NARRATIVE - Black Ice Cometh

Narrative Feature

Title: Black Ice Cometh

Page Count: 123 pages

Project Status: In Development

Logline 

In order to bury his personal demons, a young, black advertising wiz living with bipolar disorder participates in the gentrification of the poor Detroit neighborhood he grew up in. The only person who can stop him is the vivid hallucination of his Blaxploitation-style alter ego.

Synopsis

Kourtney’s bipolar disorder went undiagnosed in his youth. For better or worse, he channeled his manic tendencies into a passion for Blaxploitation films, which manifested as Black Ice—an alter ego/imaginary friend who helped Kourtney stand up for himself.

Twenty years later, Kourtney is the lone black person in an ad agency. He has worked hard to suppress Black Ice and follow his no-nonsense Mother’s advice to Uncle-Tom his way through the agency ranks so he can get his piece of the pie someday. But a conglomerate sees Kourtney’s talent and offers him a ton of money to create an ad campaign for a national urban-revitalization effort of low-income neighborhoods. Kourtney knows that’s code for gentrification, but he jumps at the chance to prove Mom wrong and get his piece without years of kowtowing. And then Black Ice resurfaces, not to help Kourtney, but to stop him from helping “The Man” displace entire communities.

In the interest of protecting his career trajectory, as well as his mental health, Kourtney tries ignoring the part of him that knows Black Ice is right, but he can’t do it any longer when the revitalization effort targets the Detroit neighborhood Kourtney grew up in. He teams up with a local arts collective to revitalize the community on their terms, but when that isn’t enough, he has no choice but to let Black Ice take over and fight gentrification with fire…

Additional Project Information

We’ve soft-pitched the project to industry colleagues here and there and received good feedback, but this has never been officially submitted/pitched.

In the end, Kourtney fights for what is right, but, like Lakeith Stanfield’s character in Sorry to Bother You, Kourtney is sometimes hard to root for because he puts his own interest above that of his community. He is relatable throughout though because he does what Black men in America have always had to do: strive in silence in order to survive.

The topic of Black mental health has been dramatized more and more in recent years, but those stories are too often grounded in trauma—namely police brutality—as if mental-health disorders in the community only exist because of negative past experiences. But like The Last Black Man in San Francisco, This Is Us, Dave, and Euphoria, Black Ice Cometh would explore the reality that people sometimes Black people simply have mental health conditions, which their community has historically stigmatized. Kourtney’s struggle pushes the boundaries of this discussion to a breaking point, and then to an inevitable catharsis.

Team

Written by: Jake Hart & Calvin O'Neal, Story by Calvin O'Neal

Seeking

We want to find a producing partner/production company who can help us get the script into its best possible shape so that we can attach actors and/or a director whose involvement will get this thing made.

Contact

Jake Hart

jakevhart@gmail.com