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Sincere Fictions: The Production Cultures of Whiteness in Late

1960s Hollywood

Eithne Quinn

The Velvet Light Trap, Number 67, Spring 2011, pp. 3-13 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: 10.1353/vlt.2011.0008

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/vlt/summary/v067/67.quinn.html





Eithne Quinn 3

Picket lines, congressional hearings, and letter-writing cam-

paigns threatening to boycott Hollywood could only get us

so ar in our search or jobs on both sides o the camera. The

answer was always, “O course, we’d like to hire you black

olks, but the unions won’t let us. And even i they did, where

would we nd black technicians, prop men, costumers, and

makeup artists? Where?”

—Ossie Davis, in Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee,

With Ossie and Ruby: In This Lie Together

“Sincere ctions” [are] personal ideological constructions

that reproduce societal mythologies at the individual level. In

such personal characterizations, white individuals usually see

themselves as “not racist,” as “good people,” even while they

think and act in antiblack ways.

—Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur,

White Racism: The Basics

arly 1968 saw the announcement o twolm projects that were among the most

inluential o the period in terms o

behind-the-camera Hollywood racial poli-

tics. The Learning Tree was to be the rst studio picture

directed by an Ar ican American. The second project, a

lm about the slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, proved

so contentious that it ended in cancellation. Although

the announcement o both these black-themed lms

was hailed as an advance in race relations, the projects

diverged signicantly in terms o their racial politics o

production. For The Learning Tree , Warner Bros.–Seven

Arts’ head o production, Kenny Hyman, signed Arican

American Lie photographer Gordon Parks Sr. to direct

the lm adaptation o Parks’s own autobiographical

novel. Also hired as screen adapter, score composer,

and coproducer, Parks was, according to one journalist,

“backed to the broadsword” by Hyman (Knapp, “Assess-

ment” 18).The Conessions o Nat Turner (later shortened

E

Sincere Fictions: The Production Cultures of Whiteness

in Late 1960s Hollywood

EithnE quinn

te Velve Lg trap, Number 67, Spring 2011 ©2011 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

to Nat Turner ), by contrast, was—along with almost every

other Hollywood lm o the period—to be made by

whites. It was an adaptation o William Styron’s 1967

historical novel o the same title, and Norman Jewison

signed up to direct. In response to black cr iticism about

the planned lmic portrayal o Nat Turner, Jewison

declared: “I’ll make the lm my way—and nobody isgoing to tell me how to do it” (Warga 1).

Focusing mainly on the two contrastive case studies o

The Learning Tree and Nat Turner , this article oers a his-

torical study o lm production practices and discourses

ocused on race. Late 1960s America was adjusting to

the end o state-sanctioned white supremacism, when, as

historian Nancy MacLean writes, “groups that had been

pressed to the margins o American economic and public

lie challenged their connement and shook up the estab-

lished social order” (8). This was a moment o proound

contestation over the meaning o race and the means o achieving racial equality, which traveled into the lm

industry in vital ways. As Arican Americans and other mi-

nority groups increasingly contested their exclusion rom

lm jobs, white lm workers had to reect, probably or

the rst time, on their own racial practices in and belies

about the workplace. This article is not concerned with

more racially recalcitrant personnel, like the executives

o the Walt Disney Film Company and some members

o the crat union locals, who made little eort even to

pay lip-service to racial tolerance in the late 1960s (Burke

14). Instead, it ocuses on liberal and centrist workers, like

Hyman and Jewison, and seeks to establish that there was

a prevalent view among whites that the industry, despite

glaring evidence to the contrary, was basically racially

progressive. To understand and explore this view, this

article draws on the work o race sociologists—above

all, the idea o “sincere ctions o the white sel,” which

Feagin, Vera, and Hernan identied ollowing extensive



4 Sincere Fictions

opinion surveys o post–civil rights white attitudes. Such

discourses are “sincere” because they are heartelt, but

they are also “ctions” because they deny that there is

discrimination in the ace o persisting inequality. Feagin

and his coauthors’ work on sincere ctions, according to

leading race theorist Howard Winant, is “indispensable in

answering [the] question in the US context” o why and

how “racism remains” (New Politics 36).1

Whiteness may have emerged as a hot topic in lm

studies, but most scholars’ purview has been limited to

analysis o lm texts and stars and their reception (see

Dyer; Flory; Negra; and, to a large extent, Bernardi). Such

studies make many implicit claims about how lmic

images o whiteness relate to social reality, but these

connections quite oten remain abstract and discursive.

Very rarely examined are the kinds o behind-the-camera

attitudes, actions, and racial sel-conceptions o whites

that come to eed into narrative representation. Withimportant exceptions, studies o lm’s black-white racial

politics have tended to totalize (usually in negative terms)

and normalize (as implacable) the white-dominated Hol-

lywood industry.2This article oers one way o extending

the scholarly purview into the concrete social practices

and sel-evaluations o whites behind the camera. As such,

it can readily be situated within the eld o production

studies, an emergent area o lm studies that explores

industry cultures, discourses, and practices (see Caldwell;

Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell). Like Vicki Mayer’s work,

this article attempts to “bring the social back in” by o-cusing on the connections “between the micro contexts

and the macro orces” (15). As yet, the generative new

eld o production studies has not extensively engaged

questions o racial ormation in the lm industry.

Oering, then, a historical production study o race, this

article opens up ways o exploring the range and complex-

ity o white social practices in Hollywood at the critical

moment o conrontation by the racial justice movement.

Considering discourses and practices in general beore o-

cusing in on the two case studies, this article insists on the

signicant eects, both positive and negative, o individual

and group actions. At the same time, it shows how these

actions operated within discursive rames and institutional

rameworks that generally served to perpetuate exclusion.

I argue that sincere ctions rendered unequal power rela-

tions imperceptible to many, but by no means all, white

lm practitioners at this ormative moment. Furthermore,

I suggest that sincere ctions still inorm some o the as-

sumptions in the scholarly coverage o The Learning Tree

and the Nat Turner controversy. Finally, I want to suggest

that cultural industries like lm, when examined simulta-

neously as image actories and industries, oer revelatory

sites or the study o racial identity ormation.

“The screen speaks for itself”:Discrimination Denial

By the late 1960s Arican Americans had neither a mean-

ingul independent lm sector, ollowing the demise o

the small black companies that had made race lms since

1915 (Cripps 126–50; Reid 15–18; Rhines 36–50), nor

any real oothold in mainstream movie production. As o

1968, not only was Hollywood yet to see its rst black

studio lm director, but also there were no senior black

executives at any o the major studios (Knapp, “Assess-

ment”). None o the companies in the Association o Mo-tion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which

represented leading producers and studios in their dealings

with labor, was black owned or run (Wood 3). Film’s

crat unions and guilds were also extremely exclusionary,

built on the seniority structure known as the “experience

roster,” which all but excluded minor ities. In the coveted

areas o sound and camera work, many union locals had no

black members.3The studios had the legal power, ollow-

ing civil rights legislation, to orce the unions to include

minorities when presenting their lists o applicants or

crat jobs or, ailing that, to look beyond the local unionsor personnel. But studio executives, with the important

exception o Universal City Studios, did not intervene

in these processes that aorded systematic advantages to

whites. In an article on cinema and black liberation, lm

scholar David James summarizes: “I anything the sixties

marked the culmination o a decline in the Black cin-

ema, whether it be dened rigorously in terms o Black

control over all stages in production, or more generally

as any measurable degree o Black participation” (126).

Despite the entrenched exclusion, the unequal hiring

and promotion system was, asserted Daniel Steiner o the

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC),

“completely accepted by industry and the unions” (“State-

ment” 22). Indeed, many industry whites held the belie

that conditions or minorities were improving substantially.

According to Los Angeles Times sta writer Dan Knapp,

progress was “overestimated in every quarter o the enter-

tainment industry” (“Black Cratsmen’s” 23). “Even among



Eithne Quinn 5

those with their hearts in the right place,” wrote Knapp

in another piece, “there is a tendency to over-estimate the

progress that has been made, and to see clearly with one

eye but not the other” (“Assessment” 18). Industry com-

mentator Leonard Feather concurred, pointing wryly to

a perceptual schism along racial lines: “Although both the

companies and the union deny that they are responsible

or any discrimination, they have not convinced many

members o the black community” (14). A 1968 trade

press report pointed to the same discrepancy. According

to rustrated black lm workers, “[p]rogress made in the

past ew years has not been nearly up to the level generally

surmised by the white community” (“Unless Negroes” 4).

The idea o “sincere ctions” helps to explain white lm

practitioners’ overestimation o their own industry’s racial

progress. Although Feagin and his coauthors’ work has

been used to interpret racial themes in lm narratives, it has

yet to be applied to Hollywood’s production cultures.4 Inact, its ocus on white “personal ideological constructions”

and “sel-concepts” lends itsel to the reexive thrust o a

productions studies approach. How industry practitioners

understand and explain their own practices is central to

John Thornton Caldwell’s pivotal studyProduction Culture:

Industrial Reexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television,

and it is this ocus on the identity politics o production

that can be generatively extended into an examination o

the racial sel-concepts o industry whites. Feagin, Vera, and

Batur argue that, while a great deal o scholarly attention

has ocused on white sentiments and behaviors o “anti-black prejudice” and how these have aided the persistence

o inequality, relatively ignored are the “sentiments about

the white sel elicited by encounters with the ‘others’”

(186). In line with scholars in critical race studies (Yancy),

they state that “racialized attitudes and actions require not

only a representation o the stereotyped other but also a

representation o onesel ” (Feagin, Vera, and Batur 186).

Whites across the country were moving toward a rhetoric

o racial tolerance during the 1960s—in itsel, a major

improvement on the previous widespread acceptance o

racism (Schuman et al. 108–20). Yet, the turn to tolerance

gave rise to a powerul new sel-assessment o “the white

sel ” as basically benign and “color blind” (see Brown et

al.). This crucial shit in U.S. racial meanings opened up

new ways o explaining continuing inequalities that were

much harder to pin down than the Jim Crow practices

o old deended by law (Bobo and Smith; Brown et al.;

Winant, World 164–72).

This essay ocuses on two o the various sincere ctions

that white people regularly deployed in explanations o

persisting racial inequality.5 First is the view that “whites

are more insightul about or active in racial change than

blacks” (Feagin, Vera, and Batur 196). This can be seen in

the statements o late 1960s industry personnel, as when

one “white executive” quoted in the Hollywood Reporter

avowed: “There is a conscious eort on the part o the

people in the industry who do the hiring to consider as

many Negroes as possible. There was a great move in that

direction in 1963. By 1965, it seemed we had done about

all the assimilating we could. Now, however, the eorts

continue but it’s getting harder to nd qualied people”

(Hull, “Dramatic Upsurge” 15). This perception o the

assiduous eorts o whites “privileges whites and seems

essential to many whites’ conceptions o themselves as

nonracist,” explain Feagin, Vera, and Batur (196). The vice

president o the AMPTP, Charles Boren, oered another example o this emphasis on white eorts, asserting: “There

has been a run on the minority manpower market in Los

Angeles” (“Boren Reminds”). Demand, he intimated, was

ar outstripping supply. Elsewhere, Boren again stressed the

elusiveness o the black labor pool: “The diculty is trying

to nd people who can t into a particular job when it

opens up” (Ornstein, “Progress” 17).

A 1968 public opinion survey ound that whites were

moving away rom explanations o black disadvantage

based on lack o innate ability but also away rom clas-

sic liberal explanations based on racial discrimination.Instead, a large majority o whites “attributed black

disadvantage to lack o motivation (or example, ‘not

trying’)” (Schuman et al. 153). As sociologist Howard

Schuman and his coauthors explain: “This was oered

by respondents as a sel-sucient explanation, one that

in eect assumes ‘ree will’ as the main source o success

in America” (153). White attitudes in Hollywood seem

to capture this wider trend, overestimating the potential

“ree will” o blacks to enter the industry. To be sure,

in an industry where hiring is normally done through

riendship networks and known experience, bringing

Arican Americans into an almost exclusively white

workplace was always going to present challenges. But

the underlying suggestion o such attitudes was another

prevalent white ction: that the responsibility or black

underrepresentation rested with black people themselves.

The comments o industry executives were misleading,

overemphasizing white integration eorts while ignoring



6 Sincere Fictions

the agrant structural impediments that served to per-

petuate black disadvantage.

The second white sincere ction central to this article

concerns the reliance on cultural and media imagery as

social reerence point—in this case, the reliance on the lit-

eral “ctions” produced by the lm industry. The dramatic

late 1960s racial advances taking place on-screen worked

to obuscate behind-the-camera exclusion. Above all,

Sidney Poitier’s major-league acting success symbolized

progress. Following the release o three hit movies starr ing

Poitier in 1967— Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley

Kramer); In the Heat o the Night (Norman Jewison);

and To Sir, with Love (James Clavell)—he was voted the

number one national box-oce attraction (Champlin 1).

That an Arican American achieved this level o national,

mainstream acceptance in 1968 was in itsel remarkable

in terms o the trend toward white tolerance. Poitier’s

controversial screen persona during this period has beenextensively discussed, with the prevalent and persuasive

critique leveled that it catered to white sensibilities more

than it did to black.6 For present purposes, the point to

pursue is the way that screen advances epitomized by

Poitier came to present a misleading image o the racial

division o labor within the industry itsel.

Charles Boren declared: “The best evidence o im-

provements is up on the screen. The public can see what

has been done. The screen speaks or itsel ” (Knapp,

“Assessment” 18). The tendency o whites to rely on

screen developments as “evidence o improvements” wasexacerbated by the lack o contact between black and

white Americans. Racial disconnection compounds the

inuence o pop-cultural imagery on people’s attitudes

and belies. As Joe Feagin explains, “[O]ne o the windows

looking out o the racial isolation in which the majority

o whites live is that o the mass media” (247). Day-to-day

engagement with black people or most lm personnel in

the late 1960s might have amounted to a casual exchange

with a studio janitor (many o whom were black) or

contact with a very rare black crat union employee.

Probably the most compelling evidence o the myopia

o white industry attitudes in the ace o institutional

discrimination came in the testimony and ndings o the

EEOC Hollywood hearings o early 1969. In its report

ollowing the one-day hearings, the EEOC committee

identied a “pattern or practice o discrimination” in

the industry’s hiring and promotion practices that was so

egregious as to warrant recommendation that the Justice

Department le a suit against practically the entire indus-

try under Title VII o the Civil Rights Act. Despite the

agrant discrimination in the recruiting systems, “which

have as their oreseeable eect the employment only o

whites,” the committee reported that they had “heard no

testimony that there is any intention to change the sys-

tem” (“Statement” 22). Tellingly, then, the committee saw

no evidence o the indeatigable eorts whites claimed

to be making on behal o blacks in the interview state-

ments quoted above. Reiterating the point about white

complacency, the committee reported: “We have seen, in

sum, no concrete evidence o a willingness to change the

employment pattern” (“Statement” 22). Paying lip service

to liberal principles, producing a ew black-themed lms,

and holding well-publicized meetings with the National

Association or the Advancement o Colored People had

suced. Within this climate o institutional intransigence

and de acto white opportunity hoarding, it was thereoresignicant that one executive at a major studio stepped

outside the “encapsulated white bubble” (Feagin, Vera, and

Batur 192) to sign the rst Arican American to direct

and coproduce a studio picture.

The Learning Tree: Disturbing Fictions

When he joined Warner Bros.–Seven Arts in 1967,

“Kenny Hyman immediately announced he would woo

directors by giving them more artistic control,” recounts

lm commentator Peter Biskind (36). This agenda wasin keeping with emerging “New Hollywood” currents

o the time, but what was unusual was Hyman’s exten-

sion o this control to an Arican American. He had

been approached by independent auteur and actor John

Cassavetes with the idea o Gordon Parks directing a

screen version o his own ctionalized memoir The

Learning Tree . Parks, an esteemed black photographer

and author, had very little lmmaking experience—

he had previously made just one well-received short,

Flavio, in 1965. Nonetheless, he was given real decision-

making power, including choosing his own director

o photography, opting or Burnett Guey resh rom

his Bonnie and Clyde Oscar-winning success. As a Hol-

lywood Reporter journalist wrote at the time: “No other

Negro in the industry has been given such autonomy”

(Ornstein, “Progress” 8).7 Hyman had already displayed

racial open-mindedness in casting decisions at his previ-

ous job at MGM, where he produced The Hill (Sidney



Eithne Quinn 7

Lumet, 1965) and The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich,

1967). Both ilms had signiicant roles or Arican

Americans: the ormer eatured Ossie Davis, and the latter,

which costarred Cassavetes, included a high-prole role

or ootball star Jim Brown. Cassavetes, who had become

riends with Parks ater a Lie photo shoot, was a pre-

eminent independent auteur o the 1960s. His celebrated

debut lm, Shadows (1959), had dealt overtly with issues

o race relations and racialized identity.

As with other prominent cases o Arican Americans

penetrating Hollywood lmmaking around this time,

such as Harry Belaonte and Ossie Davis, the Learning

Tree deal emerged out o interracial exposure, riendship,

and collaboration—as well as, o course, economic sel-

interest. Most whites by the late 1960s were happy to

espouse racial equality in principle; but as ederal courts

and minorities started to demand the implementation o

equal treatment, most were, at the same time, unwillingto endorse equality in practice (Schuman et al. 120–38).

Cassavetes and Hyman were among a minority o whites

who, in this case, combined racially open-minded prin-

ciples with all-important practice. They were individuals

whose production-culture parameters extended somewhat

beyond the white bubble and its concomitant ctions.

In an attempt to explain why Warner Bros.–Seven Arts

decided to sign an Arican American director, one black

industry worker commented, “[Parks] comes in with a

package to Warners, a best-selling book, a score and lots

o publicity behind him as a Lie photographer. Theycouldn’t turn that down i it were handed to them by a

two-headed, one-legged Martian” (Hull, “Use” 8). The

cynicism is understandable. First, as this comment suggests,

the project had presold attractions and market potential,

propelled by a sudden late 1960s awareness that in thematic

terms “black is boxoce.”8 Moreover, the white studio

executives on this project still, o course, called the shots,

determining, paradoxically, how much “autonomy” Parks

had. In terms o industry power and prot structures, as

the work o lm scholars like Mark Reid makes clear, the

signing o a black director was o modest import (83–91).

Indeed, much o the racial signicance o Parks’s land-

mark signing rested on the degree to which he would

make eorts to extend his own opportunity to others.

Because black people tended to have a personal and

political commitment to racial change and, in practical

terms, because o their contact base, when given positions

o power on lm projects they oten pushed ar more

aggressively and eectively than their white counterparts

or integrated crews. Logistically, training up and getting

union cards or black technicians and installing them as

working members o the lm business was not an easy

task. It was, ironically, in many ways more dicult than

Hyman’s hiring o an Arican American director, since

the latter job was one o the ew areas o lm production

not subject to the experience roster system.

Once signed, Parks managed to hire black technicians

or The Learning Tree , eventually securing twelve (on what

was nonetheless a “predominantly white crew” [“Gordon

Parks”]). Two o the twelve were nonunion members

who, through work on the lm, obtained union cards.

Parks’s success in signing minority technicians and ap-

prentices served to cast doubt on the ction o manage-

ment that there was a “run” on black labor. A year ater

the release o The Learning Tree , Parks commented: “It’s

rotten in the rest o the industry. They should go out andget more black people. The act that I was told I would

never nd qualied black kids—and then went out and

got 12 o them—proves that they can do it i they want

to” (Knapp, “Assessment” 17).

This case, in which individuals brought about integra-

tion on a picture inormally, might be seen to support the

idea that institutional reorm and preerential measures

or minorities were unnecessary. In the case o Hyman

and Cassavetes, the characterization o the benign white

sel operating in the lm business was reasonably valid.

Some o Parks’s own interview comments may have lenturther weight to the notion o Hollywood as a potential

racial meritocracy. Parks said, “[Hyman] gave me the

chance because he believes I can do it, and not because

I’m a Negro. It’s been that way all my lie. White men

have made the breaks or me, and I’ve made sure that I

was prepared or them” (Hull, “Negro Director” 1). But

the ease with which Hyman was able to combine com-

mercial sel-interest with racially enlightened activity

surely highlights how possible it would have been or

other liberal white executives at the time. Preerential

policies were needed in part because so ew were willing,

at the time and thereater, to “make the breaks.”

I the advent o this rst Arican American studio lm

director disrupted commonsense perceptions about black

employability, it was also open to discursive reappropria-

tion by corporate Hollywood.The Learning Tree , released

at a time when the ederal government was trying to

bring about integration in Hollywood, was paraded by



8 Sincere Fictions

management as the exemplar o the industry’s racial pro-

gressivism. When Jack Valenti, head o the Motion Picture

Association o America, held a 1969 lunch in honor o

the NAACP, he preaced his remarks about the industry’s

racial openness by pointing to Gordon Parks’s lm. In his

speech to industry leaders and journalists he stated that,

o the “47 people working beore or behind the camera

on the lm, all but ve [were] black” (Ornstein, “Black

Employment” 1). Not only did this seriously undercount

white involvement (not to mention, o course, the lm’s

all-white capital), but also, through its aggregation o in

ront o and behind the camera on this mainly black cast

lm, it oers another example o “the screen speaks or

itsel” elisions. Based on the case o The Learning Tree ,

Valenti proclaimed his message that “we have the desire

to open the door to new Negro talent rather than have

someone orce it open” (“Negro Film Roles”).

This black directorial signing thus became grist or the anti–armative action mill, with Parks in danger o

becoming the behind-the-scenes equivalent o screen

star Poitier: the racial exception that conrms whites’

sense o themselves as tolerant and o their industry as

postracial and in no need o reorm. The themes o The

Learning Tree probably complemented such a perception.

As summarized in a Hollywood Reporter review, the screen

adaptation, about “one proud young black man’s growing

up in the historically ree state o Kansas in 1925, is an

indelibly American lm, unashamed in its honest emotion

and sentiment, remarkable in its morality, tolerance andidealism, enriched by understanding o those character-

istics which bind and separate men” (“Learning Tree”).

The racial conciliation in its narrative resonated syner-

gistically with its production context to conjure a sense

o personal racial empowerment that may have chimed

inadvertently with laissez-aire management discourses.

There can be little doubt that, in terms o its racial

production culture,The Learning Tree possesses discursive

and material signicance. That it has received very little

scholarly attention may in part be explained by the heavy

emphasis in the race scholarship o lm on textual rep-

resentation.9 Discursively, the lm was requisitioned by

the anti–armative action proponents in lm industry

management and brandished as a mark o Hollywood’s

postracialism. This shored up certain white ctions, help-

ing to undermine attempts by government and activists

to implement equal treatment in Hollywood hiring

practices. Nonetheless, in material terms, Hyman’s deci-

sion to sign Parks and, in turn, Parks’s decision to recruit

black technicians represent something o a landmark,

disrupting white ctions about the supposed black labor

shortage. As Howard Winant explains, “The key element

in racial ormation is the link between signication and

structure, between what race means in a particular dis-

cursive practice and how, based upon such interpretations,

social structures are racially organized” (Racial Conditions

4). The contestation over racial structure and signication

in this lm’s production and reception was revealing: an

advance in the industry’s racial division o labor giving

rise to discursive retrenchment. By inversion, the racial

storm that precipitated the nonrelease o Nat Turner , I will

argue, was more a case o Hollywood’s sincere ctions

giving rise to productive black industry resistance.

Nat Turner : Confronting Fictions

O all the Sidney Poitier vehicles, none had been more

eted as a race relations victory than the critical and

commercial hit In the Heat o the Night . Fresh rom its

success, the lm’s director, Norman Jewison, signed up

to make the screen adaptation o Styron’s novel The

Conessions o Nat Turner . Announced in early 1968, just

as the Learning Tree package was nalized, the lm was to

be a high-end Twentieth Century Fox eature about the

most prominent slave rebel in Arican American history.

Styron’s best-selling novel had won great mainstream

critical acclaim, culminating in the 1968 award o thePulitzer Prize or Fiction. The author was taken on as

a paid advisor or the lm, and Jewison asserted that he

planned to “apply the eeling I got rom the book to the

problems o today” (Warga 19).

With surging race consciousness, Arican Americans

assuredly wanted narratives about their desperately under-

represented history. As black journalist Charles Hobson

stated at the time: “Black people have been in this country

and visible to all or over 300 years, but the story o our

history, until recently, was always a national secret, and

much o the story remains untold.” Slave rebel leader Nat

Turner was ostensibly a perect subject—a hallowed ore-

ather who resonated with the nationalist cultural-political

tenor o the times. However, the announcement o this

lm project angered many in the black intellectual com-

munity, where Styron’s account o Turner had been very

poorly received (see Clarke). The novel’s publication, sum-

marized New York Times reviewer Eliot Fremont-Smith,



Eithne Quinn 9

“provoked the most bitter, interesting and ar-reaching

literary controversy in recent memory” (29). Related rom

the rst-person perspective o Turner, Styron’s novel ven-

tured into highly racially sensitive terrain, with the slave

leader portrayed as sexually obsessed by a white woman

and deeply ambivalent about the violent revolt that he

had spearheaded. As even Fremont-Smith, whose review

had been highly positive, allowed, “[t]he real Nat Turner

was taught to read by his parents and later had a wie—

while Mr Styron’s Turner is coached by white masters and

depicted as an unmarried celibate haunted by masturba-

tory antasies o the white girl he later kills” (29). Jewison

must have had some awareness o the growing backlash

by the time he signed as director. The rst major dissent

rom the novel’s widespread approval, Herbert Aptheker’s

inuential review in the Nation, had come in October

1967, several months beore Jewison signed as director in

early 1968. Since the movie “would command its prestigebased on the reputation o its source book,” as lm scholar

Christopher Sieving puts it, Jewison had, in signing up,

bought heavily into controversial Styron stocks (39).

In March 1968 Arican American activists ormed a

group called the Association to End Deamation o Black

People—later shortened to Black Anti-Deamation As-

sociation (BADA)—headed by black reelance writer

Louise Meriwether. While BADA welcomed the idea

o a lm project about Nat Turner, they insisted on its

distancing rom Styron’s charged depiction o black mas-

culinity, sexuality, and rebellion. In a letter to Jewison andthe lm’s producer, David Wolper (and copied to Jack

Valenti), BADA demanded changes to the script and also

that “no picture bear the title o William Styron’s book

lest it lend validity to his alsication o history.”10 Later

that spring, Ossie Davis, who emerged as the group’s

leading spokesperson, stated in a BADA advertisement

published in the Hollywood Reporter : “Styron’s implication

about black men and black rebellion is that what agitates

the black man is not a search or reedom but a search

or white women. To magniy this inammatory lie on a

mass scale—as only a motion picture can magniy it—is

the height o social irresponsibility.”11

The lmmakers switly responded. In a Variety article

titled “Wolper and Jewison Brush ‘Turner’ Bee,” the

director asserted: “I can only say that whatever goes

into the lm is to be determined by me.” Just back rom

Martin Luther King Jr.’s uneral several weeks later and

under mounting pressure rom BADA, Jewison had not

relented, stating: “I’ll make the lm my way—and no-

body is going to tell me how to do it” (Warga 1). Even

with the wave o white liberal contrition that ollowed

King’s assassination, Jewison did not regard any Arican

American input as desirable in the making o a story

about, ironically, the struggle or black sel-determination.

Indeed, at this stage he did not even deem it necessary

to pay lip-service to black aspirations and concerns.

Wolper and Jewison’s initial disregard o black concerns

was urther suggested by the act that they rst ap-

proached leading white screenwriters (including Styron)

to adapt the novel (see French 242).

At rst glance, Jewison’s stance may seem surprising,

particularly given his liberal publicity image. However,

it coheres with the incipient sincere ctions o well-

meaning whites. In a curious echo o “the screen speaks

or itsel ” discourse, Jewison deended his position by

asserting: “I think In the Heat o the Night speaks or itsel as ar as my eeling toward social problems in this coun-

try” (French 240; see also Jewison 154). He perceives

his own antiracism as transparent and beyond interroga-

tion, based on this (white-made and largely white-cast)

lmic reerent. His decision to direct Nat Turner seems

to be inormed by the idea that he (along with Styron

and Wolper) was better positioned to handle black rep-

resentational politics than were Arican Americans. This

resonates with the sincere ction that “whites are more

insightul about racial change” already encountered in

the comments o industry executives. A wide yet seem-ingly imperceptible gul separated Turner’s real-world

struggle or black sel-determination and Jewison’s white-

determined intentions or its lmic production.

Where a degree o transracial alliance marked the genesis

o The Learning Tree , initial activity on The Conessions o

Nat Turner occurred inside a white bubble, which BADA

was intent on bursting. “Relatively ew whites think re-

ectively about their whiteness except when it is orced

on them by encounters with or challenges rom black

Americans,” ound Feagin, Vera, and Batur (191). So it was

with Jewison and Wolper, and it soon became evident that

the lmmakers’ lack o sel-reection had resulted in a grave

tactical error. Jewison’s high-handed response strengthened

the resolve o a growing number o protestors. Once the

lmmakers nally understood the strength o the black

challenge, they were orced to agree to changes to both

script and title, which was shortened to Nat Turner —a big

compromise, as it undermined the project’s key presold



10 Sincere Fictions

attraction (see French 242–46). In February 1969, the

month that Wolper agreed to the picture’s name change,

Jewison let the production, citing scheduling con-

icts—again suggesting the director’s commitment to

the controversial source novel. The lm continued into

preproduction, but under the pressure o mounting costs,

conicting interests, bad publicity, and lm industry slump,

the project lost momentum. Then, in January 1970 came

the announcement by Fox that Nat Turner had been shelved

indenitely, losing the studio a great deal o money. (Buying

the rights to the lm version had alone cost $600,000.)

In his autobiography, rst published in 2005, Jewison

commented that not getting “the opportunity to make this

lm” had been “the biggest disappointment o [his] career”

(155). I this statement intimates the episode’s importance

or Jewison, his account also suggests a persistent, almost

possessive investment in Styron’s interpretation o Turner.

Notwithstanding the widely aired concerns o so manyblack readers, it was, he insists even years later, “the most

important American novel o my lietime” (154). Wolper,

on the other hand, whose public statements during the

racial controversy had always been more considered,

seemed better able to take on board the concerns o the

protestors. O course, as the project’s producer, he had more

at stake than did Jewison in reaching resolution. Still, on

agreeing to change the lm’s title and aspects o the plot,

Wolper’s measured tone diers markedly rom Jewison’s:

“I we were going to do the denitive story o Turner it

was acceptable to us to use other source material available,the story being as important as it is to the blacks, we don’t

want it to be harmul to that community” (“Wolper Makes

Change”). Forced into reection about their racial views

and sel-conceptions by encounters with the protestors,

Wolper seems to have been more exible than Jewison.

Scholars have debated the reasons or the cancellation

o Nat Turner . Historian Scot French oers a meticulously

researched account o BADA’s campaign, ultimately an-

swering the question posed in the subtitle o his article

(“Should black power take the rap or killing Nat Turner ,

the movie?”) in the negative. He argues instead that the

industry’s economic troubles and Fox’s losses o 1969 were

largely responsible or the lm’s cancellation. Disputing

French’s conclusion, lm scholar Christopher Sieving,

by contrast, puts most o the responsibility onto BADA:

“French’s downplaying o black activism as a cause or Nat

Turner ’s premature death is curious, especially in light o the

act that the bulk o his essay is devoted to an explication

o the eorts o those groups” (46). In this article, entitled

“The Concessions o Nat Turner ,” Sieving argues that the

BADA campaign generated bad publicity, increased prepro-

duction costs, and brought about the enorced distancing

o lm rom book that so damaged the project’s established

selling eature or white audiences. Sieving thereore

concludes, persuasively, that the black protests were the

principal reason or the abandonment o Nat Turner .

Both conclusions, however, are built on a common

assumption: that the lm project was basically a good

thing or black people and its cancellation deleterious.

French’s “take the rap” subtitle intimates culpability,

which the author is ultimately reluctant to assign to the

protestors. Sieving spells out his reasons or arguing that

the demise o this lm project was damaging to black

progress in Hollywood: “[P]erhaps the most salient result

o its cancellation was the reluctance o the majors to try

anything remotely like it thereater” (48). He continues:“The heaviest irony o the Nat Turner episode may be that

organized black protest eectively ended any serious com-

mitment by the majors to ‘A’-level pictures about Arican

American themes and stories, and in turn this resistance

helped pave the way or the much-derided blaxploitation

era” (Sieving 48). However, i we are to take seriously the

black power struggle as social practice within the lm

industry, the highly eective BADA campaign must be

understood, in two important ways, as a proound victory.

First, since Hollywood was desperate to greenlight

black-themed lms and needed good community rela-tions to do so, the lm’s nonmaking surely helped “pave

the way” or the entry o black lmmakers into Hol-

lywood. The Nat Turner controversy itsel may contain

evidence o how pressure exerted by activists led directly

to new black behind-the-camera involvement: ater an

initial quest or a white scriptwriter, Wolper signed a black

one, Louis Peterson. But a more ar-reaching example o

how the protest was connected to new black opportuni-

ties surrounds the campaign’s champion, Ossie Davis. At

the same moment that Jewison walked away rom Nat

Turner in the spr ing o 1969, Davis was asked by producer

Samuel Goldwyn Jr. to direct Cotton Comes to Harlem

(1970). This adaptation o a novel by Arican American

author Chester Himes resulted in a blaxploitation lm

that has not been “much derided” and that made Davis the

second black American director o a studio picture (and

the rst to turn a signicant prot). Just ater Goldwyn

signed Davis, in the late spring o 1969, a third Arican



Eithne Quinn 11

American was signed on as studio director: Melvin Van

Peebles struck a three-picture deal with Columbia, start-

ing with the topical comedy Watermelon Man (1970).

His experience on this latter production allowed him to

hone skills and develop networks that would help him

next to direct and coproduce his experimental hit Sweet

Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Factors beyond the

controversy over Nat Turner doubtless inuenced these

early black directorial signings. Nonetheless, without

risking essentialism—without arguing that white people

should not make black-themed lms (BADA resisted

this logic)—one can surely contend that, given Arican

American underrepresentation in Hollywood, protests

that encouraged or pushed white executives toward hiring

blacks into positions o creative inuence were welcome.

The second reason why the BADA protest can be seen as a

victory relates to the lm’s prospective race-representational

politics. Without the (possibly atal) changes BADA sought,what kind o cultural-political work would the lm version

o The Conessions o Nat Turner have perormed? Without

risking, this time, an overly instrumental view o culture, one

can surely argue, as did the protestors, that Jewison’s intended

narrative serviced white outlooks and expectations in ways

that were at the expense o black cultural-political needs and

sensibilities. Pop-cultural images o blackness contribute to

the perpetuation o whites’ sincere ctions, and these c-

tions, in turn, have material consequences. “White actions

are still oten legitimized by an overt or barely disguised

racial mythology,” explain Feagin, Vera, and Batur (190).One can only speculate as to the proposed content o the

canceled lm, but evidence suggests that the lmmakers’

pre-BADA intentions were or a airly aithul adaptation.

I that were to mean any inkling o a Turner, to repeat

Fremont-Smith’s words, “haunted by masturbatory antasies

o the white girl he later kills,” the lm would surely have

delegitimized the slave leader’s struggle or reedom—and,

by implicit extension, black nationalist politics. By contrast,

The Learning Tree and Cotton Comes to Harlem, according to

lm scholar Ed Guerrero, “pointed in the direction o an

honest depiction o blacks, o a black point o view, and o

the black world” (81). These Arican American directorial

debuts in commercial lmmaking, both completed in timely

ashion, possessed “validity as depictions o black culture and

consciousness” that would no doubt have eluded Jewison’s

lm project (Guerrero 81).

There is a certain consistency in the depiction o black

protest by Styron, Jewison, and even perhaps Sieving. The

ght or black sel-determination is underestimated, rom

Styron’s portrayal o the insurrectionary motivations and

misgivings o Turner (not to mention his description o

black complaints about the novel and lm project as “al-

most all . . . invalid, irrational, and hysterical” [Peary 120]),

to Jewison’s initial ailure to grasp the seriousness and

legitimacy o BADA’s concerns. The thrust o Sieving’s

article, or all its well-developed empirical detail, is to hold

Arican Americans inadvertently responsible or their own

marginalization rom mainstream Hollywood narrative

representation thereater. His ocus on sel-deeating black

demands—despite “the best intentions o white liberal

lmmakers” Wolper and Jewison—chimes with wider

white explanations o persisting post–civil rights inequality

(Sieving 40). Race sociologists have oten come across “the

white perspective that views black Americans as illegiti-

mately challenging cherished white values” (Feagin, Vera,

and Batur 189). In this case, the undue challenge may betoward the kind o cherished “A”-list, liberal lmmaking

that Nat Turner represented: “serious, big-budget, black-cast

prestige [pictures] about black American history,” describes

Sieving (48). Reecting on this period years later, Ossie

Davis reminds us o the power relations that were only too

apparent to blacks: “There is rom time to time a big brou-

haha—sometimes it gets quite excitable—over whether

or not a white director can really ever make a lm truly

representative o black liestyle and black culture. This ques-

tion, in my opinion, is more about jobs—and ultimately

about power—than it is about race” (Davis and Dee 338).

Conclusion

The strength o the idea o sincere ctions or lm studies

is that it helps us explore the racial practices and belies o

white industry personnel in a ormative period o widely

proessed tolerance but also o scant labor redistribution. It

helps us examine how racial dynamics behind the camera

interplayed with Hollywood’s collective representations

and institutional politics o race. Because a cultural indus-

try like lm combines resources and discourses (like any

other industry) with symbolic representation, it contains

an extra dimension or racial contestation and, through this

representation, dramatically stages the connections between

structure and signication in the ormation o racial iden-

tity. It thereore becomes an especially rich and revealing

arena or the study o racial conict and change. Much o

the scholarship on the racial politics o American lm in



12 Sincere Fictions

this period has ocused on textual representation and press

reception and, to a lesser extent, on the black struggle or

jobs and power. The neglect o white racial practices and

attitudes in Hollywood’s production cultures is curious

given the central power-broking role o white practitioners

to reinorce or disrupt the industry’s social relations o

race and, in turn, its racial regimes o lmic representation.

The power relations in Hollywood’s production cultures

traced in this article crystallize two trends that have be-

come central to post–civil rights racial politics. First is the

continuing white blindness to and disavowal o structural

racism in the period since end o state-sanctioned white

supremacism in the mid-1960s. This article considers the

ormative years o color-blind discourses as they developed

in the “well-meaning” white zone o Hollywood. Second,

however, the case studies examined above reveal how, in

ts and starts, white racial identity has been challenged and

changed during this same period. Hyman and Cassavetes,in conceiving the idea o a black-made lm, had absorbed

some lessons rom the 1960s political upheavals and how

these might aect their workplace. Jewison and Wolper,

who perhaps elt they had already learned all the lessons

o those upheavals, were dragged unceremoniously into

urther racial sel-reection. Relinquishing some racial

privilege, whether voluntarily or under duress, whites like

Hyman and Jewison became subject to a degree o “double

consciousness,” long experienced by blacks, as Du Bois

amously suggested (45). “From the late 1960s on,” argues

Winant, “white identity was reinterpreted and rearticulatedin a dualistic ashion: on the one hand egalitarian, on the

other hand privileged; on the one hand individualistic and

‘color-blind,’ on the other hand ‘normalized’ and white”

(New Politics 104). Through the emergence o black talent,

interracial alliances, group activism, and ederal interven-

tion—all within the context o growing cultural and

market liberalization—Hollywood’s possessive investment

in whiteness has been shaken though not broken.

Notes

I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humani-ties Research Council, Jan-Christopher Horak, Mel Donalson, Peter

Krämer, William Van Deburg, Brian Ward, S. Craig Watkins, Steve

Neale, Mark Jancovich, and Velvet Light Trap’s anonymous readers.

1. My approach is also inormed by the inuential work o Lipsitz

and Roediger.

2. For exceptions, see Cripps, Donalson, Lott, Quinn, Reid, Rhines,

and the excellent study o Watkins, which inorms the approach taken

in the present article.

3. One celebrated exception was Vincent Tubbs o the Publicists’

Guild, who was the rst Arican American to head a union local.

4. Hernan Vera, in collaboration with journalist Andrew Gordon,

has written an insightul monograph on white sincere ctions in

lm narratives.

5. The opinion surveys o Feagin, Vera, and Batur were conducted

in the 1990s, when, according to many scholars, color-blind discourses

had become normative (see Brown et al.). The late 1960s periodexamined in the present article is important because it represents the

ormative period in the emergence o such discourses.

6. For an inuential press critique o the time, see Neal; or a recent

scholarly critique, see Sexton 40–45.

7. On Parks’s own account o his signing, see the interviews in

Berry and Berry 108–12; Alexander 3–15.

8. “Black Is Boxoce” is the title o chapter 10 o Leab. See also

Beaupre’s inuential 1967 article.

9. For a brie but insightul scholarly treatment, see Donalson 10–11.

10. Association to End Deamation o Black People to Wolper and

Jewison, 26 March 1968, in Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee le, Schom-

burg Center or Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

11. BADA/Ossie Davis advertisement, Hollywood Reporter , 18 April

1968: back page.

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