Tracey Edmonds

Every picture tells a story. But not necessarily the right story. Just ask Tracey Edmonds. Edmonds, the president and CEO of Edmonds Entertainment, producers of the new Showtime series "Soul Food," was frustrated when she first saw a promotional picture for the drama. It was a family portrait of the young attractive African American cast--very sedate, very poised. "That just isn't what the show is about," Edmonds said. "It needed to be sexy.

Every picture tells a story. But not necessarily the right story. Just ask Tracey Edmonds. Edmonds, the president and CEO of Edmonds Entertainment, producers of the new Showtime series "Soul Food," was frustrated when she first saw a promotional picture for the drama. It was a family portrait of the young attractive African American cast--very sedate, very poised. "That just isn't what the show is about," Edmonds said. "It needed to be sexy.

Eddie Murphy celebrated New Year's Day by tying the knot with film producer Tracey Edmonds. The pair exchanged vows Tuesday on a private island off Bora Bora in French Polynesia in front of family and friends, their representatives told People magazine. A call to Murphy's publicist, Arnold Robinson, wasn't immediately returned.

*** Various artists, "Hav Plenty" soundtrack, Yab Yum/550 Music/Sony Music Soundtrax. Stripped-down grooves and cottony-soft melodies from neo-soulsters Faith Evans, Erykah Badu, Chico Debarge, SWV, et al, complete a trifecta of winning soundtracks associated with Babyface and his wife, Tracey Edmonds (executive producer on this record), that includes 1995's "Waiting to Exhale" and last year's "Soul Food."

Your cover story on Hollywood's new black power players (by Richard Natale, June 14) has the details right but the big picture wrong. The movie industry is increasingly driven by the foreign marketplace, with more than 50% of revenues coming from overseas. And conventional wisdom is that African American movies don't make money outside the U.S. When you ask foreign distributors or sales agents what they want, the first thing they say is, "Nothing with blacks." So economics becomes the rationale for today's movie racism in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

T-Boz of TLC guested with Paula Cole on "I Wanna Be Somebody" for Cole's next album, "Amen," due Sept. 28. The first single, to be released earlier, is a song called "I Believe in Love." . . . Rob Zombie is following director John Carpenter as designer of Universal Studios' Halloween attraction. As Carpenter was last year, Zombie is being given free rein to fashion a fright-night extravaganza in a sound stage, which will open Oct.

When writer-director George Tillman Jr. was shopping his screenplay about a large middle-class African American family around Hollywood, some studio executives turned him down cold, saying the project needed action and violence if it was ever to attract audiences. How wrong those studio executives were. Tillman's new film, "Soul Food," based on his memories of his grandmother's Sunday afternoon dinners attended by the whole family, debuted at No.

Some of the men at the Decadestwo party July 18 went undercover to eye the vintage at the newly expanded store, which sells recent designer consignment. Eventually 1. Zachary Quinto sneaked a peek at the collections, which include Tom Ford-era YSL and Gucci. His "Heroes" costar 2. Ali Larter also showed love to one of her fave shops. Thirty Seconds to Mars bandmates 3.

Well, that was fast. Kim Kardashian is putting the kibosh on her marriage to Kris Humphries little more than 10 weeks after their $10-million wedding. "I had hoped this marriage was forever but sometimes things don't work out as planned," she said in a statement. The divorce comes just weeks after the premiere of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Kim's Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event" -- a two-night special that reportedly drew an average of 4 million viewers.

Martha Stewart got her small-screen time in the sun after she served her time. Now another celebrity inmate, Lil' Kim, the self-described Queen B of hip-hop, will have her own reality show on BET: "Lil' Kim: Countdown to Lockdown," which she managed to film 14 days before beginning her 366-day prison sentence for perjury and conspiracy in September.

Jon B. has a sheepish grin on his face as he quietly explains how an upstart white teen-ager from Altadena has taken the predominantly black world of R&B by storm. "People seem to like what I do, which is still sort of amazing to me," says the lanky 19-year-old singer, whose last name is Buck. At this point in his young career, most people know him from "Someone to Love," the dreamy Top 10 ballad that's a duet with Babyface.