The Catch-22 is that in order to get a screenplay read and considered, you have to know someone in the business. But to know someone in the business, you sort of have to have a track record as a screenwriter -- which is difficult to do if you haven't had anyone read your screenplay because you don't really know anyone....
Thus, festivals: the way in for people who don't have a way in.
The Abraham Lincoln
Brigade eventually
had 3000 men
and women serve
in Spain.
To get some traction on a screenplay I really liked, I began submitting Ain't Ethiopia, which I had written during my final semester at NYU in 2004. It combines two of my enduring interests. The first is the continued rippling out of America's racial history in our culture. I use "rippling out" in this sense: scientists can still detect the corrugations in space-time caused by the Big Bang 13 billion years ago, and so it is with slavery, America's Big Bang. A current canard concerns how Hurricane Katrina exposed the barely hidden underbelly of America's racial indifference, a comment often made and dismissed in the same breath by the punditocracy, as if to say, "Oh, that kind of attitude is so old-school! Get past it!" Yet those pictures of the Superdome and convention center exist -- they mutely document, they accuse by simple demonstration. They are the photographic evidence of the scores gouged by that explosion. They cannot be planed down by cavalier dismissal.
Oliver Law, the first
black American to
command white troops.
He appears in
Ain't Ethiopia
The second is the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that has always fascinated me in how it hooked the minds and bodies of people whom one would think would have no interest in carnage and destruction -- in the case of my script, a poor young barely educated black man from Mississippi escaping from the people who lynched his wife because they believed her a Communist for asking the government for poor relief during the Great Depression. (News clips I'd read from 1936 about lynchings cited several instances where Communism stood in as a proxy for race, as if hanging a black Communist killed off two infections for the price of one.) I had read where about 100 African Americans had gone to Spain, and reading this immediately sparked a "why?" Why would these dispossessed men and women fight to protect freedoms in Spain that they couldn't enjoy at home? This type of choosing against the grain always hooks the writer in me.
Here is the 62-word kernel of the script:
After local whites lynch his wife as a suspected Communist, African-American Jesse Colton flees his small Mississippi town and travels to Spain in 1937 to fight Franco. But there he finds that his real battle is with the fascists back home and that he must return to face them down if his life, and his wife's death, is to have any meaning.
Coming up with the return journey for Jesse turned Ain't Ethiopia into a dramatic script instead of just a historical narrative. Up to that point, I struggled with how to turn my admiration for the people who went to fight into a compelling dramatic story -- in short, how to transform the documentary and educational into something personal and morally troubling. It is one thing for Jesse, in his new-found freedom as a freedom fighter, to face the gigantically repugnant figures of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini; it is another, more harrowing, thing to face his wife's killers and face them squarely. And that could only be done at the original crime scene.
The script had had a good reception at the IFP Market & Conference in September 2004, being one of 200 selected projects (from over 1600 submitted). The script reader, who had recommended it for inclusion in the conference, told me that he felt that at the end of two hours he had been taken on a journey he never expected to make and that he thought script very fine indeed -- honey for the ears. The IFP is not buy/sell kind of event, so even though I "pitched" it, I did it in the context of talking with fellow-hungry movie people, all of us looking for some crease in space-time that would allow us to leap forward past time and chance.
My next step (label it "naïve") I took, buoyed by these good responses, was to seek out directors/producers/actors of color who might be interested after reading my query to be interested enough to read the whole script. So I signed on for the free 14-day trial at IMDb that allowed some deeper spelunking on the site for contact information and extracted what I could. Then mail-merge, query letters out, waiting by the mailbox.
And bang against the next installment of Catch-22: we can't read your ideas because you may sue us if we ever come up with anything remotely similar, so we must, unfortunately, remain agnostic about the contents of your missive. Only the agent of Denzel Washington took pity on me. He made me sign a form that forever and a day held them all blameless, and then took receipt of my scripts -- and after a respectful interval (so that I didn't feel that they were immediately circular-filed but only gradually circular-filed) returned them to with his and Denzel's regrets. I pretended that Denzel had actually touched them, leafed through them, and shook his head at being unable to forward such a promising script and the promising writer who had birthed it. I kept the returns in very neat stacks until I couldn't bear their mock anymore and ditched them with the recycling (not before extracting the return envelope with the still-usable stamp -- there would be others, I said defiantly, who would make good use of these SASEs).
What was a poor flicks-scribbler to do? And then -- the siren call of the festivals. That was it! That was the ticket in!
Screen-Play: Part II