JOE GOMEZ-This is not based on a real story. This is a real story.

Based on the true story of Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr. and Michael Friedman

Proposed format: Narrative short film, approximately 22–28 minutes Genre: Coming-of-age historical drama with humor Setting: Walla Walla, Washington, primarily spring 1962, with memories of the harvest years from 1956–1961 and a brief epilogue in late summer 1962 Status: First-stage treatment, before scene outline and screenplay

Working Title

**JOE GOMEZ FOR PRESIDENT **

Alternative Title

I’M FOR JOE GOMEZ

Tagline

He never existed. The truth he revealed was real.

Logline

In 1962, a seventeen-year-old Indigenous athlete and his close Jewish friend invent an extraordinary Latino student and campaign to elect him president of their largely white high school, transforming a mischievous prank into a confrontation over prejudice, belonging, and the sovereign right to choose—until an elder’s unexpected act of wisdom changes everything.

The Heart of the Film

JOE GOMEZ is a coming-of-age story about a young organizer’s awakening. It begins with humor: a handful of high-school friends invent a candidate who does not exist. Beneath the fun, however, lies something serious. The agricultural prosperity of Walla Walla depends upon Indigenous, Mexican, Mexican American, and migrant labor, while the people doing much of that labor remain unseen, demeaned, and absent from the halls of the high school.

Young Phil Lane does not yet possess the language he will later use as a lifelong Indigenous leader and community developer, but he already carries the instinct. He knows from working beside the men in the fields that character is not determined by race, social standing, or popularity. He knows that authority should not decide beforehand who is worthy to be seen or chosen. The imaginary Joe Gomez becomes a vessel for that unarticulated conviction.

The film moves toward what appears likely to become a physical confrontation in a packed school auditorium. Instead, Principal Tedrick steps through the curtain wearing a handmade sign around his neck: “I’M FOR JOE GOMEZ.” His gesture does not crush the students, surrender his responsibility, or publicly humiliate anyone. With humor and emotional intelligence, he enters their story and turns a dangerous moment toward peace. The seventeen-year-old Phil is disappointed that he does not get to deliver his defiant speech. The elder Phil, looking back more than sixty years later, understands that Tedrick’s response was the greater act of leadership.

Point of View and Storytelling Approach

The story is seen primarily through the experiences of seventeen-year-old Phil and Mike. An older Phil and Mike may provide a light voice-over at the beginning, at two or three important transitions, and at the end. The voice-over should not explain what the images already show. It should bring the perspective of an elder to experiences the young man could not yet fully interpret.

The film should feel lived rather than narrated. Walla Walla is not presented as a place of simple villains and heroes. It is a beautiful, hardworking community carrying the ordinary prejudices and exclusions of its time. Vice Principal Kramer is an institutional antagonist, but the film does not portray him as a monster. The later reconciliation between him and Phil is essential because it demonstrates that opposition does not have to become permanent enmity.

Joe Gomez is never physically depicted. The audience may briefly believe that he is real, just as many Wa-Hi students did. His presence grows entirely through words, questions, posters, rumors, and others’ reactions. The more the administration tries to remove him, the more powerfully he fills the school.

Principal Characters

PHIL LANE JR., 17: An Ihanktonwan Dakota and Chickasaw senior, athlete, farm laborer, natural organizer, loyal friend, and gifted troublemaker with a strong internal sense of justice. Phil is physically courageous and accustomed to hard work. His greatest strength is his willingness to act; his youthful limitation is that he can mistake confrontation for victory.

PHIL’S FATHER: Quiet, grounded, hardworking, and observant. He speaks sparingly, but his words carry weight. He teaches Phil through example and serves as elder adviser to the Joe Gomez campaign. He recognizes the deeper purpose beneath the boys’ mischief without romanticizing it.

MIKE FRIEDMAN, 17: Phil’s Jewish friend and principal co-conspirator. Quick-minded, funny, adventurous, and prepared to challenge convention. His friendship with Phil gives the story its Native American and Jewish coming-of-age dimension. Their shared courage will soon take them hitchhiking across the United States and onward to Europe.

PRINCIPAL TEDRICK: A mature educator and former lightweight Pacific Coast Light-Weight College Boxing Champion who understands the difference between maintaining authority and defending his ego. His climactic action reveals humor, courage, restraint, and the ability to recognize truth inside youthful rebellion.

VICE PRINCIPAL KRAMER: Responsible for discipline and increasingly angered by the campaign. He believes Phil is a ringleader and attempts to stop the movement through warnings and institutional pressure. His eventual recommendation of Phil to the University of Washington reveals a more complex man capable of changing his relationship with a former adversary.

JOHN “SPEEDY” FOLSOM: The actual Student Body President. Initially threatened and frustrated by the campaign for an imaginary challenger, he tears down posters and helps defend the official process. He and Phil later reconcile and live together while attending the University of Washington.

ED WEITZ AND RON BRADSTREET: Phil’s exceptionally large athletic friends, seated with him at the assembly. Their physical presence makes the plan to rush the stage feel both possible and dangerous.

THE CAMPAIGN NETWORK: Juniors, sophomores, athletes, friends, and curious students who turn a private joke into a schoolwide movement. Collectively, they show how quickly an idea can travel when people feel that it belongs to them.

Visual World

Walla Walla in 1962 is rendered with warmth and specificity: golden wheat rolling toward the horizon, green pea vines crossing mechanical harvesters, dark soil beneath sweet onions, white cannery steam, metal flumes filled with rushing vegetables, dust on young workers’ faces, horses being fed at dawn, and an aging brick high school nearing the end of its life. The valley’s beauty exists alongside the hard labor beneath its abundance.

The color and energy shift between three worlds. The harvest sequences are sunlit, physical, noisy, and expansive. The school corridors are enclosed, orderly, and increasingly overtaken by handmade Joe Gomez posters. The final auditorium sequence begins crowded and restless, then becomes nearly still, with the old stage curtains holding the audience’s attention like a closed door.

The posters should look handmade and plausible for 1962. They become the film’s central visual motif. At first there are only one or two. Then they appear on hallway walls, bulletin boards, bathroom mirrors, and inside lockers. Administrators tear them down, leaving tape marks and pale rectangles. New posters appear in their place. By the final morning, the campaign has moved from the walls into the hands of approximately 1,200 students through the manifesto.

Treatment

Opening Image: A Name Appears

Before the audience sees any person, a hand presses a poster against an old high-school wall. Thick black letters read: JOE GOMEZ FOR PRESIDENT. A bell rings. Shoes pound through a corridor, and the poster is almost swallowed by passing students. One student stops, reads the name, and asks a friend, “Who’s Joe Gomez?” The friend answers with complete confidence, “You haven’t met him yet?”

Over this, the older Phil begins quietly: “In the spring of 1962, we started a campaign to elect Joe Gomez Student Body President of Walla Walla High School. There was only one small problem. Joe Gomez did not exist.” The title appears: JOE GOMEZ.

The Valley Beneath the Story

The film moves back several years. Twelve-year-old Phil works in a strawberry field under the Walla Walla sun. His hands are small but quick. Around him are working families and Indigenous and Latino laborers from the South. Seasons pass through grounded images rather than a rapid, glossy montage. Phil cuts hay, suckers corn, cuts onions, stacks cans at the cannery, and guides produce through the flumes at Birds Eye. Each new task reveals him growing older and stronger.

The labor is demanding but not portrayed as punishment. Young people in Walla Walla expect to work during the summer. The fields are places of responsibility and fellowship, but they also reveal an inequality Phil cannot ignore. Men who are mocked or dismissed in town are dependable and highly skilled in the fields. They share food, help one another, and work until the crop is safely in.

At fourteen, Phil drives a spreader truck alongside a moving pea combine on a steep hillside. The machines sway dangerously as processed vines pour into the truck bed. Phil concentrates, exhilarated by the challenge. When the truck is full, he drives onto a harvested field, pulls the floor lever, and accelerates. The bed rises, spreading vines evenly across the earth behind him.

Phil begins a night shift near Dayton, remains for the day shift, and then chooses to work another night. After thirty-six hours, he walks home at seven in the morning. His father is outside feeding the horses. He asks, “Good morning, son. How was work?” Phil answers, “I worked three shifts.” His father gives a small nod and says, “That’s good, son.” Phil goes upstairs to sleep because he must return for the six o’clock night shift.

The older Phil explains that this work taught him to judge people by whether they showed up, did their part, helped someone tired, and stayed steady when conditions became difficult. The men from the South earned his respect through their actions. The film then cuts from their faces in the fields to a busy corridor at Wa-Hi where no Latino faces are visible.

The Candidate Is Born

In spring 1962, seventeen-year-old Phil drives his old pickup toward track practice. Friends crowd into the cab or ride in the back. They talk about the student-body election and the familiar machinery of high-school popularity. Phil suggests inventing a candidate. Names are proposed and rejected until “Joe Gomez” lands with unexpected force.

The boys begin creating Joe’s life. Joe has just moved to Walla Walla. He runs the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat, broad-jumps more than twenty feet, runs two hundred yards in under twenty-three seconds, and pole-vaults higher than Phil, who was the Jr. Olympics pole-vault champ. He is highly intelligent, warm, friendly, and, Mike adds, extremely handsome. Each claim becomes grander, but not quite impossible. By the time the pickup reaches the track, Joe feels almost real.

Their first method is rumor. Phil asks someone, “Have you met Joe Gomez yet?” Campaign members repeat the question throughout the school. Students offer conflicting sightings. Someone thinks Joe is in a math class. Someone else heard he will join the track team. A girl says her friend met him. The campaigners do not need to manufacture every detail; the school begins creating Joe for itself.

Then the posters appear: JOE GOMEZ FOR PRESIDENT. The humor is infectious, but an unmistakable edge runs beneath it. The name of a Latino student—one who does not exist—is suddenly more visible inside Wa-Hi than the Latino and Indigenous workers whose labor sustains the valley outside it.

The Campaign Goes Underground

At first, Phil and his friends post their signs openly. Student Body President John “Speedy” Folsom tears them down. Vice Principal Kramer orders that the unofficial campaign material be removed. The campaign continues, and the struggle becomes a rhythm. A poster goes up. An administrator or a Student Body Officer pulls it down. Another appears somewhere else.

When open posting becomes too risky, the campaign develops a network. During class, a student raises a hand and asks to use the bathroom. A small folded poster hides beneath a notebook. In the bathroom, posters are stored behind a fixture or passed to another student. A campaigner emerges, walks the corridor, and puts one on the wall. During lunch, someone tears it down. Before the next bell, two more appear.

The campaign grows through participation. No single person controls it completely. Students who weren’t in the pickup start contributing ideas and recruiting others. Joe becomes a shared creation, and the administration’s effort to erase him only makes students more curious.

Kramer summons Phil to his office. The vice principal sits behind a desk and states that he believes Phil is one of the ringleaders. Phil maintains an expression of injured innocence. He truthfully says he has never put up a Joe Gomez poster. What he does not say is that he makes posters, hides them in bathrooms, and recruits the people who put them up.

In a brief flash of memory, twelve-year-old Phil stands beside his grandfather, Strong Heart, and receives the name Shúŋkmanú—Horse Thief. Back in Kramer’s office, a faint smile crosses Phil’s face. In his youthful mind, the campaign has become a raid on the Wa-Hi bureaucracy. Kramer warns that if the campaign continues, Phil won’t get school time to visit colleges or universities. Phil smiles, rises, and leaves.

The Manifesto

The schoolwide candidate assembly approaches, and rumors spread that Kramer is furious. At the Lane family home on Mill Creek Road, Phil, Mike, and two co-conspirators meet with Phil’s father. The mood is half war council and half writing session. Phil’s father listens as the young men talk over one another. He helps them slow down and express what the campaign is actually about.

Together, they write the one-page Joe Gomez Manifesto. Joe will humbly withdraw because he does not want to participate in a system based on personality and social status without full participation. If Joe is attacked at the assembly, however, the campaign will defend him. The Joe Gomez Election Campaign signs it.

The next problem is printing approximately 1,200 copies. A school copying machine begins operating after hours or beyond authorized use. The film does not reveal who has access. We see only paper feeding through the machine and stacks of manifestos growing. The older Phil asks, with a smile in his voice, “Who had access to those old Wa-Hi copying machines?” After a pause, he answers, “Only the Shadow knows.”

A Plan That Goes Too Far

The campaigners believe Kramer may attack Joe from the stage. Their response is no longer merely playful. If he denounces Joe, they plan to rush the stage, physically restrain the vice principal, and allow Phil to speak in defense of Joe and their sovereign right to choose.

Ed Weitz, six feet five and about 220 pounds, and Ron Bradstreet, six feet four and about 245 pounds, sit with Phil near the center front. The boys imagine the plan working but do not discuss what will happen afterward. Their silence about consequences shows the edge between youthful courage and recklessness.

Phil’s father is not shown approving a physical assault. The distinction must remain clear. He helped the students articulate their manifesto; the plan to rush the stage belongs to the young men and their incomplete understanding of power.

The Last Assembly at the Old Wa-Hi

The morning of the assembly arrives. This is the Class of 1962, the last graduating class to complete its education in the old Wa-Hi before the school moves to Fern and Abbott in 1963. The aging building carries decades of memory, authority, and tradition.

Juniors and sophomores stand at every entrance, handing a manifesto to each arriving student. Phil quietly places one through the administration office mail slot and slides another under Kramer’s door. Students enter the auditorium reading. The usual noise begins to fade.

Athletes and their friends occupy the center rows according to the informal hierarchy of that time. Phil positions himself between Ed and Ron, literally seated partly on one leg of each of them. Mike and other campaigners watch the entrances and stage. Kramer is nowhere in sight. About 1,200 pieces of paper rustled, then fell still. Students glance toward the stage, toward Phil, and toward one another. The atmosphere is no longer that of a prank. The room feels ready to break in one direction or another.

The curtains part.

Principal Tedrick steps onto the stage.

Around his neck hangs a simple sign: I’M FOR JOE GOMEZ.

For a moment, no one responds because no one expected this. Then surprise rolls through the auditorium. Laughter and applause release the tension. Campaigners look at one another. Phil remains ready to move, slowly realizing there is no attack to answer and no enemy on the stage.

Tedrick does not deliver a sermon. He does not expose the ringleaders or demand a public apology. His sign is enough. He has acknowledged the campaign, accepted its humor, and made space for the truth beneath it without surrendering the school to disorder.

Seventeen-year-old Phil feels cheated. He had prepared himself to rush the stage, restrain Kramer, and defend their rights before the entire school. He wanted the confrontation and the speech. Instead, Tedrick has ended the conflict with dignity before Phil can become the hero of his own imagined battle.

The older Phil’s voice enters: “At seventeen, I was foolishly disappointed. Today, I thank the Great Spirit that Principal Tedrick saved the day.”

Epilogue: What Victory Looked Like

The school year ends. Posters are stripped from the walls. Seniors carry boxes and yearbooks out of the old building. Joe Gomez never appears because no one ever did. Yet his name has become part of Wa-Hi’s memory.

The epilogue does not pretend that one campaign ended prejudice in Walla Walla. Its victory is more intimate. Kramer eventually writes Phil a strong recommendation to the University of Washington. Speedy Folsom later makes peace with Phil, and the two live together while attending the university. Former adversaries are not frozen forever in the roles they played during one high-school conflict.

In late August 1962, Phil and Mike stand at the edge of Walla Walla with one suitcase. Phil’s father has attached a sign featuring a large hand-drawn thumb and the words NEW YORK OR BUST! A vehicle approaches, slows, and stops. The two friends climb in, beginning the forty-four rides that will carry them to the Staten Island Ferry in fewer than five days and eventually onward to Europe.

As the car disappears down the road, the older Phil reflects that Joe Gomez was imaginary, but the exclusion he exposed was real. The campaign taught him that organization begins in relationships, stories carry power, humor can open doors, courage without wisdom can become recklessness, and an elder’s timely action can turn confrontation toward reconciliation.

The final image returns to the old school corridor. The wall is bare except for pale marks where tape once held a poster. A custodian passes. From somewhere off-screen, a student asks, “Whatever happened to Joe Gomez?” Another voice replies, “You mean you never met him?”

Cut to black.

On-screen text: “Joe Gomez never existed. The 1962 campaign did.”

Themes

Belonging and visibility: A community cannot be whole when the people whose labor sustains it remain unseen or demeaned.

Sovereign choice and participation: The campaign expresses a young Indigenous man’s instinct that ordinary people possess an inherent right to participate and choose, even before he has the mature language to explain that conviction.

Work as a source of knowledge: Phil’s respect for the workers comes from shared labor rather than abstract argument. Relationship corrects prejudice.

Humor as nonviolent power: Joe becomes influential because laughter makes participation possible and exposes contradictions that a lecture might leave untouched.

Courage and recklessness: The students are brave, but their plan to rush the stage shows how easily righteous energy can cross into harmful action.

Elder leadership: Phil’s father helps transform mischief into a statement of principle, while Principal Tedrick transforms confrontation into peace.

Reconciliation: Kramer and Speedy do not remain villains. The story allows people to grow beyond conflict.

Tone

The film should be warm, intelligent, energetic, and funny without trivializing the prejudice beneath the campaign. It should avoid nostalgia that makes 1962 appear innocent. It should also avoid imposing contemporary speeches upon teenagers of that era. The young people act from instinct, relationship, loyalty, humor, and an emerging sense of justice. The elder perspective gives those actions their fuller meaning.

The humor should arise from character and circumstance: the increasingly impossible perfection of Joe Gomez, Phil’s technically truthful denial in Kramer’s office, clandestine bathroom poster operations, the mysterious copying machine, and Phil’s sincere disappointment when wisdom prevents his moment of heroic confrontation.

Historical and Cultural Integrity

The film is based on Phil Lane Jr.’s firsthand recollections. Before finalizing the screenplay dialogue, check names, school roles, dates, athletics details, photographs, the old campus layout, and any surviving yearbooks or newspaper references. The original Joe Gomez Manifesto should be incorporated if a copy is found. Where exact dialogue is not remembered, the screenplay should preserve the truth and intent of the exchange without falsely presenting invented words as verbatim history.

The terms used against Latino and migrant workers belong to the historical reality and should appear only where necessary to establish what Phil and the workers confronted. They should never be used casually or for entertainment. Ground Indigenous identity in Phil’s actual Ihanktonwan Dakota and Chickasaw life, his relationship with his father and grandfather Strong Heart, and his name Shúŋkmanú, without adding invented ceremony or generalized “Native” imagery.

Joe Gomez must not become a stereotype. He is deliberately unseen. The actual Latino and Indigenous farmworkers, however, should be portrayed as distinct human beings rather than as a silent background. During screenplay development, add any remembered names, personalities, meals, jokes, gestures of kindness, or specific working relationships wherever Phil can recall them.

Why This Story Matters Now

The story asks a contemporary question without leaving 1962: Who is allowed to be visible, to belong, and to lead? It demonstrates how quickly a shared story can expose a social contradiction, but it also warns that moral certainty does not make every tactic wise. At a time when public life often treats humiliation and domination as victory, Principal Tedrick offers another model. He listens beneath resistance, recognizes the truth within it, and creates a way for everyone to step back with dignity.

The final meaning is neither that the students defeated the school nor that the school defeated the students. The deeper victory is that an imaginary young man revealed something real, a dangerous confrontation was transformed, and relationships survived strongly enough for former opponents to become friends.

Recommended Next Development Stage

The next stage should be a beat sheet and scene outline, identifying about 20–28 scenes, each scene’s purpose and emotional turn, which moments require older Phil’s and Mike’s narration, and where historically accurate dialogue must be reconstructed.