narrative - Turf
Narrative Feature
Title: Turf
Page Count: 97 pages
Project Status: In Development
Logline
A lesbian high school baseball coach's dreams of winning the championship game are threatened when a transgender student is set on joining her team.
Synopsis
RACHEL is really good at her job. Unfortunately, she’s coaching little kids' softball teams, until she is suddenly asked to coach varsity boys' baseball – something people care about. She’s promised she can keep the gig if she can get to the championships. But she’s only needed because her best friend, JIM, got fired. Jim claims that he’s being punished for saying something “benign” to ELI, a transgender student who’s back after psychiatric care. Now Jim has to move far away, and Eli’s managed to worm his way onto Rachel’s team. He’s a great batter, but he's going to prevent the team from competing at championships: the players' “biological sex” must align with the team’s.
After convincing the star player, NATHAN, to nail Eli in the face with a baseball, Rachel gets Eli off the team for his “safety”. At an important game, Eli leads a sit-in with the school’s queer community. The team has to forfeit.
Alone in the girls’ locker room with Eli, Rachel snaps and hits him with a baseball bat. She convinces Eli to say he hurt himself, like he did to land himself in the “loony bin.”
With his pervy hidden cameras, Nathan watches everything unfold. Despite disliking Eli and Rachel’s promising college scouts, he slips the footage into the principal’s mailbox. Rachel is fired. She points out that Jim was also fired unfairly, but turns out he sent “pictures to students.” As she’s being handcuffed, the team and Eli are happily playing baseball together.
Additional Project Information
I truly believe the canon of queer media needs and deserves to be expanded. Not only should our community be able to see themselves reflected on screen, but also be able to see totally out there, weird, complicated, or misguided queer characters on screen that come from a place of fondness for the community. I once had an Emmy-award-winning actor tell me she accepted the role because she’s gotten to play every type of lesbian before, but never a mother. That is at the heart of my storytelling. There can be so much fear and weight in writing queer characters because there are so few of them in the public eye, so the more there are, the more will come.
The first draft of Turf was developed with Stowe Story Labs Feature Campus.
Team
Written by: Amelia Xanthe Boscov
Seeking
Currently seeking producers with feature film experience and development or production fund opportunities
Project Website
Contact
Amelia Xanthe Boscov