The movie “Zola” has only just hit the theaters, but it is already being hailed as a success.
The flick is based on a Twitter threat by author A’Ziah “Zola” King, telling the story of a road trip she embarked on with a woman named Jessica after a random meeting at the Hooters, where King worked as a waitress at the time. The pair decide to hit the road together to Florida to earn money dancing at strip clubs.
“I tweeted when I first got home from the trip. I was literally off the plane for about five hours and it wasn’t a thread. I didn’t go in-depth,” King told VIBE about her decision to share her story on social media. “It was one of those statuses like ‘You guys would not believe the weekend I had,’ and I kind of left it at that. I didn’t go into detail because I was still kind of traumatized. I was still processing what had just happened.”
The thread blew up in a major way.
She says she had to inject some humor into the thread because of the stigma surrounding sex work.
“If I just told that experience just cut and dry with no laughs, I don’t think it would have gotten the same traction,” she explains. “I don’t think people would have related to it or been interested in it. At the time, the conversation of sex work was still pretty taboo. I wanted people to be receptive to it and listen to what I was saying. And I think in order to do that you have to have a little bit of humor. It was traumatizing but we’re going to laugh about this later.”
According to Variety, “Zola” pulled in $1.07 million across 1,468 theaters over the July 4 weekend.
A24 has also released the thread in book form, titled “The Story.”
