On Wednesday, Zola’s story finally makes its way to the big screen-in a film directed by Janicza Bravo ( Lemon), cowritten by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. She can write!”), written up in Rolling Stone, and six years later, adapted into a film by Hollywood. The Twitter tale went viral, was praised by Ava DuVernay (“Drama, humor, action, suspense, character development.

Zola had just survived a frightening road trip with a woman she called Jessica-another exotic dancer or, as Zola ID’d her, “this bitch”-and proceeded to recap said weekend in a 148-tweet thread involving sex work, guns, and violence. That is how A’Ziah “Zola” King, a blogger and former exotic dancer, began her epic Twitter tale back on October 27, 2015. “We’re both theater kids, so we treated the source material like we would any piece of great theater that we would be adapting,' Bravo says.“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Together, they approached the movie with a commitment to taking their cues from Zola's tweets. So my job, our job, was to replicate what she did and imbue the world with all the pride that she had filled it with.”Īctor James Franco was originally supposed to direct 'Zola.' When he dropped out of the project, Bravo came on board and asked her friend Harris to collaborate on the screenplay.

She is judging the circumstance that they found themselves in, but she isn’t judging that work. everyone in that world is met with a good deal of generosity and dignity. Says Bravo, who's helmed several recent episodes of HBO's 'In Treatment' reboot, “The story that A’Ziah King wrote is one in which not only the protagonists, but. When “Zola” premiered last year at Sundance and became a festival hit, the Hollywood Reporter noted that “it makes ‘Hustlers’ look like a Disney movie.’” While it certainly earns its R rating for sexual language and content, what really sets it apart is that it does so without exploiting or lessening how harrowing Zola's predicament was.

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