The actions in the civil-rights movement were important but most of them aren't very interesting in terms of drama because there is no resolution.

People are slow to change and the problem hasn't gone away. Can you capture that in a movie, at least so the audience responds to it? Change is just too slow and messy.

Little Rock was interesting because it had the potential of National Guard v. National Army, Brown because Thurgood Marshall was there and it was a "one against the world" type story. In both cases there was a resolution, the kids got to school where they wanted (I know the actual Truth about Brown, but that's how it's popularly remembered). Jackie Robinson got to play baseball and was awesome.

Truth to gory? Never heard it put that way before.

If the Bush administration gets its way they'll undue the good of the 1964 Civil Rights Act & the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Movies will be the only way we'll remember them.

Tom

tlees: "If the Bush administration gets its way they'll undo the good of the 1964 Civil Rights Act & the 1965 Voting Rights Act." Todd's problem is solved. All we have to do is make a movie about race today and run in backward. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

So, liberal Hollywood is only liberal when it doesn't cost them anything or cut into their profits? What a revelation! The only vocal liberals out here are the ones who can afford it. The rest of us depend on the movie business for our survival.

I usually deplore what comes out of Hollywood - which they call movies - but they only put out what the public wants to see. Perhaps you should take your gripe to the public.

I think Hoover's FBI looks a lot better in "Mississippi Burning" than they do in reality.

Tom

I think we may be too literal here.  Who says a movie, in order to be effective, has to show every wart and blister of every historical figure?  Exhibit A: the movie, M*A*S*H*?  Exhibit B: the TV series of the same name?  They had two entirely different ways of dealing with war.  Everyone knew the story was about Vietnam.  (I guess George Bush was too drunk to watch either, or he might have learned something)

Born On the 4th of July (the movie that made me realize that Tom Cruise could act)

The Insider. OK, I'm embarassed to say that before I saw that movie I actually believed that cigarette companies were not to blame for their customer's addictions.  (An aside: my mother has lung cancer and has smoked for 60 years -->  I hate smoking and despise the smell; I just thought that it was purely a choice.  The movie opened my eyes to the manipulation of the addictive qualities in cigarettes.)

My point here is that Hollywood is Hollywood.  It is entertaining and very powerful in its ability to affect our senses.  Sometimes they use it purely for $$$$.  Sometimes they blow it.  But really, it is nonsensical to blame them for not doing a nonfiction blow-by-blow of Martin Luther King (as if that would help race relations), or to say that a documentary-style film of the civil rights fight would be boring.

The whole idea behind creativity and a gift for story-telling is that a good writer can hone in on a part of a story and expand it in order to enlighten people.  Fiction is a very powerful medium, and often helps people to relate to situations that they could otherwise not empathize with.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape -- A Movie about a young man who has a brain-damaged brother, and whose mother is so obese that she cannot get off of a sofa -->  Just an example of a story that some of the posters above might say would be too boring or absurd to EVER be a movie.  However, it was a wonderful movie.

Jan

"Insider" was great--also see "Thank You for Smoking". Both hilarious and wrenching, (and you never actually see anyone smoking). Also Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck" was a good story, although difficult to watch with its historically-accurate chain-smokers in every frame.

BTW, tobacco is hugely addicting, with a response similar to cocaine, in that stronger doses make the craving stronger (this one speaks from experience in both). I recently quit with the aid of varenicline, quite effective.

Write your own and shop it around.

With respect, Bev,

I think the point both Gitlin and Hornaday makes is not that the artists don't want to do them, but that the money-men scotch the deals.  All the examples are of people with impeccable credentials trying to get stories made and finding them stymied one way or other.  Hornaday's key paragraph:

So why, with such promising stories, such larger-than-life characters and such historic sweep and importance, hasn't the civil rights era been captured in a feature film? Not surprisingly for the movie industry, the answer is portrayed as purely economic; and equally unsurprisingly, economics in Hollywood are inextricably interwoven with the still unresolved issue of race.

When an American Icon like Harry Bellafonte has to wait twelve years to get a film made about Ray Charles, another American Icon, and then it only gets it made by going outside the industry for financing, I think the point being made is worth considering. 

The point about Hollywood following popular sentiment and not leading it is also valid.  But that could be said about commercial entertainment generally and racial themes have not received the kind of treatment in serious films they merit.  Spectacular actors like Ethel Waters and Esther Rolle had to spend their lives playing Beulah roles. 

There's a lot to complain about with regard to PBS, but hats off to it for stepping in where Hollywood feared to tread with regard to civil rights and racism.  Eyes on the Prize is only one of a number of stellar series produced over there.  You and others might also be interested in a very interesting website:  Facing History and Ourselves.

Since 1976, Facing History has been engaging students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development and lessons of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the choices they confront in their own lives.

aMike

Wikipedia lists 31 of them.  There are others,

Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York provides something of the Civil Side. 

aMike

We're going to have to agree to disagree about this one, Bev.  I think Medved is a doofus, too, but there is a difference between what he's saying about "family films" and what the Post says about Civil Rights films...for one thing the author gives examples of stories which deserve to be told as well as the troubles getting them told.   

I could add several myself.  For example, someone needs to tell the story of the four girls killed in the Birmingham Church bombing, so the story doesn't get lost from the public memory. 

There's also a difference between outside funding of the kind the author describes (no safety net) and taking out a loan or soliciting investors by giving them a part of the film.  For that matter, there are films by persons who raise funds from politically motivated persons, Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films comes to mind.

If one cannot criticize the film industry for venality, one is on shaky ground criticizing any industry which plays it safe and goes for the purely profitable and avoids the possibly controversial.  But then again, perhaps criticism as a genre is passé.  There is little utility in criticizing an artist's recital...that recital ain't gonna happen again.  It makes little sense criticizing a film...it's made already. 

aMike

An interesting bio film that's never been made would be Adam Clayton Powell. He was flamboyant enough to provide 2 hours of material.

There was a 2002 TV movie titled Keep The Faith Baby starring Harry Lennix (24, Commander-In-Chief) and Vanessa L Williams (Ugly Betty) depicting the life of Adam Clayton Powell.
It's available on DVD.

It's a no win proposition for Hollywood to portray the Civil Rights movement accurately.

White Southerners would be having seizures complaining about how they are always portrayed as Bad Guys. And they'd scream how there is racism is other parts of the country.

The Civil Rights Leadership would get upset with the showing of any warts on the leaders of the Civil Rights Movements. Think about it Jesse Jackson & Al Sharpton wanted to boycott the movie Barbershop. Because you know, Hollywood just puts out too many films showing African Americans working "normal"(as normal as it can be for the movies) lives by written and directed by African Americans.

So what you are left with are saccharine story lines that have been done to death.

I don't have a problem with Transformers. I do have a problem when every movie is Transformers.

With a movie like Transformers, I wonder would it have been made if there hadn't been a tv series and a previous movie? If there had never been a Transformers and I had written a script about a bunch of robots that transform into talking cars and jet fighters, would anyone have ever agreed to spend a bajillion dollars producing it? I doubt it.

Original ideas of all types, not just about the Civil Rights movement, but about everything, languish because a movie like Transformers, with established name recognition, guarantees a minimal box office and thus gets made. Transformers gets made instead of some other entirely orginal sci-fi feature just so they can save a few bucks on marketing.

It's more complicated than that, of course. There is also the brutality - in Hollywood, you make one bad decision, back one flop, and your reputation is ruined. So rather than risk your career with a new story that completely blows you away, you go with a story that you know will generate x-dollars, so that even if the end product sucks like the vacuum of space, it's still going to make enough money to keep your reputation intact. It's smart for the individuals involved, smart for the investors, but it is bad for art.

"someone needs to tell the story of the four girls killed in the Birmingham Church bombing"

See Spike Lee's "4 Little Girls"

You've named about as many Civil War pictures as gangster pictures -- starring James Cagney.

The United States produces almost 400 movies a year and it's been several year since the last major Civil War picture, probably "Cold Mountain" or "Gods and Generals."

But then, there aren't many Westerns any more either.

Gore Vidal says he asked David O. Selznick why nobody ever made a movie about the antislavery side in the Civil War and Selznick said, "How can you make a movie about a war that's still going on?"

There have, in fact, been terrific TV movies and miniseries about this period-- Paul Winfield as King, Gary Sinise as George Wallace, etc. However, every time Hollywood has tried to make a feature film about this era, it gets caught up in the same suffocating piety that it applies to the countless movies about the most important event in American history ever-- the Hollywood blacklist. There's some kind of perfect storm there in which Hollywood's enthusiasm for fearlessly championing a cause no one is against any more collides with Hollywood's self-congratulatory liberalism, and the result is a tedious liberal suckfest. Frankly, based on the track record of the few movies to touch on any aspect of the 60s, from Forrest Gump on down, it's probably best that Hollywood tends to ignore the entire era.

Tobacco also reduced the likelihood of Parkinson's.