THE FLAG WAVERS -- A Black teenager hijacks the Rebel Flag at a high-school football game and turns a small Southern town upside down.

SYNOPSIS:

THE FLAG WAVERS

By Bill Osinski

This is the story of Raymond Harper, a black Ferris Bueller who hijacks the Rebel flag at a high-school homecoming game and turns a small Southern town upside down.

Think FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF meets DEAR WHITE PEOPLE.

THE HOMECOMING GAME is a teen dramedy about some highly-sensitive adult issues. The screenplay skips through the minefields of race relations and interracial relationships, doing some equal-opportunity skewering of both sides along the way. The black and white folks of Oppaloosa, Alabama, take their traditions and taboos quite seriously; but Raymond sees the silliness of it all.

The concept for this project came from a satire column I wrote decades ago as a cub reporter. There was a battle over Confederate symbols at a high school in my newspaper’s area, and I posited the question of what would happen if a Black kid grabbed the flag. Sadly, those issues are still plaguing us, to wit, the photos of the Rebel-Flag-toting rioter in the Capitol this week.

THE HOMECOMING GAME seeks to take things down a notch. It depicts a Southern town where the young people decide they’re not bound by their parents’ and grandparents’ fears and prejudices. And along the way, they manage to have some fun. Yes, it’s a movie, but it’s not a fantasy. In the forgotten bombshell of this past week, voters in Georgia disposed of many generations of the most intense discrimination by electing a Black and a Jew to be their U.S. Senators.

The story begins with Raymond witnessing the senseless murder of his friend and barely escaping the killer, a vocabulary nut of a thug named Bodybag. Raymond and his widowed mother Naomi flee Cleveland and take refuge in her hometown, but they arrive in the midst of an escalating Rebel flag controversy. Blacks are preparing to boycott the high school that still has the Confederate nickname and symbols; whites are mobilizing to preserve their “heritage”. The school is the last in the state to hang on to the Confederate nickname and symbols.

Raymond writes an essay that becomes a galvanizing force for both sides. He argues that Blacks have as much right to live in and to love the South as Whites. He receives national publicity; Blacks see him as co-opting the whites’ symbols, while Whites see him as coming over to their side. Raymond is a crossover hit.

As he finesses the opposing demands on him, Raymond develops a secret relationship with a white girl, Nina, the daughter of the high school principal. Simultaneously, Naomi does the same thing with Nina’s widower father, David. Ultimately, there is an accidental and totally embarrassing convergence at a beach house, and both relationships spin into retreat.

The Homecoming Game arrives, and so does Bodybag. Before the game, Raymond conspires with Nina to hijack the Rebel Flag. So, when the band stikes up “Dixie”, it’s Raymond who runs out onto the field waving the Stars and Bars. He takes the microphone from the Homecoming Queen and challenges the crowd: “Way down South in the land of cotton, who do you think was pickin’ that cotton?”

Later that same night, Bodybag has challenged Raymond to a life-or-death game of Scrabble. The match is interrupted by a drug raid – which happens to be part of Raymond’s plan for dealing with Bodybag. Raymond gets bailed out of jail in the morning, and he hops into a car with Nina, getting back to school just in time for the dueling protests. Raymond again takes over the microphone at a student assembly, and he fashions a new flag, one they can all march behind.

In today’s South, people are not nearly as segregated by geography as in the North. In small counties like the one Raymond moves to, Black children and white children often go to the same schools as they grow up. So, this is where the races can come together.

I wrote THE HOMECOMING GAME as a feature, and, now that the Rebel Flag issue has been resolved, it could easily be spun off into a series: The valedictorian, the prom date, making the sports team are all issues that the continuing characters could grapple with.

CONTACT: Bill Osinski, 404-213-8808, billosinski@comcast.net