Petition asks Stacy Haiduk to read prison screenplay

More than 2000 women sign petition demanding a firm commitment from  Stacy Haiduk (film producer) to read screenplay addressing Texas judicial system

Stacy Haiduk – Talent Agents
– Actress, Producer – The Young and the Restless (1973), Prison Break (2005), Steel and Lace (1991), Superboy (1988) – Mavrick Artists Agency, Bobby Moses –

Dumbass,

Stacy Haiduk & Adam Sandler’s film company targeted by Texas petition

Will Hollywood just rollover and let prisoner’s suffer?

EXCLUSIVE

More than 2000 women have signed an open letter to Adam Sandler calling on Stacy Haiduk and Hollywood to take “movie action” to tackle injustice against men and women in the wake of revelations that Texas has more prisoners incarcerated than the Soviet Union’s gulag system had. Texas currently has over 290,000 inmates housed at 580 facilities.

The signatories, including state senators, professors of criminal justice, social workers, family, and inmates, call for a “firm commitment” to tackle the unjust prisons in Texas. The petition has also been signed by Beto O’Rourke, and Matthew McConaughey. These two signatories might face each other in the 2022 Texas governors election. Both have expressed interest in the job.  The petitions arrived for Stacy Haiduk at Mavrick Artists Agency, Bobby Moses last week.

In the open letter to Stacy Haiduk, the 2080 women write that they are “heartbroken for first-time drug offenders many times addicts who have received extremely harsh sentences in Texas when rehabilitation has proven a cheaper and more effective solution.”  The petition goes on to say their family and friends are often heartbroken for and looking for redemption and rehabilitation for the victimless drug crimes.”

The signatories, including attorneys, professors, politicians, family members, and inmates, call on Stacy Haiduk for a ‘firm film commitment’ to tackle the issue of operating the Texas prison system for profit.

The petition came to light when women discovered the screenplay, a copy which was dontated to all 580 of the state’s prison and jail libraries. The existence of the petition surfaced on International Women’s Day. Women in Texas face extreme prejudice in Texas and often receive extremely harsh penalties for even a small amount of drugs, including marijuana. Marijuana is legal now in 21 states.

Inside prisons, the women are faced with such horrendous conditions… the petition demands that “filmmakers begin to take the issue seriously.”  Also, the petition reminds that “even here in the USA in the 21st century citizens are not safe from government oppression.”

Actress, Producer, Stacy Haiduk, has not responded to the petition. Nor has Mavrick Artists Agency, Bobby Moses responded with a comment.

Alan Nafzger/caption]

The screenplay “Dumbass” was penned by writer and retired professor of political science Alan Nafzger.

The premise of the story is that, “Adam Sandler writes letters and saves numerous women from the monotony of prison life, and later when he gets into trouble with a drug cartel they return the favor by rescuing him.”

The film would be set in contemporary, Gatesville Texas. There are four women’s prisons located in Gatesville. And of course, Texas is famous for putting everyone in prison for a long sentences for little or no reason. The number of women in Texas prisons has tripled in the last ten years, as mass incarcerations have proven profitable to not only the state but also profitable for an array of business interests.

Writer Alan Nafzger has called on Governor Greg Abbott to, “end the prison industry.”

Recently, “Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak spoke out against the Texas system and put a good word in for mercy and forgiveness out on social media. “How nice for those who have lived such exemplary lives that they can express glee when others have their lives ruined by a mistake, real or perceived,” Sajak tweeted last month.

During the winter’s deep freeze, the The Marshall Project, exposed the horrible prison conditions, “Inside Frigid Texas Prisons: Broken Toilets, Disgusting Food, Few Blankets.”

The petition states, “Why don’t we have the ‘Adam Sandler’ character… sending letters to women in prison and being their friend and trying to help them adjust, giving them hope… and when they get out of prison he picks them up so they don’t have to ride the smelly bus back home… but his pickup truck is a junker, smoking and sputtering … worse than the bus. But his heart is in the right place… He’s the last “chivalrous” man on earth.”

Stacy Haiduk has not commented on the script, thus far. A statement is expected soon.

Professor Nafzger has made a short treatment of the project available online.

He has made the finished script available at for select filmmakers.

Adam Sandler of Happy Madison Productions has expressed interest in the screenplay.

Stacy Haiduk is a Actress, Producer known for The Young and the Restless (1973), Prison Break (2005), Steel and Lace (1991), Superboy (1988) and is represented by Mavrick Artists Agency, Bobby Moses.

——————- READ MORE ——————-

Think about your own experience as an audience member. I remember going to see Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn in “The Break Up” because I thought it was a RomCom. It was advertised as a RomCom, but I guess I should have known with a title like “The Break Up” that it was actually a romantic drama. I left the theater thinking to myself, “What a piece of shit of RomCom – I wasted my money to watch a sappy drama where the couple doesn’t end up together in the end!” We’ve all had similar movie-going experiences….the producers played an advertising bait-and-switch trick on the audience because they knew a RomCom sells better than a sappy romantic drama. I still want my money back!

Audience is the area I believe is the biggest failure of most screenwriters. It’s easy to say, “My script is written for a teen audience or a 30+ audience”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Understanding an audience means understanding what entertains an audience. Don’t be like the magician who got so caught up in his own little ‘magical’ presentation that he forgot how to be entertaining because entertaining means knowing how to create genre-related emotions.

Editing is another contributing factor to writing failures. I’m not referring to editing dialogue that doesn’t work or moving a plot point. Pro editing means listening, really listening, to your gut instinct; it means removing a beloved dialogue scene or a grand visual sequence when you know deep down that it doesn’t work. Pros don’t become emotionally involved in their stories to the point they can’t let things go. Oh, they know how to create emotion, but they explore it through their characters and keep themselves out of the story. Don’t become attached to any piece of dialogue, scene, characters, etc. It’s like having a million pound anchor strapped around your neck. It makes it difficult to function and you’ll never get where you want to go.

Timing, editing and audience are major contributing factors to why many aspiring screenwriters never succeed in breaking into the biz. Timing failures are usually a result of not understanding a story’s genre, how it works and how it’s delivered. It’s knowing the perfect moment in a horror to reveal the monster isn’t dead. It’s knowing how and when to deliver a big kiss scene after a chase scene in a romantic comedy. It’s knowing how to keep suspicions away from the real killer in a suspense thriller by misleading the audience with red herrings. Timing goes beyond pacing. Perfect timing delivers! If you think I’m talking about following a formula then think again. Learn the structure of the genre you’re writing, then come up with an original way to deliver a story and timing will fall into place. Think of films like “The Sixth Sense”….it’s a supernatural thriller that delivers its promised genre in a very structured way, but it’s not obvious because the writer cleverly came up with a unique way to deliver a good, old-fashioned ghost story.

In fact, I think this is a major failing that we see not just in beginning writers’ work, but in published books and produced movies: Not forcing the hero/ine to face his or her greatest trauma and fear in the climax. And I mean on an emotional and thematic level, not just physical. A good writer is brave enough to dig past those first superficial ideas about the final confrontation and find a place, a conflict, a heartbreaking decision, that really tests everything that the hero/ine is.

This is a very important point: in the climax of Chinatown, Jake finds himself (actually deliberately drives himself) right back into the same situation that almost crushed him in his past. The climax externalizes Jake’s GHOST or WOUND: he is in Chinatown again, a wonderful, seedy, ominous visual, and he’s trying to save another woman, two of them this time, when we know that the last time all his best efforts to save a woman in Chinatown resulted in that woman getting hurt or killed (in some way that was awful enough that Jake quit the police force). The lesson here is — spend some quality time figuring out how to bring your hero/ine’s greatest nightmare to life: in setting, set decoration, characters involved, actions taken. If you know your hero/ine’s ghost and greatest fear, then you should be able to come up with a great setting that will be unique, resonant, and entirely specific to that protagonist (and to the villain as well).

· In the climax, the protagonist must confront his greatest nightmare.

And of course it helps that Jake Gittes is deliberately based on one of the all-time classic protagonists of world literature: Sophocles’ King Oedipus. Not that Jake has a lot in common with Oedipus, really, but even the slight resonance with Oedipus’s tragic blindness to his own culpability, and the deliberate references to the very first detective story, go a long way toward making Jake a haunting character.