In a civil suit filed June 17 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Tatyana Ali (Fresh Prince of Bel Air) and her sister Anastasia Ali are suing Julian Breece, the director of their web series Buppies over a reported $45,000 they invested in the show. The fraud claim states that Breece’s company, Game Theory Films, lost the money before ever producing more than a pilot for the series. Also, according to a report by TMZ, the sisters are seeking rights to the project which apparently were promised but never delivered.
The series was announced back in October, in what was said to be a partnership between Breece and the Ali sisters’ HazraH Entertainment. Breece and Tatyana were college friends at Harvard and had been working on putting together the project for several years.
In a MySpace post last fall, Tatyana talked about the project and the choice to take the young adult drama to the web:
This is a project that has been three years in the making. The writer/director Julian Breece is a college friend who shared the idea with me about three years ago. Putting a project like this onto the TV air space was difficult. It’s a very different kind of show, a comedy/ drama that talks about everything from life and love, fashion, sexual orientation, pregnancy… basically all the things young adults are really going through.
My sister Anastasia Ali and I started a production company about a year and a half ago with the purpose of making high end urban content. BUPPIES made alongside friend and producer Aaliyah Williams is our company’s first effort. With the advent of the webseries and the recent lack of African American original programing on TV these days we thought the series would really be well suited for internet broadcast. (Tatyana Ali)
Where it gets interesting, and perhaps what prompted the suit, is that the show has been picked up by BET for online distribution. A “coming soon” page at BET is all that is currently up on site. We placed a call to BET for further comment that was not yet returned.
From the looks of it, the Ali sisters may have been cut out of the BET deal, though it’s not clear how much of the series is even shot. Video from the pilot for Buppies is embedded above. The next hearing for the case isn’t scheduled until October 5, 2009.
Related News:
- Tatyana Ali and Her ‘Buppies’ Score BET.com, Covergirl
- The Fresh Princess Hits The Web with ‘Buppies’
- ‘Pink’ Anniversary, Interview With Streamy-Winning Director Blake Calhoun (Part 1)
- Friday Rewind – Tubefilter News of the Week: October 3, 2008
- P&G’s Not-So-Viral ‘Zack’ Web Series Shows Agencies Fire Duds Too
Comments
That’s funny! Because she’s not even African-American! She is Hispanic and Indian!
well she can still be full black on one side–hispanic is a culture not a race. and she was raised here all her life, so according to the ‘one-drop rule’…i was under the impression that she was black and east-indian and african-americans = black or some semblance of it so she fits the bill!
i dont know how to get to myspace can you hepl me
What difference does it make what color or nationallity she might be? She’s hot good and more power to her. She’s young, gifted, pretty and intelligent. So people need to stop hating!
some people don’t have computers and people work @ 3pm
lookslike a good show please make acessessable for us to iew
Hm. Sounds to me like Miss Ali might have been trying to hijack rights from the writer. I mean any producer knows that you either own intellectual property or you don’t, meaning a contract. There’s really no grey area. I hope this wasn’t another situation of someone with [relative] power in Hollywood trying to take advantage of a young creative type. If this guy is a member of the WGA [which it doesn't sound like] he won’t have any problem.
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