Bet You Didn’t Know: Secrets Behind The Making Of “B.A.P.S”

The Writer

Troy Beyer, who had been acting since the age of four, (She said her role on “Sesame Street” often helped her mom pay rent.) had had moderate success as an actress. After “Sesame Street” Beyer played Diahann Carroll’s daughter on the hit television show “Dynasty.” She would continue television before working in movies like Robert Townsend’s Five Heartbeats. But Beyer wasn’t happy with her career, she wasn’t getting the roles she wanted. She told The Baltimore Sun:

“I could make a gazillion excuses why I wasn’t succeeding,” she says. “The bottom line is, if you have the chops, you get the parts. The seeds of failure were my seeds of success. I saw that writing, producing and directing was the most valuable thing for me.”

Which is how she came to write the screenplay for B.A.P.S. But like so many of the critics, Beyer wasn’t happy with the film either.