When Shannan E. Johnson thinks about her father, two pictures come to mind. One is the ropings her family hosted in the back of her grandmother’s house. The other is the two of them on the side of the street, selling watermelons.
For years, those memories sat in the background of a script she kept rewriting. Now they sit at the center of “The Weight of Silence,” a crime thriller set inside Houston’s Black rodeo culture.
Johnson spent much of her career helping other people tell their stories before telling her own.
She grew up in Scenic Woods in northeast Houston. In third grade at Burbank Elementary School, she turned in a full paragraph describing a single blade of grass. Her teacher, Mrs. Jones, told her she should be a writer, and Johnson took her at her word.
That creative streak followed her to Booker T. Washington High School. Actor Jason Dirden, a Houston native known for OWN’s “Greenleaf” and BET’s “American Soul,” was two years ahead of her and remembers her as a leader on the Mademoiselles step team.
“Creatively, she’s always been at the forefront,” Dirden said. “Whether it was choreography or dance, she was just in tune to artistic expression.”
Each one teach one
At Texas A&M University, Johnson studied English and journalism until a magazine profile of a Black woman television writer, mailed by her mother, showed her another path. After graduating in 2004, she worked with students at the university until she realized she was helping them chase their dreams while ignoring her own.
She quit, packed what fit in her car, and drove to Los Angeles, where she slept on couches and floors for a year.
“I like to call myself a professional quitter,” Johnson said. “I quit that job at Texas A&M so that I could come out to L.A. and just soak it all in before going to grad school.”
Johnson had settled on screenwriting too late in her senior year to apply to graduate programs, so she spent the waiting year in Los Angeles learning how the industry worked. She then enrolled at Florida State University, where the film school’s writing program let her study film, television, playwriting, and creative writing.
There, a professor asked why she was so good at getting other writers out of their problems but not her own. She took the hint. After earning her master’s degree in film, she became a creative executive at NBCUniversal’s Syfy, working on series such as “Haven” and “Warehouse 13.”
In 2010, she quit again, this time to dance. She spent about eight years with Step Afrika! and on national tours of “Amazing Grace” and “Ghost the Musical.” When she came off the road, she built The Professional Pen, a script consultancy she describes as the first Black-owned one in Hollywood. She offers direct feedback to enhance creative work and is returning to Texas to expand filmmaking opportunities for Houston creatives.
Dirden became a client and sought her expertise on two of his scripts.
“She does her homework to be prepared to give you the knowledge that you need,” Dirden said. “She’s the experimental lab rat before she tells you this will work.”
Black cowboys
In 2024, Johnson returned to a romantic comedy she first drafted in 2007 about a daughter raising money for her sick father. The father, inspired by her own dad, Sidney, known as “Sid the Cowboy,” became the latest victim of a serial killer targeting Houston’s Black cowboys, and his estranged daughter comes home to uncover family secrets.
What finally unlocked the story was honesty. Her father had six daughters, and they were never all in one room until the day he died. Johnson, the youngest, arrived last.
“He literally waited until I got into the room,” Johnson said. “This man left the planet without having ever brought all of his children into one room.”
Dirden did not know the script came from her life until he read it alongside her pitch deck.
“One of the first things that I did was I thanked her for sharing her vulnerability,” Dirden said. “That’s not easy to do.”
On Sept. 20, Johnson brought that world to Los Angeles with an immersive staged reading she crowdfunded herself, with a cast led by Birgundi Baker, Omar J. Dorsey, and Deborah Joy Winans.
“You have to be vulnerable on the page if you want audiences to be vulnerable with your work when they’re watching it on the screen.”
Shannan E. Johnson
“It really takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there to do something that has never been done,” Dirden said. “She’s not a gatekeeper of information, knowledge, and experience.”
Now she is looking for funding, representation, and the right director. She hopes to film during the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
“I just want to have an opportunity to continue to put Houston on the map,” she said. “But also to create jobs.”
