Picture a film about the women’s suffrage movement, one that focused on the efforts of an idealistic young man. That is, a young male legislator bubbling with fiery speeches about Doing The Right Thing–giving women the vote– while the suffragettes were confined to bit parts, virtually mute save for a few noble lines.Imagine the reactions with which our hypothetical movie would be greeted: protests, press conferences, pickets.
What, then, are we to make of “Ghosts of Mississippi,” the latest in a long line of films from “To Kill A Mockingbird” to “Mississippi Burning,” about blacks’ struggle for justice–told through the eyes of an idealistic young, white, male lawyer/journalist/FBI agent bubbling with fiery speeches about Doing The Right Thing?
“Ghosts,” directed by Rob Reiner and starring Alec Baldwin as Mississippi prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter and Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie Evers, is the real-life tale of the prosecution of avowed racist Byron de la Beckwith (James Woods)–decades after he assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers in front of his home in 1963.
The film begins with an insistent caption: “This story is true.”
Both critics and supporters of “Ghosts” generally agree that the film is, as Evers’ brother, Charles, puts it, “85 to 90 percent true.” The controversy surrounding the movie lies in the other “true” facts shunted to the background, namely the life of Medgar Evers, briefly depicted in flashbacks, and the highly public, 30-year campaign of his formidable widow, Myrlie (now chairwoman of the NAACP), to bring his killer to justice.
“If the movie errs, it errs by omission,” says Maryanne Vollers, a journalist who wrote an award-winning book about the Beckwith trial, “Ghosts of Mississippi.” (Producers optioned Vollers’ title for the movie but did not consult her during the production.) “It errs by what it doesn’t do, more than what it does do. And that is a filmmaker’s prerogative.”
Which poses an interesting question: If movies are created to make money, and when you’re dealing with a film about history, where do you draw the line between facts and the truth? Many Americans rely on films for their history lessons; Even the African-American jurors in Beckwith’s 1993 trial had never heard of Evers, who was from their home state and fought to ensure that Mississippi blacks could vote.
So what is a revisionist whitewashing and what is a legitimate, commercial approach to telling a complex story that happened to have really happened?
“The notion that Bobby DeLaughter is a phonied-up white hero is patently untrue,” says “Ghosts” producer Fred Zollo, who also produced the even-more controversial “Mississippi Burning.” That late 1980s film infuriated blacks and whites alike who felt that it revised history by implying that the FBI was at the forefront fighting for civil rights.
“This isn’t a film about the civil rights movement,” Zollo says. “This is a film about the pursuit of justice of the murderer of a great American hero.
“Ghosts of Mississippi is an immensely accurate film. We’re not phonying up this stuff so that we can make money off of it.”
Counters filmmaker Spike Lee, who directed the epic “Malcolm X”: “Fred Zollo has a problem; he is the most major civil rights revisionist ever. He and D.W. Griffith (director of the silent film `Birth of a Nation’) should have gotten together. He relegates Medgar Evers’ role to that of an extra. These films (are) about the moral dilemma of the white liberal, and black people are pushed to the side. . . . (Hollywood executives) feel like they have to have a white lead to bring the audience in. And everything gets corrupted right then and there.”
Then there’s Charles Evers, who defends the film: “I wish someone would do a story about Medgar. But this wasn’t a film about Medgar. It was about Byron, and how he smirked around the country, saying he killed my brother. The movie is about justice finally coming to the South when a white man is convicted of killing a black man. I don’t know why people are upset about it.”
Black directors struggle
The fact that some audiences and film critics are upset is not new. What is new is that Hollywood now boasts a burgeoning number of talented black directors who can take on these stories too. So why aren’t they?
Getting studio financing is no easy task. Some have succeeded, like Lee, who in 1992 created a furor when he announced that only a black was qualified to direct Malcolm X’s story. Norman Jewison, who directed Sidney Poitier’s “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), originally was hired to do the film, but stepped down from the project. Ultimately, the $35 million movie disappointed at the box office.
“I’m still trying to raise the money for a film about Jackie Robinson; that’s all I can say,” comments Lee, who raised the $2.5 million for his 1996 film about the Million Man March, “Get On the Bus,” through private African-American investors. The film subsequently failed at the box office.
Meanwhile, “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton is completing “Rosewood,” a film about a black town destroyed by a white lynch mob in 1923.
Still, most films are shot through the prism of white sensibilities, according to Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television. “You find these liberal white male figures that are valorized, and the struggle presented is just a convenient excuse (for a movie). It’s a very paternalistic view of race relations,” he says.
The controversy was ignited with the 1988 release of “Mississippi Burning,” a fictionalized account of the FBI investigation of three slain civil rights workers in Mississippi, featuring two white heroes played by Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman. The film sparked so much criticism that ABC’s Ted Koppel devoted an entire segment of “Nightline” to it.
Director Alan Parker, amid accusations that his film falsified an era, told Time magazine: “Our film isn’t about the civil rights movement . . . Because it’s a movie, I felt it had to be fictionalized. The two heroes in the story had to be white. That is a reflection of our society as much as the film industry . . . it could not have been made any other way.”
Almost 10 years later, films like “Mississippi,” “Ghosts,” and their African counterparts, Richard Attenborough’s “Cry Freedom,” (about the life of South African activist Steve Biko), “A Dry White Season,” still are not being made any other way.
Whether these movies are set in the American South or in South Africa, whether they are based on fact or are the construct of the imagination, they all tread familiar celluloid terrain. There is the Sweaty South/South Africa of Jim Crow/Apartheid: hot, backward and filled with folks who know their place. There are the Supporting Players: menacing and murderous rednecks/Afrikaners, blacks who endure crushing humiliations with passive nobility. There is the Misunderstood Hero who risks his life for justice. And last but not least, there is the Moral of the Story: We’re All God’s Children.
And if these films depict race relations from a paternalistic viewpoint, the South itself fares no better. Again and again, we see the South viewed from the stereotypical lens of the outsider: In “Ghosts,” whites casually utter the N-word while being attended to by a servile African-American waiter; prosecutor DeLaughter later sings his little daughter to sleep with an a cappella rendition of “Dixie”–something DeLaughter himself admitted that he had never done. Charles Evers is depicted as a down-and-out disc jockey, when in reality he is a public radio station manager, talk show host, former mayor and onetime Mississippi gubernatorial candidate. The action in “Ghosts” is set predominantly in the present, but its sensibility is firmly rooted in the past.
A crisis of conscience
“These films are about a certain kind of white person who came of age at a certain age. That’s who makes movies,” says Bernard Beck, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “There’s a crisis of conscience that liberal white, progressive thinking people have.
“It’s no longer clear in white America who the good guys are. Today, race relations . . . make them pessimistic, confused, always putting their foot in their mouths. They like to remember a time when things made sense, when we were the good guys.”
The best of the good-guy genre is “To Kill A Mockingbird,” a 1962 classic about a white attorney, played by Gregory Peck, who defends a black man unjustly charged with rape (played by Brock Peters, who portrays Myrlie Evers’ second husband in “Ghosts”). Almost 35 years later, there is the flip side of “Mockingbird”: “A Time To Kill,” starring Matthew McConaughey, who defends Samuel L. Jackson, a black man who killed the whites who raped his daughter.
To be sure, the makers of “Ghosts” were sincere; Reiner and Baldwin are known for their liberal politics. The producers even cast actress Yolanda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, in the role of Evers’ daughter and featured Evers’ grown children, who play themselves and jury members in the film.
Reiner has said focusing on DeLaughter made the most sense for him as a white man making this film. Myrlie Evers and her children were consulted; publicly, the Evers family has embraced the picture. In an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Myrlie Evers gave Reiner her slain husband’s bloodied wallet, a relic from the night of his murder.
Indeed, compromises are part and parcel of filmmaking. Getting any film made is a tricky process; a lead actor with box-office draw helps. To get a big-budget film made about America’s least comfortable subject matter–race–is another matter.
So will we ever see films about blacks’ fight for equality, told from their own perspective?
“I would love to do a movie about Medgar Evers,” Zollo says. “What are the chances of someone financing a movie about the civil rights movement? About zero.”
One industry insider concurs. “The bottom line is, if `Ghosts of Mississippi’ had been successful (the $35 million-plus film has grossed $12 million as of last week), there’d be a better chance of getting a film about Medgar Evers made.”
But can art, commerce and history cohabit peacefully?
“These (white) guys will have every opportunity to make as many films as they want about the African-American experience at whatever budget. (Black directors are) not at that point yet,” says Lee. “If you call yourself an artist, you do the movie the way it should be done, but on a smaller scale. But the problem is, if you do that, Fred Zollo can’t get his fee, Rob Reiner can’t get his fee, Alec Baldwin can’t get his fee and Whoopi Goldberg sure can’t get her fee. But it would be the right movie.”
