Clarence Darrow’s Last Stand is the story of Darrow’s best case where he successfully defended an African American physician who was falsely accused of murder. Excellent coverage from Julian Krainin Productions and Warner Bros: “This moving and poignant story is compelling throughout, fast pace and dramatic.  It should attract strong talent, have mass appeal, and earn critical acclaim. Strong Recommend.” This script also received honorable mention, the runner up to the Nicolle Fellowship Award when the award first started. I wrote it as a stage play and it was the finalist in the AACT New Play Festival.

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Second, the whole pitch:

 

The Good Fight is the story of Clarence Darrow’s most compelling case where he successfully defended Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American physician who was falsely accused of murder. The Sweet case was Clarence Darrow’s last great case before his death. He was already an old man, his tall frame hunched over, bent, as if weighted by the burden of his humanity.  His famous cases were behind him, the Loeb—Leopold murder trial, the Scopes monkey trial, all his important labor cases and few people thought he had another fight in him.  He was to prove them wrong. 

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 The story takes place during the great industrial migration when the black population of Detroit swelled from four thousand to seventy thousand and yet all people of color were confined to a small, horribly over crowded slum area just outside the city.  Our hero, Dr. Ossian Sweet, an internationally prominent black physician, bought a house in a white neighborhood and moved his family in.  A vicious lynching mob of seven hundred people collected outside.  In the ensuing riot, Dr. Sweet fired a warning shot from a rifle above the crowd.  The police fired twice afterwards. One white man lay dead. Dr. Sweet and his family were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree.

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 The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion until the NAACP convinced Darrow to step up to the defense one more time and still, all might have been lost if not for the intelligence, strength and dynamic qualities of the Sweet family themselves: Dr. Ossian Sweet, his wife, Gladys, his two brothers, Drs. Henry and Otis Sweet, and his gifted seventeen year old daughter, Alana. (There is a very tender and doomed romance between Alana and John Hays, Darrow’s young law partner.) This script is packed full of outstanding, dramatic, and starring roles for African Americans. The Sweets leap to life as an educated, wealthy, upper class family, a vivid portrait of the American dream and all its possibilities. The role of Clarence Darrow is great as well; he is at once witty, sly, cunning, and brilliant but fading, all in all larger than life. 

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 This is an important story. The Sweet case not only marked the beginning of racial equality under the law, but it presented the first possibility of racial reconciliation and harmony in our country.