The new A24 film Zola has earned its flurry of feverish coverage in part due to the stars attached at its helm: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom actress Taylour Paige and Under the Silver Lake‘s Riley Keough, as well as director Janicza Bravo and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris, of Slave Play. But the biggest catalyst for the Zola hype is its unorthodox origin story. The film is the first to be based entirely off a series of a tweets, which themselves were based on a true story, originally posted in 2015 by a woman named A’Ziah King, also known as Zola.
If you’re new to Twitter, or if you happen to have a fleeting memory re: the mid-2010s, you might fail to grasp the extent to which King’s 148-tweet thread went viral. Hashtagged #TheStory, the stripper saga—in which King, 19 at the time, was lured to Florida for a weekend of exotic dancing, only to be roped into something far more nebulous (and dangerous)—trended around the globe. Filmmakers and celebrities (including Keough herself) read it in one sitting. A Rolling Stone profile of King, from which the film drew much of its plot, describes how “Zola Halloween costumes, Zola feminist think pieces, [and] Zola comics” proliferated in the aftermath. For a few moments, it was as if the entire internet belonged to one woman.
“I made people who probably wouldn’t want to hear a sex trafficking story want to be a part of it,” King told David Kushner of Rolling Stone, “because it was entertaining.”
In #TheStory, King described how she met Jessica Rae Swiatkowski (renamed Stefani and played by Keough in the film) while waiting tables at a Hooters in Detroit. They swapped stories about dancing, and their friendship-at-first-sight chemistry lit a fuse that convinced Zola Jess was worth trusting, even if the young dancer seemed a bit…much. A few days later, when Jessica texted Zola and invited her down to Florida to stir up an adventure and make some extra cash dancing, Zola agreed without many reservations. That weekend, they motored down to Tampa with Jessica’s boyfriend, the stumbling, pitiful Jarrett (renamed Derrek and played by Nicholas Braun in Zola), and a man named “Z,” eventually identified as Rudy (Colman Domingo, who goes by “X” in the film).
The supposed adventure wasn’t much of a trip at first. When dingy motel rooms and a less-than-lucrative evening dancing at spots like the Tampa Gold Club didn’t present a substantial payoff, Zola didn’t let it concern her. But when Rudy was revealed to be Jessica’s pimp, she finally felt her internal alarm go off. She hadn’t agreed to prostitution, and wouldn’t have signed up for the weekend excursion if she’d known it’d be asked of her. Plus, Rudy had posted a picture of her to Backpage—a classified ads site often used for sex work—without her permission. Furious and increasingly freaked out, she told Jessica she was done, but Jess burst into tears, begging Zola not to leave her alone in Tampa. Zola couldn’t tell how much of Jessica’s plea was manipulation and how much stemmed from genuine fear, but she stayed, worried that if she left it would spell trouble for both Jessica and herself.
Turns out, she had good reason to be concerned. As Vulture‘s Allison Davis wrote in her June 2021 profile of King, #TheStory “started in a rosy flush of friendship, turned into a wild, careering two-day nightmare, and ended (maybe) with a gunfight.” The film depicts an (albeit dramatized) version of the raucous weekend that captivated so many in short spurts of 140 characters. Zola presents itself as its own artsy acid trip, a rose-colored Florida funhouse experience set to the rapid-fire tune of incoming tweets (and, eventually, gunshots), injected with just enough chill to make you shiver. But nothing quite comes close to the story as Zola herself tells it.
In the immediate wake of the thread captivating Twitter, some accused the epic of being mostly or entirely fictitious. But both Rolling Stone and the Washington Post were able to verify many details of Zola’s account, adding not only credibility but an awed urgency to the young woman’s tale. And the story didn’t end with King herself—others were caught up in Jessica and Rudy’s scheme as well, including Jessica Lynn Forgie and Breeonna Pellow, as the Post reported. Although Zola claimed in her thread that Rudy/Z was arrested for murder, he actually ended up being charged on six counts, including sexual assault, battery, and trafficking.
Today, Zola lives with her mother in Atlanta, where she writes and records music, and hopes to write more for the movies or in books, mining her own experiences for content again. She certainly has the talent; As Keough told ELLE.com, “I was totally riveted by [Zola’s] storytelling, just like everybody else.”
The original tweet thread was deleted from King’s Twitter account, but it’s been reposted for posterity on Imgur. You can read the full saga here, or you can purchase the thread in the form of a coffee-table book, as put together by A24 ahead of the film’s release, titled, fittingly, The Story.
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