Our first look at one of the 2018 Nicholl Winners!
Genre: Drama
Premise: A gifted young black mathematician’s life is thrown into disarray after a terrible accident sends him to prison.
About: Today’s script was one of the four WINNERS of the 2018 Nicholl Contest, the most popular of all the screenwriting contests.
Writer: Grace Sherman
Details: 117 pages
What’s the only thing that gets screenwriters talking more than a two-page preface proclaiming one’s awesomeness and that all men are evil? A Nicholl winning script, that’s what! This one came recommended to me by commenter, Da Choppa. I find that he and I see eye-to-eye on a lot of screenplays, so I was excited to check it out.
I have a love-hate relationship with Nicholl. I feel that they prioritize a script’s message over its storytelling, whereas for me it’s the opposite. With that said, they usually find a few talented writers every year, so it’s worth checking out who won.
15 year-old DeMarcus Daniels lives in the ghetto with his mother, who’s dating a no-good dickhead loser, Nate. DeMarcus doesn’t plan to be living this life for long, though. He’s a borderline genius when it comes to mathematics, and his goal is to solve the most difficult math problem ever created, The 500 year-old Pythenian Hypothesis.
DeMarcus is one of two kids from his neighborhood who commute to a rich white school in the suburbs. The other is 12 year-old child prodigy, Beth, a bookworm who’s constantly pushing DeMarcus to read more. DeMarcus considers this Harry Potter dork an annoyance, and mostly keeps her at arm’s length.
One day, at home, DeMarcus gets into an anything-goes fight with Nate that ends with DeMarcus bashing him with a bat. Nate is able to grab DeMarcus’s mother at the last second, throwing her in between them, resulting in DeMarcus bashing in the head of and accidentally killing his mother.
DeMarcus then goes to prison for 26 years, where he loses all hope in humanity. His only friend at prison is Clint, a college kid who use to pay him to do math problems, who also got thrown into prison for a drunk-driving accident that crippled his girlfriend. After DeMarcus finally gets out at 41 years old, Clint (who got released a long time ago) helps him reintegrate into society.
DeMarcus only cares about one thing these days – finding and killing Nate. But when he runs into Beth again, recently divorced from her husband, their friendship slowly helps chip away at the hard shell he built up during prison. Beth encourages DeMarcus to get back into math – maybe even solve that unsolvable theorem he always talked about. But DeMarcus claims to be too far gone for that. In fact, DeMarcus only has one goal left on this planet, and that’s getting even with the man that killed his mother.
Well, this is definitely a Nicholl script, that’s for sure.
As I’ve told you guys plenty of times before, this is the kind material the Nicholl responds very positively to. They’re receptive to stories led by minorities and anything that has a strong social message about the world. Especially right now. So I can see why this won.
But as you also know, all I care about when I read a script is: Is the story good? And, unfortunately, with Numbers and Words, that question is hard to answer. It’s been awhile since I’ve read a script this ambitious, this frustrating. I was so on board with the first ten pages. I liked the friendship built up between DeMarcus and Beth, the way he pushed her away and yet was the first to stand up for her if she got in trouble. I loved the math equation stuff. There’s always something mystical about an unsolvable equation, which is probably the same reason Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite movies.
But the script takes a giant left turn at the end of the first act that was so shocking, I’m not sure I ever recovered from it. That would be when DeMarcus accidentally kills his mother. There were a couple of issues with this. First of all, it felt contrived. I just didn’t believe that it would happen. I would’ve preferred if he had killed Nate, to be honest. I would’ve bought that in a second.
But it was more the after effect of that choice. It turned the story into something completely different than what I thought it was going to be about. All of a sudden, we’re in prison for 40 pages and it’s like, “Oh, it’s one those movies?” That was not an easy transition to make.
Also, every 15 pages, right when the story had me again, something would happen to pull me back out. For example, what are the chances that the 19 year old privileged white rich kid who pays you to do his math homework ends up in the same prison you’re in? That was hard to buy into. Later still in the prison section, a program is implemented where college kids come in to tutor inmates. And guess who, coincidentally, happens to be one of these college kids? Beth. All grown up.
Despite this, I was still invested in DeMarcus’s journey. Yeah, it was too melodramatic at times. But you wanted this guy to overcome the conflict within himself. And, most of the time, that’s all you need to make a script work. You establish a compelling character, you introduce something broken inside of them, and the audience sticks around to see if that character can be fixed. This works because we all have something broken inside of us. And there’s some psychological trickery whereby we believe that if this fictional character can be fixed, then we can be fixed as well.
And I have to give it to Sherman. The level of difficulty in any theme-heavy script that traverses an extended passage of time is in the 8 out of 10 range. Movies are not good at conveying the passage of time. Books are. Which is funny because while I was reading this, I kept thinking that it would work better as a novel. As it stands, it’s a flawed but intriguing story. And the Nicholl has always said that they’re more interested in finding good writers than good scripts. By that logic, they’ve done a good job. Sherman is talented. Also, this is a GREAT example of the kind of material you should be sending to Nicholl if you want to advance far. If you plan on entering the contest in the future, it’s worth reading Numbers and Words just for that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure to add low-key goals to “living life” stories. A “living life” story is any movie where the focus is more on the characters living their lives (Ladybird being a recent example) than a clear focused plot (Ocean’s 8 being a recent example). A neat trick you can use to add some low-key narrative thrust to these scripts is to pepper in some softer goals. There are two of these in Numbers and Words. The first is The Pythenian Hypothesis. We want to see DeMarcus solve that. The second is when he’s released from jail. He wants to kill Nate. Again, these aren’t big overarching plot goals. But they’re strong enough to keep the story focused. Without them, some readers may not be sure what they’re sticking around for.
