A True Story in Search of a Green Light

The story of the Alisal High School graduating class of 1986 seemed made for the big screen. It had drama, colorful characters and an inspiring message. It even had a passionate, stormy romance.

Indeed, when an article about how 82 children of farm workers had overcome steep odds to get admitted to top universities appeared in the Los Angeles Times that fall, 37 producers showed up on campus or called seeking to secure rights to the story.

“I think the real, true story is as dramatic as any true story I’ve ever bumped into,” said Dave Bell, a veteran TV movie producer who held an option on the story for five years.

Alas, 14 years later not a single frame has been shot. “I worked my ass off trying to get this made,” said Bell, who regards his lack of success as a major failure of his 40-year Hollywood career.

To be sure, many inspiring and even socially important stories circulate through Hollywood but never become movies. It takes the right mix of script, producer and box-office star for studios to justify investing millions.

That’s especially true with a story such as this one, which in Hollywood terms is “soft,” said producer Moctesuma Esparza, one of several producers who tried to make a movie based on the Alisal story but was unable to get a bankable star interested.

“Nobody gets killed, there isn’t any life and death, it’s an intimate social drama that’s not a love story, and it’s about parochial issues in the U.S.,” he said.

Even so, he said, “if you have passionate people attached to a project, it can overcome a great deal.”

That’s what actor Mike Farrell and his producing partner, Marvin Minoff, are hoping. They are circulating a new, prizewinning script to a select group of top actors, hoping for a breakthrough.

“If you believe in a project, you just keep banging away,” said Farrell, who worked with Minoff on “Patch Adams,” the idealistic movie starring Robin Williams. “It’s perseverance more than anything else.”

But the history of efforts to get this particular story made is revealing.

George P. Shirley, the Alisal High teacher who became a hero to his former students for pushing them to apply to top colleges, is at least partly responsible for the project’s delays. All along he’s insisted, as a condition of selling his story, on a large measure of control over how the story is told. He rejected one script and walked away from deals that took that away.

That stubbornness could be seen as prudence, given the way true stories tend to be mangled by the Hollywood entertainment machine. It’s also characteristic of Shirley, who throughout a checkered career as a lawyer and a teacher has always put his own rough-edged idealism ahead of economic gain.

He worried a movie would create a “cult of George Shirley,” when what he wanted was a story about the lives of his students. To him, the only reason to agree to a movie was to send a message to a mass audience. “I’ve always wanted to be able to tell parents and students that these kids did it and you can do it too,” said Shirley, who now lives in Sacramento. But mass entertainment is rarely an effective venue for polemics, especially in the bottom-line atmosphere of Hollywood. Even though polls show education and questions about how to fairly apportion opportunity are topical, and even though this particular story also is replete with cinematic elements, that’s not been enough to give it a green light.

*

Alisal High was then and, in many ways still is today, a school that many students considered a “factory for farm workers.” The derogatory label came about because every year all but a handful of its graduates wound up laboring in the lettuce fields around Salinas instead of going on to college.

But, in 1986, that changed. That year, more than a third of the class went off to the nation’s best universities--among them, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and UC Berkeley. It was a stunning development. And, although obviously many teachers, counselors and parents had a role in making that happen, Shirley was the catalyst.

Then 46, he had a rogue, rules-are-meant-be-broken style. In one such breach, for example, he now admits he actually wrote some of the essays that helped students get into college despite their abysmal scores on entrance exams.

“It was a war to me, and it was a war hopelessly stacked against them,” he said recently.

Effective as it was, that aggressiveness won him little support among superiors.

In a plot twist right out of a screenwriter’s imagination, he was dismissed after only two years at the school.

That so many students had apparently won a chance to escape poverty probably would have been enough to draw attention to this out-of-the-way school, where about 90% of the students were Latino, most were poor and not fluent in English.

But Shirley’s ouster--technically speaking, he was simply not rehired or granted tenure--was the capper. Newspapers across the state carried the story. People magazine published a laudatory article headlined: “A Teacher Pushes Migrants’ Kids Into College--and Gets Fired by His California School Board.”

Accompanying it was a picture of Shirley, smiling, smoking a pipe, squatting in a plowed field; behind him was a lineup of his students wearing sweatshirts from Bard, Columbia, Princeton, Notre Dame and Williams.

“Class after class was being assigned to oblivion,” said Mike Nagata, a member of the class of 1986 who went to Williams College and who now is a partner in a Carmel bookstore. “George was a Roman candle illuminating this problem.”

Amid the publicity, the graduates began leaving for college, heading for a world of fraternities and designer clothes and late-model cars that was so far from the dusty fields of home that neither they nor most of their parents could imagine what awaited them. Alisal school administrators were convinced that many of them would be overwhelmed and that they’d quickly fail.

They didn’t.

More than three-quarters graduated, according to an informal survey of students who have remained in touch with their classmates. Many went on to graduate and professional schools. Today they are teachers, principals, business executives, doctors and on and on in Salinas and across the country.

Manuel Lopez, now 31, went to Bard College. Near the top of his class at Alisal, he was so far behind academically in college that he nearly gave up. “I cried so much that first year because I had to do so much work,” he said.

He survived. Then he went to Brown University, where he earned a master’s degree in education. Now he is in charge of the migrant education program at Alvarez High School in Salinas. Next year, he plans to return to teaching and will travel to Japan on a Fulbright fellowship.

Lopez and his wife, Leticia, a high school math teacher, recently bought a two-story, three-bedroom home complete with two-car garage in a suburban-style housing development in Salinas. They have a 5-year-old son, Christian Manuel, who loves to shoot baskets in the driveway with his dad.

When Lopez was at Alisal, he’d lived with his parents and four siblings in a tiny two-bedroom house at the end of a dead-end street. Going to college, he said, changed everything. Not just for him, but for his younger brothers, who followed in his footsteps.

“Wow, it’s like a dream sometimes,” Lopez said, sitting on the patio in his well-tended backyard, which has a vegetable garden and cactus, for preparing traditional nopales dishes. “I never thought I’d have a place like this.”

As Hollywood struggled over the years to figure out how to tell the story, the ending was getting better and better.

*

When Shirley showed up at Alisal in the fall of 1984, he had what might be called a well-developed back story.

Born to what he called “hillbilly” poverty in East Tennessee, Shirley had been the first in his family to go to college. After a brief stint as a teacher, he earned a law degree at the University of Denver. He spent the 1970s as a poverty lawyer in California, Minnesota and Florida, litigating cases involving substandard farm worker housing, brutal working conditions and education issues.

Everywhere he went he had an impact. He also evoked controversy. At one point he was the target of five investigations of his conduct, sparked by his aggressive tactics.

By the early 1980s, Shirley had a private appellate practice in Monterey. He says now he was working himself into the ground, handling hundreds of cases pro bono and making promises he could not keep.

He was drinking too much. His second marriage was collapsing. In November 1983, he suffered a mental breakdown on the steps of the Monterey County courthouse. Hospitalization followed. “I’ve had an erratic career to say the least,” said Shirley.

After a year of treatment and inactivity, he showed up in the fall of 1984 to teach government and English. Later on, school officials regretted their decision. On the one hand, as a lawyer with a teaching credential, he was a good catch. On the other, not only was he recovering from a breakdown, but as a lawyer he had previously sued the school district.

He told senior class counselor Pamela Bernhard he was looking for a low-stress job. But what he found there appalled him. One teacher taught the story of the American West by showing the movie “Paint Your Wagon.” In another class, the musical “1776” conveyed the lessons of the American Revolution. Nearly two-thirds of the students usually dropped out short of graduation.

The first year Shirley kept mostly to his teaching. He threw out 25-year-old textbooks and used the U.S. Constitution as his lesson plan. Sometimes leaping onto a desk to make a point, he pounded home the idea that the Constitution guaranteed them rights, even though many of his students were not citizens.

Students recall his tongue-in-cheek refrain. Learn your rights, he would tell them, “Or I will hunt you down, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

“George incites people, in both the good and bad senses,” said Nagata, the former student who was editor of the school newspaper. But, he said, “we weren’t naive. We were ready to be incited. We hated the image our school had. We hated the image we had. And we were willing to do something about it.”

Then, in fall 1985, Shirley gave his seniors the assignment of applying to 10 colleges out of state and four in state. He also enlisted the help of Bernhard, the senior class counselor, whom he had begun seeing socially.

But the students had terrible scores on the college entrance exams Shirley made them take. Only four students had a combined score of more than 1,000 out of a possible 1,600; the average was below 800.

*

Shirley and Bernhard were undeterred. “The SAT is absolutely meaningless for these kids,” Shirley said in an interview.

Most spoke Spanish at home and had little contact with the college-level English vocabulary the entrance exam stresses; plus, most of their teachers had expected little and had taught accordingly.

Bernhard wrote a letter to admissions directors explaining the students’ backgrounds. Set the scores aside, she urged them. Look at the students for themselves. Consider what they’ve accomplished, just by finishing high school. “Our students have a maturity, a desire to learn and a need to succeed that many other applicants from the mainstream do not,” she argued.

Shirley and Bernhard also had the students write and rewrite essays to focus on the difficulties they faced.

In some cases, Shirley says now, he went so far as to rewrite the essays himself.

Shirley and Bernhard used school money for postage and got universities to waive application fees. They helped parents fill out financial forms and, in some cases, persuaded them to let their children head off to college rather than stay behind to help support their families.

In spring 1986, Shirley was accused of spending $6,000 of school money without authorization on a senior class trip to Washington, D.C. He was cleared, but his contract was not renewed.

Nearly 100 students went to the board of education to protest. They praised Shirley first as a teacher rather than as a crusader.

“Above all, George was a damn good teacher,” said Pat Egan, the former union president who still teaches English at Alisal and who was there that night. “People tend to forget that . . . kids were attracted to him because he really did extend himself in the classroom.”

Later, the senior class would select Shirley as the “Teacher of the Year.” During commencement exercises, student speakers repeatedly thanked Shirley for his efforts.

“There is no word in the dictionary that describes the way I feel about you,” said co-valedictorian Juan Pantoja in his commencement speech. “Sometimes there is one person who crosses your path and changes your life forever. Mr. Shirley, you are that person.”

Pantoja graduated from Princeton, earned a graduate degree in education from Harvard University, became a teacher and then a school principal in Los Angeles. (Although admitted to Harvard Law School, he decided not to attend.)

*

In 1987, not long after the story surfaced in The Times, Imagine Entertainment offered to buy the rights to the story. But Shirley and Bernhard rejected the deal. The money, $2,500 upfront, was skimpy, and the proposed agreement gave him little control over the project. He also wanted the deal to generate payments for some of his students, whose families were struggling financially while they were away at college. And he wanted a commitment that the producers would put on a benefit premiere to raise money for scholarships.

Creative Artists Agency, the powerful packager of talent and projects, put together a writer and director for a television movie, and all Shirley and Bernhard had to do was sign a contract.

Shirley remembers Michael Ovitz, then CAA’s president, sticking his head into the meeting with the agent who had arranged the deal and the proposed director to say hello and make sure everything was lined up. Shirley says now that’s when he got nervous, feeling like things were moving too fast.

Shirley then contacted Susan Grode, a prominent entertainment lawyer. Grode spent six months talking to various producers and negotiated a contract with Dave Bell Associates that Shirley said gave him everything he wanted originally.

Bell had made the prison documentary “Scared Straight” and had just won an Emmy for “Do You Remember Love,” which starred Richard Kiley and Joanne Woodward. He agreed to pay $10,000 a year for five years for the story rights. Shirley and Bernhard split the money. (No students have yet seen a dime, and as talk of the money paid to Shirley and Bernhard made its way back to Salinas, it created some bitterness. Various producers had promised the graduates that money would come their way, and some had come to count on it. “We were told we were going to get $25,000 here or $20,000 there,” said Lopez.)

Bell commissioned a script, bringing in veteran television writer Clifford Campion, who had written “The Marva Collins Story,” a TV movie about the private schoolteacher in Chicago who gained fame for her success with inner-city children.

Campion spent six weeks careering around the Salinas Valley with Shirley, gathering material. Shirley said he hated the result. It was heavily fictionalized, and it made Shirley a hero of near-mythic proportions: Not only does Shirley help students with college, in this version he sends in a play that helps the hapless football team get its first victory in years.

But it didn’t matter. The script had been delayed by a writers’ strike in 1988, and by the time it was written, the division of CBS Television that had expressed interest in producing it had been eliminated.

Bad timing was to continue. “Stand and Deliver,” the uplifting story of Garfield High School math teacher Jaime Escalante, hit the screens in 1988, also after a long period of development.

*

Then came “Dead Poets Society,” which starred Robin Williams as the unorthodox teacher who got in trouble for questioning authority. Both movies made a profit, but that didn’t pave the way for the Alisal story.

ABC and NBC passed. HBO said it was too soft. Bell tried selling it as a small, independent feature film. But he said that idea was even harder to sell, because “Stand and Deliver” had been a feature film that started out as an independent project.

“Everybody said that two movies about education is one more than the public wanted and yours is the third, so forget about it,” Bell said.

He also said some network executives he spoke to were cynical about the story itself, suggesting that the students didn’t deserve to go to fancy colleges.

Despite all the disappointments, Bell still pursued a deal. In 1997 he notified Shirley by fax that he had reached a tentative agreement with Esparza/Katz, the company that had produced the movie biography “Selena.” With a major star in the role of Shirley, Bell wrote confidently, the movie “will not only get the Hispanic audience but will get a large crossover audience as well. We should do $100 million domestic.”

The stars Esparza said he had in mind were actors such as Richard Dreyfuss or Nick Nolte. But, to his disappointment, he couldn’t generate any interest.

Today, the project faces other obstacles as well.

One is Hollywood’s difficulty--or unwillingness--to try to market movies prominently featuring Latinos to general audiences. Another is the virtual disappearance of dramas in general. Also, until recently, the project lacked a solid script.

Mark Johnson, producer of “Donnie Brasco,” knows what it’s like to work on a project for a long time. He said “Brasco” took eight years.

“It always comes down to a script,” Johnson said. “Just because there’s a great man and a story that needs to be told doesn’t mean it is going to be told unless someone translates it into a form for a director and actors and financiers.”

Around the same time that Esparza came into the picture, a father-son writing team had decided to take a crack at a script. Mario Balibrera, a veteran writer, director and actor, had mostly made his mark in industrial films and public service announcements. He and his son, Chris, had earned master’s degrees at UCLA’s film school, and both were working hard to break into feature films.

The elder Balibrera had read the original newspaper stories about Alisal High and remembers thinking at the time that “this is the best education story I’d ever read.”

About three years ago, he went to Salinas, met Bernhard, and she introduced him to Manuel Lopez and some of the other 1986 graduates who were around town. Chris wrote the script with Mario’s help, calling it “Harvest.”

But they had never talked to Shirley.

On Election Day 1998, Roberto Martinez, a friend they had enlisted to help produce the movie, called Shirley in Sacramento. Shirley, who usually screened his calls to avoid bill collectors, picked up the phone.

After Alisal, Shirley moved on with his life in some ways. The romance with Bernhard ended not long after a blowup between them the day before commencement. During an argument in a parking lot, she slammed the car door and drove away. His shirt got caught and he was pulled to the ground and dragged. His arm was broken.

Shirley remarried in 1992 and moved to Sacramento, where he didn’t teach or practice law but dabbled in politics. He and his wife, Laura, now have three children, ages 2, 4 and 6.

When the telephone rang on election night, Shirley, his wife and the kids were headed out to walk precincts.

Martinez said he was a movie producer, told Shirley about the Balibrera script and said they wanted to buy rights to his story.

Shirley was skeptical, but he agreed to meet them. The three of them flew to Sacramento, and they put together an agreement that gives Shirley and his wife a share of the movie project and makes them partners in the production company, Harvest Films. He retains all the same rights he had negotiated with Bell.

The script was extensively rewritten, after talking to Shirley, and it was entered in the 1999 Nicholl Fellowships screenwriting competition sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Chris Balibrera, as the principal writer, was awarded a $25,000 fellowship.

Shirley sent the script to Farrell, because Shirley admired Farrell’s liberal views and his political activism in opposition to the death penalty. Farrell and Minoff are now working with Harvest to develop the project, with the idea of producing a major feature film.

But first, they have to find a star. The matter is so delicate that they’re approaching actors they think have the weight to persuade a studio to join in. “All studios see is the American box office, and the American box office from their perspective is driven by these big macho box-office stars,” said Farrell.

*

Recently, Shirley and the Balibreras met in Salinas to visit with some of the former students and to check out a nearby school as a possible location for the movie.

Alisal has returned to what it had been before. On the state’s Academic Performance Index, the school has the lowest possible rank, 1 out of a possible 10; compared only to schools with similar students, it does only slightly better, with a rank of 3.

The percentage of students taking the SAT college entrance exam has dropped steadily over the past decade; so have scores. Only 21 students applied to the California State University system in fall 1998; all but two had to take remedial courses in math, and all but five had to take remedial courses in English once they got to campus.

Even so, the legacy of the events of 1986 continues.

Lopez, who works in the migrant education program, said he helped five of his students get into the University of Santa Clara last year. Another five attend San Francisco State University.

“They do have the potential, but nobody has ever believed in them,” Lopez said. “I’m pretty much saving kids like Mr. Shirley did.”

Another former student, Jorge Salas, teaches Spanish at Rio Vista High School in Rio Vista. Salas graduated from Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn. He later earned a master’s degree in Spanish literature at the University of Denver and began studies for a doctorate at UC Davis. Now, his focus is on raising the sights of his students and getting replacements for his school’s Spanish books, some of which are more than 30 years old.

As currently written, the script for “Harvest” focuses on the events of 1986, winding up with commencement exercises. As the Shirley character enters the scene, a school board member hisses at him: “We’ll never know the damage you’ve caused!”

If the movie were to be made, what would happen next is that the names of the colleges, graduate, business and medical schools where students earned degrees would scroll across the screen.