I don’t know about you, but I really get fed up with historical dramas that steer waaaay off the territory of what really happened. It had heroes and villains, and because I know someone out there will ask, yes, the story can be told with sympathetic treatment to both Christians and Muslims. The Ethiopian-Adal War was a bitter conflict that made a huge impact on the country. It would be called The Lion’s Realm, and if miracles happened and all went well, it would run for multiple seasons.įor a taste of how the show might start, scroll down below, and you’ll see the opening three pages of the draft pilot script.Īs we got to start somewhere, let’s start with an era where we have a reasonable degree of great source material to work from.
But it’ll be less painful than a booster shot, and before we discuss that, let me try to dazzle you with the grand vision… You can tell I’m leading you towards crowdfunding, can’t you? Yeah, yeah, I know. Meh.Īs an experiment, let’s try the “Holy shit! This is so cool, yes, Jeff, you should really do this, and also if we polish your head, we can light the way to the test screening!” The alternative is to send off a pilot script like a note in a bottle. We’re fortunately living in a time when it’s still hard as hell to get anything produced, sure, but if you make something that excites a lot of other people-that catches fire-maybe, just maybe, the gods in Los Angeles or at Netflix or Prime Video or whoever will say, “Yes, we will take a chance on you.” You write a film script because you want to see that story up on a screen or on television. You write the novels you wish you could read. If you want to create, you’re burning to create.
REALMS DEEP SERIES
Jada Pinkett Smith has brought out a doc series on Angola’s Njinga while The Woman King stars Viola Davis.
You got stories galore from the real continent.”Īnd now Hollywood and the streaming networks seemed to have finally “discovered Africa.” Okay, fine. And sure, we were happy for it-yea, go Marvel-but both of us thought, “You know… you don’t have to create a made-up African country. When Black Panther hit theaters years ago, we were busy with film shoots, trying to make my book Prevail into a documentary film (which kept getting stalled for different reasons, c'est la vie ). It’s been on my mind and the mind of my occasional business partner down in California for quite a while now.
REALMS DEEP TV
What a hell of a TV series this could make. But…wow.Īnd yes, that’s besides all the excitement and tragedy of the different wars, the grandeur of building castles, the interaction of the various ethnic groups, which no, was not at all how the propagandists say it was, and-and. You had an emperor who once herded a whole troop of monkeys into Gondar. You had a ras almost shot by a sniper from a window, only the guy hit the dwarf fanning him (and yes, I know it’s “Little People” now, but the poor servant is described as a dwarf in the source texts). You had assassinations with muskets and swords. Ethiopia…? Where do you want to start? When priests came to lecture Amda Seyon on who he slept with, he got so pissed off, he had them flogged-and then he had them flogged the next day. Because holy crap! Ethiopian history is crazy-busy with drama. I literally have small towers of bought and borrowed source texts surrounding my desk at the moment as I type this.Īnd hey, I am having a ball.
Because people deserve real history and not farcical nonsense designed to whip them into a fury at this ethnic group or that one. “Menelik wasn’t at Adwa, he was in a cave!” Or “Ancient Axum gave Egypt and Mesopotamia their cultures! And it invented microwave popcorn and Brazilian waxes!”
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