A troubled teen, forced to spend the summer on her grandparents' farm, learns about love, faith and family after discovering her grandfather was a World War II fighter ace.

SYNOPSIS:

ON SUMMER'S WING is a coming-of-age drama set in rural Ohio in the summer of 1984. It is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl running from her mistakes — and running straight into the family, faith, and sense of purpose she never knew she was missing.

SUMMER WILLIAMS (born Julie, a name she has abandoned along with much else) is a Chicago teenager adrift in the wake of her parents' bitter separation. After a blowup with her mother, she steals a classmate's pickup truck as an act of petty revenge, triggering a police chase that forces her to flee the city. With barely twenty dollars and a suitcase, she hitchhikes toward the one place she can think of to go: her maternal grandparents' farm in rural Ohio.

She arrives on foot at the Morgan farm to find her grandmother MAGGIE — warm, clear-eyed, and unshakeable in her faith — and her grandfather JOHN, a weathered farmer and former WWII combat pilot who is initially cold, suspicious, and deeply reluctant to harbor a teenager in legal trouble. Maggie negotiates a fragile truce: Summer can stay a few days while the family figures out next steps.

Summer chafes against farm life immediately. She is bored, contemptuous of the rural landscape, dismissive of her grandparents' Christian faith, and convinced she is unwanted. She makes two attempts to run — once from a nearby town when she tries to buy a bus ticket with insufficient funds, and once in the middle of the night when she steals John's truck, runs it out of gas, and is arrested at gunpoint by OFFICER CHARLIE MEYERS before John arrives to claim her. Each time, John and Maggie pull her back — Maggie with love, John with reluctant, grudging obligation.

What begins to turn Summer around is work. John puts her to work hauling manure, operating a skid loader, plowing fields, and planting corn — and she discovers, to her own surprise, that she is capable, even gifted. The physical labor settles something inside her. Her grandfather, slowly and carefully, begins to teach her not just farming but life: how to look toward a fixed point rather than staring at the ground behind you; how freedom is never free; how pride is its own kind of wound.

A violent hailstorm destroys a significant portion of the corn crop, and in its aftermath, John opens up to Summer about his past — his WWII combat missions in a P-51 Mustang, his two years as a prisoner of war, the men he killed, and the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades. Hidden in the barn is an old biplane — the very trainer John first soloed in — which he quietly bought from a crop duster friend not merely to help the man financially, but because he could not bear to see it destroyed. The plane becomes the central symbol of the story: something clipped, waiting to fly again.

When the tractor falls on John and shatters his femur, everything shifts. Summer, wracked with guilt because John pushed her out of harm's way, makes a decisive choice: instead of fleeing, she stays. She calls neighbor LEWIS IVERSON, a gentle red-haired farm boy her age, and the two of them finish the planting. She takes a job at the Iverson Dairy to earn money. And quietly, with help from BUSTER WATKINS — the crop duster who originally sold John the plane — she begins restoring the biplane as a gift for her grandfather.

Through conversations with Maggie, with the young PASTOR HASTINGS, and with Lewis, Summer's wall against faith begins to crack. She cannot explain away the series of events that have brought her here, protected her, and slowly transformed her. When a bench warrant is issued for her arrest in Illinois, Summer makes the most mature decision of her life: she voluntarily turns herself in. At her court hearing, the charge is reduced, her record is set to be expunged on her eighteenth birthday, and she is remanded to her grandparents' custody — an outcome that amounts to everything she actually needed.

The story ends on two time scales. First, in the autumn of 1984: John, having secretly renewed his pilot's license during his physical therapy appointments, takes the restored biplane into the sky for the first time in decades. Then he invites Summer up. She climbs into the front cockpit, raises both arms as the plane lifts clear of the earth, and screams with joy.

The final scene jumps forward thirty years. Summer — now in her mid-forties, a farmer and pilot herself — flies the same biplane to a small family cemetery to lay flowers on John and Maggie's headstone. Lewis Iverson, now her husband, meets her there. Standing at the graves of the two people who changed everything, Summer reflects aloud that she can see God's hand in every event that seemed like a catastrophe at the time — the divorce, the stolen truck, the hailstorm, the accident. Every loss led her here. Every broken thing became a wing.

NOTES:

This screenplay was sold and in pre-production. Then, the studio changed its mind. It's currently on hold but can readily be resurrected. Contact me for more info.

An earlier version of this story was a finalist in the Kairos Prize Competition for Spiritually Uplifting Screenplays.

ON SUMMER'S WING

An earlier version of this story was a finalist in the Kairos Prize Competition for Spiritually Uplifting Screenplays. If you like the concept of ON SUMMER'S WING, I'd be pleased to send you the script.