Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Nickel Boys’: Read The Screenplay By RaMell Ross And Joslyn Barnes That Reimagined A Pulitzer-Winning Novel For The Big Screen
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind awards season’s buzziest film continues with Nickel Boys, the feature directing debut of Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening filmmaker RaMell Ross, who with longtime collaborator Joslyn Barnes adapted Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-wining 2019 novel.
Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios debuted the film at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of summer and its has been racking up awards recognition ever since, including Best Picture nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and the Gotham Awards, where Ross won Best Director and co-star Brandon Wilson won Breakthrough Performer.
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Ross and Barnes’ adapted screenplay has also been nominated for several honors especially among critics groups this season, as has Jomo Fray’s cinematography, which has drawn raves for its use of an unconventional POV that, according to Ross, is designed to make the viewer a character. Nickel Boys was released in theaters December 13.
Whitehead’s novel follows the friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Jim Crow Florida. In the movie, bright, striving teenager Elwood (Ethan Herisse). living amid the terrors of the Jim Crow South makes a split decision that recasts the course of his life. On the cusp of college, he’s instead sentenced to time at a notorious reformatory. There, he encounters Turner (Wilson), a kindred spirit, forming an alliance but one with incalculable consequences.
The book features a penal institution for juvenile offenders that Whitehead calls the Trevor Nickel Academy but is based on the notorious real-life Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, FL.
The film spans the early 1960s to 2010, with three different actors playing the roles. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor co-stars.
Ross, also professor of visual art at Brown University, described the movie as an “alternative” adaptation that he was surprised made it through the studio system, after first being introduced to Whitehead’s book five years ago during a meeting with producer Plan B Entertainment.
The plan for Ross and Barnes was to reimagine the book for the screen, with Barnes saying during a conversation at Deadline’s Contenders Film: London, “If you’re going to tackle something like this and turn it into a film, you have to reimagine it completely, or you risk making a terrible film of a brilliant book, which is everyone’s nightmare.”
Ross, after writing a long letter to Whitehead when he first accepted the job, got a much shorter, but no less gratifying “Best of luck” response from the author, and they were off.
Check out the script below.
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