About BSP

Mike Black and Carole (Black) Summers - brother and sister, twins -
were born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Growing up with a love of movies, they pretended to make movies with
the neighborhood kids. They had to stop "production" on Attack of the
Cactus because it was too scary.

Black and Summers abandoned all pretense of sober-minded adulthood in 2005 and, at age 52, formed
their own film production company. Undaunted by their inexperience and with scarcely the money to buy the
digital equipment necessary to make their first film -- and brushing aside any self-consciousness about the
indulgent cinematic karaoke that such technology is fostering -- they worked with creative daring at a
necessarily breakneck pace (nine days of actual shooting) to craft Cassandra's Echo. The generosity of
fellow artists and the kindness of strangers, along with their own phenomenal organizational skills -- not to
mention plain old-fashioned guts -- had to make up for the lack of a budget. The present project would
certainly not have been possible without the help of a lot of people more talented than themselves, although,
surely, none were more foolhardy.

Black studied filmmaking independently in the 1970s before succumbing to the rigors of reality. His
various careers have run the gamut from restaurant cook to published novelist (An Italian Elegy, Knights
Press 1989), travel agent to playwright (The Norma Desmond Stratagem, 1997), legal word processor to
screenwriter - Cassandra's Echo being but the latest in a string of hitherto unproduced film scripts. Black
brings to his perennial status as struggling artist a dutiful contempt for the merely sensible, even as he
resorts to the desperate measure of directing his own material. It was his inescapable passion for the
storytelling magic of movies that compelled him to take a break from all those regular paychecks in order
to write, direct and co-produce Cassandra's Echo, a contemporary mystery set in San Francisco, the city
he has called home since moving there from Texas in 1973 (decades punctuated by sojourns abroad in
Italy, Greece, Spain . . . Minneapolis).

Summers finally settled in San Francisco in 1984 after living in Texas, Ohio, Colorado, and
Montana. She has dabbled in photography over the years and continues to learn as the person
behind the camera for BSP.