THE STAGE 32 LOGLINES
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BLACK/WHITE MAN
By Kevin Hager
A Black Man ends up switches bodies with a White Supremacist and must find a way to stop him from helping his gang commit a hate crime.
SYNOPSIS:
BLACK/WHITE MAN
James Matthews is a member of a Black Rights Organization and is next in line for leadership, and like many members he is very liberal and anti-police viewing them as fascist and wants to defund and limit them, on occasions harasses Commissioner Alan Forrest and Police Officer Eric Kent, and causes riots and or vandalism that they try to justify. Then one day his organization works with organizing a Unity Festival when he is kidnapped by a group of White Supremacist/Klansmen and a captured scientist named Dr. Simon Wu who stalls for time by showing a new invention to help with CT scan but instead switches James mind with a Klansman named Alex Craig and once the switch is proven Craig realizes they can use the switch to their advantage by impersonating James he can infiltrate the Unity Festival and set up the bombs on the inside and James would take the blame for it. The group and their leader Orson Rainer agree, and Craig learns about James and his life and sets into his family life while the real James is locked up. Craig hates people who are colored for no other reason than hate, and while getting close to James’s friends and family behind closed doors acts disgusted for associating with them.
James realizing his family and friends are endanger escapes with Wu and attempts to return home, Rainer alerts Craig and using Craig’s past history turns James into a wanted criminal. James runs into Eric and with Wu’s help convinces him and the Commissioner of James’s true identity and they agree to help him, and soon James ends up meeting Eric and Alan’s families and finds them to be good people, and supporters of Martin Luther King Jr, he learns the only reason Eric has a rivalry with him is because some people including African-Americans view the group as vandals no better than the criminals the cops arrests, and meets an elderly Black neighbor who is friends and neighbor to the Kent’s and had Grandparents who marched with Dr. King and believe that James’s group are desecrating everything Dr. King lived and fought for causing James to rethink how his organization works.
Wu fixes his device and finds out what went wrong with it, and Eric and James stops the bombs and they confront Craig and Rainer and Eric kills Rainer while James and Craig fight, and the switch is revealed and using the device switch their minds and the invention is destroyed much to Wu’s relief (the mind switch was an accident) and James kills Craig and shows his true identity. Alan remarks it is best for the machine to be destroyed as its powers are not what the world needs.
Released from the hospital, James takes over leadership and promises no rioting and will instead take the group in the path of Dr. Martin Luther King and gains a new respect for cops and befriends white people whom he distrusted before.
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3 people like this
Great title, Kevin Hager!
I think your logline needs to be tighten up a little. Here's a suggestion: "After a Black man switches bodies with a White supremacist, he tries to find a way to stop (or he searches for a way to stop) the supremacist (or racist if you don't want to use supremacist twice) from helping his gang commit a hate crime."
Also, if the Black man is the supremacist, wouldn't the Black man be able to control the supremacist (so the supremacist wouldn't be able to help his gang commit a hate crime)?
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2 people like this
The basic idea is great, but there has to be a plausable story as Maurice says. Let us say the hate crime was already commited. This is a posssble basic setup.
FADE IN TO
A black youth cousellor doing his job, leaving work. Going home, where his whole family is killed before his eyes. He barely survives.
Flashback to a white gangleader who says a counsellor must be killed because he hangs out with his kid.
A scene sequence with the black guy tries to cope with his grieve but can't.
In a black seance the black guy switches bodies with the white guy, so he can setup the supremesists gang to kill their leader ( the basic irony in the story) , who now feels what it is to be a black guy.
He gets remorse about what he's done in life. The black guy's soul in the white body sees this and the evening just before his revenge decides to tell the gang about the body/soul switching, he made happen in a black seance ritual he performed and in a flashback that there was a sacrifice to be made as the deity's compensation, a beloved would die, not telling WHO. They laugh at him, and tell him maybe they should get rid of him too. He flees, bumbs into -- you know who.
So the tables turn again and now it is the two of them who have to fight the gang members; they now must work together in harmony to survive the night (again irony). They both come out alive, killing the whole gang.
End good all good...except forgetting a deal with a deity was made. You must know that the black guy was a youth counsellor, helping black kids to stay out of gangs, but he also knew this white kid who had a troubled life because of his father running a gang and killing people (black and white), which he had to witness, not approving. This kid's soul is taken and it feels like he goes to hell for his father's deeds.
Now there is a dual between the two, and the white guy supremacist (in the black body) is shot by the black counselor (in the white body). How much irony do you want!
The black guy still in the white body wants to kill himself, but as he rases his gun he sees a black guy being harasset by a white gang. Now, because of a superior skil set -- he sees things from a 'white and black perspective' -- he stops the assoult by talking the gang out of it, and at the and switches roles again, seing life still has purpose when he becomes guidance counsellor for white kids who want to join a gang, talking them out of it..
Just my two cents. Many other variations.
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