‘Nickel Boys’ — how a prized literary work became a game-changing movie

SAN FRANCISCO – The instant RaMell Ross finished reading Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Nickel Boys,” he knew he wanted to bring the powerful, truth-inspired story about boyhood, resilience and Jim Crow-era racism to the screen from the viewpoints of its two primary characters — Elwood and Turner, Black Florida teens stuck in a horrific juvenile reformatory known as the Nickel Academy. (See the review here)

Then he read it a second time and the idea can even further into focus.