“Amy Rennert was one of my producers from KQED - I hadn’t talked to [her] in ten years! Well, she now has the Amy Rennert Agency, which is one of the biggest literary agencies in the Bay Area. So Amy says, ‘I just read the review of your show and I want to represent you to do a book.’

“She helped me put together a book proposal and it sold in three days! So now I’ve got a manuscript due in July for release sometime next year. It encompasses the show, but [includes] all the other stuff I wasn’t able to put in, research that I’ve [done] since … It’s about the evolution of the city as well as my evolution, and how the issue of race wears on people.”

“Stories like Brian’s really appeal to me,” Rennert later told me. “It’s memoir, but it’s also social commentary. I hadn’t seen the show before Brian and I talked but I felt from reading the script, and then seeing it, that it was going to make a fantastic book. It’s beautifully detailed, it’s funny, it’s loving, it’s honest, and Brian has great wit. And it’s a great, little-known story, or was before Brian began his one-year performance.
“It’s wonderful because the book will have the opportunity to reach many more people than the play could,” she continues. “It’s a fascinating story and only Brian can tell it, and I think it will be just as winning on the page as it is in performance.”

When Genuine continued to receive rave reviews, Reiner requested a tape of the show.

“[Carl] calls me like the next week, and he goes, ‘This is incredible, I think Robby needs to see this!’ And I thought, ‘Robby? … Oh, wow!’ ” the comic exclaims. “So, three days later I get a call: ‘Rob Reiner’s office calling. We’d like to know if you’d come to Beverly Hills for a meeting this week.’ And I go, ‘Let me see … yes!’

“When I saw the tape of his show, I thought immediately that this could make a wonderful television series,” the younger Reiner said during a segment on KGO radio documenting Genuine’s one-year anniversary. “I was totally blown away by it - it was so moving and so funny and so real, it had all the elements of great theater. Any time you can make people laugh and think and feel, that to me is the ultimate theatrical experience, and I felt it even watching it on the video tape.”

Copeland’s obviously got another busy year ahead, with both a manuscript and a television script in progress, but he seems to be thriving on it, even looking ahead to other media he wants to conquer.

“I’d love to do film,” he says, enthusiastically. “If they told me right now that I could do anything I wanted to do, I would want to be the Bay Area’s Kevin Smith or Woody Allen and do these little movies for two or three million dollars that I write myself, that I direct myself, that get national distribution, [where] I don’t have a studio up my butt, that I can cast who I want and do what I want with.”

If the past year is any indication, Copeland’s not going to be just a local success story for long. When asked how it feels to be ‘on the verge,’ he laughs.

“I always say my entire career is a fluke,” he says with a smile. “My plan was, the show was going to have a six-week run and if we were lucky, maybe we’d get extended for another four weeks, and then I would go on to something else. I had no idea that this was going to happen, none. And this was never the plan, but … sometimes the stars just line up.”

Not a Genuine Black Man will be published by Hyperion Books in 2006. Catch the play at the Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., SF, Thursday and Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 5 p.m., until further notice. For more on what Brian's up to, visit www.briancopeland.com.