Waking the Ghosts

Assassinated in June 1963, five months before John F. Kennedy and five years before Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers was the first of the series of national liberal political figures gunned down in America in that fateful, uneasy decade. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him (“A Pawn in Their Game”) and he was given a martyr’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery, yet Evers remains possibly an obscure figure to today’s film-going audience. His memory has been disinterred in director Rob Reiner’s new movie “Ghosts of Mississippi,” about the unlikely 30-years-after conviction in 1994 of Evers’ killer, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith.

It is the latest in a recent spate of films that take on history and real events but leave us wondering how much of what they seek to show actually happened.

Notably, “Ghosts of Mississippi” has been produced by Fred Zollo, who seven years ago made “Mississippi Burning,” the controversial fact-based fiction, directed by Alan Parker, about the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss. “Mississippi Burning” upset all kinds of people--old guard Mississippians who recoiled at its ugly reenactments of race hatred, as well as civil rights veterans who bristled at seeing two white FBI agents (played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) made heroes in a story about the black struggle for equality and justice.

“Ghosts of Mississippi” is likely to attract similar criticism in that it paints only part of the picture in choosing to focus on the story of the white assistant district attorney in Jackson, Miss., Bobby DeLaughter (played by Alec Baldwin), who went the final mile to win a conviction against Beckwith. The film pays less attention to Evers’ widow, Myrlie (Whoopi Goldberg), who hounded authorities for 30 years to retry Beckwith--not to mention Evers himself, who is seen only briefly in a flashback to the night of his killing.

Myrlie Evers has indicated she is unhappy with the finished film despite being quoted in publicity material as calling the movie “wonderful.”

Zollo and Reiner, meanwhile, are adamant that they have been faithful to history in this case, even choosing to affix to “Ghosts of Mississippi” the on-screen assurance, “This story is true,” opening the door to all manner of second-guessing from various people touched by the real events depicted in the film.

“It posed the most problems for me of any film I’ve done,” says Reiner, whose stock in trade has been romantic comedy. “In that I understand full well that people get their history through movies. And I take the responsibility very seriously to be accurate. The problem with that is, if you’re going to be accurate, it limits your ability to be as dramatic as you might like it to be.”

Seeking the stamp of authenticity, Zollo and Reiner retained the services of native Mississippian, author and former Harper’s magazine Editor Willie Morris, who served as a consultant.

A resident of Jackson, Morris happened to see Zollo in town the night the Beckwith jury returned the guilty verdict in February 1994. He invited the producer to his house and said, “Fred, after ‘Mississippi Burning’ you owe us one,” suggesting that the story of Beckwith’s retrial and conviction after three decades was movie material--and this time with a redemptive theme for his beloved Mississippi.

Zollo agreed. “A state that’s known for its racist past attempts to cleanse itself,” is the way the producer puts it. “In a sense, it’s a Nuremberg Trial for America. Because what Beckwith did is what the Nazis did.”

Evers, 37, a civil rights leader active in registering African Americans to vote, was shot in the back as he got out of his car one night at his Jackson home. He died in front of his wife and three young children. Beckwith, who owned the deer rifle that killed him, was tried twice in 1964 for the crime, but both trials ended in hung juries.

Zollo dispatched screenwriter Lewis Colick (“Unlawful Entry”) to Jackson to research the ’94 trial and all that had gone before.

At least three books have been written about the case, including Maryanne Vollers’ 1995 National Book Award-nominated “Ghosts of Mississippi,” which the filmmakers purchased for its title but otherwise did not rely on, they say. “In fact, none of the books have anywhere near the scholarship of the investigation that we did into this crime,” Zollo boasts. “And none of the writers had the access that we had.”

Colick says he shared Zollo’s view that DeLaughter was the story: a young prosecutor, son of Ole Miss, who overcame the objections of his own racist family to join forces with Medgar Evers’ widow and win the longshot case to finally put Beckwith behind bars.

“You’re looking for things where you can get a movie star,” Colick says. “This was a movie star role.”

There were other major players in the story, to be sure: Myrlie Evers, who, as she herself puts it, “worked for 30 years to bring the case to the place where Bobby DeLaughter picked it up.” There was Jerry Mitchell, the reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger who broke a number of early and important stories about the case, including the revelation that a state espionage agency called the Sovereignty Commission had been guilty of jury tampering in Beckwith’s second trial.

In fact, the Jackson district attorney’s office had only taken up the case again in 1990 after a number of media organizations, the Jackson City Council, the NAACP and Myrlie Evers had prevailed upon it for more than six months to do so.

But Reiner says, “We’re not making up that Bobby DeLaughter was the guy who spearheaded this 4 1/2-year re-investigation and re-prosecution. And in a way, I felt that because he was white, it was my way into the subject matter. I felt if I told the Medgar Evers story or the Martin Luther King story as a white filmmaker, it would be politically incorrect and all of that. But I thought, here’s a guy I can hook into.”

That Myrlie Evers, now 63, voices ambivalence about the film is surprising, since she served officially as a consultant to Reiner. In a phone interview from her home in Oregon, she chooses her words carefully in expressing her disappointment that her own pain and suffering and that of her three children are not larger factors in what ended up on screen. “I have often described myself and my children as damaged goods, and in a sense we are. The wound is so deep it never really healed. I wish that could have been shown in the movie, what we went through. It was living hell.

“I wanted to be involved, and Rob was very generous with his time in listening to my suggestions and recommendations. But I know he felt he had to do it this way. It is his film, and I think he’s a brilliant director. And Bobby DeLaughter deserves a tremendous amount of credit. But I suspect people will ask, ‘What about Medgar? And what about his family?’ ”

“It’s not the ‘Medgar Evers Story,’ ” Reiner says. “But what he stood for is felt all the way through the film. It’s not a movie about the civil rights movement, it’s really about the character of Bobby DeLaughter coming to terms with his own racism in pursuit of justice.”

Asked how she felt about Goldberg’s portrayal of her in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” Evers answers, “Whoopi Goldberg is a superb actress.” There is a long pause before she adds, “I’m being very tactful. I don’t want to cast any aspersions.”

Mitchell, the Jackson reporter who broke the jury-tampering story that helped persuade the grand jury to indict Beckwith again, has some problems of accuracy with the film based on his reading of the script. (He is a minor character, played by Jerry Levine.) “The case would never have been reopened without persistent pressure from the media,” Mitchell says. “I think you miss some of that. And in reality it was a triumvirate of Bobby, Myrlie and me. After the articles appeared, Myrlie used them to call for reopening the case. I dug. Myrlie pushed. Bobby prosecuted.”

Mitchell finds it ironic in the film that, for dramatic purposes, DeLaughter has been given the key cross-examination scene of a lying alibi witness when in the real trial the cross-examination was done by Dist. Atty. Ed Peters (Craig T. Nelson in the movie), known as a much fiercer courtroom fighter.

DeLaughter, who met extensively with Reiner, Colick and Alec Baldwin, rates the film’s accuracy a bit higher. “I’m honored, more than a little blown away, and also a little nervous,” DeLaughter says about his soon-to-be fame in multiplexes across the land. “I’d say 80% to 85% of what’s in there is authentic and the other 15, they’ve taken events and expanded on them.”

For example, since Beckwith (played by a particularly spooky James Woods) never took the witness stand in the trial, Reiner was denied the final confrontation of protagonist and antagonist that movies usually call for. So he made do with a scene based on a real but somewhat shorter conversation that took place near the end of the trial when DeLaughter and Beckwith found themselves alone in the courthouse men’s room and Beckwith taunted the young prosecutor with the prediction that he would once again go free, guilty or not.

The filmmakers have also arranged for Baldwin to sing his frightened daughter to sleep at night with the Confederate anthem “Dixie,” a broad stroke some might trace to the hand of Hollywood. Asked about this, DeLaughter says, “I would always tuck my kids in at night, but no, I didn’t sing ‘Dixie.’ ”

Sitting for lunch in a restaurant near the Sony lot in Culver City, Zollo defends “Mississippi Burning” all over again but with a new relevance. “It was a fictionalized story based on a real event. It said so on the screen. Many of the things you saw happened just as they happened in the movie, but we did not want to to be in situation where we had to have a higher truth than dramatic truth. Here, Rob has made a movie that’s true. I don’t see them as a big difference actually.”

The 43-year-old producer then goes on to explain how the lawsuit brought by Lawrence Rainey, former sheriff of Neshoba County, against Zollo and Orion Pictures over his presumed portrayal in “Mississippi Burning” resulted in Zollo’s Jackson attorney, Jack Ables, turning up an obscure 20-year-old book about the Klan (“Klandestine”). It included an eyewitness account by an FBI informer, Delmar Dennis, who heard Beckwith bragging at a Klan meeting in 1965 that he had indeed killed Medgar Evers.

This proved to be still more evidence for the grand jury.

“It’s the power of a motion picture,” says Zollo, whose other films include “Quiz Show” and “The Paper.” “Oddly enough, when some of the critics said we rewrote history with ‘Mississippi Burning,’ we did--in the bigger sense. The movie was essential to the retrial and successful re-prosecution of Byron De La Beckwith.”

Which is saying a lot, if true.

“Jerry Mitchell started poking around in the files of the Sovereignty Commission because he was charged up by the movie. No movie, no Jerry Mitchell, no Jack Ables, no ‘Klandestine,’ no Delmar Dennis. And Beckwith is still living up in Tennessee a free man.”

Mitchell acknowledges that “Mississippi Burning” served as a kind of goad for him and his newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, to reexamine the race crimes committed in the state 25 years before. Yet he remains troubled by what he views as the new film’s distortion of the way things really happened in the Beckwith case.

“It might be a well-done movie,” he concedes. “But it’s not a history textbook.”

Reiner admits as much. “It’s not a documentary,” the director says. “You have to make some compromises for dramatic purposes. But to be completely honest with you, the compromises were very minor.”

As usual in these situations, minor is in the eye of the beholder. If there is a disagreement between the filmmakers and some of the subjects in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” it seems to rest on the meaning of the word “true,” which in Hollywood has always enjoyed an array of definitions.

“Oddly enough,” Reiner says, “there were so many bizarre things about the case that were larger than life, I had to put at the beginning of the film, ‘This story is true’ because I think a lot of people just wouldn’t believe it.”

Wouldn’t believe, for example, that the rifle used to murder Evers, long thought to have disappeared, would turn up in the attic of a dead judge who happened to be the late father-in-law of Bobby DeLaughter.

Says screenwriter Colick: “We almost wish it weren’t true because people are going to say, how is that possible?”

Reiner and company filmed on location in Jackson, using the house where the Evers family lived, the Hinds County Courthouse where Beckwith was tried and the landscape of the Delta.

Morris, who is writing a book about the making of the movie, vouches for the director’s attempt to get it right. “I’ve taken Yankees to the Delta before, but Rob was so curious. Just one question after another.”

Whatever arguments ensue about the shape and shading of the events depicted in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” the film’s story line can’t help but improve the image of a state that may have produced William Faulkner and the Delta blues but became more famous in the 1960s as the heartland of the Ku Klux Klan.

“We’re not just a bunch of redneck idiots down here,” DeLaughter says. “This is a great place to live and we’re embarrassed when we’re sized up by the activities of a few of the Beckwith ilk.”

Myrlie Evers still considers Mississippi home, returning for visits two or three times a year. “But it’s been difficult for me and my three adult children to relive that night,” she says, her voice quavering with emotion. “It was not until the verdict came through that we were finally free from the horror of it all.”

For her, the film’s happy ending, however, is muted.

“Perhaps one day,” she says, “Hollywood will not say it has already been done and will be open to doing a full story on Medgar’s life. I truly hope so.”