HOLLYWOODSCRIPT.COM CONTEST WINNER

Date: 7/21/05

Title: "BOOKER T."

Author: Joe Holland

Submitted by: Joe Holland

Submitted to: Hollywoodscript.com

Format: SP

Pages: 120

Draft

Time: late 1800's

Locale: Alabama and other locations

Genre: Biography

Analyst: Hollywoodscript.com

PREMISE: Booker T. Washington endeavors to make the transition from equivocal educator to reluctant hero to American legend. His journey is a tough one, but his story of success along the tortuous path of racial progress is more than worthy of the big screen.

COMMENTS:
Concept Very good

Characterization Excellent

Dialogue Excellent

Story Line Excellent

Setting/Prod. Values Excellent

Freshness of Story Very good

SYNOPSIS:
The American South of the 1890's. Reconstruction is long over. Racism permeates every aspect of Southern life. Lynchings average 200 per year. Jim Crow laws are being rushed through state legislatures. Hostility, distrust, and fear govern race relations.

Amidst this turmoil Booker T. Washington has risen - through the benefaction of his white mentor, General Samuel Armstrong - to become the charismatic head of Tuskegee Institute, the fledgling black college in Southern Alabama. His mission is to uplift his people. His success depends on the support of the Armstrongs of the South - whites of good will. His philosophy of hard work, entrepreneurship and self-help has made him a beacon of black hope. Booker's convictions - and the realities blocking them - were forged as a boy. The story opens in West Virginia, 1867. Young Booker works himself from a mining job to a position in the household of Viola, the wife of General Ruffner. Schooling Booker in more than the 3 R's, she gives him strategies that shape his character:

VIOLA
Always strive to exceed . . .

BOOKER
(smiling)
. . . the expectations of others.

ViOLA
But don't show your pleasure. . . . Never let on what you're thinking or feeling until it's to your advantage.

But her mentoring cannot shield him from the adversities of the day. Out early one morning delivering produce, Booker stumbles upon a group of white men pummeling a black man. A noose hangs ominously over a tree branch. At the clearing's edge, Booker's eyes widen as he crouches down behind a large bush--petrified. The black man, now mounted on a horse, while pleading for his life, sees a trembling Booker in the distance -- their eyes lock. The horse is then walked from under him. A horrified Booker runs for his life but he cannot evade the terror of these times. Later, his attempt to save General Ruffner in the midst of a race riot fails. As he agonizes over Ruffner's death, more pain:

VIOLA
You're permitted to cry today -- but only today. Your time of grief must be short. You have work to do. . . . You must hold on to your dreams, Booker. Don't ever let go. Don't let anyone take them away. She hugs him, exits.

25 years later. Things are worse in post-Reconstruction Alabama than they were in post-Civil War West Virginia. One white citizen of Tuskegee says to another: " The Birmingham lynching tree is busier than its train depot. Is that what we want for Tuskegee?"

Booker, now an enterprising educator but ever the quiet warrior, endeavors to steer clear of the trouble that stalks members of his race. Encouraged by his compassionate wife Maggie, Booker stops his carriage to help an injured white girl, whose bigoted father then steals the carriage. As they drive off, Booker's brother John reaches down to his leg holster, looks at his pistol, glances at Booker. Booker wages the inner battle of self-discipline, folding his arms, keeping a tight rein on his emotions.

BOOKER
Justice finds its own redress.

The prevailing ethos of white supremacy is personified in Rufus Murphee, the Machiavellian white business leader who secretly heads the local clan. He understands better than others the threat of Booker's burgeoning influence and is determined to stop it.

" We dethrone Booker T. by cutting off his money from Montgomery. He'll never raise enough in the North to compensate for the loss of state funds. . . . Once his appropriation is gone, he'll be gone within a year."

Booker's challenges come from blacks as well as whites. The black activist attorney Peter Ferris, his former student and alter ego, drags him into the controversial Plessy versus Ferguson case, the trailblazing test case against the "separate but equal" segregation law.

FERRIS
This is the most important case since the end of Reconstruction. If we don't overturn the Louisiana segregation statute, Jim Crow laws will sweep the South.

BOOKER
(worried)
This Plessy case is different from other matters you have brought to me.

FERRIS
If Plessy loses, they'll separate everything. Trains, schools, eating houses, parks, even outhouses and cemeteries. Is that what you want?

BOOKER
I want peace between the races.

FERRIS
Too late for that.

Ferris' demands for support of this Plessy case couldn't come at a worse time for Booker - on the eve of Armstrong's first visit to Tuskegee. Proud of his prodigious pupil, Armstrong presents Booker with the biggest opportunity of his life - to give the Negro address at the opening ceremonies of the upcoming Atlanta Exposition, "the showcase of the New South":

" Your speech in Atlanta would take our message of industrial education and moral uplift to a broader audience. . . . and help expand your base of financial support."

Booker's excitement over this breakthrough is soon overshadowed by the massive manhunt for Ferris, falsely accused of murdering a white man. He and Maggie hide Ferris from the authorities in a secret room in their mansion. Bolstering his ambivalent wife as the Sheriff approaches to search their home, Booker exclaims:

" Do you want him to die in our arms or their noose?!"

Murphee artfully uses Booker's contretemps to turn Armstrong against Booker. Now suspicious of Booker's radical sympathies, Armstrong withdraws his support for Booker giving the Atlanta speech.

As Murphee continuously plots Booker's demise, he finds himself attracted to - and unexpectedly entangled with Estella, a gorgeous Tuskegee student and Maggie's maid. This relationship later creates unwanted complications for him.As Booker deals with the fallout from the Ferris incident and maneuvers to regain the favor needed to attain the Atlanta speech, he is approached by the conflicted Murphee protege, Duncan Abernathy, who is willing to help exonerate Ferris. But Abernathy is killed before providing the exculpatory information, which shakes Booker's bedrock faith in his ability to foster racial progress through personal uplift rather than political confrontation.

Indignant in the aftermath of a midnight cross-burning on the main lawn of the campus, Booker moves further beyond his veil of moderation. He enlists the help of his brother John to set a trap for the next night-riders.

JOHN
A lot harder to catch these rascals than the jackrabbits back home.

John loops one end of the rope near the bottom of a tree trunk, ties it, tosses the other end of the rope to Booker, who connects it in the same way to a tree across the path.

JOHN
(pointedly)
But what if we succeed?

Now a fleeing fugitive, Ferris makes it from Montgomery to New York, where he is pursued by Sam, the leader of the racist thugs. Having evaded Sam for the moment, Ferris challenges Booker backstage at his lecture hall to go beyond simply paying some of Plessy's legal fees and take a public stand on behalf of the Plessy case.

FERRIS
It's time to demand Plessy's rights! It's time to fight Jim Crow.

BOOKER
(fervent)
I do fight -- everyday. You fight against the White man. The real struggle is on the inside, against our ignorance, laziness, and fears...that's why a long time ago I resolved to gain knowledge, own land, and make myself so useful that every man, woman and child, White and Negro, would respect me and want to be my next-door neighbor.

FERRIS
(impassioned)
You could have the brains of the Egyptians who built the pyramids, the property of the Indians before the settlers' rampage, and the character of Jesus Christ, and they'd still lynch you. And your mother, too.

When Sam reappears, Booker experiences a moment of truth: he assaults Sam to help Ferris narrowly escape.

During his travels North to raise funds for his school, Booker is once again compelled to risk public exposure of his secret work to help Ferris and Plessy: he retains Albion Tourgee, a prominent white attorney, to represent Plessy on appeal.

TOURGEE
I only take on matters that, I believe, have a good chance of winning. There just isn't enough time to prepare a cogent case to present before the Louisiana Supreme Court.

BOOKER
Your brilliance prepares you.

Booker's visit to Armstrong compels him to confront the General - and defend his special calling.

BOOKER
I came with the hope that you would try to understand my - Armstrong is increasingly incensed.

ARMSTRONG
Understand what?! Your apostasy?!

BOOKER
My convictions. I need to run my school. I need to help my people.

ARMSTRONG
They are the same.

BOOKER
(softly)
I've come to realize that they are not always the same.

His problems mount when Sam captures Ferris in the Port of Mobile and takes him back to a Tuskegee jail. And when Maggie is assaulted during a burglary of Booker's office, he hits rock bottom. Her injury and pain force Booker to confront his own selfishness and ambition; he grants her wish not to speak in Atlanta. But Ferris' capture and apparently imminent death compel Maggie to change her mind and support Booker making the Atlanta speech. To gain the opportunity to make the Atlanta speech and secure Ferris' freedom, Booker arranges a midnight meeting with Murphee. In striking a Faustian bargain, they struggle to reach an agreement not to destroy each other...it won't be easy!

In a final stroke of genius, Booker delivers his historic speech in Atlanta ("Cast down your buckets where you are!") while orchestrating the rescue of Ferris through Murphee's surreptitious intervention.

On the day the United States Supreme Court rules against Plessy, Booker turns short-term defeat into long-term victory by manipulating Murphee into an unexpected accommodation - and reconciliation!

COMMENTS:
Booker T. is a dynamic and fascinating piece of work, one of those rare biographical movies that not only gets the facts right but is also a truly entertaining experience. It also has, in its own way, an uncanny resemblance (and relatability) to the world of today in terms of cantankerous politics, maddening injustice, bone chilling jeopardy and a beam of light at the end of the tunnel.

Booker himself is a complex and sturdily sympathetic character, someone who has to impose almost superhuman discipline upon himself in order to realize his bone deep and visionary ideals and goals. But at the same time he is continuously confronted with heartbreaking situations and insults, fires that need to be put out and Solomonesque dilemmas both "small" and gigantic, that would challenge any man's soul. His true feelings are always close to the surface peeking out with potent resonance, but he dares not indulge.

The script reflects what feels like a true sense of life and times, very contemporary in its "tell-all" approach, akin to our own era and experience. I heard an interesting thing on the radio recently. They were talking about the trial in Mississippi of the now 80 year old racist killer who was partly responsible for the deaths of the three civil rights workers back in the Sixties. A profound observation was made in that there was a surprisingly small core of front-line civil rights players, including Martin Luther King Jr., at the time, maybe one -hundred or so, who first made their noble way into these terrifying places. And in doing so changed the world not only on a civil rights basis but also by setting the stage for all kinds of productive civil disobedience down the line, which provided effective checks and balances on the status quo and the powers that be.

In this same sense, Booker T. Washington was an iconic trailblazer for all to come. His plight and triumph, and the plight and triumph of his people, and indeed all of us, is reflected in this classy and potently entertaining piece of work.

The author is a Harlem-based, Harvard-educated attorney and produced playwright whose writing comes from deep knowledge and heart, and does it ever show up on the pages as Booker T. endeavors to make the transition from equivocal educator to reluctant hero to American legend.

To contact writer directly: JHol1215@aol.com

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