A chance meeting between a busy saleswoman and a young panhandler changes both their lives as she is healed from her childhood trauma when she helps him overcome his impoverished background and move out of the projects
Now That Should Be A Movie
In the vein of The Blind Side
It is like Instant Family meets Slumdog Millionaire
It follows sweet-natured but determined panhandler Maurice Mazyck
And busy sales executive Laura Schroff
As they help Maurice overcome his impoverished background and find healing for Laura’s childhood trauma
Problems arise when Maurice’s mother is arrested, and he ends up on the streets and Laura’s husband does not want her to have anything to do with him.
Together Maurice’s freedom of choice and Laura’s faithfulness to her promise will help set him on the right course in life
The idea came to me when after reading Laura’s book I saw that there were Christmas editions for young readers and realized it would make a great Christmas Season movie
My unique approach would be Maurice being helped out of his traumatic situation by a seemingly successful woman who is getting over her own childhood trauma
A set piece would be when Laura takes Maurice to visit her sister Annette’s family in the suburbs on Christmas Eve. Her niece comes home crying from a friend’s house. When she mentioned Santa Claus, her friends laughed at her, saying Santa Claus was not real. She asked her brother and sister if that was true, and they said yes. She began wailing. Later that evening she was dressed in wings and a halo to play an angel in the church pageant, but was still inconsolable, making the family run later. Maurice watches her throw a tantrum expecting that at any moment she would be shouted at or hit by someone. He thought, “She better quiet down before she gets a whipping.” He sees her father, Bruce, approach him and just knows she’s going to have a whipping. Instead, Bruce sits next to her, picks her up, puts his arms around her, and strokes her hair. Instead of punishing her, he was loving her. Maurice could not believe what he had just seen. He vows to be a father like that someday.
Target audiences would be women (30 to 80), African Americans, New Yorkers, college students, fans of The Blind Side, Instant Family and Lion, and people interested in social issues.
Audiences would want to see it due to its themes of hope, compassion, inspiration, motivation, healing from trauma, overcoming an impoverished background, and the message of the power of kindness.
Today’s book I would like to pitch for a movie is An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski, from Howard Books, A Division of Simon & Schuster.
When Maurice Mazyck was two years old his father’s neglect led to his malnourishment and his stomach had to be pumped after he dug through the trash and ate rat drops. He developed bed sores and was covered in red bedbug bites. Whenever he cried, his father would shout, “Shut up, Punk!” This was often followed by physical violence. Maurice remembers praying at age six that he would not die in his father’s “care.” Then his mother arrived on the scene, chasing another woman with a hammer, and “rescued” him from his father. He knows that at least she loved him.
There were not very many strong male influences in Maurice’s life. His father disappeared when he was six. Around the same time, his grandfather got into a fight with his grandmother. After she sliced him with a razor, Maurice never saw his grandfather again. His uncles mostly stayed in the orbit of his grandmother. They were mostly drug dealers and street-smart thugs who worked odd jobs. One was a Vietnam vet who would take off running, claiming the Viet Cong were chasing him. Another one would come back from jail spouting Muslim Brotherhood theology that made no sense to Maurice.
The glue of the family was Grandmother Rose, who had grown up in the backwoods of North Carolina. She wore prominent Timberland Boots. “Get out of the way, my Timberlands are coming through,” she would declare. She carried a sharp straight razor nicknamed Besty. Unlike everyone else, she did not take drugs. Maurice would wake up and see her staying up all night in a rocking chair. When he asked why, she replied, “Because I gotta watch out for my kids. I’m always watching over you.”
She had to since Maurice’s mother, Darcella, was a heroin addict. Darcella would often shoot up in front of her children. One time she had them stand up and shield her as she shot up on a subway. Maurice could tell the effect the drugs were having on his mother’s body. All her teeth had fallen out. He would see his mother detox from drugs only to become addicted again. But he could see that she was happy when she was high.
Happiness was something rare in the turbulent and violent environment in which Maurice grew up. To afford her fixes, his mother would lure Johns into her apartment. One of Maurice’s uncles would be waiting behind the door to bludgeon the John with a ten-pound dumbbell. Then they would rifle the man’s pockets for money. Sometimes the John was not knocked out, and Maurice would wake up to screaming and shouting. Darcella became an informant for the NYPD. After a drug kingpin had her legs and arms broken, Darcella told Maurice she had been in a car accident.
Maurice’s grandmother and mother did whatever they could to keep their family off the streets. Sometimes they lived with relatives, often with five to eleven people in one room. Often they were kicked out after disagreements. Once they lost the roof over their heads when one of Maurice’s aunts burned to death after lighting her bed on fire while smoking cocaine.
The family’s odyssey started at Marcy Projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, then they moved to the Van Dyke Houses, known for rampant crime and drugs, before moving into an Emergency Assistance Unit, where mice ran up the walls. Next was the Roberto Clemente shelter in the Bronx, which consisted of six hundred cots in the middle of a warehouse and two bathrooms. Then to public housing which pimps used for their business, condoms left over in the beds. Sometimes Darcella would start fights in the shelters and housing and the family would be kicked out.
They ended up in the Brooklyn Arms. With up to ten people crammed into a room, crumbling stairwells, and exposed wiring, conditions were notorious. “Unless God spares them, children are going to die there,” a New York senator declared. Two friends of Maurice did die when they fell down an elevator shaft while playing near a broken door. Maurice watched his mother become the queenpin of drugs at the Brooklyn Arms. Then the place caught fire. The four children who started it perished in the blaze. Maurice witnessed as the police arrested his uncle on drug charges as they came out of the burning welfare hotel.
After that, the family was separated. Grandma Rose moved to the Bryant uptown while Maurice and his mother and sisters moved into the Prince George on West 28th Street. One day Maurice’s mother disappeared for several weeks, and his siblings began fending for themselves. Then the police and Bureau of Child Welfare arrived at the door. His mother had been arrested and they were taking Maurice and his siblings. Maurice escaped and ran up Manhattan Island, passing landmarks like Macy’s, Rockefeller Center, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He ran up to 54th where he found his grandmother at the Bryant. Grandma Rose convinced the Bureau to let him stay with her.
Maurice learned how to survive on the streets. A pimp paid him to be his lookout for police while clients did their business in parked cars. He carried a small razor blade box cutter for protection. He would sit in the audience for the taping of the show Kate & Allie and then sneak backstage to eat food reserved for the crew. When his mother was released from prison, she tried to get him to panhandle for money that would go toward her fixes, but he refused to do her dirty work. She found younger children, whose parents were also addicts, to do it for her.
Maurice’s spot for panhandling became the corner of 56th and Broadway. One sunny September day he asked a passing white woman, “Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I’m hungry.”
This would be the inciting in Act I of a screenplay.
The lady’s name is Laura Schroff. She is a successful sales executive for USA Today. She lives in a studio apartment in Manhattan. She has a closet full of Albert Nipon, a silver LeBaron in the garage, a Ghurka attaché case, and all the marks of success in the 1980s. She is also busy. She micromanages the clock, makes appointments, and shows up 15 minutes ahead of time.
This is not the first time that Laura has passed a stranger asking for change. But something happens this time, a kind of “invisible thread of fate” as the Chinese proverb says, that causes Laura to stop and turn around. There’s something about Maurice. His eyes were bright and there was a gentleness about him
She offers to buy Maurice lunch at MacDonald’s. Maurice asks for a cheeseburger, fries, and a soda. Then she takes him for a walk in Central Park along the Great Lawn. After the Park, they go to a Haagen-Dazs, and Maurice has a chocolate cone. Then she takes him to an arcade where he plays Street Fighter, much to his delight.
During their walk, she asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. This is the first time that an adult has shown him any such interest. He wants to be a police officer to stop policemen from abusing the poor and defenseless.
Seeing the joy that their time together brought him, Laura promised to meet Maurice every Monday for a cheeseburger.
She keeps this promise for 150 Mondays.
Laura does not portray herself as a saint. She wonders if she is being exploitative or patronizing. Her boss tells her not to take Maurice to her apartment. People might misconstrue it and call Social Services. She has to tell the concierge at the studio apartments to treat Maurice just like he would treat any of her other friends. She admits giving Maurice her business card when they first meet but not a coin for the phone booth – it was 1986. He threw the card away on his way home. Later, Laura had to return to the corner of 56th Street to find him.
His relationship with Laura opens up a whole new world for Maurice. When Laura takes him to Hard Rock Café, he learns about structured meals. Before then he had always eaten what he could get when he could get it. When the waitress brings him orange juice, he thinks it has gone bad because he has never before seen pulp. He learns basic hygiene like blowing his nose. Laura gets him an alarm clock so he will not be late for school and introduces him to art and culture like La Bamba. She also quits smoking to be a good example to him. One day Maurice asks her to tell him sternly to never due drugs or alcohol. He has seen the negative effects of those substances on people’s health, but no adult had ever told him to not take them. Laura is the first adult who has looked out for his health that way.
When he visits Laura’s apartment, he is amazed to see a jug full of change that could buy dozens of hamburgers. He had no concept of savings. Laura believes he never took any change off the top. Maurice, who was used to adults expecting something from him, had Laura agree to trust him and shake hands to confirm the deal. It would be years later before Laura realized the significance the handshake had on boosting Maurice’s confidence.
During his visits to the apartment, he learns about desserts, recipes, and baking cookies. He asks Laura to show him how to set the table. He becomes friends with the doorman. He brings his family’s clothing and asks if she can wash them. Before he leaves, he asks if he can take leftovers and milk home.
Laura takes him to movies, ball games, a wrestling match in Madison Square Garden, and an up-close view of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from the windows of an apartment. They go to visit Laura’s sister Annette in the suburbs. Maurice could not believe that one family could own a front lawn. Or a washer and dryer just for them. Or that each child had their own room. Or a room just for watching TV. Or a dining room just for eating and talking. None of this culture shock kept him from enjoying his time playing with Laura’s nephews and nieces and riding bikes with them.
A literal set piece would be the dining table at Annette’s table around which everyone seta, ate, and talked. On their drive back to the city, Laura asks Maurice what he liked most about her sister’s house. The big table, he replied. He liked that everyone just sat and talked. He told Laura that one day he would have a table for his family to sit at and talk.
The friendship opens a whole new world for Laura as well.
She asks Maurice, “Does your mother know you panhandle?” He replied, “Nah, she don’t care.” Laura could not believe it. One day Maurice asks her to give him a meal in a brown paper bag. He insists upon it. Then he explains that at school whenever a student brought their lunch in a brown paper bag, that meant to the other children that someone loved them.
Then one day Maurice does not show up at 56th Street with a school note saying that he can go to the Mets game to which Laura invited him. She goes to the Bryant Hotel to meet him. The security guard keeps his eye on her the entire time. She meets Darcella, who is strung out on drugs. Then Grandma Rose, who has told Maurice to “stay away from that white b—ch..” The grandmother begrudgingly signed the paper. Maurice makes “a nice lady like” Laura promises that she will never go to a crime-riddled place like the Bryant again.
Then Laura is confronted by Maurice’s teacher, Miss Kim House, who has seen his living conditions. Miss House has a stern talk with her. “Children like Maurice are always disappointed in life…If you are going to be there for him, you have to really be there for him…You cannot just wake up one day and abandon this boy. Do not abandon this child.”
During this early ascending action of Act II, the audience learns about Laura’s family history.
Her great-grandmother was a war widow with seven children in Italy. She was declared by the government unfit to be a mother after one of her seven children fell into a well and drowned. This prompted her and her family’s immigration to America. Both Laura’s grandfather and great-grandfather were strict disciplinarians who did not know how to show affectionate acts of love. This cycle of abuse continued when Laura’s mother ran away at age nineteen to get married.
There can be flashbacks of Laura’s upbringing in Huntington Station, Long Island. It was filled with material blessings, stability, and routine. Her father was a World War II veteran, bricklayer, and bartender. He was outgoing and energetic. People would tell Laura that they wished their fathers were like the one she had.
But behind closed doors, he was a different man especially when he drank. He verbally and physically abused his wife and children. Once he brought home a box of ice cream sandwiches. Seven-year-old Laura declared in her excitement that she could eat every one of them. Something about this set off her father. He made her eat nearly all of them until she began vomiting. At one point Laura’s mother did leave her father but was told by her grandmother that her “place is with your husband.”
Laura’s ability to sleep suffered because of the abuse. This caused her grades to fail. When she was about sixteen, she finally stood up to her father, threatening to call the police if he hit her mother again. She married young to get out of the family, but the union was short-lived due to her husband’s infidelity. The divorce shattered her faith in people and love.
Then her mother died of cancer. Before she passed away, she told Laura that she “was strong and good, I’m so proud of you. I love you so much.” She believes that it was her mother, someway, somehow, looking down at her, that had steered her back to Maurice years later.
About a third of away through Act II there is a Christmas scene, which brings another culture shock.
The only Christmas that Maurice had ever celebrated had been a free meal at the Salvation Army. When he joined Laura, her sister Nancy, and brother Steve in singing songs one Christmas Eve, it was the first time he had celebrated Christmas with “family.” The hats and gloves they gave him were the first real gifts he had ever received. Other Christmases would be spent at Annette’s house.
One Christmas Eve one of Laura’s nieces comes home crying from a friend’s house. When she mentioned Santa Claus, her friends laughed at her, saying Santa Claus was not real. She asked her brother and sister if that was true, and they said yes. She begins wailing. She was inconsolable that evening when she was dressed in wings and a halo to play an angel in the church pageant and was making the family’s departure late. Maurice watches her throw a tantrum, expecting that at any moment she would be shouted at or hit by an adult. He thought, “She better quiet down before she gets a whipping.” He sees her father, Bruce, approach her and just knows she’s going to have a whipping. Instead, Bruce sits next to her, picks her up, puts his arms around her, and strokes her hair. Instead of punishing her, he was loving her. Maurice could not believe what he had just seen. He vows to be a father like that someday.
One Christmas Laura’s family gives Maurice a bike. At first, he does not want it, afraid it might be stolen when he takes it back to the welfare hotel. But they convince him to take it home with him.
At this point in the screenplay, there could be more flashbacks to Laura’s childhood and her memories of her brother Frank.
When Frank was five years old, he moved one of their father’s tape measures. It set their father off. He took a pair of scissors and, despite Frank’s tearful apologies, cut up his son’s favorite baseball glove. The father bought a replacement the next day, but the damage had already been done. Sometimes their father would just burst into anger, going into Frank’s bedroom door and screaming insults and profanity at his young son for what seemed like hours until he exhausted himself.
As Frank got older, he would have screaming fights with his father over nothing. He had been a good athlete as a kid, championing at baseball, wrestling, and bowling. Shiny trophies with sculptured figures atop filled his room. Then one night their father came home in a rage and stormed into Frank’s room twisted off the figures, smashed and destroyed all the trophies, leaving Frank to sleep among his broken dream. Frank developed a stutter, dropped out of high school, and joined the Navy. He started drinking and using drugs. He neglected self-care and died at a young age. Laura finds healing in helping Maurice overcome his situation after she could not help her brother. The point is that the human longing for love and appreciation crosses all socioeconomic, age, time, gender, and racial barriers.
Between the middle and end of Act II, there are rising stakes, tension, and conflict as cultural barriers that keep Laura from understanding the choices Maurice has to make to survive look like ingratitude to her. They start meeting on Saturday afternoons. Then toward midway of ACT II Maurice’s mother is sent to Riker’s Island for selling drugs. He had told Laura that his mother was a stay-at-home mom, an idea he got from TV commercials. Laura was the first person he felt he could turn to when he had a problem. Laura still took him to a wrestling event in Madison Square Garden.
Maurice’s mother came out of jail clean, but it only took a few weeks for her to be hooked again. Then Laura is introduced to a boyfriend, named Michael. Laura and Maurice begin missing dates. Then Michael asks her to move out to his place in the suburbs. Now Laura meets Maurice every other Monday. Maurice is excited for her, saying that it is her time now. But still the words of Miss House echo in Laura’s mind. Do Not Abandon This Child.
Maurice’s family gets Section 8 housing. Then his bike is stolen. He tells Laura he was jumped by a gang. He does not want to tell Laura that he allowed someone to borrow it and they had taken off with it after giving him a fake ID. Then Darcella is arrested again for selling drugs. A woman tried to rob her at the Port Authority, and she beat her bloody. “That’s malice with intent to harm,” the court declared. The new housing was gone.
Then Laura and Maurice begin meeting each other only three Mondays a month, Then two Mondays. Then Michael will not let Maurice visit for Christmas. Maurice understands. Then Laura and Michael are married. Maurice was not in attendance at the wedding. The words echo in Laura’s conscience. Do Not Abandon This Child.
Then there is a Montage. Maurice cannot take the craziness of living in a room with fifteen people anymore. He goes out onto the streets. He panhandles enough money for a ticket to a theater off Time Square that shows Kung Fu movies. He also sleeps in that theater and another, seeing the comedy Coming to America three hundred times. He sneaks into the YMCA on West 59th Street, stealing a shower. He is sent to a school with children with emotional and mental problems. He leaves. At age sixteen he is done with school. He refuses to become a drug dealer. Instead, he finds work as a messenger boy. He buys knockoff jeans in Chinatown and sells them uptown. He checks into Covenant House, a place for wayward and runaway youth. He walks into the Bureau of Child Welfare. Instead of sending him to a group home, they return him to live with his grandmother.
Meanwhile Laura and Michael fighting. Michael does not want children, either natural or “adopted” like Maurice. He is stubborn and argumentative. Then Maurice, now nineteen, begins dating a girl named. Meka. Laura warns him to be careful. He’s in no position to have children.
Then Maurice a first in his family history buys a two-bedroom apartment on Hillside Avenue. His sisters and nieces move in. Then one of the nieces starts a fire that guts the place Homeless again. Soon after he fathers a son with Meka. Then he finds out that Grandma Rose, the bedrock of the family whom he has always respected for being clean, has been doing drugs. She dies shortly thereafter.
Sometime after his son’s fourth birthday, Maurice meets with Laura and asks for 300 dollars to buy a winter coat for Meka. Even though Laura has spent thousands on him, this is the first time he has asked for any money. Laura gives him two hundred dollars and loans the other hundred.
Then he disappears. For two years.
End of ACT II
ACT III begins with Laura finding out that Maurice and Meka split after they had had a second son. That is why Maurice needed the 300 dollars and disappeared. Meanwhile, her marriage with Michael disintegrates.
Maurice has gone with some friends to North Carolina. He would be selling designer and knock clothing there and had set up a pipeline to send money home. Even though he was not involved with their business, the people he was traveling with were drug dealers.
It is here that Maurice is to be the hero of his story as he learns that no matter his circumstances, he still has the freedom to choose. The drug dealers begin getting in trouble with the locals, fighting over girls. Maurice attends a local church. After one sermon the pastor approaches him, tells him that trouble is brewing, and he needs to leave town. Maurice does not listen.
The climactic scene comes when the local drug dealers open fire on the trailer house in which Maurice is staying. The owner of the trailer house tosses a gun toward him. But instead of picking it up like his father or uncles would have, he realizes that that is not him. He’s not a victim. He’s a survivor.
Three and a half years after disappearing, he recontacts Laura. He obtained his GED and started a construction company. While attending Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn he learned there were more black men in prison than in college. He now works with a men’s program at the college and with the New York Police Department with a prison-to-college pipeline. He married Meka and they are raising seven children. And he has a big dining table around which they sit, eat, and talk.
An Invisible Thread is a powerful story of how friendship, grace, love, and appreciation can cross social, racial, and economic lines. There is the theme of hope as the chains of generational trauma and abuse are broken. There is the theme of freedom of choice and attitude as Laura and Maurice choose to rise above their pasts and circumstances rather than heed the siren call of intellectuals to blame everything on “systemic issues” and play the victim card. It is a gentle reminder that in an age where everyone is shouting at others about lofty ideas like “The Right Side of History,” “Black Lives Matter,” Blue Lives Matter,” or “Make America Great Again,” and in which political arguments for “women’s health” suggest that young black men like Maurice are better off dead, that sometimes the greatest impact you can have on society is simply to be there for someone, one private citizen to another private citizen. And there is the True Meaning of Christmas as friendship is shown to be the greatest gift.
All this and more would make Laura’s book a great Holiday Season movie release. Due to the success of The Blind Side, The Pursuit of Happyness, Instant Family, Lion, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Florida Project, and Slumdog Millionaire, it’s obvious that there’s an audience for stories of individuals changing the world bit by bit. Even though the book by Laura, a film adaptation could subvert the “white savior” genera by being told from Maurice’s perspective. Laura only becomes a prominent figure at the end of Act I and someone we learn more about throughout Act II. Maurice’s impoverished intercity world starts off as the norm while suburban and high-rise stability are shown as being the anomaly. This would make it an entertaining reminder that friendships can transcend racial, class, socioeconomic, and other lines with which demagogues seek to divide our society.
You can follow Maurice and Laura’s continued journeys and impact at LauraSchroff.com.
Because of its timeless and inspiring message of friendship bridging social gaps, I highly recommend that An Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff Should Be A Christmas Season Move Release.
