by Chris Neumer
To date, my column has always had a point; I’ve always been hesitant to use space to just tell stories that don’t necessarily reflect any social dichotomy or tie in with a larger vision of the world. This changes here because of one of the most curiously interesting sagas I’ve experienced while publishing the magazine.
Like everyone else in the United States, I have gotten my fair share of spam e-mails from former government officials in Nigeria asking for my help in hiding a vast fortune in my personal bank account for a short period of time, of which I will later get a percentage. The scam is, of course, that when you give the Nigerian officials your bank account information your money quickly disappears. I’m not exactly sure why so many of these e-mails prominently involve Nigeria, but that is the case. As a result of this, I don’t even think twice about deleting any e-mails I get that merely contain the word ‘Nigeria’.
In the early part of 2006, I got an e-mail that was titled: New Movie, Love of Soccer. I quickly skimmed over the text and noticing the word ‘Nigeria’ peppered throughout the body, moved it to the trash. As I was about to empty the trash, I started thinking about how specific these Internet scammers were getting; here was somebody who had specifically written an e-mail about film and addressed it to me at my business e-mail address. On a whim, I went back into the trash and pulled the e-mail out and learned, much to my surprise, that it wasn’t a standard Nigerian scam e-mail; it was from a high schooler, DB Ukwu, who had written a script and wanted to pick my brain about how he could get his screenplay to actor Wesley Snipes. I could have told him to start researching jails, but chose not to.
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When I was a young writer attempting to break into journalism, I’d dealt with a few different editors who seemed to relish their position of power over me. Often going out of their way not to help me, these editors would sometimes even belittle me (one prospective editor told me that I couldn’t write but, if I decided that I’d be his assistant, bring him his coffee and hand him his morning newspaper that he’d teach me how to). This behavior always bothered me; you should try to help other people, not disenfranchise them. As such, I generally try to help or advise any young writers who take the time to contact me. I’m an extremely soft touch in this respect. Connecting wannabe screenwriters with Hollywood stars falls well beyond the designation of helping young writers though. Normally, I politely decline requests like Ukwu’s—not only do I not want to give out personal phone numbers or e-mail addresses, but, from a simply logistical point-of-view, agencies and studios rarely, if ever, accept unsolicited screenplays because of the fear that they may later be sued for making a completely unrelated movie that might resemble someone’s spec script. However, Ukwu’s case was a little different. For starters, he was 16 and secondly he was Nigerian. In and of itself, it seemed as though his own attempts to write a script and get it into the hands of the one actor, Snipes, who has gone on the record as saying that he would like to work in Nigeria was film-worthy. I remember what I was doing at 16 and it assuredly was not writing screenplays and trying to pitch them Hollywood’s A-list; it instead involved sleeping in, cramming six weeks worth of knowledge into my head four minutes before a first period history test and copious amounts of video games. What kind of moxie did it take to blindly e-mail someone seven time zones away and ask for help? I read Ukwu’s e-mail one more time and replied with a few words of wisdom, also asking him to send me a break down of his script; I was curious to see it. As a last good-natured gesture, I gave him the general phone number of Snipes’ agency, something anybody could find with even a cursory amount of looking.
I figured, at worst, the situation was so unique that I’d have some kind of column that would come of the experience, if it was only a by-the-numbers examination of how small the Internet has made the world. I’d never gotten a ‘real’ e-mail from Nigeria before and, while I couldn’t exactly figure out how I could turn that one fact into a 1,000 word piece, knew something would happen in the future that would serve as a climax to the situation.
Ukwu e-mailed me a few days later and attached a very muddled treatment of his movie for me to read. I eyeballed the somewhat broken English and attempted to make sense of his film’s plot; I felt like I must have missed something because, at first glance, it seemed like he had written himself into the lead as an all-world soccer star whose nickname was “Lover”.
The next day I received a genuine surprise when I got a phone call from Ukwu… in Nigeria. Like his script’s leading man, Ukwu actually referred to himself as Lover. While I attempted to figure out how much it would cost him to call me from Nigeria (I ended up with the designation of ‘a lot’), I talked to Ukwu about his script. I just couldn’t call him Lover with a straight face. He alternated between calling me Mr. Chris and Mr. Nice Guy; I felt good about my decision to help him. I offered even more advice to him about pitching his script to a smaller agent—or even a local lawyer—and suggested writing a more standardized treatment and plot summary. Ukwu ate up my advice with a spoon and sounded eager to get to work as we ended our conversation.
Several days later, he sent me a very slightly revised treatment of his script and, after going through it with a fine-toothed comb, I realized that it was as I had initially suspected: his screenplay was, in fact, about how good he was in soccer and how smooth he was with women. What I had missed the first time was that there was also a sub-plot involving vampires. As our correspondence continued, I began to wonder if Ukwu had actually a completed script or whether he was simply trying to entice the William Morris Agency with the concept that he was the world’s best soccer player and ladies man. I also wasn’t sure if English was his first language, which brought an added degree of difficulty to the proceedings… and the script.
Because of the time change—Nigeria is seven hours ahead of Chicago—Ukwu would occasionally call me in the middle of the night and my office voicemail would pick up. This began to get slightly annoying when Ukwu started calling my cell phone at all hours of the night.
We talked a couple of more times at decent hours in the weeks that followed and Ukwu did nothing to change my feeling that he didn’t actually have a completed script. As a matter of fact, I slowly began to realize that Ukwu wasn’t listening to any of my advice either. Two months had gone by after he’d initially asked me what he could do to try and get his idea to Snipes and nothing I’d suggested he do had ever quite materialized. He hadn’t tried calling William Morris, he hadn’t created a four sentence plot synopsis for his script, nor had he written a passable treatment for it.
While I was pondering this development—there are only so many times you can tell someone to do the exact same thing over the course of two months before you begin to wonder—I received a quizzical text message from Ukwu. He stated that he wanted me to “add urs to make d movie, d world as been waiting 4”. I was admittedly confused. An hour later, I received another text message from him, “Whats d next level? I need ur help.” Another hour later, my phone rang. It was Ukwu and he was telling me how he needed my help: he needed me to send him $5,000.
Apparently, Ukwu had taken the money his father had given him to take an exam of some kind, I’m imagining a sort of comprehensive exam that is taken in order to graduate from high school, and told me that he had instead spent it working on his script. He didn’t have a computer at home and had been paying the exorbident fees to the Nigerian Internet cafes and had also been making long distance phone calls to me to discuss matters. He had also hoped that he could put some of this money toward the purchase of a computer for himself. The one thing Ukwu hadn’t been contributing money toward was his script.
Barely able to afford my own rent, I told Ukwu that I couldn’t help him. He called again the next day and the amount of money he needed was down to $500. By the end of the conversation it was down to $200. When the subject of his script came up near the end of the call, I told him encouragingly that he didn’t need to give up on it and that he might ask an English teacher of his to look at it. Ukwu cut me off, sarcastically thanked me and hung up.
I heard nothing from Ukwu for a couple weeks and figured that this chapter of my life was over. I figured wrong. He contacted me again asking for money and spiced up the request by telling me that people “say the white guys aren’t good guys” and asked me to prove those people wrong by sending him cash. The part of the e-mail that interested me the most was that instead of asking for money to pay for his test, he was now asking for money to pay for some unexplained “papers”, It was at this moment that my great experiment with helping other people swiftly ended.
Only one thing is certain after this, from now on, I’m deleting all e-mails that are sent to me that contain the word Nigeria, regardless of whether I can get a column out of it or not.
