On Tuesday morning, just before the 2010 Academy Award nominations were announced, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher couldn’t get his TV to work. He scrambled to his computer and searched for the online broadcast of the nominations, his ears perking up for his name to be called.
He found a feed and waited. “After the first couple of names were mentioned, I somehow didn’t think mine would be,” Fletcher said.
Seconds later, Fletcher’s name flashed across the screen. He was stunned. He was nominated for best adapted screenplay for “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” the story of a semi-literate teen girl from Harlem in 1987 that has captivated audiences since the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Precious is physically and sexually abused from infancy by her mother and stepfather. After Precious becomes pregnant again, she’s forced to leave school, her mother demanding she go on welfare.
But Precious resists. She wants a better life, one filled with education and love. With the help of a devoted teacher at an alternative school and a caring social worker, she weaves a new life from the tatters of her previous one.
The film has been nominated for best picture. Gabourey Sidibe is a best-actress nominee, Mo’Nique, best supporting actress, and Lee Daniels, best director.
Fletcher finds much common ground with “Precious.” His struggle to enter the entertainment industry resembles her humble beginnings. And through dedication, they both found their true calling. “Precious” was the first screenplay Fletcher had adapted, a job he given to him by Daniels after viewing his mid-’90s 23-minute short film “Magic Markers.”
“I really didn’t believe him,” Fletcher said. “I had heard ‘no’ so many times over the years that I thought even if he meant it, he said it too quickly.”
Fletcher said he fell in love with “Precious” from page one.
“It was such a complete and fulfilling experience. I was just cast under its spell.”
Fletcher was drawn to “Precious” because the story touches on some many common threads that connect all people. The marketing slogan used to promote the film, “We Are All Precious,” was an apropos way for the audience to identify with a girl whose life, from the outside, seems unremarkable. It’s the commonalities, the dreams, the ambition and the hardships that kept the audience — and Fletcher — clinging to “Precious.”
“I love stories that have such specific characters and specific places, yet are about things that are so universal,” he said.
Fletcher loves Precious — the character and the film — because he understands being invisible, an overarching theme in the story. Before “Precious,” his career was largely off the radar in the entertainment world. “I was searching for my voice and my place in the film industry,” he said. “In large part, she reminds me of myself.”
House Calls Via TV and Streamers: A Rundown of The Season’s Doctor Dramas
No matter your ailment, there are plenty of TV doctors waiting to treat you right now on a selection of channels and streamers.
Whether it's Noah Wyle putting on his stethoscope for the first time since "ER," Morris Chestnut graduating to head doctor, Molly Parker making her debut in scrubs or Joshua Jackson trading death for life on a luxury cruise, new American hospital dramas have something for everyone.
There's also an outsider trying to make a difference in "Berlin ER," as Haley Louise Jones plays the new boss of a struggling German hospital's emergency department. The show's doors slide open to patients Wednesday on Apple TV+.
These shows all contain the DNA of classic hospital dramas โ and this guide will help you get the TV treatment you need.
"Berlin ER"
Dr. Suzanna "Zanna" Parker has been sent to run the Krank, which is only just being held together by hardened โ and authority-resistant โ medical staff and supplies from a sex shop. The result is an unflinching drama set in an underfunded, underappreciated and understaffed emergency department, where the staff is as traumatized as the patients, but hide it much better.
From former real-life ER doc Samuel Jefferson and also starring Slavko Popadiฤ, ลafak ลengรผl, Aram Tafreshian and Samirah Breuer, the German-language show is not for the faint of heart.
Jones says she eventually got used to the blood and gore on the set.
"It's gruesome in the beginning, highly unnerving. And then at some point, it's just the most normal thing in the world," she explains. "That's flesh. That's the rest of someone's leg, you know, let's just move on and have coffee or whatever."
As it's set in the German clubbing capital, the whole city... Read More