A Screenwriter Meets a Queen by Clare Sera

A Screenwriter Meets a Queen by Clare Sera

Thank you Brother Mockingbird Publishing for letting us share some stories!

The following is an excerpt from Clare Sera’s story. If you’d like to read the rest (how could you not?) purchase your copy of The Pulpwood Queens Celebrate Twenty Years.

“You want to read a book?”

“Me? Always.”

“It’s about a ladies club.”

“Okay. I like ladies.”

“They wear leopard print and tiaras.”

“Oh.”

“They like big hair. In fact they have a Great Big Ball of Hair Ball every year. Get it?”

“Yeah. I get it. But... I’m not sure it’s my...”

“It’s a book club.And they drink.”

“I’m in!”

I was given the book The Pulpwood Queens’ Tiara Wearing, Book Sharing Guide to Life by a Hollywood producer to “see if there was a movie in it.” Oh, laugh emoji, was there a movie in it?!

There are five hundred movies in it, one for each nutty book club and crazy character, and that is part of the dynasty that is Kathy L. Murphy.

When a screenwriter is given a book to see if she thinks it could make a good movie, the first thing on the list is, “is this story visual?” Um, check. Next is, “does it have heart?” Oh boy does it.

And the million dollar question, “Is the main character compelling?”

I could write this whole essay on how compelling Kathy is, was and will always be. I certainly wrote a movie based on it. It sits on an executive’s desk at Dreamworks/Amblin and if you’re the praying type, pray they finally decide to make it! The hardest thing about turning Kathy’s life story into a film was deciding what to leave out. The woman is a mother of two, a hairdresser, a bookseller, a fine artist, an entrepreneur, an involved townsperson, a shoulder to cry on, a dreamer of big haired dreams. And not just for herself. She dreams other people’s dreams alongside them.

That’s what makes her tiara shine.

I arrived at Girlfriend Weekend 2015 with a pen and a pad, ready to take notes on this woman and the weird and wonderful world she had created for herself. Dreamworks had purchased the right to make this movie and I was tasked with writing it. I was definitely going to take this job seriously. Only... you can’t take anything too seriously when you’re around a couple hundred leopard-print wearing, book-sharing, margarita-mixing, utterly fantastic women (and a few good men, it should be noted). However, I most certainly took notes as both authors and book club members would sidle up to me and share the most delicious bits and pieces of their lives with Kathy.

“Did you know Kathy did Joan River’s hair?”

“Kathy loves to roller skate, you should put that in the movie.”

“Kathy got us all to stay at a haunted hotel one time. We were so nervous, we all went to our rooms and then one of the women screamed and we came running and screaming and she cried, ‘That is the dirtiest commode I have ever seen.’”

“Kathy wanted us to go read books at nursing homes, but I couldn’t speak loud enough.”

“I believe God smote Jefferson, Texas, because it wronged her and it is still trying to recover.”

“Did you know I went through college on a rodeo scholarship?”

It was love at first chinwag. These women were unabashed Kathy fans, unabashed devourers of books, and just plain unabashed. They ranged from as young as twenty to as spry as “eighty something, honey.” They arrived in their tiaras; some were diamond, some were twine and forest twigs, and some were towering representations of the id. And these tiaras stayed on all weekend long. I loved that. They were queens and this was their kingdom.