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Screenplay goes beyond black and white

As a boy, he faced a conflict involving ethics and race. As a young man, he hopes to reflect those issues on film.

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE
Published June 19, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - The 1996 St. Petersburg disturbances made international news, stunned a laid-back city and provoked a spate of soul searching among well-meaning residents. But for a 12-year-old boy, the clashes that erupted after the police shooting of a black man would become seared in his psyche.

Nine years later, Walter Clark continues to examine the troubling moral questions of race, loyalty and friendship that first jolted him that October. Now 21 and a senior in the film department at the University of Central Florida, Clark has coalesced his questioning into a screenplay he will produce and direct as a thesis project this year.

The result is Beyond the Blacktop, which he describes as a drama about a young man forced to choose between helping a friend "and fulfilling his social duty of loyalty to his race."

"I have always, in school and early on in my neighborhood, had friends of different races and I always was well liked by everyone, regardless of race," said Clark, who is African-American.

An incident in the aftermath of the disturbances was the first time he was confronted with "this quasi-camaraderie within the black community," he said, "that when a situation arises that we all should disregard ethics and just stick together because we are all the same race. Something about that philosophy, at 12 years old, didn't sit right with me."

Though embellished for dramatic purposes, his screenplay was inspired by actual experience, Clark said during an interview at his parents' Greater Pinellas Point home. He was a seventh-grader in the magnet program at Bay Point Middle School that Oct. 24, when helicopters droned overhead and flames rose above what is now called the Midtown area.

TyRon Lewis, 18, had been shot by police. The unrest that followed would lead to a declaration of a state of emergency, Pinellas sheriff's deputies patrolling the streets and National Guardsmen on standby near Tropicana Field.

Clark vividly remembers the day after Lewis was shot. It was surreal. Many white students did not attend school. Their parents thought it was too dangerous to drive into the city's southern neighborhoods, he said. When classes ended that day, he rode his bicycle to a service station at 62nd Avenue S and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street.

"I had come there to maybe get snacks or something and I saw these older guys ... and they were chasing a white man," he recalled.

"They weren't, like, running after him. They were just, like, walking behind him, yelling at him, harassing him, cursing at him. Once they got to the door, they stopped and they saw me and they told me, "Whenever you see a cracker, curse his a- out.' That's something that always stayed with me. Something about that struck me as wrong."

But the intimidated 12-year-old simply nodded and walked away. Today Clark describes the incident as a seminal moment in his life, one he has reprised in a fashion for his screenplay.

Like Clark, Marcus, his main character, is black. Marcus' close friend, Ryan, is white. They are basketball buddies. The three remaining characters are black, one of whom is chased by police and shot.

Riots erupt, leading to tension at school between white and black students. Marcus, who Clark acknowledged is loosely modeled after himself, is forced into a complicated role. He must stand up for himself against a prejudiced white student, and though he doesn't condone the behavior of rioters, must try to explain their difficult lives. He also must save Ryan from being shot by a young black man - his cousin.

On a certain level, Clark said, the screenplay mirrors a few of his less dramatic experiences growing up in St. Petersburg. As he focused on his education, Clark said, some blacks accused him of "acting white." And some whites, a few of them teachers, expected less of him because of his color.

"There's this misconception that ignorance or stupidity is linked to being black, while eloquence and education are equated to being white," he said, adding that he doesn't know whom to blame for such stereotypes.

The college student, who has met Spike Lee and occasionally exchanges e-mails with the director, is working on the final draft of his script. He is trying to raise $20,000 to produce and direct the 10-minute film that will be made by his fledgling company, Ampersand Productions Inc. He said it will be cheaper to shoot near his Orlando campus but is considering St. Petersburg.

His ambition had been to become an architect, but that changed when he was 15 and attending the Center for Advanced Technologies at Lakewood High School.

"There was an English class that I had in my sophomore year, and a friend of mine - he's my roommate now - had a video camera," he said.

The two decided to use the camera to earn extra credit in the class.

"The experience was so captivating for me that I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker. The first thing I started doing was research how to write a screenplay on the Internet."

He completed his first screenplay at 15.

"It was terrible, of course," he said.

His parents, Anderson and Mildred Clark, support his ambitions.

The St. Petersburg native graduated from Lakewood High's CAT program in 2002 and was one of 30 students accepted to the UCF film program. He hopes to go to New York University for graduate school.

[Last modified June 19, 2005, 00:38:17]