The Butler: A Witness to History (8 page)

In the category of films that will be remembered but not necessarily profitable is
The Wiz.
It was directed by the great Sidney Lumet and starred the luminous Lena Horne as the Good Witch. It must have seemed like a lovely idea at the time: a black cast reimagining a beloved classic. The movie—both fun to watch and a bit too busy—ultimately suffered from the miscasting of Diana Ross. But blacks thrilled at the sight of a big-budget musical. How many inner-city dreams were hatched from the viewing of that film? We may never know.

Filmmakers are, after all, ultimate gamblers. Throw race into that gamble, and the predictions get a lot trickier. Tyler Perry has legions of admirers, but also those who do not rush to see his comedic work. But there’s no denying he’s tapped into a vein: movies with predominately black casts that are comedic sending the director-producer go laughing all the way to the bank. Perry has a genius marketing machine: the black church ladies talk of him in gospel-like tones. They bolt for the multiplexes to see his latest after Sunday services. Samuel Goldwyn and
Louis B. Mayer would have loved the Perry formula. A lot of business, a lot of show!

It took George Lucas more than two decades to mount
Red Tails,
his movie about the black Tuskegee Airmen who flew in World War II. He bemoaned that no Hollywood studio wanted to make it, so he financed it himself. It became a modest box office hit, accumulating a $50 million gross. The brave gamblers can certainly win, particularly when measured in terms of both box office rewards and cultural pride. Which begs the question: Why have American filmmakers shied from taking advantage of the greatest civil rights movement in this nation’s recent history, that of the 1960s and its oceanic emotions? The territory is fertile and untapped. “I hope
The Butler
causes a movement in that direction,” producer Pam Williams told me.

If cinema is a universal language, what does it say about America—and American movies, which are great sources of export—that its movies tend to ignore a whole segment of its populace? Is that not cultural blindness? And yet, bringing attention to the plight hardly seemed to solve the problem.

In writing a story about the 2011 Oscar nominees—for performances in 2010—the estimable
New York Times
film critic Manohla Dargis commended those nominees and pictures for the variety of roles as well as genres. But the nominated films were also, she wrote, “more racially homogenous—more white—than the ten films that were up
for best picture in 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ” To Dargis, it was painfully obvious that 2010 was “perhaps the whitest year for Hollywood” in decades. For a major film critic to take American movies back to the 1940s when talking about race could only be seen as a rebuke of modern-day filmmaking. The Dargis story appeared in the
Times
on a Sunday, a day of wide circulation, and you could practically hear the gnashing in Hollywood: a black man occupied the Oval Office, yet the movies seemed to be harking back to the kind of “whitelisting” that existed in those mean days of yesteryear. (Interestingly enough, a story in the
New York Times
in June 2013 paid attention to African American–themed movies slated for pending release—one of which was
The Butler.
)

Fortunately, one of those people who had long been concerned about the lack of diversity in American films was Laura Ziskin, a powerful producer in Hollywood. Among her best-known produced works were
Pretty Woman, As Good as It Gets,
and the Spider-Man films. Ziskin was in London when she first read my article “A Butler Well Served by This Election” in the
Washington Post.
She and her producing partner, Pam Williams, tracked me down in a hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where I was on assignment.

Ziskin and Williams were immediately drawn to the article as a potential movie and imagined
The Butler
as an epic, a story that would encompass modern civil rights history through the eyes of a White House butler. “We sent
that article around to potential investors for the film and eventually met with several prominent directors, including one no producer can afford to ignore—Steven Spielberg,” Williams remembers. But Spielberg finally admitted he could not squeeze the movie into his schedule of projects already lined up. Other directors were called in for meetings with Ziskin and Williams. None impressed as much as Lee Daniels, who came with a vision, which he laid out over several hours, that nearly brought the two producers to tears.

Lee Daniels, who directed
Precious,
his dynamic and blistering Harlem-set drama about an abused teenager, imagined a movie that would sweep from the White House to the streets of the civil rights movement. It would feature many of the major players from the 1960s; the unsettling footage of Birmingham and Selma and night riders would be brought to life on screen. (The gifted Danny Strong wrote the script.) Such a movie would require a decent-sized budget.

That didn’t deter Ziskin, who gritted her teeth and adopted another strategy when she was told by a big studio that she was asking for too much money to mount the film they all wanted to make. If she had to, she’d raise the money independently. In risk-averse Hollywood, that is a common maneuver for many serious filmmakers. Daniels himself was adept at going hat in hand for the sake of art; he had raised much of the money for
Precious
by that method. That movie had taken home two Oscar statuettes, for best supporting actress and adapted screenplay—and had earned him his nomination for best director.

Ziskin and Williams began their new strategy by reaching out to Sheila Johnson, the former cofounder of Black Entertainment Television (BET). The story of a humble, long-serving butler appealed to Johnson: she owns Salamander Hotels and Resorts in Virginia, which employs many domestic workers. “I met Lee at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City,” Johnson recalled on the film set one evening. “I was committed before I sat down with Lee. I knew this story had to be told. It is such a layering of history.” (It was Johnson’s seed money that initially opened the financial gates.)

The quartet—Ziskin, Williams, Daniels, and Johnson—began talking to and bringing in other investors. But as the late winter of 2010 turned to the early months of 2011, it became painfully clear that Ziskin’s health—she had been diagnosed years earlier with breast cancer—was worsening. Still, the weaker she grew, the more ferocious she became. She made phone calls late at night and was at it again early in the morning. Between calls, she’d gulp down her medicine, ready to strategize the next move to get her movie made. She’d turn to her daughter, Julia, then to Lee Daniels, who would be visiting, then to Pam Williams, who never seemed to leave her side. After gathering strength from her, they’d each get back on the phone, raising the money needed to make the movie. Laura herself would plead with investors to come to her home, and she told them, as they nibbled on sandwiches, that the story was too important to
not
be told. The money started to come in. Sitting there on her couch, bent, exhausted, Laura Ziskin, for the world
to see, was standing tall. Some evenings, David Jacobson, one of the coproducers, would bend down, lift her up, and climb the stairs to lay her down to sleep. She died on June 12, 2011, but not before she made those around her promise to get her last-conceived movie made. They all promised.

With money raised, director, producers, and casting guru Billy Hopkins along with Leah Daniels-Butler began assembling a cast. It’s widely acknowledged that actors marvel at the performances Lee Daniels is able to elicit from them. (There’s no dissent from the real-life butler’s son, Charles Allen, who after seeing Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey play characters inspired by his parents became emotional, later telling me that they had captured the core essence of his mother and father, even if their story had been dramatized for the sake of the film. “They’re uncanny,” he said of the actors. “They’ve somehow channeled my mom and dad.”) Known for talking at length with his cast about their performances, Daniels also spends countless weeks poring over materials and photographs, immersing himself in the world he will soon commence filming. Actors are told by other actors about his intensity and attention to detail. David Jacobson would make some of the calls to actors’ agents as the cast was being assembled. “I would tell agents that by the time this movie is finished, their client would want to pay us for having been in it.” He wasn’t laughing.

As Laura Ziskin proudly knew, given the film’s subject matter, the cast was going to be racially diverse. Oprah Winfrey signed on, then
Forest Whitaker and David Oyelowo. Alan Rickman and Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz followed. Then came Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, and Mariah Carey. The Hollywood trade papers were gushing over the cast. There were more: Liev Schreiber, James Marsden, John Cusack, Clarence Williams III, Nelsan Ellis. Many of those who worked behind the scenes—Ruth Carter in costumes, Andrew Dunn in cinematography, Matthew Mungle in makeup—boasted Oscar nominations and multiple film awards as well. It became common knowledge that cast and crew took pay cuts to work on the film; otherwise it simply could not have gotten made. “Many worked for scale,” Pam Williams confided to me. “They just wanted to be in this movie.”

One evening on the film set, I asked Danny Strong, a native Californian, who had started his career as an actor before turning to screen-writing, why he was so eager to work on the film. “I’m really passionate about race in America,” he said. “And I thought this film could be a way to cover African American history from Jim Crow to Obama. I thought this could be an epic film on race.”

There has been much talk over the years in film circles about Hollywood’s attempt at civil rights–themed movies. As it is, there have been just a few. And for the most part, they have been met with scorn. In 1988 came
Mississippi Burning,
which was inspired by the true story of three murdered civil rights workers in early 1960s Mississippi. The film made heroes out of the two investigating white FBI agents, which
is where it all went awry. The historical record clearly shows the FBI
did not play a heroic role in the Mississippi case, and the movie actually minimized the role of black civil rights workers in the state during the reign of terror there. In 1996 came
Ghosts of Mississippi,
about the probe into the murder of civil rights hero Medgar Evers. Mississippi law enforcement showed little desire to solve the killing. The movie itself focused on the white assistant district attorney—certainly a brave and conscientious man—who reopened the case after it lay unsolved for three decades. Filmmakers, of course, have to make decisions on which particular story to focus on in any multifaceted drama. But a question about
Ghosts
lingered: would not the life story of Medgar Evers have made a compelling drama? Strong was aware of the aftertaste those movies left. “It was easy to avoid that trap,” with this movie about a White House butler, he told me. “It wasn’t going to be about the noble white man helping the oppressed. This was going to be a story about a black butler and about black kids fighting back in the movement. This was something they did themselves, forcing the presidents to come along with them.”

I
ARRIVED IN
New Orleans a few days before filming on
The Butler
began. After our first chat while I had been in Tennessee, I had first sat
down in person with Laura Ziskin and Pam Williams in Washington, DC. Following that, there were also long sessions spent with screenwriter Danny Strong as we visited and talked to real-life butler Eugene Allen. But this was my first visit on the set. It was heartening to sit with the actors, actresses, and other creative people working on
The Butler
and listen to them talk so passionately about why they wanted to work on the film. “They represent the whole black middle class that nobody knew about,” Oprah Winfrey said to me one afternoon about the butler and his wife. “It’s such a beautiful story.”

Everyone associated with the movie was jubilant when Forest Whitaker signed on to play the butler. “My career just wasn’t going in the right direction,” Whitaker said to me the day before filming got under way. The words sounded a bit jarring coming from the best actor Oscar winner for his galvanizing portrayal of Idi Amin in
The Last King of Scotland.
(Far too many of his movies of late—though Whitaker did not allude to it—have had excruciatingly brief runs in theaters before going to video.) He says how gratified he was when offered the part of the butler: “It’s one of the most complicated roles I’ve ever played.” The complexities, he says, stem from the fact that the butler goes from segregation to integration, from president to president, and from decade to decade—in addition to being a father and husband during tumultuous times in American history. “I hope I can meet the challenge” of the role, he said. Whitaker hired a professional butler to teach him
the intricacies of the job. (I noticed, on the first day when Whitaker filmed a scene, that he had masterfully adapted Eugene Allen’s soft southern accent.)

The role of the butler’s son, Louis, is played by the British actor David Oyelowo, who has received acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic but has yet to play that so-called breakout role. Shortly after filming got under way, there was a collective feeling on the set that this might indeed be his chance. He was both magnetic and fierce as the rebellious son of the butler. “It feels divine to be here,” he said during lunch one late afternoon during a break in filming. The arc of the film itself—a butler’s journey through the White House—had Oyelowo recalling other movies that had claimed the public’s attention at one time. “It has elements of
Forrest Gump
and
Gone with the Wind,
” he said. “This film pays homage to the foot soldiers.” He was well aware of the arduous journey to get the film into production. “It takes the power of people like Lee Daniels and Oprah Winfrey—and this plethora of stars—to get a film like this made,” he allowed. Before he landed his part in
The Butler,
Oyelowo was on a roll with appearances in both
The Help
and Spielberg’s
Lincoln,
which had not yet been released while he was in New Orleans. “This film is about the butler and his family. There is no white savior.”