Breaking the Silence with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Welcome to Breaking the Silence, a powerful podcast and YouTube channel that pulls back the curtain on Hollywood’s hidden truths. Join bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and blacklisted creator Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez as she exposes her 20-year battle to adapt her iconic novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, into film and TV. Through candid storytelling and insider insights, this channel dives deep into the systemic racism, sexism, and bias that have plagued the entertainment industry for decades . Each episode uncovers the challenges, betrayals, and triumphs of a revolutionary stereo
Episodes
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez reveals the shocking reasons Hollywood refused to sign on to a film adaptation of The Dirty Girls Social Club produced by Tyler Perry, even though he was the No. 1 movie producer in the industry, and the team had an incredible Oscar-winning screenwriter on board.
In this episode, I take you through the development deal I had for my bestselling novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, with NBC. Though the network itself did nothing wrong, the production company I aligned myself with, Encanto, made some questionable choices (to say it politely). Among their choices? To remove all Afro-Latino and Black British characters because, according to the producer Ann Lopez (George's then-wife), "No one wan...
After her bestselling novel fails to get produced at Columbia Pictures because the studio could not see past their own stereotypes of Latinas, DIRTY GIRLS SOCIAL CLUB author finds things are even worse in the next development deal her novel gets, at Lifetime Television. This episode details the breathtakingly racist reasons the series never got made with the network.
After Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's debut novel, THE DIRTY GIRLS SOCIAL CLUB, became a huge bestseller, the author got lots of interest from Hollywood studios to adapt it to the screen. This episode chronicles what happened with the first development deal, at Columbia Pictures, and talks about the well-intentioned but still very racist reason it did not make it to production.
In this debut episode of Breaking the Silence, I take you back to where it all began. From my roots as a jazz saxophone student at Berklee College of Music, to my shift to journalist, working on staff at the Boston Globe and LA Times, to my rise as a bestselling novelist, this episode explores the experiences that shaped my worldview and my journey as a creative person attempting to break barriers in industries that often don't kno...
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