The Screenplay Pitch
It’s about this cis-het WASP widower, perhaps on the spectrum, who lives next to a black couple and across the street from a Latinx family. The widower’s recently deceased wife was a fabulous, woke teacher, who taught from a wheelchair. (We’ll include a flashback that shows her in it.) The man in the black couple is severely disabled, and his wife tends to him like a saint. A trans boy, kicked out of his house by his cis-het WASP father, distributes circulars on their street.
The powerhouse in the story is the wife/mother in the Latinx family. A college-educated dynamo, she’s a great cook and mother, but also far more competent than her somewhat feckless, but certainly lovable, husband. Yes, they are a nuclear family, but not in a patriarchal way. I want to call her “Marisol,” which is Spanish for “a day at the beach.” That way you know she’s good people.
Of course, there’s a villain — a big real estate development company represented by a straight white guy. Think Snidely Whiplash. Verisimilitude counts, right?
I’ll probably name the film after the widower, but for now the working title is “Checking Boxes.” (I heard that “Bankable Diversity” was already taken.) I was thinking of having our guy work in a supermarket checking the boxes that come in, but that seemed a bit on the nose and maybe even a tad ironic; so he’s an engineer, good with things but not with people.
Nothing much happens in the movie. When it begins, the widower is in the anger stage of grief and when it ends he’s in the acceptance stage. I suppose there’s an Everyone-Who-Isn’t-White-or-Cis-heteronormative-Savior story there. We’ll get someone to bang out the requisite tear-jerky manipulations. I’m thinking we’ll call the guy Otto. It’s a palindrome, and when the movie starts he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. But if you want to go another way with the characters, that’s fine with me. As the french say, les cases sont cochées.