We're always gonna have to live among white people.
culture is the cure, first drafts ain't first, and why the new Wicked doesn't work
¿What you heard?
“We’re always gonna have to live among white people,” my friend laments.
“No, we won’t,” I counter, and I’m not just saying that to make her feel better.
Whiteness is an illness, an infection that can be cured by culture.
The phrase white culture is laughable because the joke is that there is no such thing.
It is in this lack that the virus grows.
Though we ADOS folk feel abstracted from our ancestral cultures, we have created new cultural ground to root ourselves in here in America.
To be white, on the other hand, is to remain uprooted, untethered. The cure is for white folk to fill their cups by reclaiming their own ancestral cultures or else to be like Black folk and make new cultures that are theirs here.
What you doin’?!
The first draft I’m writing this year comes from a new process, where first drafts aren’t first…
CHARACTER DIARIES: POV journal entries from each major character writing about their relationship to the film’s theme
CHARACTER BACKSTORIES: first-person prose about their backgrounds
CHARACTER ONE-SHEETS: overview of each of their core qualities
CHARACTER ARC OUTLINES: progression maps of each major character’s arc across eight sequences
PLOT OUTLINE: hero’s journey mapped across eight sequences
SCENE OUTLINES: every major scene loglined and explained according to the wants, needs, and arc progression of each major character
TREATMENT: scene outlines translated into prose
FIRST DRAFT: treatment translated into screenplay format
What you seen??
WICKED: FOR GOOD (2025) was destined to drag, and it did.
The power of Wicked (2024) is the tension of the central relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. We watch to find out will they or won’t they be friends?
However, that tension is majorly resolved after the first film because the internal obstacles to their relationship (at first, we don’t even know if they’re going to like each other) are overcome in Wicked. This leaves the second film to deal with only the much-less-engaging external societal/ political obstacles to their friendship.
The sequel, therefore, really has nowhere significant left to go. Even the reprise from Wicked: For Good’s namesake song was already woven a number of times into the previous movie.