As I studied cinematography back in the early 1990s, to realize that we were all big dreamers toward a fair and just social change. The following is a synopsis of one was of my first completed works. Hope you like it. Enjoy.
Different Faces Different Ways
Lavorne Williams, a middle-aged black woman, is happily married to John, an insurance executive in Connecticut. After years of marriage and living an upper middle class, suburban lifestyle, John, is dismissed off the corporate ladder and proceeds to fall through society’s cracks.
In despair, he turns to alcohol and drugs; it is then that his wife and children’s daily abuse begins.
Lavorne later becomes homeless with her two young children; however, due to her strong spiritual beliefs and moral-ethical standards, she can overcome the abuse endured at home, the demeaning existence of life in a shelter, and other seemingly unbearable obstacles.
Lavorne is determined to explore and correct the country’s increasingly dysfunctional civility.
By rising above it all, she becomes a major figure in American political history and an inspiration to all.
This story is about a courageous, educated young black woman who, through a string of events, ends up on the streets but learns to fight against the odds, the unjust system and ends back up on the top.
This story deals with a number of social issues such as homelessness, domestic violence, racism, and the abuse one can suffer by the system as it now exists; and how one person, through unrelenting effort, can make a change for the better. It’s about how she struggled with her two children to overcome obstacles encountered in their day to day lives. However, in her spiritual fight to find the golden mean, she confronts political, social, economic, and moral issues afflicting our society.
Such struggles lead her to open up the first twenty-four-hour day-care center in the country for working parents. She also founded and organized NACSO, the National Association for A Color Blind Society, and TURBO, The Urban Rebirth Organization. She also managed and spearheaded a march on Washington, DC, which challenged the Republican’s Parties Contract With America. Such later influenced her to become a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. Lavorne later becomes the first woman President of the United States and the first person of color to hold the highest office in the land.
(This body of work is a 250-page manuscript, written in a standard film format as a television miniseries or movie of the week and could also be easily adapted to the stage as a dramatic piece or as a musical. It contains over twenty-one original copyrighted songs composed by the author and other local Connecticut artists.)
Sabas Whittaker Copyright 1993.
Proposal for Different Faces Different Ways. A Whittaker Productions film
( Copyright 1995 Sabas Whittaker All Right Reserved).
In response to the increasingly severe problem(s) associated with homelessness, domestic violence, racism, and downtrodden hopelessness and in keeping up with Whittaker Production’s Mission Statement of producing and providing socially and responsible, family-oriented, educational entertainment, Whittaker Productions proposes the following:
1) Produce a full feature film on a very low budget and in a state of the art production studio, with one or two known name actors. While still maintaining the film’s high characteristics and quality, as if it being a multimillion-dollar final product and suitable enough to compete in the industry and generate high market value and substantial returns to our investors. The film is geared to invite society to reexamine a broader spectrum of issues contributing to domestic violence, homelessness, racism, and a variety of social afflictions that impairs the development and growth of our inner-city women and minority groups across the board.
As filmmakers, it is our duty and belief that such reexamination could lead to the revival of a personal and communal covenant while directly addressing factors currently placing women and children at risk of becoming desperate victims in crisis. The story will focus primarily on placing continuously sober or intoxicated abusers and batters into rehabilitative treatment programs, with child safety being our main focus and first priority. The film will also attempt to discourage racism by fostering racial and cultural diversity and will shine the spotlight on individuals involved in positive and productive activities geared toward peace, harmony, and personal growth rather than concentrating our valuable taxpayer-funded communication resources solely on those involved in negative behavior, which further increases the proliferation and fertilization of settled, stereotypes.
2) Our goal
Wrote this way back in 1993. Not much has changed; in fact, I believe that we appear to have drifted further off track and far, far away from our moral compass.
