Pappaw Land: Synopsis

I mentioned during a previous post that I wrote a script, called "Pappaw Land," that takes place in Wise, Virginia, the small coal mining town where I used to spend summers when I was young. Last May I submitted the script to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and it happened to become a Semi-Finalist come July. I figured I'd give you an idea what the script is about, for anyone interested. This synopsis is the same one I sent to Sundance last year--

"The main title, “Pappaw Land,” comes in scrawled across the screen in a child's hand, the heading of a yellowed fourth grade assignment fluttering against the dashboard of Stanley Nichols' car. Fresh out of high school, he drives past the trashcan fires and stray dogs of the fabled land, known by most as Wise, Virginia, as he recounts the idyllic childhood summer he wrote of ten years earlier. Despite it’s painfully polluted landscape, the magic of Wise remains real and intact, when it’s searched for. Stanley's journey is in finding magic that exists in the everyday, love in the dependable, and God in a rustling tree house and the muddy creek.

Stanley grew up in a Virginian suburb, and rather than move to Florida with his retiring parents, he drives to the backcountry to stay indefinitely with his Pappaw. His dying car and his dying dog Hobbes are all he takes along. The story unfolds in quiet scenes that pass like humid summer days—and that reach for the star-filled beauty of warm summer nights. Stanley and his Pappaw are kindred spirits from their first meeting. The old man winks rather than scolds; when something needs to be fixed, they fix it together, their hands blackened with coal and grease. Life only begins to speed up in Wise after Stanley meets a wild brown-haired girl named Emily by the creek, and her BB-gun wielding brother.

A rift forms between Stanley and everything-not-Emily—even his family and faith are forgotten in a hot wave of teen angst. The first act of the film, moving leisurely through his town explorations with Hobbes and his first time at Pappaw’s church, gives way to a fiery second act after his meeting with Emily. The crescendo builds as Stanley ignores his old Pappaw, and then betrays him by stealing his church keys. Stanley sneaks into the church, exploring not just the labyrinthic structure but the nubile body of his brown-haired addiction. The church throughout the script is a present, radiating entity. Like the writer's own faith, it's never obtrusive or somber, but rather, a solid place of warmth and questioning.

Stanley's revelation in the third act occurs not in a sexual, romantic, or even social realm, though these elements are certainly present; he finds a transcendent truth in himself. Cliché, you say, but true nonetheless. Stanley must put a dying Hobbes to sleep in a modern animal hospital, and in this moment we see that the eight-year-old Stanley that first visited his Pappaw in Wise is immortal—that innocence doesn't always have to be lost when you grow up. In the end, a moral—and "Pappaw Land" is what I would call a moral tale—can be found in doing good, in living well, and experiencing what there is in this world to experience, with blackened bare feet."

*I find it impossible to write a synopsis of my own work, so I had the brilliant Mike Turner do it for me.*