Racial Strife Is Hard Sell in Theaters but Less So on TV

Big stars, big budgets and classic struggles of good versus evil usually spell success at the box office. Yet even films that fit that formula keep failing to win audiences when they explore the emotionally potent history of slavery and the civil rights movement.

Actor Danny Glover learned that bitter lesson after starring in the 1998 film “Beloved,” an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a former Kentucky slave haunted by her daughter’s ghost.

However, Glover believes his next project, “Freedom Song,” a look at the violent desegregation of a Mississippi town, will find a large audience--because it will appear on television.

Indeed, Hollywood has found that while people seem unwilling to pay to sit in a theater and visit the horrors of those times, they will gather around their television set at home to watch visceral, often painful depictions of racial conflict.

Picking up on this trend, producers and writers are pressing forward in growing numbers to confront the turbulent South of the 1960s with a new breed of dramatic projects that they say will attract the viewers that movies have been unable to.

Television’s storytelling approach puts smaller-scale, more personal stories with universal themes at center stage. The more intimate style of these dramas--even when set against the backdrop of oppression--is helping them reach a larger mainstream audience, producers and scholars say.

Another critical factor is the medium itself, which can create a comfort zone in which to watch an uncomfortable subject. The scale of the big screen, the environment of the theater itself--which creates a collective experience--can provoke a far more powerful reaction than television, said writer-producer Tina Andrews.

Also, viewers come to television with different expectations. Quite simply, TV is cheaper, easier, available in 99% of the country’s homes, and requires little effort to watch. For television executives, the decision to take on such difficult topics is easier too: The typical budget for a TV movie is about $3 million, compared to $50 million for the average theatrical movie.

More Projects Coming to TV

“Freedom Song,” starring Glover and Vondie Curtis Hall and premiering Sunday on Turner Network Television, represents this new wave of TV films. The movie, for which Glover also is an executive producer, dramatizes the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which staged sit-ins in restaurants and bus stations to force desegregation.

Its main theme, however, is a bitter dispute between a black father and his son. Characters loosely based on real-life civil rights activists such as Bob Moses and Chuck McDew figure prominently.

Still planned, though it has met with delays, is ABC’s “Parting the Waters,” an adaptation of Taylor Branch’s massive Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the civil rights movement. And HBO is developing a movie based on David Halberstam’s book “The Children,” about the important role of young “freedom riders” in the civil rights movement.

Andrews, writer and co-executive producer of CBS’ recent successful miniseries, “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal,” about Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress, has spent a lot of time thinking about where to tell these stories.

“I really believe that ‘Beloved’ would have done well if it had premiered on television,” she said. “[Audiences] don’t want to sit around with a bunch of strangers, spend all this money for popcorn, baby sitters and parking, to be browbeaten for three hours. . . . I really think that the acceptance of these projects has to do with the medium.”

Gladys Vaughn, a retired nurse who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., avoids films such as “Beloved” when they are in theaters, but is not averse to watching them at home.

“Seeing things like that on the big screen is much too vivid,” said Vaughn, who is black. “On television I can tape it and fast forward through the bad parts, like I do with my soaps.”

Linda Nesbit agreed. The African American hairstylist and foster mother, who lives in Los Angeles, said she prefers to watch such films at home because they are easier to digest. “People can sometimes feel funny when they leave the theater. Also, they might hear something someone in the audience says that might be upsetting.”

John Clevenger of Frazier Park, who is white, said he and his friends won’t go to a theater to see such films. Watching them leaves the movie and TV production worker feeling defensive and guilty, he said.

“Roots,” the 12-hour miniseries focusing on slavery and a black family in the South, proved to be a landmark when it premiered in January 1977. It broke ground in its graphic portrayal of blacks and slavery. What network executives feared would be a ratings disaster turned into the highest-rated television show ever at that time.

More recently, HBO has expanded its subscriber base and drawn critical attention with civil rights dramas like “A Lesson Before Dying” and “Miss Evers’ Boys.” “Any Day Now,” a Lifetime drama series about a black woman and a white woman who became friends while growing up in the South of the 1960s, is that network’s most watched original series.

“Sally Hemings,” which contained scenes of Hemings being abused psychologically and physically, was a ratings hit for CBS during the highly competitive February sweeps with about 20 million viewers tuning in--so much so that there is already talk of a sequel. Indeed, these films offer a clear payoff for networks by providing a high-profile opportunity to showcase multicultural programming and at the same time attract large numbers of viewers.

Getting Away From the White Perspective

The economics of television offers more creative license in everything from storytelling to casting.

“[For theatrical films] you always have to deal with the constraints of Hollywood, and the question always is, ‘What big white actor can we cast, and how are we going to sell this to white audiences?’ ” said Vondie Curtis Hall, one of the stars of TNT’s “Freedom Song.”

“The white character has to be the hero, while blacks are relegated to being saved. Black people have never been able to buy into that. That’s not how we feel about the struggle that our parents and grandparents suffered through.”

In fact, “Freedom Song” is told from the point of view of strong black characters, even though it also shows blacks being terrorized, beaten and victimized.

The movie’s producers are optimistic that by focusing on the human stories, they won’t turn viewers away from the violence and raw emotion of the era.

“This film was never conceived as a political piece,” said Julie Weitz, executive vice president of TNT Original Programming. “It’s not about victims; it’s about people taking their lives in their own hands. Even though there are setbacks and ugly moments, there’s nothing that should alienate blacks and whites.”

Susan Lyne, the top movie executive for ABC, which has the Taylor Branch adaptation in development, contends that, “as long as you can tell a story that is character-driven . . . audiences will show up.”