Posing for photographs on the grounds of the Dearborn Homes development, Dreyana Grooms is approached by a building maintenance worker who wants to let her know police have been towing cars from the lot where she parked.
“I ain’t stressed,” says Grooms. “I’m comfortable. This is where I’m from.”
She suggests a photo on the steps of the neighboring public school, overlooking a playground and baseball field.
“There was, like, 12 of us. We used to sit out here all day, cracking jokes,” she says.
Grooms’ childhood ended, though, when she was charged with murder as an adult at age 16, right at the beginning of her sophomore year at DuSable High School. The story of that crime and that trial — and of the Logan Square filmmaker she met after the end of the trial — is the reason she is here on this bright spring morning, a 22-year-old expecting she’ll be watching lightly fictionalized chapters of her life get filmed around Chicago this summer.
The photographer tells her he saw her IMDB page, the one that says “Dreyana Grooms, writer” and links to the announced film “Dreyana Grooms.”
“Thank you,” says Grooms. “That’s the goal. I’m a Leo. I love the attention.”
Her car, it turns out, will be fine: no ticket, no tow. And the film project has been looking more and more like it will be fine, too. In the course of the spring, the funding necessary to get it made climbed to well over halfway to the target, says Gabe Klinger, the film’s director and Grooms’ writing partner, friend and mentor.
More is still needed, but “we’re in the home stretch,” says Klinger, planning to start shooting their “scrappy little indie” in August. Rayven Symone Ferrell (“All Eyez on Me”) is signed to play Grooms, Wunmi Mosaku (“Lovecraft Country”) her mother, and John Ortiz (“Silver Linings Playbook”) her lawyer, known as Bow Tie.
They want it to be an unconventional film treating urban street life, one that isn’t so much about uplift or redemption as about hard realities.
“It kind of feels like I got my family and my friends and my team on my back. And I want this movie to shine for them, for the community,” says Grooms. “I know it’s violence. I know it’s jail. I know it’s all that that’s involved. Through it all I want them to see like the wildness and how it really is growing up in Chicago. And not just the Low End or the South Side or the West Side. This should shine a whole light on how it is in Chicago.”
Says Klinger, “It was very important for Dreyana to, in her words, ‘keep it raw.’ And so it’s not about forcing suspense or plot into this, it’s about showing things as they are. And I think we really believe there’s a power in that.”
Theirs is an unlikely partnership. Klinger, 38, is a white North Sider born in Brazil who has directed two well-regarded films, the romantic drama “Porto” and the documentary “Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater.” Grooms is a Black South Sider from the Low End neighborhood around the Dearborn Homes who, while keeping up her grades in school, was also hanging with a neighborhood “gang clique” — as Klinger has put it in trying to sell the movie — and whose life was going sideways at best after the murder charge and then a subsequent gun charge.
They joined forces in 2018 after Klinger attended anti-violence programs for underserved neighborhoods. A caseworker he met there knew Grooms, having worked with her during Grooms’ two years at Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, and said he absolutely needed to meet Dreyana.
“She just said she’s unlike anybody you’ll meet, amazing potential,” Klinger recalls.
Grooms earned her high school degree while there and was “the only graduate of her class in juvie,” the director says, not without pride. A note that Leonard Dixon, the juvenile home’s superintendent, wrote to Grooms’ public defender and noted her 4.0 GPA, “highest behavior level” and praised her “positive leadership among her peers.”
So the caseworker, Grooms says, “reached out to me. And she’s like, ‘I met somebody named Gabe and he’s got a movie on Netflix. And he’s real cool. He’s real nice.’ I’m like, ‘I want to meet him. I want to meet him.'”
Klinger had to go to her home because she was under house arrest, charged with aggravated assault because she’d been caught with a loaded gun, a semi-automatic .45. (Chicago police reported she told them “when the police pulled up, some dude gave her the gun and told her to run.” The police account adds, “she stated she did not want to get shot so she threw the gun.”)
The gun charge came about eight months after she was found not guilty in the killing of 25-year-old Walter Neely (a witness had misidentified her as taking part in the crime), and she was feeling low.
“He was like, ‘People need to hear your story.’ He’s like, ‘I’m gonna get your story heard,'” Grooms recalls. “I’m already beating myself up because I just got out and I caught another case. And you know, I just thought this was God bringing an angel to my doorstep — and, like, this is going to be my out. Like, I’ll be a fool if I was to say no. So I say, ‘OK, I’m gonna give it a try.’ I knew it was going to be something different. I knew it would be out of my comfort zone. But I’ll give it a try.”
She has a metaphor for how it felt to have the director, out of the blue, take interest: “It just was dropped onto my doorstep like a big ol’ package from FedEx and I ain’t never ordered nothing. I’m just so excited to open it up, you know? Get to see what it is. That’s kind of how it went.”
“It’s the kind of thing where I didn’t know if it was gonna work out,” says Klinger. “It’s such an unlikely partnership. And we just kind of fell in love with each other as friends and became really close. And sometimes it’s like a brother-and-sister type of relationship. Sometimes, I’m a little bit more avuncular or parental with her, but I try to dial that back, because I don’t want her to look at me as like a parent. And when I’ve heard her talking to people about me, she’s referred to me as like a mentor and stuff. So that’s very flattering, and, you know, very cool.”
Klinger hired Grooms as an employee.
“She said she had researched a first-time gun offender program online and said, ‘I think I’m eligible for it.’ I hired her that day,” he says, not only because of the film potential but knowing that proof of employment could get her into the program. “I said, ‘You’re going to come to my office every day. You’re going to write a movie about your life.'”
They worked through the summer of 2018 and had a first draft of a screenplay completed by the end of August.
“He had me under the impression that I was going to be telling the story and he was going to be writing everything down,” says Grooms. “But he tricked me. It was like I was in movie scriptwriter class 101. He taught me everything I needed to know.”
They researched how people talk in court. “We read a lot of court transcripts,” says Klinger, “and just hung out at the courthouse a lot and listened to lawyers. I would sit in bond court a lot. I would sit in the courtroom that Dreyana was tried in and listen to the judge.”
Klinger also asked to meet Grooms’ friends and family, the people who could give dimension to the story.
“When they met Gabe they were like, ‘What is he, the police or something? Why you bring the police around?'” Grooms says. “He was asking them questions and stuff. And I was like, ‘Nah, y’all, he’s like family, y’all.’ So they started opening up to him and he started coming around more and more.”
“All the people from her gang, everybody from her life, trusted me,” says Klinger. “Everybody had amazing stories to share.” He at first wasn’t sure what shape the movie would take, but the more he learned and the more the duo worked, the more they began to think, “this has the dramatic substance for a feature script,” he recalls.
“We used sticky notes,” says Grooms. “And we wrote down, like, the beginning, middle, end — you know, like you learn in school, like the plot twists. And also like the climax. We kind of did that: wrote down names, wrote down places, wrote down times. It was messy, but it all kind of came together like a puzzle in the end.”
From finishing a script in summer 2018 to preparing to film three years later can seem like an eternity. Grooms pleaded guilty to felony gun possession and successfully served two years’ probation. She found work at a Southwest Side candy factory, but then lost that job early in the pandemic, she says.
Now on unemployment, she’s rooming with young women she knew from school, away from the old neighborhood.
But there was also, during that time, a film to pitch, including a December 2018 trip, Grooms’ first time on a plane, to meet potential investors. “When Gabe took me to California, I didn’t want to leave,” Grooms says. “It was a feeling of safety. You didn’t have to watch your back.”
There is a spark to Grooms, a sense of curiosity about the world beyond what she has known that makes it easy to spot what her caseworker and then Klinger saw in her. She asks the Tribune photographer about details of his work. At the end of a long joint phone interview with her and Klinger, she asks me, “Like, Steve, what are the other stories that you’ve been working on?”
And she marveled, she reports, as a new kind of American justice played out in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer found guilty of murdering George Floyd. Grooms was visiting friends in the Twin Cities and saw the verdict delivered on TV screens while they were at a Hooter’s in the Mall of America.
“Everybody in the restaurant went crazy,” she says. “It was like 100 tons lifted off of everybody.” That everybody, she was surprised to see, included “you know how I mean, Caucasians. That’s how I know the world’s changing. Black lives do matter.”
She’s been talking periodically on the phone with Ferrell, the actor who will play her (who is not to be confused with the former “Cosby Show” actor Raven-Symoné).
“I love her. She’s cool,” Grooms says. “She interacted with me like she’s been where I’m from, but I know she’s never been where I’m from.”
Ferrell warmed to Grooms as well. “She’s a people person,” says the actress. “She has a positive vibe. She’s warm. She’s comfortable. She’s not really worried about people’s opinions, so that she doesn’t switch out when she’s in front of, you know, certain people or different crowds. She is what she is.”
Despite soaking in the new experiences, all this waiting has not been easy on Grooms, she says.
“I’m ready for a movie to get going because the last couple months — 2021 has not been good to me whatsoever,” she says. “I lost three friends that died literally weeks apart. I’m just trying to stay safe and keep myself staying safe and stay alive and stay out of trouble so I can see this movie through.”
Somewhere in there, she allows, she is “so very excited. But I’ve been keeping my composure. I want to save all that for when it’s done. Right now I’m just really focused on taking it day by day. I’m not ahead of myself.”
Klinger, though, allows himself to get a little ahead. Asked if he wants to add anything at the end of the dual interview in which Grooms did about 80% of the talking, he says he’s been formulating a publicity plan.
“What struck me,” the filmmaker says, “is that after we get this thing made, and we’re touring around on the festival circuit, I’m just going to be able to, you know, sit back and have Dre talk because she’s so much more articulate about everything than me. So thanks, Dre, for doing all the heavy lifting for me.”
“No problem,” says his subject and co-writer. “I’ll be your voice.”