USA TODAY International Edition
Film on Tuskegee Airmen gets boost from activists
WWII Tuskegee Airmen movie inspires youth and activism BLACK History Month
Facebook posts to organizing movie premieres, grass- roots campaign to promote movies about blacks gives Red Tails a bump at box office.
A grass- roots campaign on social media, in church groups and by community activists to promote more movies about black people has pushed a World War II period film about black fighter pilots to do better than expected at the box office.
The movie, Red Tails, produced by director George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is about the heroics of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
It spurred activists in Los Angeles and Oakland to organize movie premieres. Church groups took busloads to see the movie. Filmgoers posted on Twitter and Facebook, urging others to see it.
“We need yall to put your money where your whine is,” actor Carl Gilliard, 53, posted on his Facebook page before the movie was released. He says he was tired of people complaining about not seeing enough black people in movies.
The only way to see more films with black actors, he says, is to support the films that are made. So he and several friends organized an “Occupy Red Tails Mixer” at a theater in West Los Angeles the night the movie opened Jan. 20. More than 125 people showed up, and several showings sold out.
“I wanted to show the power of the urban audience,” Gilliard says. “With this movie, there was an insatiable desire for content by African Americans to see themselves in a heroic way. You couple that with social media, and it went viral.”
Especially timed to Black History Month, black communities are seeing the movie as an acknowledgment of the role of blacks in the military and during a pivotal moment of American history.
Despite middling to bad reviews, the film did better than expected with a second- place showing in the box office on its opening weekend, taking in $ 19 million. It dropped to fourth place its second weekend with $ 10.4 million.
“It has had a positive impact on the box office,” says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office division of Hollywood. com, a movie- related website. He says the film, which has held steady in fourth place, has done well for a period piece.
Dergarabedian says he has seen other successful grass- roots campaigns, but mostly around faith- based films, not films that feature all- black casts.
The film resonated with black audiences because it showed blacks, particularly men, in a different way than they are often portrayed in popular culture, says D. Soyini Madison, who teaches performance studies at Northwestern University.
“It’s about representation. How you are represented is how you are treated,” Madison says. “So even if it is embellished, the movie still gave a nod to a moment in African- American history where black men flew planes.”
The movie excited audiences, many of whom do not personally know black fighter pilots, she says.
That differs from a movie such as The Help, in which black characters are portrayed as domestics. Black maids are a more familiar experience, she says.
Madison says the last times the black community rallied so strongly around a film were in 1997, when Amistad, about a mutiny aboard a slave ship traveling to America, was released, and in 1985, with The Color Purple, about the life of black women in the South.
“Tuskegee Airmen” refers to everyone involved in what was known as the Tuskegee Experiment, when the Army Air Corps trained black men to fly and maintain combat planes — pilots, navigators, instructors, maintenance and others. Of the 15,000 documented Airmen who served from 1941 to 1949, about 1,000 were pilots, says Zellie Rainey Orr, former historian for the Tuskegee Airmen Inc., which preserves the men’s history, and president of the group’s Atlanta chapter.
For young people in low- income neighborhoods, the image on a big screen of young black men as heroes is powerful, says Georgette Greenlee Finney, 45, a Chicago attorney who directs a youth ministry at Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church there.
She took about 20 young people to see the movie during its opening weekend. Since then, they have created skits for the congregation, acting as airmen.
“Our kids came out chanting,” she says. “It’s going to be one more positive opportunity that allows them to redefine who they are and who they believe they can be.”
Effie Tesfahun, a community organizer in Oakland, says she talked a local theater into playing the film, which sold out on the opening weekend.
Tesfahun, 32, had seen a TV interview in which Lucas said he had trouble getting the movie financed because Hollywood didn’t think a movie about black fighter pilots would sell. She says she and her friends e- mailed everyone they knew and sent messages on Facebook.
“I reached out to people and said, ‘ Let’s show our dollars say something, too.’ ”