XAVIER JACKSON
Community Word writer Xavier Jackson and co-author John McHale won the 2023 Santa Barbara International Diversity Film Script Award with their screenplay “Nurses Versus the Virus” last month.
The aspiring script for dramatic feature film consideration is set on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through the eyes of Black nurse Fred Hampton and his family.
“I love nurses and I love nursing. We are a unique kind of tribe,” said Jackson, a registered nurse who now works for the State of Illinois. “The beauty of this whole tale — and why we are telling it — is it is very timely. It mirrors what’s really going on.”
The Diversity Film Script Award winner not only relates from Jackson’s professional experiences treating COVID patients, it also dives into a society embroiled in the Me Too Movement, George Floyd protests, Insurrection and a whole host of issues facing an American mixed race family of four.
“It was an honor to be telling the tough stories of being a Black male nurse in a sometimes racist or racially insensitive environment,” Illinois State University School professor McHale said in a press release. “I learned so much about the Black experience in America from Xavier Jackson.”
The script mixes tense, dramatic moments from the past few years in our nation’s health-care system with some dry wit (Jackson does standup comedy) from a front-line warrior trying to get through each tortuous, understaffed and inadequately equipped day after each tortuous, understaffed and inadequately equipped day.
“It’s authentic,” said Jackson, who lives in Normal. “It puts you in this time period everyone is now trying to push out of their consciousness. People have stepped away from the giant terror of being isolated and the horror of being treated — how dehumanizing and soul crushing that time period was, especially for nurses.”
Indeed, Jackson reports part of the genesis in writing the screenplay with McHale, his friend of 15 years, was an Op-Ed Jackson wrote for The Community Word entitled “Haunting taste of defeat makes me long for life Before COVID” in the January, 2022 issue. Scenes from that moving story appear in “Nurses Versus the Virus.”
Santa Barbara Screenplay Awards declared, “The time is right for this film. … The script’s boots-on-the-ground point of view, unflinching take on race, class, addiction, and a health-care system stretched to its breaking point make it an important piece … (that) includes moments of comedy, tenderness, camaraderie, tragedy, and joy.”
The prestigious award entitles Jackson and McHale to professional consultations and feedback in California from award-winning writers and producers as they attempt to get the script picked up by a studio for production.
“The nurses I talk to are grateful I am telling it the way it is out there,” Jackson said. “This movie looks into that world and shows where that angst is coming from — the emotional toll.
“I want to get this thing on the screen.”