The march through our streets on our country’s birthday screams about where we are.
The masked attempt at terrorism and the declaration that American democracy is only for white people. The through-line of the white supremacists, the NAZIs, the Fascists, the Ku Klux Klan, the Confederates is white supremacist nativism: the belief that the United States should be politically and culturally reserved for white people alone, enforced through intimidation, propaganda, and violence. The specific targets and slogans change by era, but the core idea stays the same — racial hierarchy, exclusion, and the use of public spectacle to normalize hate. Like today.
IT HAPPENED BEFORE.
It happened before on American streets, under American flags, with American politicians and American cowards pretending not to see what was right in front of them.
IT HAPPENED BEFORE.
Hate dressed up as patriotism. Fascists seeking local audiences. Antisemitism infecting every part of the American society that embraced Jim Crow segregation and was willing to kill to keep it. The old poison of white supremacy moved through the bloodstream of this country like it had every right to be there. And it keeps showing up again. Right now.
That is exactly why I wrote BOYLE HEIGHTS 1939. It has a purpose but it is an exciting story, a Political Noir Thriller, for a movie to see in theaters and enjoy in spite of moving you.
I did not sit down to write this screenplay because I wanted to revisit the past for its own sake. I stepped away from everything because I wanted to find a story that could help explain the world we are in right now — and what we saw just this weekend on our country’s birthday!
We were again outraged. The fear, the anger, the exhaustion, the helplessness, the strange paralysis that settles over so many people when history starts repeating itself and nobody has the language for it. We don’t know any context to help us do anything other than rage. That kind of psychic damage is real. And when a society cannot name what is happening to it, when it doesn’t know we’ve been there before, then it becomes easier for demagogues to manipulate us, easier to divide us, easier to break us. It is blatant, it is deliberate, it is strategy. The feeling of trauma and powerlessness is a tool of demagogues and Fascists.
So, I wrote a very contained Political Noir Thriller story: four actors, one room, one week of terror. The production of the low-budget full-length feature film is designed to be made with precision and urgency, for a movie you will love.
BOYLE HEIGHTS 1939 takes place over the week of June 5–11, 1939, in Boyle Heights, a heavily red-lined, ethnically diverse neighborhood just over the river from downtown Los Angeles.
In 1939, a 20-year-old Mexican man, Juan Ignacio Herrera Martínez, flees American NAZI Silver Shirt vigilantes — Hitler-inspired NAZIs determined to terrorize, seize, and disappear the “undesirables” they want gone from the country: Mexicans, through “repatriation” laws, and Jews, through rampant antisemitism. Here. In America.
Juan crashes through the door of the small one-room apartment of Michael Scott Whitney, a 65-year-old white widower and Spanish-American War veteran struggling to survive in Boyle Heights. Soon a Jewish doctor, Samuel “Dr. Sam” Lieberman, a refugee from Germany, is pulled into the crisis, too. And in that one claustrophobic room, over a handful of days, the question becomes brutally simple: who is protected, who is abandoned, and what does a decent human being do when fascism comes to the door?
That question is not historical decoration. It is the whole point. It is a fictional story that is historically accurate.
IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE.
Because the truth is, the black cloud of our trauma and powerlessness did not come out of nowhere. American NAZIs were real in the 1930s. Antisemitism was not some fringe embarrassment hidden in the shadows; it was organized, public, and emboldened by the rise of Hitler abroad and by the willingness of people here to treat racial hatred as a legitimate worldview. The Ku Klux Klan had already spent decades proving that white supremacy in America could be mass politics, not just private prejudice. The Confederates took us to war over this. And proved it did not need to win everywhere to be dangerous. It only needed enough fear, enough silence, enough permission. That is what we see happening today.
That is why I keep coming back to the fact IT HAPPENED BEFORE.
It happened before in the organized hatred of Jews. It happened before in the terror directed at Black Americans. It happened before in the language of “law and order,” “American values,” and “keeping the country safe,” used to justify violence against the vulnerable and “different.”
When people decide that if the cruelty is public enough, it must be normal; when the only expression is outrage, when people feel powerless … they can eventually cave in to complacency and then complicity. When people have no context, people have no hope, and when people have no hope, they have no vision.
IT HAPPENED BEFORE.
And it happened before in Los Angeles, a city many people imagine as always modern, progressive, and immune to the ugliest parts of American history.
It was not immune.
In 1938 and 1939, NAZI and pro-NAZI activity in Los Angeles was not a rumor or a footnote. It was a public reality. There were rallies, marches, supporters, sympathizers, and men who believed they were on the right side of history while praising one of the most monstrous regimes the world has ever produced. The facts about NAZIs versus BOYLE HEIGHTS in 1938 and 1939 are looking a lot like I.C.E. versus Blue Cities today.
That is the heartbeat of BOYLE HEIGHTS 1939. Not nostalgia. Not costume history. It’s an entertaining thriller with an eye-opening context.
Because the same American reflex when feeling powerless is still with us: assume the threat is minimal, sanitize the language, accept white nationalists as mere “provocateurs,” believe that it is the anti-fascists who are “the problem,” pretend that neutrality is wisdom.
It is not wisdom.
It is surrender.
When hate is allowed to march openly, it is not constrained by courtesy. It grows. It infects. It spreads like another pandemic. And it feeds on the feeling that ordinary people have no power to stop it.
But ordinary people do have power when they can see clearly. Without vision, people fall into complacency and then complicity. History proves this over and over and over.
IT HAPPENED BEFORE
That is what I am trying to do with the exciting screenplay BOYLE HEIGHTS 1939. It’s not just an exciting story to tell, it is also a reminder. A piece of art that says: you are not imagining the pressure, and you are not wrong to feel the weight of it. The fear has a history. The helplessness has a history. The rage has a history. There is a context. And the history matters because it tells us we are not dealing with some new, inexplicable breakdown. We are dealing with a pattern we have seen before.
IT HAPPENED BEFORE.
And because it happened before, we have a responsibility to recognize it faster, call it by its name, and stop pretending the warning signs are somehow too extreme to believe.
BOYLE HEIGHTS 1939 is my attempt to make that recognition impossible to ignore.
If this may be a story that speaks to you, share this. If you are or know collaborators, historians, producers, artists, or anyone who understands why this moment demands memory instead of amnesia, if you believe the arts still have a role in telling the truth before it becomes too late, then this is part of that work.
IT HAPPENED BEFORE.
And it is happening again.
This time, we are supposed to recognize it and stop it!