Treatment for Brothers and Keepers

A childhood friend first brought the nonfiction novel Brothers and Keepers to my attention three years ago. She knew that I had graduated from the same high school around the same time as some of the characters in Mr. Wideman’s book. At the time I was in film school and very busy on other projects, but as soon as I started reading Brothers and Keepers the proverbial saying “I couldn’t put the book down” came to play. I was reading page after page of stories about people I went to Westinghouse High School with in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It seemed like yesterday when I was walking the halls at my high school with these people. Michael Dukes, one of the main characters in the book, was a good friend of mine who was in my homeroom all the way through high school. Another character was Cicil Rise who was in most of my classes also. While talking with the author when writing the second draft of the script, he reminded me of the fact of what I want most to tell in the story. That central point is what I hope to explain in this treatment.

Having been there, I know exactly what Robby, Cicil and Mike were going through. If my mother hadn’t made me leave Pittsburgh the day after I graduated from high school and gone to Los Angeles to live with my sister, quite possibly I could have been with them on the night the murder went down. My thoughts on the book may be different from other people, but the general current running through the book seems to be how these black men got caught in a downward spiral they couldn’t control. The only reason I bring up race is because being a black man; I knew it could have happened to me too. If you’re a black man growing up in any major American city you have a price to pay.

John Edgar Wideman was fortunate, not lucky, that his talent was recognized at an early age, having gotten a basketball scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania in his last year of high school. After leaving U of P, his career started to blossom: a Rhodes Scholarship and teaching post at the University of Wyoming, the 1984 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction, and currently a Professorship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and along the way he found time to write four highly acclaimed novels. While all of this was going on, there were several personal tragedies occurring in Mr. Wideman’s life, one of them being what his brother was going through on the tough streets of Pittsburgh.

Robby wasn’t fortunate enough to escape Pittsburgh like his brother. Robby Wideman is a decent human being just like we all want to be. But he got desperate, and along with his buddies Mike and Cicil, invested their life’s earnings into a drug deal that went bad. So to make quick money they did “Murphy’s,” which means to talk people into purchasing items that are either third rate or simply don’t exist. For these buddies, those items were televisions. A deal was set up between Robby and a man named Stavros to purchase the TVs. The night the deal went down there was a major mess-up and Stavros was accidentally killed.

That is what the script is about. It’s a period piece that starts in the present but goes back and forth between the present and the middle ‘70s, when the murders happened. It starts with a good friend of Robby’s dying and leads up to them pulling the robbery and Stavros being killed, then the subsequent cross-country chase and tension-filled climax when Robby is finally arrested in Utah. Robby Wideman is now serving a life sentence in Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh and he wasn’t even the trigger man. He will be in prison for the rest of his natural life. While in prison he has already earned a bachelor’s degree.

I have tried to stay as close to the original text of Mr. Wideman’s novel as I could. Stavros wasn’t supposed to die in the robbery. In the book John Wideman says Robby told him how they had the guns just to scare Stavros. They never meant for a man to die that night. Michael the trigger man was nervous and scared.

One of the main things I think is missing in this draft of the script is showing Robby’s human and kind side that only his friends and family knew. In the book John so beautifully expresses Robby’s human side. I feel honored because in talking with Mr. Wideman he tells me how he had the same problem but didn’t work it out until the fourth draft of the novel. I am working with Mr. Wideman on that exact point now, and we will keep working on it until John and myself feel it is right. Robby Wideman has paid his debt to society.

Hassan Jamal

WGA Registered