This project has been developed as a renewable Limited Series for Television and also as a stand-alone Feature Film. The author is a screenwriter with representation in film by Industry Entertainment Partners. To learn more about how the versions of the story differ in these two adaptations, please click “contact” above and inquire.
Film Version
This story has been developed into a film which is akin to MILK (2008) but with a more pleasant and uplifting ending.
The film focuses on Henry Sperry and the Connecticut club leadership during the race for the Connecticut Governor’s mansion in the Spring. All of Abe Lincoln’s rally speeches in the Connecticut race are featured, as are the Wide Awake riots in Waterbury and New Haven.
The B-Story of this Hartford-centric version is in New York City with Sidney Gladwin, the friend of the Hartford boys who moved to New York after marching in the first Wide Awake event. In New York, Sidney spurs the spread of the Wide Awakes amongst various immigrant populations thanks to a fortuitous friendship with a devilishly charming Irish machinist named Francis Lambert. Francis recruits former-Dead Rabbits gang members as well as his fellow machinist union members. When Gladwin returns home to Connecticut to help during the last week of the Governor’s race, he shares insights learned from the mean streets of New York. These hard lessons come at a crucial time – just as a chapter of young Wide Awakes are attacked by a mob, leaving several boys hospitalized. Their revenge comes at the ballot box days later where the Wide Awakes win the State House race.
The film finale features their more important victory: who is “inside the tent” at their victory gala. Defying warnings from moderate Party insiders, the Wide Awakes welcome women’s rights activists and African Americans to fight alongside them. On Monday after the gala, our hero Sperry finds himself inundated with hundreds of telegrams from young people across America asking to start new chapters.
In the film’s coda we see hints that the new Sperry-driven, but Gladwin-toughened club spread across 22 states as the vehicle for mass progressive change.
A draft film treatment is available: READ THE TREATMENT
Limited Series for Television
This story has been developed into a TV miniseries which features simultaneous arcs and interwoven plot line crossovers, as popularized by recent TV hits LOST and The Looming Tower (2018).
The limited series for TV starts with the original Wide Awakes in Hartford. Then, as Henry Sperry spreads the club into new cities and states, we see those far-flung chapters as distinct, mostly self-contained story arcs where local heroes fight for local needs.
Across America, people use the Wide Awakes to advocate for themselves, thus shaping the embryonic Republican Party’s identity as the vessel for a myriad of progressive hopes:
- African Americans in Boston use their Wide Awake chapter to bellow that the Republican Party is with them in their fight for their freedom.
- Women in Michigan fight for equal rights as Wide Awakes.
- Prairie socialists in Iowa fight for government assistance forcing Republican candidates to promise to help their family farms.
- Immigrant veterans of the failed German revolution exiled to Missouri get a second chance to overthrow an oligarchy.
- Using the Wide Awakes to organize themselves, Irish immigrants fight back against the gangs of New York that have been terrorizing them.
We also see long arcs that dramatize the formative experiences of future-president James Garfield, aristocratic Presidential grandson Charles F. Adams, and the sibling rivalry between conservative Mark Twain and his liberal Wide Awake brother. All of these stories show how the youngsters in the Wide Awakes forged a big-tent liberal Republican Party for a generation.
At the same time, the Hartford boys have to combat their own internal divisions and resist the corrupting influence that money and power exert on the celebrity leadership clique. After removing James Chalker, the selfish antagonist to Henry Sperry’s selfless hero, the club succeeds in galvanizing 22 states and unifying the Republican Party’s factions into one singular engine of liberalizing change.
The connection to Gangs of New York makes Wide Awake as a limited series an attractive option for TV creators who are interested in political activism, civic engagement, and historical projects from this era.
A draft TV treatment is available: READ THE TREATMENT