Interview (Part 3): Tim Ware-Hill

My interview with the 2022 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Tim Ware-Hill wrote the original screenplay “Tyrone and The Looking Glass” which won a 2022 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with Tim about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Tim reveals the inspiration for his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Tyrone and The Looking Glass.”

Scott: Let’s jump into your script. As I say, it’s just a really imaginative adventure and quite compelling. Here’s the plot summary:

“In Birmingham, Alabama, 1963, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a Negro boy goes on a quest to find the four magical treasures he needs to wield the looking glass, the only weapon powerful enough to defeat a three‑headed dragon that seeks to destroy him and his loved ones.”

Let’s go all the way back to the beginning. What was the inspiration for “Tyrone and The Looking Glass?”

Tim: “Tyrone,” it started out as my thesis project for grad school. It’s a very different version than the version that started out. I was very inspired by Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Now I was able to take his historical event and make it the backdrop of the story about this young girl who believes that she’s a princess.

I said, I tend to gravitate towards films that have a magical realism or fantasy element, because so often the movies that I loved watching as a kid, I didn’t see myself in. I wanted to tell stories that would allow little Black kids to see themselves in imaginative worlds.

In particular with “Tyrone and the Looking Glass,” I wanted to tell stories that I connected to from my home Alabama, and that connected to my family and their stories, our history. My parents would tell me stories about the civil rights movement. They were kids during the Montgomery bus boycott.

My grandmother who I lost this year, would tell me stories about what it was like for her growing up in the Jim Crow South at the time. She had many jobs. One of them did include being a housekeeper for White people. My grandma, she didn’t take no shit, though.

She ended up quitting those jobs. She’s like, “They can’t talk to me that way.” I appreciate her strength and her courage to do that at such a time that it was dangerous to have such audacity. The adventure films…Because I cannot think of Tyrone as a coming‑of‑age adventure story.

The ones that I watched, like “Goonies” was one of my favorite films growing up as a kid. It was all White leads, with the exception of a token Asian kid.

I’m like, “I want to be a hero. When can I be a hero? When can someone that looks like me be a hero, go on a quest, and save the day?” What most people don’t realize or fail to remember or acknowledge is that in most great movements, the movements are led by the youth, [laughs] including the civil rights movement.

We often think of Dr. Martin Luther King because he was a great leader. He was also, in all honesty, a kid when he started leading that movement. He wasn’t the only leader of the movement. Particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, at that time, 1963, what took place was the children’s march, is what it was called.

We’ve all seen the photos of the fire hoses that were set upon Black people and the German shepherd dogs. It wasn’t until I really started doing my research for Tyrone and The Looking Glass that I realized, “Wait, these were children.” When I saw these photos as a kid, everybody looked older than me, so I thought they were adults.

I didn’t realize, no, these were kids who were in middle school and high school, who took to the street to march because their parents were either afraid to do so or they couldn’t do so out of fear of losing their work, their places of employment as a form of punishment for standing up for their civil rights, for their human rights.

These kids took to the street. They faced water hoses and the attack dogs. [laughs] Kids that were heroes. What is that story? What is the story about those kids that were brave enough to walk through the fire, to walk towards their dragon, and to face the fire? Which is what Tyrone and The Looking Glass is.

My protagonist, Tyrone, was tasked by his father to be the first to integrate an all‑White high school. After watching his father be lynched, be burned to death, he still felt a responsibility to fulfill his dad’s wishes. How can he win? If three White men can lynch his father, what will they do to him, who’s only a child when they don’t want him in their schools? What is that courage? That’s what I wanted to explore with Tyrone.

When we first meet him in the story, we meet this kid who’s afraid of the world. We don’t quite know why at the beginning. We don’t know that his father has been murdered and that he witnessed it. We just know that he’s afraid of the world. The world, in his mind, is filled with White people who don’t want him to exist in their world.

Through going on this journey, we leave with a kid who knows that he can face and conquer anything. I just wanted to know, what is that? How does one find that courage to do such a thing? Brown versus the Board of Education was 1955, where the Supreme Court deemed it unlawful to have segregation in the public school system.

My parents were some of the first to integrate all my high school in Montgomery, Alabama, but that wasn’t until 1970. 15 years after Brown v Board of Education. What is it for a Black parent at that time to send their kid in such dangerous spaces?

You think of the movie, “Till,” that just came out, which I haven’t seen yet. I think of Mamie Till. His mother, she sent her son away to visit his family. He never came back. My husband and I are in the process of adopting a child or children. We hope to expand our family someday.

I look at my peers who already have kids. I see their first‑day‑of‑school photos. They’re like, “My kid’s first day of school.” They hold up the sign. “Bobby’s first day of school.” I smile at the pictures, but then I’m just covered in fear.

I don’t know what it takes for a parent today to have the courage to drop their kid off at a school, go to work. Pray that when they get off work, they will have a child to pick up and bring back home. What kind of courage does that take today?

Knowing that there’s a possibility that every time you drop your kid off in a place that is supposed to be safe, a place that is supposed to enrich, not take away, what kind of courage does it take to do that day after day, year after year when we see tragedy after tragedy of babies who’d never make it home?

This is why Tyrone and The Looking Glass is so relevant to today. Take that. You go, “Well, what kind of courage did it take a Black mother or a Black father to send their Black child into a school knowing, not wondering if, but knowing that they will be in danger?” Knowing that they are walking into danger.

Not whether or not they might have a harrowing day, but knowing that, “I’m sending my kid through the gauntlet of just venom and hate. I have to do it because it’s the only way that our people can move forward in this country that often doesn’t want us to progress.” I wanted to find that in Tyrone’s mother.

Scott: Maxine.

Tim: Maxine. I didn’t want to make her that same Black woman that we see in every civil rights movie, where she’s just supportive. “I’m just supportive. I’m supportive of my husband. He’s a great leader. I’m going to support him. I’m not going to question his willingness to fight for our rights.”

I wanted her to ask the questions that many of us had at the time. We look at Martin Luther King through rose‑colored glasses, but not everybody believed in Dr. King’s movement. Not every Black person. Let me be more specific. There are many who thought he was an agitator. They wanted him to just let things be, not rock the boat.

With Maxine, I wanted her to ask the question. “Why do I have to put my child at risk? I’m only doing this because my husband wanted this, but he’s gone. Now, I’m left to raise my son, a Black man. A Black young boy, not a man. A Black boy, who the world wants to see as a man, as a threat. A Black man, but he’s still a boy. I’m left to raise them by myself?

“My dead husband wants me to send him into the school with all of these White people who don’t want him there? What the hell? Dr. King is telling me I need to do this, too? Who the hell is he? He’s not sending his young kids into these schools.” These are the things I wanted her to say.

I wanted her to have some real moments where she’s like, “I’m questioning this movement. I understand why we’re doing it, but why does it have to be me and my child?”

Here is Tim’s Nicholl acceptance speech.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Tim shares how a childhood memory of collecting RC Cola caps spawned a magical aspect of his screenplay.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

Tim is repped by The Gotham Group.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.