Growing up in Ringgold, Georgia, Whitni Resides always had an interest in theater and drama, so when she heard about the Redneck Army and the Battle of Blair Mountain while a student at Ringgold High School, she immediately imagined it would one day make a great movie or TV series.
She didn't think she'd actually write it, but the pandemic gave her the time and the inclination to do just that. Last month her story about the largest labor uprising in U.S. history won Outstanding Drama Script at the Catalyst Content Festival for pilots and scripts.
According to a release from Catalyst, previous winners of the content festival have gone on to achieve success in all facets of the TV industry, including selling their shows to networks, securing top agency representation, and getting hired as writers, directors and assistant showrunners on popular shows including "Gossip Girl," "The Blacklist," "New Amsterdam," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Kenan."
Resides' entry was the nonfiction story of coal miners in 1920 West Virginia who attempted to join the United Mine Workers of America. The coal companies responded to quell the uprising by hiring armed mercenaries to intimidate them. According to Resides, the dispute culminated in 10,000 miners facing off against 5,000 mercenaries in a seven-day shooting war.
"It's such a great story, and I just knew somebody would make a movie about it," Resides, who now lives in Nashville, said in a Zoom interview.
The name is derived from the fact that the miners dressed in blue overalls with red bandanas around their necks to identify themselves to each other. Resides said the miners lost the battle during the weeklong fighting, but over the next decade, it continued to bring a lot of media attention and, eventually, empathy from around the country, which led to growth in union membership and improvements in working conditions in the mines.
Resides, who got her degree in business from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2018, said she is focusing on work in the TV or film industry. She and co-creator Mark Brown have written the first of what they believe should be three seasons of "Redneck Army," but they are mostly trying to get the pilot in the hands of a producer and production company.
"I originally saw it as a movie, but the outline alone was many pages long," Resides said.
She said she believes the story has three parts: the actual fighting that took place in 1920, the battles within the community and even among family and friends over the next decade and then the resolution.
"The fight was also with wives and families, too, and I think it's important to show them after they've lost friends and family members," she said.
Brown said in a news release after winning the award, "Television has really embraced forgotten history with shows like 'Watchmen' and 'Underground.' Whitni and I say we like to tell the stories the Chamber of Commerce doesn't want you to hear."
As for casting parts of the series, Resides laughed and admitted she had to write a part for herself, creating a strong-willed woman who loves her town, her dog and her double-barreled shotgun. She pictures Tom Hardy playing Bill Blizzard, who was described at the time as a "man who would fight you at the drop of a hat, and you did not want to drop that hat," and Tom Holland as young Jack, a spy for the coal companies.
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com