Interview (Part 4): Grace Sherman

My interview with the 2018 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Grace Sherman wrote the original screenplay “Numbers and Words” which won a 2018 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Grace about her background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to her.

Today in Part 4, Grace talks about two other key characters in her screenplay, both of whom influence the story’s Protagonist.

Scott: I tell that to my students because we obviously, in teaching writing, talk about the hero’s journey. I say, “Look, it’s not just a theory about story. This is about life.” Campbell was very specific about that. These myths and stories are reflective of our own experience. You look at DeMarcus at the beginning, his troubled family life.

He’s got a mother who’s problematic to the point where he’s separated from his sister who’s living with a foster parent. He’s got a man, Nate, who is his mother’s lover who is very violent. DeMarcus is living in a state of poverty. It’s a lot of problems going on there at the beginning. Campbell talks about the ordinary world, that the hero is just making do.

Boy, DeMarcus is barely just making due, and, that, he needs to change, that the stories are about transformation. That structure must have really resonated with you in terms of DeMarcus and his journey and applying that hero’s journey to him, I would imagine.

Grace: Yes, it did. It very much did, and that was very significant throughout the story and another way to tie in that literary element with his mathematics. How can I tie these two things together? It was very instrumental.

Scott: There’s another character, too. There’s Beth, who’s quite an influence on him. Then there’s another character, Clint, who is basically a privileged white boy, preppy, who, when we meet him, DeMarcus has been providing some math solutions to him in terms of high school, his education, and whatnot. As a result of this, this kid Clint is a college student, yes?

Grace: Yes, he is in college.

Scott: He’s a conduit for books on math to DeMarcus. Can you talk to me about Clint and how that character emerged in the story?

Grace: Again, Clint was one of those characters that was going to meet him in the second act, and then late into the script — I’m talking whole drafts where I thought I got it — I was like, “Well, why can’t he meet him, as well, in the first act?”

Again, going along with relationships and how we do influence each other. I was thinking, “OK, what would be a way for them to meet?” Clint, who is privileged, who is going to a top notch school, has all the access to education, books, technology, and doesn’t appreciate it. He happens to meet DeMarcus and pays him to complete his very advanced mathematical homework. Even more valuable, he gives DeMarcus these newsletters that his professor writes., DeMarcus is a big fan of this mathematical professor. He wants any work by the professor that he can get his hands on to help him solve the hypothesis.

Scott: DeMarcus, one way of looking at the story, and it’s a powerful dynamic in the story, is this sense of fatalism. He’s in a meeting once, and he says angrily to somebody who’s basically trying to school these young black people about interfacing with the law and whatnot…

DeMarcus says, “You can’t pack a bunch of us into this room and say society is against you, but hold your head up high and reach for the moon. It’s easier to sell dope and reach for $100 sneakers. If you keep telling me that war has been declared on me, that there’s a bounty on my head as soon as I get out of the womb, that I am a statistic upon conception, then that is how I’m going to act.”

He does have an anger to him, almost a rage, and that gets him in trouble. He ends up in prison as a result. His mother dies accidentally because he’s fighting with Nate. He ends up going to a juvenile center, and then his anger there gets him sent into prison as a youth.

This idea of will DeMarcus change or not, will he be able to move beyond anger and cynicism or not, I’m imagining that that was a pretty clear emotional and psychological touchstone for you in the story.

Grace: Yes, it’s almost which message will he listen to, or influence him, or will he embrace. On one hand, he is brilliant. He does have that opportunity at school. His teacher tells him, “We can work with you and get you into college.” There’s an opportunity there, but there’s also that aspect that there’s a violent side to him.

Again, it’s that, “I always have to have my fist up,” aspect. The self-esteem piece. The messages that we send young males of color, “Oh, this many of you are gonna end up in jail, or end up there, or end up this and that.” How do they internalize those messages, and how do those messages influence their behaviors.

If you don’t have that support system continuingly guiding you in a different direction, it’s possible you’re following the path that will not be the best. That’s what it is. Which path will he choose? He’s letting him know you’re telling us this.

We can internalize those messages. Then we’ll go out and act out what you’re telling us we are anyway. Because of his intelligence, he’s able to say it in a way that, while the other young men may feel this, they may not be able to voice it in the way that he did.

Scott: You sustain that tension of whether he’s going to give in to, basically, the question from Shawshank: “Get busy living or get busy dying.” The anger and the rage is more the latter path.

You sustain that throughout the story, all the way into act three and the central conflict with this character. Was that always the way that was? You just knew that you were going to play this thing out all the way to the end, this question about what he was going to do, what choice he was going to make?

Grace: Yes, because I thought that was the internal conflict. That was the struggle. That math, again, was that outlet for him, that therapy. He still had hope that it was somehow going to give him peace, get him out of his situation if he just held on to it. He just saw that everything would work itself out.

Then, on the other hand, he still had things that would trigger him. Yeah, I did want to still present that struggle, that conflict throughout the story.

Scott: He’s got this anger. He’s got this rage. He’s in prison. You do a couple of jump cuts in time, but basically you see him at 23. Clint comes back into his life, and then Beth comes back into his life.

Then she’s contributing, I guess you’d say wisdom, in the way of books like “The Old Man and the Sea,” “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Invisible Man.” Let me ask you a question specific to that. How did you go about deciding which books Beth would select for DeMarcus to read?

Grace: What was the process of that? I wanted known books. I wanted books that could have been used. She’s using them to help prep them for a test. Books that, again, are widely-known, so there’s been several conversations about them in terms of positives and negatives, criticisms, whatever. Their dialogue is their perspectives on those books.

I also wanted books that DeMarcus could find a mathematical angle to, because that’s his relationship to the books . “Yeah, thematically, the literature, yeah, that’s all good, but how does it appeal to me?” That’s what he’s thinking. “How do I find mathematics in this?”

Scott: She’s a countervailing influence on him that fans whatever embers of hope that he may have inside to balance out his rage and whatnot. He’s in prison for 26 years before he’s released. Peter Samuelson introduced you at the Nicholl ceremony. I transcribed this from his remarks because I thought they were quite apt given your stories. He said, “In a script, in a hero’s journey, there’s the abyss. It’s the low point. It’s the pit. One of the things that’s delicious and eyebrow-raising is to see a truly great writer take their hero to such a low point that you feel as though they are checkmated.

“There’s nothing to be done to rescue this hero and bring him or her back to the light.” It’s interesting that when I was reading the script, it’s like, “OK. Now, he’s in prison. That’s probably going to be act three, getting out of prison.” He’s only in prison for 20-some odd pages. Then he’s released.

To me, that deep dark checkmated moment is when we learn that he’s given up math. It’s like he’s freed and he meets Beth again. In fact, he says this comment. “Why?”

When he finally explains it, he said, “Because it failed me. It fucking failed me. I gave it everything. Everything I had, and all I got in return was to lose everything I cared about. Even then, even then I still gave when I had nothing, and it still didn’t save me.”

Could you talk about that confession on his part and where he’s at psychologically at that moment?

Grace: He solves the math problem in prison. He’s able to solve it on his wall, chipping into the paint. Yet, he looks around and, “Yeah, I solved the greatest mathematical problem in history, but, I’m still stuck in a prison cell.”

In his mind, when you talk about fatalism and you talk about which path can he take, in his mind at that point, he never had a chance. Things were always going to be against him.

He did give every piece of himself to solving this hypothesis. He was obsessed with it. He finally solved it and, yet, what it did do for him?

For the remaining time he is in prison after that, he stops doing his math. He gets out, and still does not want to any math. He’s telling Beth, when she’s pushing him, he’s saying there was no point.

He’s saying, “I did one of the most brilliant things you can do, and the way society saw me is the way I ended up, so what was the point?” That’s where he’s at.

Scott: That reshapes my thinking a little bit. That, indeed, those years that you basically jump past, in a way, in prison, that really was the abyss. What this side of dialogue to Beth represents a confession in a way, like almost a catharsis.

He needs to express this sense of futility and fatalism in a way to move beyond that, it feels like now. Does that seem like a fair assessment of that moment?

Grace: Yes. He hasn’t told anybody this. Along the way, people are asking in different ways, “Why give this up? Why aren’t you doing it anymore?” He just brushes it off. He doesn’t get into the heart or the depth of what it is until she pushes him to tell her the true reason.

He’s at a point where he has to make a decision. She knows he wants to go after Nate. Again, he’s back at that decision that we talked about. Which path will he choose? Is he going to go back to that rage, violence, or is he going to go a different way? That’s where he’s at, but he hasn’t told anybody his true feelings, until he confessed that to Beth.

Here is a stage reading of a scene from the script “Numbers and Words”:

Tomorrow in Part 5, Grace talks about her Nicholl experience and answers some writing craft questions.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

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

For my interviews with 53 Black List writers, go here.