Betty & “Zora”: English professor writes screenplay
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Dr. Betty Hart, professor of English, wanted to improve her dialogue-writing skills, so she sat in on Patty Aakhus’s screenwriting workshop. Aakhus, director of International Studies, has taught the course since 2002. It requires students to examine screenplays of others and write a full-length screenplay of their own.
“Patty Aakhus is absolutely inspirational,” Hart said. “It was good to learn from her teaching and see how she encourages students to produce a screenplay. For this class, their interest sustained them through 120 pages, minimum.”
After two years of research and a year of writing, Hart produced a screenplay, Zora, based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston, a Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist who wrote the acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
“Her life appeals to me because she was very independent, which is unusual for a woman of the 1920s,” Hart said. “She had her own opinions. During the Harlem Renaissance, most of the women didn’t speak up, but she was very much outspoken.”
During the research period, Hart devoured Hurston’s letters, short stories, and novels, and the major biographies of her life. With the help of a College of Liberal Arts Faculty Development Award, she attended the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston grew up. Eatonville, the first incorporated African American community in the U.S., is the setting for Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Zora covers most of Hurston’s life, from age six until her death at 69. Hart said the most difficult part of writing the screenplay was deciding what to leave in. Finally, she decided, “Anybody’s life at any point is a metaphor for one’s whole life. I had to choose the episodes that would best represent the whole tenor of her life.”
Hart said writing a screenplay is a good format for creating a work, but also a good cause for doing research. “I felt that I had to be accurate, and a lot of times I used her actual words. It was important to her to acknowledge the craft of Black dialect, and I had to be true to the words she spoke in her life.” She is currently seeking the proper permissions from Hurston’s estate.
Writing the screenplay also gave Hart a useful teaching approach. “In African American literature class we read Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I showed a film version and had students take a part of the novel that wasn’t in the film and script it. They learned how the dialogue could carry the story.”
Hart said she plans to attend a workshop next summer to improve her screenwriting and learn how to market and sell screenplays. “I never thought I’d be this interested in it, but it is fun,” she said.
Hart joined USI in 1991. In addition to the African American literature class, she teaches rhetoric and composition courses, ethnic literature, and racism in America. She received her Bachelor of Science degree from Howard University and master’s degree and Ph.D. from West Virginia University.
Wendy Knipe Bredhold
News and Information Services
wkbredhold@usi.edu
812/461-5259
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