Director says Olympian helped to ‘jump-start’ civil rights conversation

When actor Stephan James was setting off to make the civil rights-era drama “Selma,” director Stephen Hopkins gave him some advice. “I told him, ‘Don’t come back from “Selma” thinking you’re in the same era,’ ” said the director of “Race,” which opens Friday. “In 1936, black Americans were never going to get their rights.”

But 1936 was also the year that the man whom James portrays — Olympic legend Jesse Owens — went to the Berlin Games, won four gold medals and scored a public-relations coup against the Third Reich’s “corporately branded Olympics,” as Hopkins described them. Owens, arguably, changed the world.

“There wasn’t a civil rights movement at that time,” the British director said, “but in many ways Jesse’s success, especially in such a racist arena, helped jump-start the conversation.”

Owens also very globally debunked the Nazis’ theories of Aryan supremacy in what would have been considered, today, to have been a PR triumph. But despite what he accomplished in Berlin, Owens never even got a congratulatory telegram from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The movie shows a postGames Owens having to get to a dinner — in his honor — through a restaurant’s back door. The film, said co-star Jason Sudeikis, “is a nice reminder how far we’ve come as a country, and how far we need to go.”

Waning awareness

James said there’s “totally a lot of pressure” playing such icons as Owens and the great civil-rights activist John Lewis, whom he played in “Selma.” But he said he’s not sure whether young people are familiar with the Owens story the way earlier generations may have been.

“I don’t know if older people know him any better,” the actor said. “I had to learn about him, too.”

Some people, Hopkins said wryly, think Owens was one of the athletes in Mexico City who gave the black power salute (actually Tommie Smith and John Carlos). And Owens’ daughters Beverly Owens Prather and Marlene Owens Rankin said there’s a disparity in awareness about their father and his accomplishments: Many young people of, say, Stephan James’ age, have little idea about Jesse Owens. But at the Owens Foundation, which they run with their older sister, Gloria Owens Hemphill, they get many requests from young kids, seventhand eighth-graders, researching their father’s life. “I can’t account for it,” Owens Rankin said.

“Race” should bring everybody up to speed. Owens was the grandson of a slave, and the son of a former sharecropper. His gifts at track and field brought him from Depressionera Cleveland to Ohio State University, where he had a fateful meeting with the man who was going to guide him toward Berlin: Larry Snyder, a former track star himself and the coach of what was, at the time, a losing team.

It was a gray day in America when Craig Ferguson left CBS’ “The Late Late Show” in December 2014, a couple of weeks shy of a decade as its host. (James Corden, who sings, replaced him.)

Ferguson has not been exactly invisible since. There was a stand-up special, “Just Being Honest,” which aired over Epix in September, and even before his last “Late Late Show” episode aired he was hosting a syndicated game show, “Celebrity Name Game,” which earned him a Daytime Emmy award and has been renewed through 2017.

But neither of those things really showcase what makes Ferguson singular, what set him off from other late-night hosts: the intimate relation with the camera and the audience watching him through it; his improvised monological essays; a readiness to follow an idea wherever it leads.

Ferguson was a magician showing you that there was nothing up his sleeve, except that there really was nothing up his sleeve, apart from his arm, tattooed with Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 famous political cartoon, the image of a segmented snake above the legend “Join or Die.”

History Channel series

That legend is also the title of Ferguson’s new History Channel series, a weekly panel show with a historical bent. The series, which premiered at 10 p.m. Thursday, puts Ferguson back in late night, chronologically speaking, but more important, it lets him run in a way that fans should find satisfying.

“It had a kind of zippy kind of ring about it, and because I got that (tattoo) stamped on when I became a citizen, it just felt right,” said the Scottish-by-birth, American-by-choice Ferguson of the show’s title on a recent afternoon in the neutral ground of a publicist’s office. As on “The Late Late Show,” he tends to lean back in his chair when he talks, as close to horizontal as is practicable, and he speaks more softly and slowly than when on camera.

“Better than ‘Historical Discussions,’ ” he continued, pronouncing the words with an uppercrust British accent. “That would feel a little stuffy.”

Each half-hour episode has a theme (bad medical ideas, worst political blunder, most influential drug, most influential band, greatest Founding Father, history’s biggest frenemies), with six candidates for each title analyzed and argued over by Ferguson and his panel of three — typically a scholarly expert, a comedian and “someone I’ve talked to, liked and respected in the 10 years that I did the late-night show.” Guests in the last category will include Judd Apatow, Courteney Cox (an executive producer of “Celebrity Name Game”), Lisa Kudrow, Joel McHale, Julie Bowen, Jack Black, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel and Chris Hardwick.

“History Channel seemed like an obvious choice,” said Ferguson of his new series’ home, “because if you look at their programming, it’s vague. There are dramas about Vikings or there’s ‘Pawn Stars’ or ‘Ax Men’ or ‘Ice Truckers,’ so it’s a wide brief. I’m talking about history, but I can talk about ancient Egyptian hairstyling techniques or the best bands of the last 40 years; it’s not too specific.

“I also wanted to do a show where I knew what we were going to talk about and it wasn’t going to be … you. For example, if you’re Lars Ulrich and you’re coming to sit down with me (on “Join or Die”), we’re not going to talk about Metallica’s next album. You don’t have to sell anything to me; I know you’re very knowledgeable about music, I know you’re an interesting guy, and that’s what we’re going to do.”