Stories & Scripts
Essays, scripts, and stories from a life lived off the grid and on the move.THE KING’S BASKETBALL
★★★★★ 5-Star Rated Logline on Stage 32
“A haunting, beautifully textured story of grief, memory, and childhood resilience.”
FORMAT: Feature Screenplay (94 Pages) |
GENRE: Coming-of-Age Drama
SETTING: 1970s Oregon |
MATERIALS: Pitch Deck & Script Available Upon Request
LOGLINE
On a 1970s Indian reservation, a lonely 8-year-old white girl finds her only friend in a Black boy. When a midnight ambush burns his trailer down and forces him to flee, her Indian grandmother makes her tear down his abandoned outhouse board by board to process her grief.
SYNOPSIS
On a 1970s Oregon reservation, eight-year-old HAZEL is an outsider twice over: too white for the kids on the rez, too strange for anyone off it. She lives in the orbit of her Modoc Indian grandmother—a woman of flat, dry pronouncements—and BETTY, who runs the local book barn and watches Hazel with a closeness the girl doesn’t yet understand.
Hazel’s isolation breaks when JIMMY arrives, a Black boy whose family pulls onto the reservation in an Airstream trailer. The two bond fast and without explanation, trading stories—Jimmy’s tales of Wilt Chamberlain and Muhammad Ali against Hazel’s desert magic—eventually sealing their friendship with a blood oath and a private whistle signal called across the dirt.
Their bond deepens through an ordinary game of hide-and-seek—innocent right up until the moment it isn’t. When a midnight ambush by nameless attackers burns Jimmy’s trailer to the ground, his family flees before sunrise. Hazel is left in the ashes, carrying a heavy guilt about that final game she can neither explain nor escape.
Rather than conventional comfort, her grandmother gives Hazel a task: dismantle Jimmy’s abandoned outhouse, board by board, with her own hands. It is grief converted into physical labor—something tangible for a child stranded in the aftermath. Through this work, Hazel pieces her world back together alongside quiet moments with her grandmother, talks with an adopted pony, and her evolving connection to Betty, whose secret devotion to Hazel holds a quiet, unexpected truth.
By the time the last board comes down, Hazel has built a way to carry Jimmy and his memory forward. The film closes on Hazel with her pony, Wilt, whistling their private signal across the land—a ritual that keeps a lost friendship alive in the only way left to her.
The King’s Basketball is a coming-of-age drama about life on the reservation’s edges and the ways children learn to survive grief when no adult will name it for them.
From Page to Script
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My Book:
Shelter in Motion
“Would you like a shot of crazy to go with that menopause?”
What happens when a professional storyteller trades the “chaos of the defined” for a vintage rig and a toolbox she’s still learning to trust?
In Shelter in Motion, Heather Jacks delivers a masterclass in midlife reinvention. This isn’t just a travelogue; it’s a visceral, witty collection of 22 essays exploring a life lived outside the lines. Think Nora Ephron meets Nomadland—spanning three distinct worlds with raw honesty and a bourbon-dry wit:
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EARLY GROUND: Growing up as a white kid on an Oregon Indian Reservation—navigating the silent lessons of the high desert and the roots of a nomadic spirit.
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THE HIGH-DECIBEL LIFE: From the gritty backstages of the music industry to those classic “Axl Rose fired me” moments, capturing the high cost of life at full volume.
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LIFE IN MOTION: The mechanical disasters and spiritual triumphs of life on the road. A road map of roadside coffee, the “art of the breakdown,” and encounters that prove we’re never truly alone.
Grab your copy today and find your own version of home—one mile at a time.
Industry Recognition
My opening pages were recently longlisted for the Stockholm Writers Festival First 5 Pages Prize and selected out of more than 1,100 global entries by a panel of international judges.
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