NewEnglandFilm.com

Picture a classic ‘coming-of-age’ film. You know the type, growing up, getting out; the themes of these films are all but universal: reconciling one’s need for social acceptance, forging one’s unique identity, overcoming one’s often crippling angst and anxiety. Now, how many of those familiar films tell the story of a young black girl?

Not many, but Nancy Holley Hughes thinks big. "I want wide release," she said, after an afternoon of reading and editing her script, "The Wright Brothers’ Revenge," for which there will be a staged reading on December 9. "There aren’t many coming-of-age films about black girls without being attached to a guy or some issue," Hughes said. The script is about something universal, "what it means to be alive, to grow up," as she described it, and she fully intends to see it through.

The script, while ostensibly the story of Hughes’ protagonist Merlee Hildegarrd Holly, a young girl born to an African-American father and white mother of Irish extraction, in pre-civil rights America, is also about Orville and Wilbur Wright. Time, space and history are redefined, tweaked by Hughes’ literary style, (what she calls the ‘storyteller’s language’). Unique also to her script, is Hughes’ perspective as a woman with a diverse educational and professional background, and numerous, varied, eclectic interests.

The popular fascination with the Wright Brothers may be, at first glance, obvious. The pair still symbolizes the strength of America’s most prized and prestigious cultural values — the family, entrepreneurship, and competition — even 100 years after their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. However, Hughes sees the story of the Wrights as much more complex. Ever since her first visit to Kitty Hawk, (close enough to where she grew up that that visit was on a school field trip in the fifth grade), Hughes has been fascinated. Not just about the Wright Brothers, but in general, fascinated: the trip made her interested in exploring the world, in exploring history, people, places and events outside of her own experience. The Wright Brothers were the first to defy gravity, an enormous accomplishment in itself, but for the young Hughes, theirs was also a convenient metaphor for overcoming obstacles closer to home.

In her script, Hughes draws a few parallels between Merlee and the Wright Brothers. Both were first, and both had to fight to succeed. In the segregated, Jim Crow south, there was no room for the Holly family. They were literally illegal — interracial marriages were prohibited — so when the family made their annual southbound trip down the newly constructed New Jersey Turnpike to visit five-year-old Merlee’s paternal side of the family, they did so advisedly, at tremendous risk. Hughes purposely set her story 50 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, to coincide with the opening of the Turnpike, which metaphorizes Merlee’s personal journey, and sets the story in motion. On a southern stretch of the Pike, Merlee finds herself orphaned by a vicious hate crime. A gas station attendant took it upon himself to enforce the racist ‘colored only’ bathroom law, and ran them off the road, killing Merlee’s parents. After settling with relatives in the South, Merlee finds herself on territory as uncharted as the skies before the Wrights.

Hughes describes Merlee as "an eccentric, precocious kid," who had never been socialized by her parents to become the ideal she calls the "compliant southern black girl." A girl barred from the famously hostile world of white lunch counters and movie theatres, imprisoned by the segregated ‘separate but equal’ school system, Merlee was brought to the political struggle through personal experience.

"I didn’t want to write a story about a goody-two-shoes," Hughes said. Merlee’s activism was not unrealistically earnest or radical. "It used to make me mad," Hughes explained, "that I was born too late to be in the marches, but it was the kids who had to go to the school, go to jail, and actually deal with it." It was Merelee who put her life on the line every day, to change her life, and subsequently, changed history. Her refusal to stay in her place in a culture limited by racism, Hughes equates to the Wright Brother’s insistence on continuing their work and fighting to guarantee their place in history in their time with its own limited scope.

"What drives me to tell this story is to see the image of this black kid in epic proportions," Hughes said. For her, the connection to the Wright Brothers is a critical element, but also a convenient one, which provides a context for the story of Merlee into the dominant American historical narrative. Hughes is often asked: ‘Why are you writing about white men?’ Her response to this inevitable criticism is simply: "Why not?" Then it seems obvious: who asks questions whenever white people write about non-white people?

Hughes’ script not only draws parallels between an obscure little girl and two prominent historical figures, but also gives Merlee a voice — the opportunity to articulate history in her own way. ‘Why not?’ indeed. "Why shouldn’t a little black girl comment on history and white culture?" Hughes asked. However, Hughes also points out that the Wright Brothers themselves faced similar reception in their day. Despite being two upper-middle class mid-western white men, theirs was a struggle to protect their work, and, in this country, they received no recognition; "Orville was dead five years before the Smithsonian took the model," Hughes explained.

In addition to the connection between the literary Marlee and the historical innovators of flight, Hughes also manipulates the properties of time and history itself. These boundaries are not fixed in ‘The Wright Brothers’ Revenge,’ but fluid. And, as far as stupid questions, Hughes always gets a few more about this issue. When asked whether this is a ‘period piece,’ Hughes returns, "What’s a period piece?"

"In the continuum of history," Hughes explained, "there is not much to separate time, like life and death, from what we’re doing now. Color, culture, class, are still issues now. This war is a clash of culture and religion." No, she admits, "there aren’t segregated lunch counters," but Hughes herself, as well as in her piece, speaks of segregation and social inequity in general, here and now. The 16-year-old Brookline High School student who is going to read the part of Merlee at the Boston Public Library reading, caught on to the subtext right away, Hughes said. The student is half-African and half-French, and Hughes confirmed, "she relates to it, it’s contemporary to her experience today."

Hughes talks excitedly about her project. The idea for this piece has been in her head for over 10 years, arguably ever since she was in the fifth grade. She remembers that fifth grade teacher as the most popular in the school because she was able to excite her students about everything that interested her, even the story of the comparatively old, privileged, and white Wright Brothers. This early experience defined her life two-fold: it gave her the idea for the piece, but also set her on her course for life. She is a self-described ‘reluctant teacher.’

She took what she thought was a temp job, teaching theology at a small Catholic High School in Boston’s South End, as a recent graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, but stayed on for eight years. Though she described herself as having been an enthusiastic new teacher, it’s hard to imagine her any more enthusiastic than she is now, as a screenwriter, and still a teacher. She is also still a student in the sense that she describes her teaching as infused with her own questions. In both teaching and writing she said, "You get to play God…you have that opportunity to have people say, think, react, to your own questions, your own growth. I like to start with something unresolved or in my memory, and then I like to work it out."

As an actual student, Hughes started off at the Harvard Law School, "got bored," then enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. It was only in recent years that Hughes took her only screenwriting class, though she was a seasoned short story writer. She said that this is the first of her stories that she saw as cinematic; "The Wright Brothers’ Revenge" brought her to screenwriting. She credited BFVF Screenwriting instructor Andrew Arthur with showing her how to turn her 2-page story into a feature length screenplay.

"I always got stuck when I actually had to use an outline. I was not sure where I was going to end up." When she set about it in her own way, by writing a short story first, she said, "even though I wanted to quit 5,000 times, I was always sure that I was making art… Screenwriters are constantly told, ‘this is an impenetrable business,’ so even if I knew it was not going to be made, I would still have to make it."

"I’m just so lucky," Hughes continued, "to have two immensely talented people to help develop the piece," referring to Lisa Simmons, her producer, and Michelle Baxter, Hughes’ friend of over 15 years, who will be directing the staged reading on December 9th.

Next on her plate, Hughes said, "I’d like to see it attached to an actor as well." And, if all goes well, she’ll need more than one. Hughes sees "The Wright Brothers’ Revenge" as the first in a series. Hughes is adamant that she is not attempting to franchise the story into tedious sequels, but sees something more akin to Trufaut’s Antoine Doinel trilogy ("400 Blows," "Bread and Board," "Love on the Run") than "Lord of the Rings." She may be new to screenwriting, but Hughes has been thinking about film for a long time. In the spirit of thinking outside her own experience, she confesses a love of foreign films, and more broadly, "I love really feeling something deeply when I leave a movie, but it must have humor." Among her favorites are: "To Kill a Mocking Bird," "Imitation of Life," "The Wizard of Oz," and, perhaps most appropriately, "Sounder," and "Sugar Cane Alley."

Her goal for "The Wright Brothers’ Revenge," is that it resonates with as many people as her favorite films or Eudora Welty or Flanery O’Connor story. She is interested in "breaking down those barriers of audiences. As a teacher, I can’t just talk to the girls, or just to the black kids. Diversity need not be something to make people stay away and be fearful." Like Merlee, Hughes anticipates having her voice heard in "Wright Brothers Revenge." When asked whether Merlee succeeded, Hughes pauses, then answers: "She succeeds, I think she does."