes, “Where are the most resources?” I said, “I don’t know, Africa?” He goes, “No, it’s in the graveyard.” I said, “In the graveyard?” He goes, “Yes, because that’s where most of the people’s dreams die.” I said, “Okay. That’s a different perspective on that.” What I’m getting at is that most people have a dream of something or other and how to accomplish that dream. They have a dream. They may not know how to accomplish it, but they have a dream. I think researching now is the best thing. Kids who get in trouble just don’t have enough information in them. Even in Los Angeles, if you go straight down a street called Imperial, you can go from the projects directly to the ocean. Some kids have never been to the ocean, so they never knew what it looks like. For various environmental reasons or cultural reasons with gangs and all that kind of stuff, there’s a reason why, but the bottom line is if you’re not exposed to various things, it stifles your dream of certain things. You won’t know to be an astronaut if you’ve never opened up a book or looked at the news and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s interesting,” or look at a guy on a telephone pole and say, “I wonder what that job is, and what is he doing?” You just have to observe, and then you have to go act upon your observations. For example, the biggest thing now – everybody knows about libraries and the Dewie Decimal System, this that and the other, and libraries are really the best resource. However, nowadays, you can do things quicker. There are search engines that if you have a computer, you can do things quicker just by Googling. You can even look up search engines, and they’ll give fifty search engines, Google being one of the largest ones. Any profession that you want to do, or any question that you have, even if you had a disease, there are keywords that Google has set as the parameters for research. You type in those keywords, and things come up. You don’t necessarily have to know what keywords, but if you were interested to be a policeman or whatever, you type in “Police qualifications.” If you’re in Atlanta, “Police qualifications Atlanta,” and things will come up. From that, you research. So, you can research anything you want. Now, once you find the research and you start making a file – I would say everybody open up Microsoft Word, and when you’re actually finding that information, you copy and paste. You copy it into the Word, and by the time you look at six, seven, eight, ten websites, and you find the information, you copy and paste it into this one file, and then you print it out and then you have a hard copy of your research, and you’re outlining. You’re figuring out. If you go into a job interview, if you know nothing about that company and they ask you certain things, you’re not going to get the job. It’s flat out. If a company manufactures lightbulbs or whatever or rivets or whatever, and you don’t know what they do, you don’t know their gross sales, you don’t know what the employee base, and you don’t know their company philosophy, their logs, their this, that and the other, it’s hard to convince them to hire you. So, you have to research in order to acquire certain things. This Asian guy told me once, “It’s better for a poor man to take a rich man out than vice versa.” I said, “Well, the rich man, he has all the money. How am I going to take him out?” He said, “Well, listen, if you take him out, you have everything to gain. He has nothing to gain by taking you out other than some philanthropic good feeling. So, it’s better for you to take him out.” I use that philosophy. There were some millionaires that I took out for breakfast. Now, this breakfast was like $85-$90. I’m talking about eggs, something that you buy for five dollars. When I took them out, I was gaining the knowledge, and if you want to be a Roman, you have to go where Romans go. You have to think like them and walk like them and talk like them. So, therefore you have to go where they go to find out what’s in their minds. If a millionaire will bless you by going out with you for a breakfast or a lunch or something, and sit down and talk with you for an hour, you should take him or her up on that opportunity because you’ll gain much, much more. Even if you don’t have a computer, most libraries have computers accessible to the public, and if you do have a computer, say you have a computer and you don’t have internet, whatever, then, what you do is take your laptop to Starbucks. You get a little card from Starbucks. You register to buy your coffees and whatever – I know we’re in the economic times and three dollars and fifty, four dollars for a coffee maybe a little too much or whatever on an everyday, but get a tea for a dollar, forty. The point is you get that little card, and once you register and get that card, you have free access to the internet, and there are lots of places. I think Coffee Bean does it too where you go up and – or whatever coffee house is in your city. I’ve got three to four gigs from Starbucks, just from people at Starbucks who end up talking to me, and they end up saying, “What do you do?” I did a Katrina project, and it just so happens I don’t think there’s accidents, but it was a guy there who was from New Orleans, and he wanted to do a music video. He had a song. I was looking at some of the deals that I was pulling for this project that I was doing, and he saw it, and he goes, “That looks like New Orleans.” I said, “Yeah, it is New Orleans.” He goes, “Well, I’m doing a song, and I want someone to do a music video.” I said, “Hey, look, well, here’s my card. Call me, and we’ll talk about it.” We ended up doing a music video for him, and there are other things. I do bank industrials and stuff. A guy was sitting there, and sometimes you strike up conversations. A lot of times, when I’m writing, I just meet people around sometimes, but not necessarily to talk to them, just because they’re there and it’s a new environment. It is a good source of meeting connections.

Raven: You brought up the Katrina project that you did. I want to talk to you about that. I’ve got to ask you, how was it for you working on that project?

Bobby: Well, I have my pet projects, and I have projects that I want to make money from, and then I have projects that I just have to do as a person and as a human. I remember sitting in church one day, and I had this project and I wanted to do it, but it wasn’t funded meaning I didn’t get any money from venture capital investors. No one came to the table with money. Then, the word Katrina at the time I started was an older name. It was like, “Well, that name has been used, and those people got their stuff backed.” If you’re not in the gulf coast, and you don’t hear it in the news, you think they got their stuff back together, but not so. So, I go to West Angeles, Bishop Lake, it’s a big church in Los Angeles, and I was sitting in the balcony, and one day he said, “Listen, I’m feeling something. Somebody in the balcony needs a miracle. They have a project that they’re doing and they need a miracle.” I just said to myself, “Yeah, that must be me because I need some money.” He kept saying it, and he goes, “If you’ve got a project, stand up right now.” He kept saying certain stuff that just zeroed into just me. Short of calling my name, he just said, “Stand up right now.” So, I stood up. Now, there are other people who stood up, too. So, he says, “All right everybody come down here right now.” So, I went down in front, and he prayed over us in hopes that God would bless us with the resources or whatever to get this project done. So, the next Sunday, he said the same thing, and I didn’t get up because I just don’t, but I did, but not the second one, just the first one. By the third Sunday, I just booked a flight to New Orleans. I had got some camera equipment. I got my lights. I got my stuff, and I said, “Lord, I don’t know what I’m doing.” A ton of money didn’t fall from the sky, but when I looked at my American Express, and I said, “Well, let me just use this American Express. If you don’t invest in yourself, nobody else. So, let me just go ahead and do this.” What happened was I got on a plane. I went to New Orleans, and I said, “I know the nature of the project, but I don’t know who I’m interviewing, and this, that and the other, but you’ve got a whole Gulf Coast filled with people who are willing to talk to you.” So, the nature of the project was we saw on the news all the bad stuff. I wanted to concentrate on the heroes of Katrina, and the heroes were the faith-based organizations who are still down there now helping. I went from one city to the next city not just New Orleans, but went to Mississippi, Alabama, which took out all the foundations and the houses and everything as opposed to the ninth ward where you saw cars on tops of houses, houses on tops of cars and trees. It was just a shamble, but what came from that just the power of people, I have the bad stuff, too. Let me tell you exactly what happened, but when you say, “Who helped you?” They’ll tell you who helped you, but they won’t stop. They’ll go a little bit further. They were hurting at the time, so they just needed to vent to someone, and especially someone with a camera, but I got all the good stories out of that that I needed, and then I came back and I said, “You know what? I got ninety interviews from various people in various states in the Gulf Coast,” and then I needed to help to create some attention to this thing. I needed some celebrities to help me. So, I said, “Okay, I need to find out some of my friends and some people who have bigger names and this, that and other.” So, I got Shaq, Kolby, Queen Latifah, Ice Cube. I got a hundred African American celebrities. Some of them were not African American. I got the mayor of Los Angeles, and various other people, too, but they were on another channel of the DVD. The whole idea was I had a goal of helping a thousand structures in the Gulf Coast. So, what I’m doing is donating all the monies from the sale of this project to the rebuilding efforts, but the first part of it is get the film done. Now, that’s a big thing when you don’t have a lot of money. It’s get the film done. So, we got past the first part which is we got the film done. We have the DVD, and now we’re structured. Now, we’re hooking up with various organizations to get this project sold. Distributors actually came to me, but I didn’t want to go to a distributor because if you go to a distributor, the distributor will want to take the money. That’s what they do. They distribute films, and they keep the money and that’s how they operate. The way I wanted to do, which was to go to churches all around the country and supply them with a thousand units, and those thousand units, they get a thirty dollar donation for each unit. Those monies are sent back to a bank in Los Angeles. The bank sends it to the people who are actually building or refurbishing a certain unit. A check is not given to a person who is lost there. It’s paid for a new roof, a foundation, whatever it is. Therefore, you can regulate where the money goes. We don’t want to send money and someone gets like three flat screens or whatever, and no where to hang them. You can actually go to Katrina500.com, and you can research this and look at it, and see what we’re doing. We’re going to have an accountability thing too because a lot of people have been giving monies to Katrina efforts with no accountability. So, some of the people in the Gulf Coast say millions of dollars were acquired, but we don’t see any of that money. Where is it? This way, on the website, we’re going to have people who give, and then the people who they gave to, and the actual dollar figure. So, therefore, it’s immediate accountability. I have to be accountable because I’ve got all these celebrities who said there better not be any funny stuff happening. Once you have a high integrity, people first of all will continue to do stuff for you. These people wouldn’t given me their interviews knowing that I was going to do something bad with it or whatever. So, in that respect, you have to in your heart and in your mind do the right thing because of the laws of nature. If you don’t, it’s going to come back and hit you. You could win for a second, but your house could be blown away. So, you ultimately don’t end up winning. You just have to look at the laws of the universe. Some people say it’s a mystical kind of like, “Yeah, yeah, Bob, laws of the universe,” but what goes around comes around, and that is in the world in order to do right. But, that’s a special project that was dear to me, and there’s a lot of people that are going to benefit from that project. I have benefited from my project, and once again, all those proceeds are given to the Katrina relief as well as the new hurricanes because every year, there’s like a hurricane season. So, being in Houston, you know about the hurricane season. So, we’re going to be using this. I’m trying to get onboard of a couple of things, but onboard of this particular project and utilize this DVD as a way of raising monies to put into a relief fund. When we did the film, I purposely did not say the word Bush. I did not bash any governmental agency. I purposely did not do that. It was all about who were the heroes. I did show people on the roofs, and this that and the other, and you have to make up your mind what that means. They were abandoned for five or six days, which didn’t have to be because there are other catastrophes in other countries, and we were there in 24-48 hours, but we couldn’t get in our own country in six days. Anyway, that wasn’t the nature. There were enough conspiracy theories and all that out there. I just wanted to take a different approach, a more proactive, positive approach to that. Hi, this is Raven Blair-Davis interviewing for Michael Senoff’s

Raven: Now, Bobby, the actual name of that, is that Keeping the Faith?

Bobby: Yes, it’s Keeping the Faith.

Raven: I want to talk to you a little bit more about the boomer men and the boomer women. Let me find out from you – I know the audience wants to know – are you a single man or a married man?

Bobby: I am single much to the dismay of my mother, and I have no excuse other than I’ve put so much into this career and pushing and pushing and pushing. I’ve had relationships. People don’t understand why I’m up so early and why I work so late. I have to work on that. I do admit I have to work on being a workaholic. So, I’m going to work on that, as I said. Everybody has something to learn, and I think the minute that you feel you know everything, that’s the minute you should just sit down because no one knows everything. I actually learned a little thing from a guy. I was on Venice Beach. I was sitting there drawing. I was just drawing some perspective stuff. I was drawing a palm tree, and this – I don’t know – alcoholic comes next to me. It was this old white guy, and I had a thing of orange juice right next to me. He said, “Can I have a drink?” He grabbed it, and he drank some before I could respond. Then, he put it back real fast. I said, “Look, just take it.” Then, he looked at what I was doing, and he said, “Oh, you’ve got to do it this way, and you’ve got to do it this way.” So, I looked at him. I had already made up in my mind who he was. I got a little attitude, number one because he drank my orange juice. It was more of, “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you do it?” So, I gave him the pad, and he started to draw. He drew it perfectly, and he gave it back to me, and he gave me a pointer. It was just an artistic pointer, and then when he walked away, I was mad at myself because I already made up in my mind who he was, and everybody has something to offer and something to give. You have to be open enough to hear it and to see it, to acknowledge it, and to receive it.

Raven: So, you never know who you’re speaking with.

Bobby: You never know. There’s CEO, CFOs, CIOs who are without jobs right now, so you definitely never really know, and once you get up there, you have a responsibility too because the person that you pass up on the way up as you’re up there, guess what? You’re going to be a little older at one point, laws of nature, you’re going to be older, and that person that you either was positive to or negative to might either help you or not help you on your way down. So, you have to think about that because the secretary today is the producer tomorrow or the executive tomorrow. When that person is helped by you, they will help you when you need it. So, you never burn bridges, and what goes around, comes around so you always have to take the first step in doing something good for someone. It’ll come back to you. I promise. It will.

Raven: I don’t know about you, Bobby. The people that you are involved with, a lot of them of course are celebrities and stuff, but take a moment and think about the ones that are not in that arena, the ones that are forty, fifty and sixty, and you don’t really see them doing a whole lot. They’re living for their kids’ dream or grandkids’ dream, but you don’t really see them going for theirs. What insight could you offer to them and to our guests regarding learning how to believe again and open our dream circle if it’s just not there?

Bobby: I have clear views on that, and some people say that I’m a pain in the butt. I think the bottom line with beliefs, is whatever you want, you have to thoroughly believe in. Now, if there are tons of people out there who are there to break you down, call them whatever. They’re the disbelievers. So, you then have to learn how to have thick skin. In Hollywood, people will say no before you even ask the question. When people tell me no, they could be venture capital investors, they could be whatever, if I’m asking for something, what I do is I would invite them to the screening. So, for an hour or two hours, whatever the length of the project is, I don’t diss them and say, “Okay, he can just kiss my butt.” I invite them to the screening. So, for that amount of time, they’re sitting there and saying, “He did it in spite of my efforts. He did it anyway.” I do that because I might come to you again, and if I come to you again, you might think of that instant where you sitting there and says, “He’s going to do it with or without me. He’s going to do it.” Even if you look at the news, everything is negative. They don’t show too much of the kid helping the old lady across the street. That’s not news to them most of the time. They’ll do the car chase and the breaking into the liquor store. They’ll do that or the drug deal, but they won’t do the positive stuff a lot. So, your thing is to find something, it’s persistence. Once I went to some investors for a project that one last time suspense thriller. I went to 120 people. The 121st person said yes. Now, I could have said, “Oh, I’m stopping at eighty. This is too hard,” or, “A hundred, that’s it,” or even a 120, if I would have stopped at a 120, and not went to that next person, I wouldn’t have gotten that financing. So, persistence is key. You’ve got to have that stick-to-it-tiveness. It’s that never giving up thing, and I was looking at (inaudible), and I saw Will Smith, and Will Smith said, “You can’t beat my work ethic.” He said, “You can be as better talent than me. You can be cuter than me. You can have more money than me, but you’re not going to outwork me.” So, if you don’t have the Will Smith money and his looks and his talent or whatever, you have to have the outwork me belief that, “Listen, I’m going to stick to it, and I’m going to work until I get what it is I want,” and you have to look at the negatives, all that negative stuff that I was talking about, and it has to roll off your back like water. You have to look at it like energy. You have to look at it like it’s going to give me incentive to move to the next level. So, you need some nos. you need some negative. You need all that, and you just have to know what to do with it once you have it. You look at all of that in your mind. You ball it up like an energetic ball of fire, and then you use it to boost you up to the next level. My minister always used to tell me that you basically, you just get all the negatives and use it as a step, and you step on that one step further. If somebody is being negative, you step on that one step, and pretty soon you’re as high as you need to be. You need that stick-to-it-tiveness in order to get that, and you’ve got to believe in yourself because really it’s hard to get other people to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself because they can see it in your actions, your eyes, your thoughts. They can see it in just the verbiage that comes out of your mouth. I want to be a doctor. If you say that, and you’re adamant, they might help you to be a doctor, but if you say, “Well, I’m thinking about it, but I’m not sure if I could really be one because no one in my family has ever gone to college before. So, I’m not really sure.” No one wants to invest in a shaky asset. If it’s shaky and they don’t’ believe it, then they’ll keep their money in the bank, and it will at least be safe there. That’s my ideas on belief.

Raven: I do not want to leave without talking about your awesome film Obama, Tears of Joy.

Bobby: Yes, basically, what we’re doing is I’m actually using Obama’s approach of funding this, and Obama became president. There wasn’t a lot of people out there giving him a million dollars at a time. What he did was he used the electronic media, and he used that to get $25-$30-$40-$100 at a time. Most people could come up with $25 or $100. A lot of people can’t just give away a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars or whatever. So, I’m using that approach to actually help fund this film. When the inauguration came up, I had to then say as a filmmaker and as a black person, I needed to go and put my fingerprint on this presidency, the first African American president that we’ve had. So, I could not just overlook that issue. So, once again, I took that credit card out, and I went to the inauguration. I went to Washington, DC, and I just started shooting. I was up there. I had my battery operated socks, walked up and down that mall interviewing people and this, that and the other. If you go to ObamaTearsofJoy.com, you can look at the trailer. It’s a trailer of what we’re doing, and then you can go to PayPal and give like $25 or whatever. I’m actually selling credits on there. If you wanted to be executive producer, producer, associate producer, I’m actually selling those credits all to get the film done because that’s stock footage. All that costs money, and this, that and the other. So, it costs money to do films, but what I wanted to do with that piece is the reason why it’s Tears of Joy is on the election night, you saw all the people crying at the moment of realization that he’s actually going to be the first African American president. It wasn’t all the fact that he’s first African American president, but it goes years, hundreds of years prior to that, and for that moment we had to think about where we came from, from slavery, Emancipation Proclamation, the Jim Crowe Era, the Civil Rights Era, all of the different things. So, it’s the pain of black people, but it’s also the joy of black people. So, we talk about the entrepreneurs, the athletes who’ve risen from obscurity and being great in their neighborhoods, Jackie Robinson’s playing with the majors, the Muhammad Ali’s. So, we went from something negative to something positive. Traditionally, if we didn’t have money, we are innovators, and we make something from nothing because that’s what we do. So, what I used is Dr. Charles Drew who made strives in medicine, even Shawn Puffy Combs, or Jay Z or Bob Johnson who are entrepreneurs who have made companies from nothing. So, it’s the joy of black people, too, and the whole idea too is once you’re done looking at this whole thing, if I can just get one emotion from you to be proud of being an African American because what we’ve been through, and what we’ve done and what we’re about to do, then I’ve done my job. That’s what that nine minute piece is about. It’s an hour piece, you won’t see an hour piece on the actual ObamaTearsofJoy.com site, but you’ll just see a little bit to know what it’s all about, and I’m encourage everyone to send that $25 to help this get done because it’s very important film, not just for me, but for black people in general. It’s for people in general because you see other images in there who are not African Americans, and they feel it, too. In the Civil Rights era, there were people like the Freedom Riders, and it wasn’t just all African Americans who were Freedom Riders. There were white counterparts who helped us join in, so everyone wasn’t bad. That’s what I’m saying. Everybody didn’t have that idea of hold the African American down. With the Emancipation Proclamation, supposedly in theory, it was supposed to help us lift ourselves up. Then, we know that there’s a lot of unsavory things that are still pumped into our neighborhoods to keep us at a certain level. However, that’s not an absolute. There are things that you can do to rise up above all of that. Before I end, too, I do have to say that we’re in a digital age right now as evidence of Obama winning, who is sending messages on the cell phone, sending texts, sending Twitters and Facebooks and all the social networks, and MySpace and all of that. That’s how he got to a certain demographic. I know the older generation, my mom, I emailed her from Paris, and I said, “Mom, why didn’t you ever email me back? What’s the problem? I’m trying to communicate with you.” She goes, “Baby, if you want to talk to me, you just call.” We have to utilize technology that we have today, and anybody who is starting a business, women or men, you can’t overlook the technology. I’ll just say if you overlook the technology, then you’re already at a deficit because what happened with the music industry with the record store from the Tower to the Warehouse to the Virgin, all the record stores, the biggest music distributor right now is iTunes. Whether you go on the computer or whatever and look at it or not, that’s the biggest distributor of music. Where television and film are going, DVDs and all that’s going to be out soon. It’s going to be video on demand. It’s going to be downloaded directly to your flat screen. Every movie that you want to see, you just go and download it to your flat screen. So, please do not overlook technology. That’s where everything is going. If you don’t know how to run a computer, just take a class. Ask your kids. Your kids, you’ll get a five, six, seven year old kid who knows computer like the back of his hand.

Raven: In this film, Martin Luther King spoke that we were going to have a negro in the White House.

Bobby: He had a vision that everyone black and white at one point will joint together and overlook the color of a person, and look at the content of his character, and move based on that as opposed to anything else. So, the country, we’re looking at their opponents and this, that and the other, and they said, “Obama, okay he’s black, but look at it this way, look at what he’s saying and what he’s trying to do.” So, you’ve got our poor socioeconomic people, middle class and upper echelon socioeconomic people. You’ve got the white people, the black people. Everyone just said, “Listen, do we want to do what we’ve been doing?” It’s either yes or no. If you want to do what you’ve been doing, then vote the contrary way. If you want a change, which was his mantra, then you’ve got to go this way regardless to what color you are. That’s what King was saying was that at one point, it would be possible. The environment would be ready for change, and for an African American person to become president. He just projected. He thought it. He believed it. He put it out into the environment, and it came to pass.

Raven: When Donna Brazil said, “Those steps were built from us, from colored people.”

Bobby: Exactly, and look at the irony from that. Slaves who built Washington, DC, the monuments, the large buildings, the White House, slaves built that. The irony is that now there’s an African American who is running that whole city and the country, and living in the White House and working at the capital.

Raven: Go ahead and give both of the websites again, and then tell us what’s next for you.

Bobby: Well, the Katrina website for that project is Katrina500.com. The Obama project is called ObamaTearsofJoy.com, and just me in general is BobbyMardis.com. Well, right now, I’ve been doing a reality show. Tomorrow is the last shoot of it, and it’s with Wayne Vaughn who was one of the writers and keyboard player for Earth, Wind and Fire. You know that there was Maurice. There was Philip Bailey. There were three of them that stood out, but there were all these other guys. Well, he was one of the writers and keyboard players. His name is Wayne Vaughn. He married Wanda Hutchinson of the Emotions. They had kids, and so the whole house is so musical until he actually wanted a cooking show. I went to his house, and people come by like Stevie Wonder, Bryan McKnight, all these people, and I was like, “This is much more than a cooking show.” It’s called Never a Dull Moment. My next project is a horror film called Gone, and that’s purely for money. I do want to just leave with saying that everyone should try to visualize their dream and do things everyday, do at least one thing everyday to move that to the next level, and you too can be a leader in that. Martin Luther King said genuine leaders have the ability to articulate, initiate and follow through with their vision. So, follow through with your visions, and it will come to pass.