Schoolteacher’s Story Is a ‘Knockout’

In a town littered with dropouts who end up making it big, the story of high school teacher and screenwriter Mark Stevens has a natural hook.

Stevens, a 36-year-old English and drama teacher, never got a high school diploma. What’s more, he teaches at John F. Kennedy High School, where he was kicked out as a student nearly 20 years ago.

Now, he has a screenplay being made into a film. And life today, Stevens says, seems a little like an after-school special.

“My first time on the movie set I was trying to act cool and all professional,” he said. “But inside I wanted to scream: ‘Hey, I wrote this movie and this is exactly how I pictured it would look.’ ”

“Knockout,” his story about Belle, a Latina boxer from East Los Angeles who makes it to the championship bout, is three weeks from completion.

Stevens grew up in a show-biz family. His father, Steve, was a child actor and has been a longtime agent. Thus, the younger Stevens has seen the roller-coaster ride up close.

“Mark knows the most talented person in the world may never ever get a break,” said his mother, Rosemary. “Until the money is in the bank, you don’t ever count it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t pursue the dream.”

Quit his day job? Not a chance. His first taste of Hollywood success didn’t come without a struggle. He has 12 unsold scripts at home.

Still, it isn’t just a steady paycheck that keeps Stevens tethered to the beige bungalow at Kennedy High. Every day, he works with mostly Latino immigrant students struggling to master English.

“Not to sound too corny, but I feel that teaching where I am now is my destiny,” he said.

If his students get bored or disinterested, Stevens can relate.

“Apathy is the biggest problem,” he said of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the dropout rate hovers near 40%. “It is funny for me to come full circle, to try to keep these kids interested when I wasn’t myself.”

Stevens began teaching at Kennedy five years ago after attending Valley College and graduating from Cal State Northridge with degrees in English and drama. As an adult, Stevens was able to enroll in junior college without a high school diploma.

But Stevens admits he was a lousy student as a teenager. He ditched his junior year to go surfing, ending up as a part-time clerk in a health food store--on what he remembers as a “trail to failure.”

What a difference two decades makes. Now he urges his students--whose lives he used as inspiration for the characters in “Knockout”--to avoid his path.

“My first day here I told my class: ‘You know I used to go here and look at what happened to me. I got kicked out, so you’d better be careful if you don’t want to end up back here like me.’ ”

One student asked, “Is this kind of like your community service?”

For Stevens, teaching is no chore. Although he ditched class as a teenager, he had dreams of being a teacher and a screenwriter. Now, he said, he feels no need to choose. On the shelf in his classroom, next to a John Steinbeck volume, is the biography of family friend George Takei, Mr. Sulu of “Star Trek.”

“As a teacher I still feel creative,” he said. “My first couple of years I hardly did any writing at all. I was pretty much consumed by the job of teaching and it didn’t bother me not to write.”

Stevens wrote “Knockout” last summer. The director, Lorenzo Doumani, had an idea for a film about a female Oscar de la Hoya. Doumani, who works with Stevens’ father, knew that the high school teacher worked with Latino students.

“I interviewed a lot of longtime writers, but Mark’s writing was more from the heart and fit the story more,” Doumani said. “He beat out all the other people.”

Mark Stevens’ father is executive producer of the project. “The way he developed the characters blew me away,” Steve Stevens said. “If it wasn’t good, I would have had to say that this is terrible because my name is on it too.”

Doumani said the movie--scheduled to be completed by the end of this month--is expected to be released this summer.

Meantime, Stevens is working on a script about mobster Mickey Cohen. It’s an idea he got from his dad, who tells a family story about how Cohen took him out for ice cream when he was a child star.

For now, Stevens said, he has no plans to write about classroom life.

“People don’t want to see a teacher fail,” Stevens said. “They want to see a teacher overcome insurmountable odds and succeed. But I don’t want to write that kind of movie, because I know the solutions aren’t that easy.”