After reviewing the preliminary film footage, ABC’s Standards and Practices reviewers were satisfied with how the producers had handled the nudity. “The young women, all extras, appear as background,” an ABC official wrote. “There is no camera emphasis on breast nudity and no attempt to sensationalize or sexualize it.” The ABC representative continued, “This will not be the first time that bare breasts have been seen on television. We have viewed, and allowed our children to view, similar scenes in episodes of ‘Wild Kingdom’ and on National Geographic specials. They are depicted as authentic background, and in their very naturalness do not arouse any more attention than a flock of hens would in the background of a farm scene.”42 This ABC official’s comparison of black actresses to “a flock of hens” makes it clear that there were aspects of representation beyond the purview of Standards and Practices. However much Roots’s producers were committed to portraying Haley’s characters in a positive light, they were working against decades of racist and sexist portrayals of black people and Africa in film, television, and visual culture. This meant that the same production decisions regarding casting, costuming, and set design that might earn praise as “authentic” representations of historical village life could also lead viewers, like the Standards and Practices officials, to draw racist and sexist comparisons of black characters to farm animals.
Roots’s producers and directors walked a tightrope by asking black actors to portray enslaved people. Each black actor brought his or her own family history and personal experiences with racism to the set. When these memories and experiences mingled with the historical weight of the Haley’s story, they created a combustible mixture of emotions. John Amos, who played the older Kunta Kinte, described having an experience while filming Roots where he felt that his enslaved ancestors were speaking to him. During filming at Hunter’s Ranch in Southern California, Amos fell to the ground and started shouting. Amos, who had no history of seizures, could hear dozens of voices and felt emotionally overwhelmed. “I felt like I had become totally taken by the spirit of my ancestors . . . and those millions who had died on the ships on the way over here as slaves,” Amos recalled.43 “I know for a fact that I had more than fifty people talking to me at one time and I could hear every one of their conversations.”44 When he recovered, Amos understood the episode to be a call for him to be a conduit for the voices of his enslaved ancestors. “‘Now you will be our voice, you will speak,’” Amos recalled. “‘You will not break as we did not break. You will not break Kunta Kinte.’ And that’s what I carried through the rest of the project.”45 Amos described this as the most challenging acting role of his career because “it was impossible for me to emotionally separate myself from slavery and the traumas of being a slave and then to come home.”46 After Roots, Amos said he took a role in the short-lived science fiction television series Future Cop because “I needed something to help erase the scar tissue from Kunta Kinte.”47
Roots was emotionally taxing for other black actors because it required them to assume subservient roles. Richard Roundtree, well known in the 1970s for his title role as a private detective in the Shaft films, had a particularly difficult time with a scene that called for him to grovel before George Hamilton’s character. “When you’re doing something like Roots with its historical significance it’s magical,” Roundtree said. “It was never ever work with the exception of the scene I had with George Hamilton. I said, ‘We are going to do this in one take and one take only.’”48 Marvin Chomsky, who directed the episode, recalled how he pushed Roundtree in this scene. “When [Richard Roundtree] had to crawl on his knees and had to say, ‘Massa, I’m sorry, Master George Hamilton,’ it was a brutal moment,” Chomsky said. “Because Richard is the kind of man who is proud of being a black man, who has come to where he is in life as a fulfilled individual, and when he had to play crawling on his knees it was something that so physically revolted Richard that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t—until I said, ‘God damn it, get on your fucking knees—you’re an actor, if you can’t do it I’ll kick you in the balls.’” Chomsky felt that challenging the six-foot-two-inch Roundtree was essential to the scene’s success. “I had to beat Richard down,” Chomsky said. “Richard wept, Richard was marvelous, Richard was brilliant, but it went beyond what I would [normally] have to do or what I would expect from an actor, it was a tough thing for him to do and he did it because Richard is pure professional and he had to rise above his own dignity to do it.”49 Screenwriter Bill Blinn recalled this scene as the tensest racial moment on the set. “This character was embodying everything [Richard Roundtree] fought against all of his entire professional life,” Blinn said. “It was bringing him emotionally to a really bad place. . . . It quickly became clear that no white director, or white producer, or white anybody would be able to help Richard through this. The other black cast and crew rallied around him.”50 Though Roots producers and directors engaged in extensive correspondence and discussions regarding the appropriate way to film bare-breasted extras, they did not spend much time talking about what it meant to ask black performers to play slaves. Black actors had to rely on each other and themselves to navigate the emotions that Roots evoked.
While Roots boasted one of the largest collections of black acting talent in television history, civil rights advocates called attention to the lack of black writers and directors working on the series. Woodie King, a producer and director who had founded the New Federal Theater in New York to stage black-themed productions, led this campaign. In May 1976, near the end of the first month of filming Roots, King wrote to Wolper and Margulies to demand that the series employ more black professionals behind the camera. King sent copies of his letter to the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and all three television broadcast networks to put pressure on Roots’s producers. “I must write this letter because of a grave injustice and a complete lack of insight from a major Hollywood producer,” King wrote. “Not one Black director or Producer or script writer has been hired to work on Roots. This is 1976: One cannot deal with that old argument about there being no qualified Blacks; nor can one remain silent when it happens.” King questioned how an all-white production staff could do justice to Haley’s story. “We do understand the great backlash in Hollywood to Black projects of intellect and maturity and we do laud the producers,” King wrote. “Yet Wolper pictures and Stan Margulies will tell our history from their point of view to some twenty five million Americans with no input from Black Americans. The director of photography will even be white! I don’t believe that any other nationality in the world would let this happen: the recording of one’s history forever by another race of people; people who have been historically our oppressors, our slave masters.” King praised Haley as a talented writer but expressed frustration that the author did not push harder for black writers or directors. “We all respect Dr. Haley but that respect wanes when one realizes the man spent over two years with Malcolm X,” King wrote, “Did he understand any of the things Malcolm related to him?” King concluded with a threat. “If the producers continue to ignore Black professionals in this industry, Blacks have no other recourse but to let their feelings be known to the networks and the sponsors.”51
King’s protest pushed the producers to seek out two talented black film professionals, director Gilbert Moses and director of photography Joseph Wilcots. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Gilbert Moses moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, where he cofounded the Free Southern Theater, a radical black theater company with connections to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Moses directed Amiri Baraka’s play Slave Ship, first in the South and then in New York City.52 He won an Obie award for Slave Ship and directed Melvin Van Peebles’s Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death and several other plays in the 1970s. The New York Times described Moses in 1972 as “among the most highly respected and busiest black directors on the scene.” “My whole thing is work
ing on developing a black audience,” Moses told the Times. “We blacks are starved for images of ourselves all over this country.”53 Moses first heard Alex Haley tell his Roots story at Crenshaw High School in west Los Angeles in the late 1960s and teased Wolper when the producer boasted that he had known about Roots since 1972, saying, “Niggers knew about that in ’68.”54
Margulies recalled that ABC initially balked at hiring Moses to direct an episode of Roots because he did not yet have any filmmaking experience. There were “no black directors outside of Gordon Parks and Michael Schultz” that ABC would consider for a two-hour television movie, Margulies recalled, “much less something as important as this.”55 Moses knew that he had not been the producers’ first choice and did not initially hit it off with Margulies. “I think it was obligatory and sort of condescending that they . . . had this checklist of black directors,” Moses said. “When I went in for an interview with Stan Margulies I was pretty dissatisfied—I was disappointed . . . because Margulies really didn’t know who I was [or] any of the credits I had amassed in the theater.”56 Still, Moses felt that once he was hired “Margulies supported me all the way through,” even though there were “endless” technical problems as Moses directed his first television show.57 “I think Margulies was really happy about how he not only gave me an opportunity,” Moses said, “but I think I came through in a way that was surprising and gave another kind of texture to the film.”58 Margulies agreed that hiring Moses “made such a difference to the actors.”59
Figure 12. Director Gilbert Moses, at right with hat, watches over filming. Director of photography Joe Wilcots is obscured behind camera. ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images.
Actors were also happy to see director of photography Joe Wilcots behind the camera. As a child in Des Moines, Iowa, Wilcots built his own darkroom in his family’s house. His first film job was making slides and reediting films for the state department in Iowa. He broke into Hollywood and got his union card at Joe Westheimer’s optical effects studio.60 Wilcots became the first black member of the International Cinematographers Guild in 1967, and a colleague described him as the “Jackie Robinson of cinematography.”61 Wilcots was the second assistant cameraman on Gordon Parks’s film The Learning Tree (1969) before working his way up to the director of photography on Parks’s Leadbelly (1976).
Wolper learned about Wilcots from one of the black cameramen the producer had hired to work on Wattstax, a 1973 documentary film on a huge music festival in Watts. Wilcots, who shot eight of the twelve hours of Roots, was particularly skilled at lighting scenes so that darker-skinned actors would be visible. “[Since childhood] I have seen a number of pictures where I was totally disappointed in the way black people were lit,” Wilcots explained. “I was tired of having black people on the screen and not being able to see them.”62 In describing his camera and lighting techniques, Wilcots explained that too many of his white counterparts did not give black actors equal visibility in films. “The same consideration that you would give a can—a dark can and a light can in a commercial—must be given to people,” Wilcots said. “In the past I think, too often, cameramen neglected to give that equal consideration to black people in the scene and therefore the black person was lost in the scene. Not because he didn’t know his craft, but because of lack of consideration for the value of that person in the scene.”63 As the director of photography, Wilcots managed the camera crew (which included two black assistant cameramen), grips, and electricians. Gilbert Moses felt that a sense of community developed among the black cast and crew. “We were doing something, one of the few times that was relevant to us,” Moses said. “We were making a view together out of our own history and our own identity and we were doing it well and that is . . . what we trained for.”64 Wilcots agreed and approached Haley on the set one day to thank him. “All of these people have been hired by you, because you dared to put pencil on paper,” Wilcots told Haley.65
While Woodie King’s complaint pushed the producers to find and hire Moses and Wilcots, the screenwriters remained all white. Wolper and Margulies’s response to the call for black writers on Roots was simple. “We felt that we did have a black writer . . . named Alex Haley,” Margulies said.66 Head writer Bill Blinn said the first question he asked Wolper and Margulies was “Do you want a black guy to do this?” To which the producers replied, “Alex is black enough for any one of us.”67 For his part, Haley encouraged the producers to take this position. While he was in Jamaica working to finish Roots in 1975, Haley described being visited by someone from a “pretty potent black organization,” who pressed the author regarding black participation in the Roots television series and book promotion. This “virtual interrogation” frustrated Haley. “It seems of little moment that I am black,” Haley wrote.68 When Haley signed the television deal with Wolper he advised the producers to look for the most experienced television writers, without regard to race. Haley viewed Roots as the symbolic story of all black Americans, but he wanted to be the only black writer associated with series.
In the months while the cast and crew were busy filming Roots, ABC network executives and the producers were carefully crafting a marketing plan for the series. No network had ever broadcast a twelve-hour miniseries, much less a story in which enslaved black people were the protagonists. To market Roots, Wolper and ABC decided they would emphasize “family” as the series’ universal theme. Wolper recalled that when Ruby Dee had told him about Haley’s Roots in 1972, he immediately recognized that the project already had a TV Guide–ready one-sentence pitch: “seven generations of a black family from Africa to today.” “I didn’t even know the story,” Wolper recalled. “I didn’t have to. The concept was there from that first night.”69 ABC gave Roots the subtitle “The Triumph of an American Family.” This small but important tweak to the book’s subtitle, “The Saga of an American Family,” promised viewers that Haley’s ancestors would weather the horrors of slavery and emerge triumphantly as Americans.
In addition to emphasizing the universality of Roots as a family story, Wolper and ABC stressed that Roots was a major television event. Here Roots fit into ABC’s new slate of “Novels for Television.” The network’s first miniseries, Rich Man, Poor Man, based on a 1969 novel by Irvin Shaw, was a commercial success and formed the basis for part of the network’s marketing campaign for Roots. “Roots has many of the same elements that ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ had, and that we know the public will respond to, principally, a continuing story with maturing characters who experience every kind of emotion,” ABC’s Carole Stevens wrote to her colleagues. The key difference, Stevens continued, was that “Roots is based on a non-fiction book that will be published only three months prior to air, and that Roots, as a book, will have more prestige and significance beyond that of the novel ‘Rich Man, Poor Man.’ We must begin now to create an audience for Roots and whet their appetites for a project that they know will be ‘in the tradition of Rich Man, Poor Man’ plus.”70 As Stevens noted, a key difference between Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man was that Roots would broadcast very shortly after the publication of the book. Wolper worked with ABC and Doubleday to coordinate the publication and promotion of the book with the television series. “The network could put only so much promotion into Roots,” Wolper recalled. “It had eighty other things to promote. . . . I had the feeling that if you release a book three or four months before the show goes on the air, then all the book’s advertising and promotion flows into the TV promotion. . . . For four months people would be hearing about Roots.”71
For ABC, calling Roots a “novel” signified that it was a large-scale story, not that it was fiction. Doubleday worried that promoting Roots as a “Novel for Television” would confuse the publisher’s sales staff and readers. “This is the second notice I have seen of ABC announcing Roots as an adaptation of a novel,” Doubleday’s Lisa Drew wrote to Margulies. “The book is absolutely not a novel; it is nonfiction, and totally accurate American history. The thing that disturbs me about this i
s that Doubleday is selling it as nonfiction and this is going to be very confusing to our salesmen to keep seeing references to it as a novel. Would you please make it clear to ABC’s publicity and advertising departments that this book is completely nonfiction and is being sold as such by Doubleday.”72 Ken McCormick later said that he considered Roots fiction but deferred to Drew, who had taken over as Haley’s editor at Doubleday. Drew said she opted to call Roots “nonfiction” because she “was terribly afraid if we called this book fiction, although it had fiction elements in it, the people who are not sympathetic to the viewpoint of the book would use that as an excuse to say . . . this is fiction and it is all made up and didn’t happen that way.”73 For their part, neither ABC nor Wolper worried about the contradiction of referring to Roots as both “nonfiction” and a “novel.” They were invested in making Roots an epic television event, not in debating literary genres.
Making Roots Page 12