In 2015, A’Ziah King (_zolarmoon) told a Twitter tale of a strip-club road trip gone awry that has become a big buzzy movie. Now she’s ready to make her story her own again. AllisonPDavis reports 📷: Ashleyypenaa
Photo: Ashley Pena for New York Magazine. Styling by Yohana Lebasi. Makeup by Darien Woodall. This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
The plan, she shouts to me and her mother, NiChelle, over steaks at one of those restaurants where a DJ plays music at a conversation-annihilating volume and a waitress delivers chilled tequila shots to you with a sparkler, is to eventually end up at a queer dance party at a favorite bar, Friends. Along the way, maybe we’ll stop at a strip club where her friends work, or maybe we’ll swing by Magic City because you can’t not go to Magic City.
“Uh-huh. Y’all too extra,” Zola says, frowning skeptically. Once inside, she remains skeptical while a blonde dancer slowly peels off her bottoms to “Misery Business” to reveal a tattooed word right above her labia. Zola is squinting, trying to make out what it says, when her gaze accidentally lands on Amira, and Amira’s lands on Zola, and she approaches.
This is what Zola liked about dancing: being someone’s Amira. Being that girl. All eyes on her. She liked knowing she was “the prettiest girl in the club,” she says with a toss of the lilac hair. She would dance and leave it all on the floor, like it was therapy. They tell me stories about Zola’s fellow dancers at that first club, such as the mother-daughter pair who performed together and a woman who could smoke cigarettes out of her hoo-ha. “Oh!” Zola interrupts herself and grabs her mother’s arm. “This is our song, this is our song!”
Zola feeding her daughter ZäZen in their home outside Atlanta. Photo: Ashley Pena for New York Magazine. Styling by Yohana Lebasi. Makeup by Darien Woodall. It’s late enough to hit Magic City, where, it turns out, not only can a publicist in a J.Crew shirt get in, she also has the plug that allows us to bypass the $60 cover and the line winding through the parking lot.
Zola’s good at the internet, but what really set her story apart was her writing. She was profane and smart. She was observant, captured dialogue, and landed jokes. She invented and popularized phrases and words people had never heard of . One phrase, “vibing over our hoeism,” was so revelatory she almost put it on a line of T-shirts.
Zola watched with increasing incredulity as celebrities like Missy Elliott and Solange tweeted about her. She watched as BET and Complex and MTV wrote about her. She saw a tweet from director Ava DuVernay that erroneously said she was “from the hood.” The thread got rated on Goodreads, made it to Longform. Some praised her cinematic writing, while others criticized her for possibly lying. It launched hot takes, think pieces, memes, and literary critiques.
“I was like, Ain’t nooo way. They are talking about someone else,” she tells me in her mother’s living room on a recent afternoon spent chatting, getting swallowed by an oversize gray leather couch while her mother lays out the pinnacle of suburban amuse-bouche — cubes of cheddar cheese, pepperoni, and Ritz crackers — and offers me a mimosa. Zola’s 2-month-old, ZäZen, is sleeping nearby. Her 4-year-old is peering down from upstairs, hoping for cheese.
In November 2015, a Rolling Stone writer, David Kushner, came out to Detroit to write “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted.” It was published less than a month after the tweets went viral. Zola remembers liking him. He spent 12 hours with her and her family. She took him to her Hooters and answered every question and told him every story. “I thought, Okay, baby. We can be friends.” But then she didn’t hear much from him. The article came out.
People treated the tweets like a piece of literary writing, but they weren’t exactly treating Zola like a writer. Maybe it was simply because tweets couldn’t be purchased at the time, or maybe it wasn’t until a white male journalist wrote a story for a mainstream publication that the tale became legitimate enough to make into a film. Whatever the reason, after the article ran, James Franco’s production company, Rabbit Bandini, reached out for a meeting.
Deadline published an announcement soon after, declaring that Franco would direct the film from a script to be written by Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts . While the announcement mentioned Zola’s tweets as a source, it said the movie was to be “adapted from the Rolling Stone article by David Kushner.” So Zola waited in California for a bit, eventually moving back to Detroit with her then-husband. She had her first daughter — who is now 5. She bought a house. She waited for the movie deal to be finalized. She appeared on a reality show called You the Jury, where a panel of “jurors” decided whether Jessica, the woman from her Florida saga, had grounds to sue Zola for defamation, since Zola’s story painted her as a sex worker.
“I’m like, Maybe it’s just not meant to be. That’s how I was thinking,” she says. “After that fell through, for a little moment, I was over it. This particular story. I was like, ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ ” Bravo chimes in, “I was like, ‘This is Ibsen. This is my adaptation of Ibsen. This is me adapting Heiner Müller. This is me adapting Chekhov. It’s me adapting Shakespeare. I want to treat it the same way I would any of those texts. This is my Hamlet, right? In fact, when I think about Hamlet, I think about Heiner Müller’s Hamlet, right? Which is so fucking delicious to me and so abridged. And so I’m like, This is my version of this.
They went through the story tweet by tweet, filling in the gaps. Zola recounts how Bravo would randomly text her to ask for pictures of her old apartment, of what her space and clothes looked like. “Of course, I had them,” Zola says. “I’m a blogger.” Together, they added context to the film, dropping in little details about Zola’s life and personhood and relationships.
For all her involvement, Zola struggles to let go of the fact that Kushner’s story is credited as the basis for the film . When he tried to talk to her at the movie’s premiere at Sundance, she wouldn’t speak to him, Zola recalls. She feels a little bad about that now, but it is what it is. After that screening, Bravo asked what she thought. Zola couldn’t give her blessing right away, she says. She needed to process it. On her second viewing, Zola decided, “Okay! I like that!” She liked Taylour Paige’s portrayal of her. She found a montage of penises particularly funny.
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