Published in the
1/13/03 USA Today.
For Fisher, sudden fame comes with a high price
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Antwone Fisher's story sounds like something dreamed up by a screenwriter.
Antwone Fisher wrote the screenplay to the film of his life.
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY
Two months on the job as a security guard at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, the 11-year Navy veteran asked his supervisor for some vacation. Raised in an outwardly religious but internally deviant foster family headed by a preacher and his wife, Fisher gets the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving in Cleveland with relatives of his father he has never met. Edward Elkins was shot to death two months before Fisher was born to a 17-year-old girl. She gave him up because she could not care for him. Although she tried sporadically to keep in touch, she later lost contact.
As a grown man, Fisher met her: a toothless weeping woman who had born five children and put all of them in foster care. "There was no magnetic field" between mother and son, says Fisher. "She had never wiped my nose." And Mrs. Pickett, his foster mother for 12 years? She was "nuts," he says. And brutal, routinely beating Fisher and her other foster children.
Flash forward to January 2003. Encouraged by producer Todd Bla, Fisher, now 43, has written the screenplay to the film of his life, Antwone Fisher, which now is in theaters. Denzel Washington chooses it as his directing debut. (Washington also plays Fisher's naval psychiatrist.) Fisher also uses his life story to write a best-selling 369-page autobiography, Finding Fish (with Mim Eichler Rivas), now in paperback (Harper, $7.50). Last Christmas Eve, he published a book of poetry, Who Will Cry for the Little Boy? (Morrow, $9.95). That same month, Fisher returned to Cleveland and gave some of the caring teachers, principals, social workers and old friends, as well as children in foster care, a chance to see where a desperately lonely, dyslexic, sexually abused, homeless foster kid ended up.
Monday, Fisher looks like a star at a fancy Georgetown hotel: broad-shouldered, large-eyed, extremely fit. (In Finding Fish, he describes how the Navy changed him with the travel, the discipline, the pride he felt putting on his uniform and winning medals.) But the man from the Midwest hasn't gone Hollywood blasé: Within minutes of the interview's start, he has whipped out photos of his two young daughters, Indigo and Azure, and a well-worn snapshot from his wedding to his wife, LaNette. (The female lead in the movie is a composite of a variety of women from Fisher's life. The film is described as "inspired" by Fisher's life with fictional elements and characters. In Finding Fish, Fisher notes that he changed some names and circumstances.)
Fisher wrote Fish after the screenplay in part because it gave him "lots of freedom." With a movie, "You have to move the story forward." Although he was on the set every day, he left when scenes of sexual abuse by a woman neighbor in her 20s were filmed. (Fisher was three years old.)
But Fisher stresses that people, even in terrible situations, need to remember, "life is long."
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