Read Online The Butler: A Witness to History by Wil Haygood - Free Book Online
Authors: Wil Haygood
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how novel, even radical, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner seemed in 1967. It was a mainstream film, opening up the no-no subject of interracial sex to the American public. The story line revolved around a black man (Poitier) and his girlfriend (played by Katharine Houghton) who must tell her parents (screen legends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) that she is marrying a black man—a Negro. By the time the following year’s Oscar telecast was shown, the nation had days earlier been delivered the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. Anger was now everywhere in urban America. Guess who’s coming to the White House? Marchers and protesters got within a block of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (The butlers and maids, Eugene Allen among them, had clear views from the upstairs windows.) Thatvery year the Kerner Commission, ordered to investigate the 1967 riots, had concluded that America was“moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Hollywood—it was not so subtly reported in the Kerner Report—had helped perpetuate such a society.
Where did that leave Sidney Poitier? There were many, especially figures associated with the black power movement, who thought him too acquiescent to Hollywood for taking on the kind of role he did in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But Poitier was a touchstone for black America; from White House butlers to factory workers to schoolteachers to sports heroes, he had garnered wide respect. Still, this dynamic of how young and old blacks viewed Poitier created lively conversation from barbershops to dinner tables in the orbit of black America. It is also expressed in an emotional late-1960s scene in The Butler. The family—Cecil (modeled on the butler Eugene); Gloria, his wife; and Louis, their son who’s rebelling against all that his father stands for—are sitting around the dinner table. Gloria has just told Louis she recently saw Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night.
LOUIS
Sidney Poitier is the white man’s fantasy of what he wants us to be. Well behaved with no sense of his manhood as a sexual being.
CECIL
But his movies have him fighting for equal rights.
LOUIS
Only in a way that is acceptable to the white status quo.
It was impossible for Hollywood to ignore how this sentiment was expressed through the upheaval on the streets. In Los Angeles—the movie capital of the world—the community of Watts erupted in a riot on August 11, 1965. Thirty-four people died. The Los Angeles Times, a newspaper both rich and fat at the time, did not have a single black reporter on its full-time staff. They corralled a black messenger to get to the scene and take notes. In Watts, the world could now see, in newsreel footage, the painful woes of inequality that engulfed the country. Filmmakers in the land of sunshine seemed caught in a time warp and spasms of denial. Cinema was right out their front door. Directors were churning out big-budget flops like Dr. Dolittle while fires raged not many miles from the movie studios themselves.
What did slip through, though, as a kind of multicultural filmmaking moment, was the experimental era of so-called blaxploitation films. Beginning in the 1970s, those films landed in many urban theaters around the country. Nowadays many look dated and seem comically retro. The budgets were indeed low, but the films were imbued with an undercurrent of activism: the male and female stars were anything butsubservient or acquiescent. They were aggressive, cool, defiant. They were rebels with causes. On-screen, their afros bobbed in the wind. Their bell-bottoms flared. The dialogue—“whitey,” “hey brother,” “the man,” “dig it”—echoed the patter on the nearest urban street corner. Black moviegoers suddenly had heroes that looked like them, and they flocked to see the movies, among them The Mack, Foxy Brown, Shaft, Truck Turner, Cleopatra Jones, and Super Fly; the latter had a soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield
Where did that leave Sidney Poitier? There were many, especially figures associated with the black power movement, who thought him too acquiescent to Hollywood for taking on the kind of role he did in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But Poitier was a touchstone for black America; from White House butlers to factory workers to schoolteachers to sports heroes, he had garnered wide respect. Still, this dynamic of how young and old blacks viewed Poitier created lively conversation from barbershops to dinner tables in the orbit of black America. It is also expressed in an emotional late-1960s scene in The Butler. The family—Cecil (modeled on the butler Eugene); Gloria, his wife; and Louis, their son who’s rebelling against all that his father stands for—are sitting around the dinner table. Gloria has just told Louis she recently saw Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night.
LOUIS
Sidney Poitier is the white man’s fantasy of what he wants us to be. Well behaved with no sense of his manhood as a sexual being.
CECIL
But his movies have him fighting for equal rights.
LOUIS
Only in a way that is acceptable to the white status quo.
It was impossible for Hollywood to ignore how this sentiment was expressed through the upheaval on the streets. In Los Angeles—the movie capital of the world—the community of Watts erupted in a riot on August 11, 1965. Thirty-four people died. The Los Angeles Times, a newspaper both rich and fat at the time, did not have a single black reporter on its full-time staff. They corralled a black messenger to get to the scene and take notes. In Watts, the world could now see, in newsreel footage, the painful woes of inequality that engulfed the country. Filmmakers in the land of sunshine seemed caught in a time warp and spasms of denial. Cinema was right out their front door. Directors were churning out big-budget flops like Dr. Dolittle while fires raged not many miles from the movie studios themselves.
What did slip through, though, as a kind of multicultural filmmaking moment, was the experimental era of so-called blaxploitation films. Beginning in the 1970s, those films landed in many urban theaters around the country. Nowadays many look dated and seem comically retro. The budgets were indeed low, but the films were imbued with an undercurrent of activism: the male and female stars were anything butsubservient or acquiescent. They were aggressive, cool, defiant. They were rebels with causes. On-screen, their afros bobbed in the wind. Their bell-bottoms flared. The dialogue—“whitey,” “hey brother,” “the man,” “dig it”—echoed the patter on the nearest urban street corner. Black moviegoers suddenly had heroes that looked like them, and they flocked to see the movies, among them The Mack, Foxy Brown, Shaft, Truck Turner, Cleopatra Jones, and Super Fly; the latter had a soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield
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