Local filmmakers option book on Massie case

Hawaii screenwriters Aaron and Jordan Kandell, fresh off their success as part of the writing team for Disney’s “Moana,” have optioned the film rights to a book about the infamous Massie case, a saga of racially explosive crimes, lies and courtroom drama that shook Hawaii in 1931 and ’32.

The Massie story raises “important and still relevant issues,” said Aaron Kandell. “I think at that time (racism) was more overt, but those currents are still deeply felt.”

The 34-year-old twins’ production company, Twin Ink, was already producing a Massie project with a script by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright when they optioned Texas attorney Mike Farris’ nonfiction book, “A Death in the Islands: The Unwritten Law and the Last Trial of Clarence Darrow” (Skyhorse Publishing, $24.99), for an undisclosed sum.

Farris, a frequent Hawaii visitor, said the Massie story grabbed him when he found a 1966 book, “Rape in Paradise,” by Theon Wright, in a Hilo bookstore more than 20 years ago.

“It always sorta stuck with me as one of those great miscarriages of justice,” Farris said by phone from his Texas home, describing how he researched trial transcripts, interviews and other documents.

What compelled him was “the injustice of someone being unfairly accused because of nothing more, in my opinion, than their race.”

Five young Honolulu men of Asian and Native Hawaiian descent were prosecuted for rape after Thalia Massie, the Caucasian wife of a Navy officer, insisted she had been raped by a gang of Hawaiian men. The defendants were released after a jury stalemate resulted in a mistrial, but they should never have been arrested or tried, Farris said.

One of the accused, Joseph Kahahawai, was kidnapped and killed.

Famed attorney Clarence Darrow came out of retirement to defend Massie’s socialite mother, husband and two other Navy men on trial for murdering Kahahawai. Darrow is perhaps best known for representing a schoolteacher in the State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes “monkey” trial in 1925.

“Darrow was one of my heroes, (until) I realized he was a villain in this story,” Farris said. When the defendants were convicted of manslaughter, Darrow spun the verdict as reverse racism against whites, he said.

While Territorial Gov. Lawrence Judd refused Darrow’s request to pardon his clients based on the unwritten law that a man has the right to avenge his wife’s honor, Judd commuted their sentences to one hour served in his office. He did so under the implied threat that martial law might otherwise be imposed on the islands by the U.S. military, Farris said.

“The thing that’s wonderful about this book is that (Farris) takes a historical and journalistic approach but combines it with cinematic, novelistic flair,” Aaron Kandell said.

Farris said his goal was to make the story accessible so that a wider audience could know “the things that were done, the information concealed, by the prosecution to convict these guys just to calm the white people down.”

At this early stage, there’s no telling whether the Massie project will be made into a film.

Twin Ink’s next project, “Adrift,” a survival-at-sea romance starring Shailene Woodley and directed by Baltasar Kormakur (“Everest”), is expected to go into production this year, Aaron Kandell said.