The Butler - History and Hollywood

Against all Hollywood's expectations, The Butler is this weekend's number one box office draw.  Everyone passed on this Lee Daniel - Danny Strong project about the Civil Rights Movement.  It had to be independently funded.  Today, with the news still so fresh, that their struggle to bring their vision to the theaters was a winning struggle, Daniels and Strong are on the local public radio flag station, on its anchor mid-day variety talk show.

Among what matters the most to them about the success of The Butler is that all sorts of people had said things like, "It's not possible that a black man could be murdered in 1927 and the police, nobody, even bothered to look into it, nobody arrested, nobody going to trial."  They would assure these people that this happened, and happened all the time, and this is why there was a Civil Rights movement.

And this was the response in Hollywood: "That never happened.  I never saw it in a movie." *

So now it's in a movie, a movie made by a black man who lived through the Civil Rights movement.

As I've quoted previously from el V, in the growing up in Louisiana chapters in The Year Before the Flood, "Movies told me lies. Music told me the truth" about the history of the country, of white and black.

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* Rest in Peace, Treyvon Martin.