Eager ‘Agents’ Pitch Their Teacher’s Screenplay

Hollywood is a tough place to do business, but so is a junior high classroom. You think a producer can ruin your day? How about a 13-year-old with an attitude?

In a way, then, it’s very touching how junior high teacher Don Ewing’s show business destiny has fallen into the hands of about a dozen of his students, convinced he’s written a screenplay that simply must be made into a movie.

Ewing isn’t coy. He thinks he’s got a blockbuster on his hands. It’s just that he’s sadder and wiser than his students about why not all unknown screenwriters’ blockbusters find their way to the screen. His students at Orangeview Junior High School in Anaheim aren’t totally unhip to how Hollywood works, it’s just that they’re at an age where they know what they know.

So, they invited me to a pitch meeting after school one day last week. Their idea: I write about their belief in the screenplay, then someone important reads the column and gives Ewing’s “Good Morning Starshine� a serious read.

Sounds like a plan.

The screenplay tells of an oddball 14-year-old girl who goes back in time to the psychedelic ‘60s where she embarks on a cross-country hitchhiking journey of self-discovery that borrows from Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.�

“I’m not saying this to make Mr. Ewing feel good, but I liked it a lot,� says Itzul Sanchez, 14. “This script had a lot of twists and turns. I’ve seen movies like that, where in the end it all comes together and it all starts making sense. People like those kind of movies. There was this movie, ‘Crash,’ that was like that.�

Very clever, invoking this year’s Oscar winner for best picture.

For nearly an hour, the students tell me that the script moved them more than the books they’re assigned in school or movies they’ve seen.

And even though few of them would ever take on additional reading projects, they eagerly turned the pages in Ewing’s screenplay, which was not part of any school assignment.

“I heard some eighth-graders had been reading his script and I asked if I could,� says 13-year-old seventh-grader Kirsten Guillermety. “When I got into it, I felt I could actually relate to it. It was like it was happening to me.�

That is music to any screenwriter’s ears, and Ewing fairly beams as his students laud his work. “I feel this is the audience,� he says. “Forget some agent who’s read a thousand scripts and is jaded by it all. These kids have their pulses on what makes a good movie more than a lot of Hollywood agents do.�

Ewing is 54 and didn’t begin his teaching career until three years ago. He’d done a lot of different things before and says the script is a decade old. He sent it out to a few people, but it never got off the ground.

“I know I have a good story,� he says. “This is the great story, but it’s frustrating being some nobody in Anaheim.�

Twelve-year-old Blanca Rodriguez says the story’s denouement got to her, which involves Starshine letting a butterfly -- that represents her dream -- go. “You know how people dream of stuff and wish they had it, “ she says. “But some people have to let their dreams go. In the movie, Starshine lived through it and then she let it [the butterfly] go.�

It is fun to see true passion and belief in young adolescents. “If you write about it,� Itzul says, “someone might read about it. What are the odds, but maybe Steven Spielberg, if he reads the newspaper

One of the students cites what she thinks is a metaphor. “Mr. Ewing is trying to get his dream story out there, while in the script she’s living her dream.�

“You picked up on that,� Ewing says. “I’m a big dreamer.�

I ask the students if they’ll be bummed should their effort fail. “I feel it’s better knowing you tried to get it out there instead of just letting it go,� says Bianca Ramos, 12.

“If it’s gone out there and failed, you wouldn’t have any regret about it, because you know you did your best.�

Kirsten seconds that emotion. “Even if we don’t get the publicity, it’s still going to remain to us what we saw it as. It’s not going to change for us. What happens, happens, but it’s an experience and you can’t get rid of an experience.�

If I were Ewing, who teaches world history and science, I’d be satisfied just having students like these. He is.

“These are great, great kids,� he says. “I’m a romantic. I’d love for my story to have a Hollywood ending. This would be a Hollywood ending, where it’s the kids’ enthusiasm that got a movie produced and not me going through official Hollywood channels, which, to be honest, as you know I stand almost zero chance.�

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.