Screenwriters of “White Boy Rick”, Logan and Noah Miller.  Photo by Marcus Siu.

Article by Marcus Siu

It’s been ten years since identical twins Noah and Logan Miller did the implausible by “literally” breaking into Hollywood.  The Fairfax natives snuck past the tight security during the San Francisco International Film Festival to pursue Academy Award winner, Ed Harris, where he just received an acting award at the Castro Theater.  Immediately after the standing ovation and Harris’ exit, the twins darted onstage on a mission and followed Harris behind the red curtains with an open laptop and their script.

When the twins got Harris’ attention backstage, the excited fast-talking duo persuaded the amused Harris to go out into the alley by the side of the theatre so he could hear what they desperately wanted to say and to also have him watch their two-minute trailer on their laptop atop a dumpster to pitch him the script of “Touching Home”; their autobiographical coming of age drama about their alcoholic father who attempts to reconcile with his two sons as they pursue their dreams of professional baseball.

Richie Merritt (White Boy Rick, right) and Matthew McConaughey (Richard Wershe Sr.) star in Columbia Pictures’ and Studio 8’s WHITE BOY RICK.

Their mission was to make good on an eternal promise to their father; to make and dedicate a movie about him and show, despite his struggles with alcohol, that he was a good father who did his absolute best to keep his family together.

Along the same lines, it is with this same understanding about family that brought the twins their third writing credit with Sony Pictures, “White Boy Rick”, based on the true story about Richard Wershe Jr., a teenager who became an undercover informant for the FBI in Detroit during the 1980s and was ultimately arrested for drug-trafficking and sentenced to life in prison.

Before production, there were two different scripts floating around from two different production companies of the life of Richard Wershe Jr.  However, it was the Miller’s script that won each of the production companies over as both teams were drawn more to the emotional familial elements of the tale over the “gangster” themes.

Logan Miller explains, “I think just trying to look at each character as a fully formed human being in a two hour setting is very forced and restricted, but if you try to go through each person and figure out a little bit about them and not judge them morally, …they’re living their lives, they’re struggling, they’re just trying to get through the day like everybody else”.  Miller pauses, “That’s some of the great challenges but also one of the great privileges of writing…trying to understand people better.”.

Regardless if a character is a self-abusive father or a teenage kingpin crack dealer, or even the father of “White Boy” Rick played by Matthew McConaughey, who sells guns for a living, it’s hard to feel empathy for them if you are only looking from the outside in.  With the Noah and Logan Miller’s script, it shows the characters as real people who have real dreams but are struggling to make it in life in an ever-changing world.

(Originally printed in the November 2018 issue of CC Magazine)