Today I review a script by the writer of the NUMBER 1 screenplay on my Top 25 List, E. Nicholas Mariani!
Genre: Drama/True Story
Premise: A black lawyer attempts to free 87 black men who were erroneously charged with killing a white man in 1919 Arkansas during the height of the Jim Crow era.
About: E. Nicholas Mariani needs no introduction on this site. He is the author of the number one script on my Top 25. Somehow, 41 other scripts scored higher than this one on the 2018 Black List. Injustices all over the place!
Writer: E. Nicholas Mariani
Details: 180 pages!
You know, if there’s one thing I like about Nicholas Mariani, it’s that he doesn’t swing for doubles. He swings for grand slams. He goes ALL IN with The Defender. And when you go all in, you either fall on your face in spectacular fashion, or you win an Oscar. Let’s see where The Defender’s going to end up.
It’s Little Rock Arkansas, 1919. World War 1 has just ended. It’s a celebratory day in town. Except for 55 year old black attorney Scipio (pronounced ‘Sippy-oh’) Africanus Jones, who’s just watched yet another black man he’s defended, a soldier no less, hanged.
Scipio is an interesting person. He was born a slave. He worked the cotton fields. He then clerked at a law office where he became a self-taught lawyer. He’s since become very well-respected by people of all colors in town.
But that respect is about to be tested. A young black man named Robert Hill comes to Scipio’s office and asks him to help him form a union in downstate Elaine, a town with lots of black people working the cotton fields. Scipio tells him he’s nuts. The second they find out that black people are forming a union, they’ll come after him. But Robert says he’s doing it anyway.
A few days later, Scipio gets the news that black people down in Elaine who were planning to take over the town killed a white man. In the process, all 87 of the men who were conspiring to do this are in jail. Against his better judgement, Scipio goes down to Elaine, where he finds out that nothing about the stories in the paper were true.
A group of white people attacked the church where the black people were planning the union and accidentally shot one of their own in the back of the head. This created a frenzy and all the white people in town went to hunt down black people. Somewhere between 300-1000 black people were killed.
Scipio realizes that the odds are against him for saving these 87 men, 12 of whom refuse to enter a guilty verdict, meaning that they will all be hanged. But Scipio is one of the most clever lawyers you’ll ever meet so he concocts a multi-leveled plan that will invoke laws that pre-date the American legal system, all in the hopes of winning a case that, if he succeeds, will change America forever.
I had little doubt I was going to like this one.
Mariani is the real deal. How he’s not pulling in million dollar rewrites on Oscar-hopeful projects is beyond me.
My only real criticism of the script is that it’s too long. But Mariani is one of those rare writers whose scripts are so easy to read (even when they’re dealing with serious subject matter) that the script doesn’t feel nearly as long as it is.
Let’s start at the beginning and move our way through the script.
As I’ve told you a million times, how a script begins tells the reader everything he needs to know about if the writer has the goods. If you start with something boring, the reader expects a boring script. If you start with something clumsy and unclear, the reader expects a messy script. If you start with something cliche, the reader expects a cliche script.
There’s an early scene here where a black man is being marched to his hanging in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1919. Tell me how you imagine this scene. Would there be a large group of white people screaming the n-word at the black man as he’s marched to a tree? Would there be an evil sheriff with a wide grin on his face as he eagerly anticipates the man’s death? Would the sheriff then give a speech to the crowd of people about how “this is what happens” when you “disobey the law” complete with a drawn-out southern accent?
I’m guessing 90% of you imagined that scene.
Which is the number one sign that you shouldn’t write that scene. Good writers avoid expectation and cliche. If they feel like they’ve seen it, they’re going to look for another way to write it.
In Defender, the scene takes place right there in the prison yard. The white warden is not happy that he has to lead this man to his death. There is no crowd cheering. The moment is sullen. Regardless of skin color, nobody is comfortable with what’s happening. And when the death is imperfect and the victim suffers, everyone is mortified. Nobody feels good about it.
This scene let me know I was in good hands. I knew the writer wasn’t going to execute scene after scene in the cliche most predictable fashion possible.
Next up we’ve got our main character, 55 year old Scipio Africanus Jones. This character is so damn likable, which is a big reason why this script works so well. A lot of producers and executive types toil over how to make characters likable, as if there’s a secret handbook that keeps all these tricks hidden from the world. But, in reality, you just have to think of what makes a regular person likable. Scipio sticks up for the little guy. Scipio watches, sadly, as a friend hangs, powerless to do anything about it. Scipio is friendly to everyone. Scipio is intelligent. Scipio stands up for himself. There’s no magic formula here. Just imagine what makes you like people in the real world and apply it to your character.
Mariani is also a great scene-writer. Good scene-writing DOES have its own secret playbook and the only way to access it is to write a lot and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Mariani’s scene-writing book seems to be quite large. There’s an early scene that occurs in Elaine where Scipio heads to the courthouse to make some requests from the judge.
This is a pretty standard setup for a scene – two people talking in a room. So to make it more exciting, Mariani adds a scene agitator (you can learn about scene agitators in my book) where the entire town has just gotten back from the funeral of the white man who was killed. So they storm the courthouse, screaming and yelling, seemingly on the brink of breaking in. That basic “two people talking in a room” scene all of a sudden becomes a lot more charged.
I feel like I’m going over the advanced screenwriter’s playbook here, there are so many impressive things Mariani does, but what can I say? He’s a great writer. For example, he could’ve easily had Scipio head to Elaine based off of newspaper headlines alone. Most writers would’ve done it this way. But Mariani knew that it would be better if both Scipio and the audience had a personal connection to the massacre.
So he writes a scene beforehand where Robert Hill comes to his office and tells him about the union he wants to form down in Elaine. We like Robert immediately because he’s fighting for the disenfranchised and because he’s brave. This way, when the news of Elaine hits the papers, both us and Scipio have a vested interest in going down there. It’s choices like this that turn good scripts into great scripts.
Another advanced choice Mariani made was that not every white person who stood in Scipio’s way was bad. In some cases, these men wanted Scipio to win. But they also had their own interests to protect, which led to a lot of difficult choices for both sides. This is where you can really create a powerful story – when you make things difficult for your characters.
Scipio’s most powerful ally is Governor McRae. McRae is motivated by reelection. He wants to make sure that he doesn’t seem too sympathetic to the black populace of Little Rock, which is why he’s leaning towards convicting these 87 men. Normally, you’d think, “well f*$# him.” The problem is that Governor McRae’s opposition is a full-on racist. So Scipio has to play things very delicately. He needs McRae on his side. But McRae can’t be too on his side because then McRae might lose the election, which means Scipio’s town will now be ruled by a man who supports the Ku Klux Klan.
I loved this because it made you think. There was some real strategy involved in every choice Scipio had to make. By far the biggest issue I run into with scripts that deal with race is that they’re too black and white. There’s no subtlety anywhere in the story. Those are the easiest scripts for me to put down.
I don’t know what’s up with me this week because yesterday I was tearing up during Black Widow. Then during this script I was practically bawling by the end. But man, this was a really good script. If you’ve got the time and you want to become a better screenwriter, read this script. This is what top-level screenwriting looks like.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Nothing should ever be given to your characters for free. A representative from the NAACP shows up offering money and positive press coverage to Scipio. But if they give it to him, they want to be the face of the trial. They want all the glory if they win.
