Six studios announce Dolores Huerta biopics, one has met her

The Burbank visitor-parking system crashed at 10:40 on Thursday morning. Six studios had each reserved a space for an Untitled Dolores Huerta Project, and the software could only hold one.

Sources close to the situation say the barrier arm stuck half-raised for forty minutes. Six development executives sat in six black SUVs, each holding the same one-page logline, and none of them would reverse.

That, darling, is how the town paid tribute.

Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez, gave the movement the words "Sí, se puede," and died this week at 96. Gregory Nava, who wrote Frida and wrote and directed Selena, has been developing a film about her life for years and shared an update on the project this week.

Nava has a script. Everyone else has a parking space.

The six

The first rival announcement landed at 6:12 a.m., according to a trade-paper intern who asked to be described only as exhausted. The sixth landed at 12:09 p.m. All six were titled Untitled Dolores Huerta Project.

Trade papers tried to tell them apart by studio, then by producer, then by font. By mid-afternoon one outlet had given up and numbered them, like hurricanes.

"We greenlit at 5:55," said Pell Ostrander, head of development at Meridian Pictures. "We did not have a writer, a director or a second page. What we had was conviction, and a very fast legal department."

Asked what Huerta had actually done, Ostrander paused for six seconds. "Organising," he said. "Grapes were involved. Our research team is pulling the full story now, and we expect it to be inspiring."

The desk

The Writers Guild opened what it is calling a deconfliction desk on Thursday afternoon. Its job is to stop six screenwriters from being hired to write the same scene about the same woman in the same week.

"We have had six requests for the 1965 grape strike," said desk coordinator Imani Falk. "We have had six requests for the boycott. We have had six requests for a scene where she says the famous thing, and six separate notes asking if she could say it earlier."

Falk said the desk is assigning years. One studio gets the 1960s, one gets the 1970s, and the studio that arrived last gets a decade still to be determined.

"One studio asked whether it could have the whole life, and the other five could have the sequel. We explained that this is not how a life works." — Imani Falk, Writers Guild deconfliction desk

The consultants

Awards strategists, naturally, were ahead of everyone. Sources say one firm had six separate campaign decks ready by Thursday evening, each promising a "long-overdue" film about a woman most of its clients had googled that morning.

"We believe in this story," said strategist Corvin Lathe, declining to say which of the six stories he meant. "We believe in it six times, at six price points."

Lathe has reserved a ballroom for an eventual premiere. He has not reserved a date, a film or a screen.

"Thursday is traditionally strong for us," he said.

The one that exists

Through all of this, Nava's project remains the only one with a script, a history and a filmmaker who knew his subject. Nava and his wife, Barbara Martinez Jitner, were with Huerta at the end, according to Deadline. None of the six rival projects had, as of Thursday, met her.

"We're aware of the Nava film," Ostrander said. "We think there is room in the market for his version and our five."

Pressed on what made his version different, he said it would be "bigger."

Bigger than what, he could not say. The research team was still pulling the full story.

The phrase

The day ended, sources say, with a call from a sixth-floor marketing office to the Patent and Trademark Office. The studio wanted to know whether it could register "Sí, se puede" as a tagline for its untitled film.

The examiner on the line reportedly listened, asked the studio to repeat the phrase, and then explained the problem as plainly as she could.

It was already taken. Decades ago. By everyone.