Southern History on Screen by Bryan M. Jack;

Author:Bryan M. Jack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2018-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Roots Reimagined

Todd Simpson

When Roots the miniseries originally aired, it became the preeminent cultural touchstone for Hollywood’s depiction of the historic South, permanently antiquating Gone with the Wind’s romanticized fantasy by recontextualizing it. In his introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Michael Eric Dyson writes, “Each generation must make up its own mind about how it will navigate the treacherous waters of our nation’s racial sin. And each generation must overcome our social ills through greater knowledge and decisive action. Roots is a stirring reminder that we can achieve these goals only if we look history squarely in the face.”1 In his review of the original production, Sander Vanocur writes that while this was not the first miniseries to portray the evolution of a family over time, it was the first to do so within the context of slavery and “that distinction is of major importance, since the introduction of slavery into this country is the continuing central issue of our national existence.”2 Forty years after David L. Wolper produced the original, his son Mark Wolper attempted to show it to his children, and when he saw through their eyes how dated the production had become, he realized that the material deserved a reboot. LeVar Burton, star of the original, was initially skeptical, “Mark Wolper … called me to say he was doing a new version. My first question was: Why? He said he had tried to show the original to his children and there was resistance—pushback even. They likened it to their father’s music: They got why it was important to him, but what relevance did it have to them? That hit me right between the eyes. We will never get to where we should be, once and for all, unless we examine how we got here and that means coming to terms with America’s original sin.”3 While the media landscape has changed drastically since the original aired, the current cultural moment, from social justice movements like Black Lives Matter to racist political campaigns that demonize the other, demonstrate that themes inherent to an African American family romance have only become increasingly relevant and fertile for artists to explore. It is in this context that the film industry in Hollywood finds itself stumbling over issues of diversity, in stark contrast to the worlds of Broadway and television, and is being called out by grassroots social media campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite and entertainment executives alike. Universal’s Jeff Shell asserts that “the film business is about 10 years behind the TV business” in embracing diversity, and this could arguably be due to the foundation created by the unparalleled success of the original television production of Roots.4

In September 2016 the Media, Diversity, and Social Change (MDSC) Initiative, a think tank based out of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism released a study, titled “Inequality in 800 Popular Films,” that purports to be “the most comprehensive and rigorous intersectional analysis of independent speaking and named characters in popular motion picture content to date.

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