ONE EIGHT SEVEN 1997 American Crime Thriller

This was the first top-billed starring role for Samuel L. Jackson, who plays a Los Angeles teacher caught up with gang trouble in an urban high school. The film's name comes from the California Penal Code Section 187, which defines murder. The original screenplay was written in 1995 by Scott Yagemann, a Los Angeles area high school substitute teacher for seven years. He wrote the screenplay after an incident when a violent transfer student had threatened to kill him and his family. Yagemann reported the threat to the authorities and the student was arrested. About a week later, he was called by the district attorney to testify against the student in a court of law, where the student was being prosecuted for stabbing a teacher's aide a year before. This annoyed Yagemann, who had not been told about it beforehand, and led to him writing the screenplay. He claimed that 90% of the film's material is based on incidents that had happened to him and other teachers in real life.

Trevor Garfield (Samuel L Jackson) is a high school science teacher at Roosevelt Whitney High School, a high school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Dennis Broadway, a gangster student to whom he had given a failing grade threatens to murder him, writing the number 187 on every page in a textbook. Garfield knows that this is a warning and tries to report his concerns to the administration with little affect. Definitely the highlight of my viewing this week. You can tell that Samuel L. Jackson has that something about him and commands his role perfectly. The closing narration of the film cites a 1994 MetLife-Louis Harris Survey stating one in nine teachers has been attacked in school and 95 percent of those attacks were committed by students. The film's soundtrack was released under the title Music from the Motion Picture 187 on July 29, 1997 and the music also blends well with the film.