Last night’s Los Angeles premiere of
Zola was a long time in the making. A’Ziah King, known better as Zola, wrote her wildly popular, sensational Twitter thread in 2015. #TheStory, as it came to be known, followed Zola and a fellow exotic dancer named Jessica on a fateful trip to Tampa and, well, it’s better if you read the 148 tweets. Zola opened her thread with the instantly-iconic line, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Move over, Hemingway.
It had to be made into a movie. Six years later, here we are.
Zola where Taylour Paige
, playing the titular Zola, is listening to Riley Keough s character Stefani say some very, very offensive things. They re in the car on their way to Florida for a hoe trip, and Zola is starting to sense that things are not what they seem. Instead of reacting in a panic like most people would, Zola is merely annoyed. She responds to Stefani s racist comments with a simple, Word. And as the next hour and a half of absurdity unfolds, she mostly maintains that same level of eye-roll ambivalence.
It s part of what makes the movie so compelling and at some points funny to watch. Based on a now-iconic Twitter thread written by A Ziah King (aka Zola). The film follows her as she navigates what most people would consider their worst nightmare. And like the thread that inspired it, the movie oscillates between laugh out loud moments and deadly serious Oh, shit moments, with Paige anchoring them all.
Anna Kooris / A24 Hot girl bummer: Taylour Paige plays the title character in Zola. You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out? It s kinda long but it s full of suspense. That was the tweet that introduced A Ziah King, aka @Zola, to the world. And in a 140-character world in which threads had yet to become an art form, it
was full of suspense (especially if you were reading along in real time, as I was lucky enough to be), and it
was unthinkably long by 2015 Twitter standards. As for the movie, though, which finally hits screens June 30 if you read that thread, you already know the story, so there s not much suspense. And at 80 minutes long, not counting the end credits, it s not that long.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, ZOLA )
TAYLOUR PAIGE: (As Zola) You want to hear a story about how me and this b here fell out? It s kind of long, but it s full of suspense.
(SOUNDBITE OF TWITTER WHISTLE)
SHAPIRO: What followed was a wild, mostly true tale about how an exotic dancer, Zola, found herself on a road trip that went dangerously awry, to put it mildly. The new movie Zola is based on that series of about 150 funny and often profane tweets. NPR s Mallory Yu talked to some of the people behind Zola about turning a Twitter moment into a feature-length film.
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