9pm Saturday AKEELAH AND THE BEE - Drama PG
The story of Akeelah Anderson, a gifted 11-year-old girl on the verge of quitting school who discovers she has a high aptitude for spelling and enters a spelling bee contest. Starring Keke Palmer, Laurence Fishburne, and Angela Bassett.
Akeelah Anderson, a young girl attending a tough school in Los Angeles, sees the finals of the National Spelling Bee. She decides to enter the competition, despite her classmates' derision and the antipathy of her mother Tanya. Thanks to the efforts of her teacher Dr. Joshua Larabee, she reaches the final. When she meets her fellow competitors, she realizes that coming first isn't everything in life.
TRIVIA:
- The film was developed over a period of 10 years by Director Doug Atchison, who came up with the initial concept after seeing the 1994 Scripps National Spelling Bee and noting that a majority of the competitors came from well-off socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Jacques Bailly is the National Spelling Bee Pronouncer in the movie and is the Pronouncer for the Bee in real life. He also won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1980.
The final word spelled by Dylan is "logorrhea." This is the winning word from the documentary Spellbound (2002) that tracks several participants in the 1999 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.
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