Surprise Ending to a Real-Life Drama

The room bristled with suspense and anxiety as the judge stepped to the microphone to announce the winner for the most original story line.

“Wow!” Eduardo Rivera mouthed silently as his name was pronounced. “Wow! Wow!” he then said aloud, genuinely surprised at the honor won by his post-World War III fantasy flick idea.

No, it wasn’t another Hollywood awards ceremony. Not yet. These were the finalists in an essay contest that encouraged inner-city teenagers to dream up plots for the silver screen.

Nearly 1,000 high school students from the Los Angeles Unified School District submitted their ideas for feature films in one-page treatments.

The contest was the brainchild of Brad Johnson, a fledgling film producer and part owner of Georgia, a soul food restaurant on Melrose Avenue.

Disappointed at the dearth of minority nominees for this year’s Oscars, Johnson organized the event to give a voice to a demographic group often ignored or typecast by Hollywood--youth from the urban core.

“This was an idea born out of frustration,” he said. “We vicariously live through the images we see on film. When you don’t have images that reflect people that look like you, you feel left out--kids especially.”

He enlisted the help of a public relations firm to contact teachers and read through the reams of essays sent in reply. He picked eight finalists, whose essays were graded by a panel of nine judges from various media and entertainment companies.

Rivera, 18, will be the guest of honor at the 17th annual Black Oscar Nominees Dinner at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills on Sunday. The black-tie gala is sponsored by the Friends of the Black Oscar Nominees, a Virginia-based group that supports African Americans in the film industry.

In preparation for the affair, he will receive all the pampering of a real-life movie star, including a haircut, a tailor-made suit and a ride to the dinner in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

Four of the finalists, as well as Rivera, hail from Lincoln High School, where Dan Brewer assigned the essay to 35 students in his class on contemporary American literature and composition.

“They all worked hard; they all wanted this,” said Brewer, whose Lincoln Heights school has a student body that is 60% Latino and 35% Asian. The teacher said he decided to participate in the contest because he considered it much more creative than other essay competitions whose topics are irrelevant to his students’ lives.

“I liked the fact that they were going to be part of what Los Angeles has been built on--the Hollywood industry--but which has largely overlooked them.”

The finalists’ story concepts ranged from intensely personal docudramas to sci-fi features.

Edgar Garcia’s movie would be a science fiction thriller about a boy who enters a magical world to find the source of a healing water that will cure his dying grandfather.

It’s not the first time Garcia, a junior at Lincoln High, has been recognized for his writing.

When he was a 13-year-old student taking English as a second language at Nightingale Junior High School, he won a trip to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama for a tale he penned about a NASA agent--a boy--sent on a mission to find life on other planets.

“I was a kid once, and I liked fantasy and fiction. It made me feel like I was in another world,” said Garcia, who grew up shuttling between Guadalajara, Mexico, where his mother taught school, and Los Angeles, where his father worked in a factory.

Susan Oh, a junior at Cleveland High School in Reseda, said she would produce a movie based on the life of her grandfather, a Christian pastor in Korea who was tortured for his faith during the Japanese annexation.

“My whole purpose for this essay was not to meet movie stars, but to address intolerance,” said Oh, who came to Los Angeles from South Korea in 1992.

She admits it may be difficult to find an American actor to play a Korean minister. “If not, Mel Gibson would be fine,” she joked.