Film inaccurate in its lack of blacks, online campaign says
A grass-roots campaign of activists, actors, journalists and others have launched an Internet-driven campaign that pummels the Civil War drama “Cold Mountain” for its historically inaccurate absence of blacks.
E-mails are traveling on African American list serves. Book clubs including, locally, Sisterfriends and Babes on Books are forwarding critical messages. Members of the National Assn. of Black Journalists have copied Washington Post articles quoting historians from the University of Virginia. Actor Erik Todd Dellums writing in the San Francisco Chronicle decried the exclusion of black actors in major roles. Earl Olfari Hutchinson, an author and political analyst, has also weighed in in several newspapers and on Alternate.org.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Feb. 4, 2004 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 04, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 5 inches; 184 words Type of Material: Correction
“Cold Mountain” -- In some issues of today’s Calendar, an article about an Internet-driven campaign that criticizes the Civil War movie “Cold Mountain” for an absence of black actors in major roles should have said that Director Anthony Minghella addressed the issue on the “Today” show, saying: “What I was trying to do was quite political, in the sense that I think that men in North Carolina were scratch farmers. They were told that the war was about Northern aggression, about the threat of invasion.... They didn’t own slaves.... If they had known more, if they’d had the virtue of the politically correct perspective of 100 years, and perhaps they wouldn’t have ever been fighting.” In an interview Tuesday, filmmaker John Singleton also commented on the race question: “That’s not what it was about. This was the first time in American history that a war film has had a protagonist that wasn’t a gung-ho hero. He was an AWOL guy.... Other people are clouding the issue of what the film was about.” The article also misspells author Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s middle name as Olfari.
Director Anthony Minghella addressed the issue on “Today.” “What I was trying to do was quite political, in the sense that I think that men in North Carolina were scratch farmers. They were told that the war was about Northern aggression, about the threat of invasion.... They didn’t own slaves.... If they had known more, if they’d had the virtue of the politically correct perspective of 100 years, and perhaps they wouldn’t have ever been fighting.”
The movie opens with the 1864 Battle of Petersburg, a conflagration that took a huge toll on black Union soldiers; is set in North Carolina, a slave state that at the time was more than one-third black; is based on Charles Frazier’s novel, which included black characters.
What peeved Hutchinson was not “the license that was taken. That’s always the case in any kind of quasi-historical work. What got me was that Minghella made a big deal about how they took pains to be as authentic as possible in terms of this battle -- the uniforms, how they marched, the weapons, the insignias.
“They wanted to be very precise and be historically correct. They weren’t.”