Screenwriting : Pitching into the Wind by Nick Douglas

America and Hollywood’s depiction of the slave narrative has etched slavery and all its brutality indelibly on the psyche of America and the world. Most people and certainly people connected with Hollywood, can only picture black people as slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in 1863.

This is what make pitching my true story based on my book Finding Octave so difficult. My story is about the antithesis of the slave narrative before 1860. The story of Black people, free people of color, Creoles, and gens de coulure who had never been slaves and free for generations before the Civil War. They were educated, prosperous, businessmen and women, land and business owners, community-minded and fairly autonomous. In New Orleans they had what the Anglos that came to Louisiana coveted.

Unknown to Hollywood, New Orleans was the cradle of the civil right movement in the U.S., only one hundred years before the modern civil rights movement. While most people know about New Orleans being the birthplace of jazz and most other strands of American music, they do not know that jazz, jazz families, and musicians were responsible for using jazz and music performances to fund civil rights activities.

I will go on pitching my script based my book and trying to improve my pitch. But it is a difficult proposition to break-up a narrative that is universally accepted as the only story about people of color before the Civil War, and at the same time try to explain a completely different universe in a 10 minute.