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Akeelah And The Bee Kicks Off 15th Annual Philadelphia Film Fest By Rich Drees
March 31, 2006- The Philadelphia Film Festival kicked off last night with its Opening Night film Akeelah And The Bee, with writer/director Doug Atchison and star/producer Laurence Fishburne in attendance.
Akeelah, which opens nationwide on April 28, tells the story of an 11-year old girl (Keke Palmer) from South Central Los Angeles who discovers that she has a natural ability for spelling. At the encouragement of her principal (Curtis Armstrong), Akeelah enters the school’s spelling bee and wins easily. She begins to work with college professor Dr. Larabee (Fishburne) in preparation for the Regional and State competitions. However, the harder Akeelah studies the more she finds herself distanced from her family and friends who don’t seem to understand why she wants to compete in something like a spelling bee. The lack of support only fires Akeelah’s insecurities, but Dr. Larabee may be too concerned with his own personal demons to be able to help Akeelah overcome hers.
For Atchison, the journey to bring the story to the screen started more than a decade ago.
“It’s 1994 and I am watching a basketball when a commercial comes on,” Atchison relates to the crowd at Philadelphia's Prince Music Theatre following the screening. “I do what I do when a commercial comes on, I switch to ESPN. There were some kids spelling words at a mic and I see for the first time the National Spelling Bee. And it was more exciting than the basketball came I was watching. I was sucked into it, I was riveted by it, I was rooting for kids. I thought that this would be a great competition to center a movie on. But as I learned more about the typical kids who are in the spelling bees, I didn’t think that they were the ones I wanted to tell the story about.”
Atchison finally drew inspiration from the school children he saw while attending UCLA’s film school in South Central Los Angeles. But it would take Atchison several years before he would find himself ready to put the story down on paper.
“This little girl came into my head and every year that I would turn on the spelling bee, she’d be there,” Atchison states. “Just like Akeelah needs to build up the courage to go do the bee, I needed the courage to write the story. Then in 1999, some good friends pushed me, saying ‘Write that spelling bee story you’re always talking about.’”
Although Atchison’s screenplay won the Nichols Fellowship the following year, getting the script filmed would be another journey, but one he would not take alone.
“I was sent the script about four years ago,“ Fishburne says. “I read it and I fell in love with it. I was heartbroken after I turned the last page because I knew that it would be a struggle to get the financing to make this movie because of the material. I committed myself to being involved at whatever level I needed to be involved in.”
“Hollywood has every excuse in the world not to make a movie,” Atchison adds, chuckling. “We had a goal with this movie. I kept telling everyone, over and over again ‘We’re going to make ourselves a sports movie. We’re going to make ourselves a movie like Rocky and we’re going to make it with a character that nobody’s seen before.’”
“I patterned this movie after a classic, underdog structure that we’ve seen time and time again,” Atchison elaborates. “What makes it revolutionary is who it’s about. That’s why it was so hard to get made. This is the first theatrical release from a major studio that I know of that features an African American little girl in every single scene of the film but one. There are little girls who I tutor who go to the movies and see E. T. show up in a little white boy’s closet or the guy that goes to Hogwarts is a white boy. How often do we see a little black girl? We don’t, until now.”
“I’m a father,” Fishburne says. “I have a daughter and she’s fourteen. I dedicated my performance to her because that’s what this one’s about, it’s for the girls.”
“We showed this movie to a bunch of kids in south LA who go to a school like Akeelah’s school,” Atchison adds. “Afterwards we asked them how it made them feel and a 12-year old girl who looked just like Akeelah raised her hand and said ‘This movie makes me feel that I can do anything I decide I want to do.’”
Look for more FilmBuffOnLine coverage of the 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival over the next 10 days. |
