Reel history: Author reflects on role of race in Hollywood
As a middle-schooler in Columbus, bestselling author Wil Haygood went to the movies — a lot.
“My mother would give me 50 cents every Sunday to go to the Garden Theater on North High Street,” said Haygood, 67, the author of acclaimed biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, as well as the nonfiction books “The Butler” and “Tigerland.”
Twenty-five of the 50 cents covered the cost of the ticket; the other 25 cents were allocated for candy.
“Here I was — this young kid, sitting in a darkened theater, looking up at an
awesome, 60-foot movie screen,” Haygood said in a recent interview from his home in Washington, D.C. “The actors and actresses that I saw on that screen were Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin, Rock Hudson, John Wayne, Liz Taylor, Steve Mcqueen.”
The performers had one thing in common: They were white.
“Not once during my childhood, inside of the Garden Theater, did little Wil Haygood see anyone on the big screen who looked like him,” he said. “And years later, I, of course, started thinking about that.”
Now, Haygood has written a book that reflects a lifetime of thinking about the lack of representation of Black people in the movies: “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” to be published Oct. 19 by Knopf, spans the history of the medium, noting the prejudices, stereotypes and other obstacles faced by filmmakers and actors of color as they attempted to bring their stories to the screen.
The book — which, while celebrating those artists who broke through, notes long periods of exclusion for Black artists from Hollywood and documents a persistent lack of diversity on screen — is something of a first, said Peter Gethers, Haygood’s editor at Knopf.
“There’s never been a book that told the detailed history of Black films,” Gethers said from New York. “How many history books are there on the history of cinema? Thousands. And no one has done this book . ... The timing is right, because there’s a heightened awareness about the need to know stories from different points of view.”
To coincide with the book’s publication, Haygood — who graduated from Miami University in Oxford in 1976 and was for many years a writer with The Washington Post — will be in Columbus for screenings, talks, book signings and other events at venues throughout Greater Columbus.
Most major independent film venues in town, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, Gateway Film Center and Drexel Theatre, will participate, as will numerous other cultural centers, including the Lincoln Theatre and the Columbus Museum of Art.
“We have all seen in the past yearand-a-half a new awareness of how much work we have to do to be antiracist and to change the system for the better,” said Jami Goldstein, of the Greater Columbus Arts Council, which helped organize the events.
“That’s one of the beauties of Wil’s work,” Goldstein said. “He just digs in, and he gets not just wonderful stories, but stories that need to be heard.”
Haygood first became aware of the power of movies — that it mattered who was or wasn’t on the screen — when, as a college student coming home to Columbus for summers, he began encountering movies with Black casts.
“The Southern (Theatre) showed Black movies like ‘Shaft’ and ‘Super Fly,’” he said. “I started to realize, in a very real sense, that movies were a cultural force in this country.”
Yet, even then, communities of color were, on the whole, underrepresented in an art form as popular as motion pictures.
“If you were white going out to see a movie on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday evening, you had maybe 25 choices — I mean, you had a feast of movies to choose from,” Haygood said. “But, if you were Black, you had one (movie) — I’m not even going to say two.”
It took Haygood’s own brush with moviemaking for him to think there was a book in the subject: In 2012, his Washington Post article about long-time White House butler Eugene Allen, who was Black, was turned into the movie “The Butler,” starring Forest Whitaker as a character inspired by Allen. The eclectic and impressive cast included Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo, John Cusack and Jane Fonda.
One day during filming in New Orleans, while attending a cast party at costar Sandra Bullock’s house, Haygood soaked in the scene.
“I said to myself, ‘My goodness — somebody needs to write a book about this moment, about all of these movie stars, across races, who have gathered (and) taken pay cuts to make a movie about a man who is a butler who served eight American presidents,” he said.
Hovering over Haygood’s shoulder, co-star Terrence Howard peered around
with a piece of advice.
“He walked around me and got noseto-nose to me and said, ‘You are the writer. So you ought to write the book.’”
There began Haygood’s journey into film history — one that, initially, he hoped would be a bit more focused than the sweeping volume he ultimately produced.
“His very first idea was to do something on Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte,” Gethers said. “I said to (Haygood), ‘That’s way too narrow. There’s no book there, especially since Poitier’s done his memoir, Belafonte’s done his memoir.’”
From there, Haygood dove into cinema’s earliest days, researching maverick Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux and trying to understand pioneering Black actors such as Hattie Mcdaniel, whose Oscar win for “Gone With the Wind” did not grant her access to a wider variety of parts.
“It reminds us that (Black actors) never were given roles as doctors and nurses and lawyers in these movies,” Haygood said. “They had to perform in the roles that they were offered.”
Racism in American society reflected in film
Hollywood, as Haygood sees it, reflected the racism in American society at large.
“If there were not CEOS who were Black in society, Hollywood was not going to make roles for Black CEOS in their movies,” he said.
Hollywood’s relationship to race didn’t remain static: There were periods when Black films were made in greater numbers and reached larger audiences, including in the 1970s.
“(Directors) Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles appeared on the scene, and proved to Hollywood that there was an audience that they had totally missed out on serving that would make them a lot of money. They suddenly said, ‘Oh wow — there’s a Black audience,’” said Black filmmaker Michael Schultz, 82, of Los Angeles, the subject of a multi-film retrospective at the Wexner Center in connection with Haygood’s book.
Highlights of that series include a Haygood favorite: Schultz’s high school comedy “Cooley High,” showing Oct. 18. “I had never seen Black high school students in a full-blown movie, and it was just thrilling,” he said.
Following the screening of “Cooley High,” Haygood and Schultz will have a conversation (Schultz will participate via Zoom); Schultz will also lead a virtual masterclass on Oct. 19.
“After that period of the ’70s and the ascent of Richard Pryor’s career and then the descent of it, it went back into
that fallow period,” said Schultz, several of whose films starring Pryor — including “Car Wash” and “Which Way is Up?” — will also be shown at the Wexner Center.
By the 1980s and ’90s, though, good movies on Black subjects — such as Robert Townsend’s “The Five Heartbeats,” showing Oct. 16 at the Lincoln Theatre — barely got attention.
“There was not a lot of money spent on commercials,” Haygood said. “I wouldn’t have known ‘The Five Heartbeats’ had come out that week unless I was sitting at my kitchen table ... and looked in the paper and saw it. It was just a tiny ad.
Then, around the time Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, the movies became more diverse, Haygood said.
“All of a sudden, Hollywood in 2008 looked across the landscape and said, ‘Wow — the most-powerful person in the world is a Black man,’” said Haygood, pointing to a fertile period that produced movies such as “12 Years a Slave,” “Fruitvale Station” and his own “The Butler.”
“Hollywood takes steps forward, and then it takes steps backwards,” he added. “You had those two years, 2015 and 2016, where there were no Black actors and actresses nominated for Oscars. That was heartbreaking. It almost seemed willful.”
During the past 18 months, the entertainment industry seems to have redoubled its efforts to bring diverse voices to the table. “Black Panther,” starring the late Chadwick Boseman, was a blockbuster. Haygood notes that, for the first time in his lifetime, he’s started to see commercials with interracial couples all over TV.
“You can walk through a downtown park in any city, in the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s, and see somebody Black and white holding hands,” he said. “But, as far as Madison Avenue is concerned, this is new.”
He hopes the changes will be lasting, especially given the power of streaming services, such as Netflix and Apple+, that aren’t “hidebound by the old paradigm of race in movies.”
Schultz, who remains a prolific director of episodic television, is optimistic that, as more people of color become executives in Hollywood, more projects featuring people of color will roll before cameras.
“It’s still pretty much an old boys’ club, even though there might be a few women at the helm of the major studios,” Schultz said. “But as that gets a little more colorful, you’re going to see a diversity of really good storytelling that will help us all come together as a people, in spite of this divisive period.”
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