Were amos and andy white1/8/2024 ![]() ![]() When Amos ’N’ Andy was airing, it was essentially the only place on American television to see black people at all the next popular sitcom with a majority black cast- Sanford And Son-wouldn’t arrive for nearly two decades after this show’s cancellation.Īll of that may very well be true-I’m not enough of an expert on the original radio show to say-but what’s harder to square as a progressive viewer in the year 2013 is that this story is based around harmful stereotypes. ![]() (Though his name is in the title of the show, Amos has essentially become a supporting character in the story by this point, reflecting the way that popular newspaper comic strips would eventually be hijacked by former supporting characters who became more and more popular-see also: Barney Google And Snuffy Smith.) The TV series’ Harlem is a place that comes to vibrant life each week, filled with a panoply of characters from all walks of life. In the central roles of Andy and the Kingfish, Spencer Williams and Tim Moore are fine and funny indeed, finding the humor in some very broad material. ![]() White characters were an unusual occurrence, and every one of the major regular and recurring characters was played by a black actor. The primary argument in favor of Amos ’N’ Andy is that it depicts a richly textured Harlem community at its center, filled with all manner of black people, filling all manner of occupations and roles. You know? These guilty pleasures.The question of representation is a difficult one to answer. I can’t help myself.” So I think that kind of tension is dramatized in the movie-how it would even split some families, and people would almost be watching it like pornography. But then when he would leave, the grandmother would be like, “I know it’s bad for us, but I love them so much. It would come on the air, and his dad’s own mother would be like, “Oh, let’s watch this show!” And he’d be like, “Mom, we can’t watch this show.” He’d pull young David Alan Grier and his brothers and sisters away from the TV screen, so they couldn’t see it. In the ’60s, was just as red, black, and green as you can get-really a towering intellectual figure. David Alan Grier, whose father was a very famous black psychiatrist-wrote a famous book called Black Rage -tells this great story. It’s funny: The actors-especially comic actors-know much more about it, obviously, than I ever did and than most people did. What have the conversations been like in the room while you’ve been directing? What have you guys been talking about and mining while putting this together? Just when it was about to do really great things, the NAACP came in and really shut it down.Īnd the cast includes David Alan Grier and Jesse Williams-Īnd Mykelti Williamson, Yvette Nicole Brown from Community. So certainly, the story is the rise and especially the fall of these three comic geniuses and this really important black television show. And the cast of characters-the act of Amos and Andy and Kingfish-were some of the greatest comedians of all time. It’s all the #OscarsSoWhite, and every season with the new TV shows, where we look to see, “How are these images? How diverse are they?” And so, the more I looked into it, it just became an irresistible story. ![]() Such a rich world to explore, and so current. After I dove in and started reading about them and finding out about these black actors, with an all-black cast, and how beloved it was by working-class black people and how reviled it was by upper-class black people-or at least publicly reviled, and maybe secretly they liked it. So my line about this choice and making it: Everything I thought I knew about Amos ’n’ Andy was wrong. As soon as they said the name, I just kind of recoiled, like, “That seems like Stepin Fetchit, Uncle Tom.” It’s like, “I don’t want to open that door.” Because I knew nothing about it. Professor Henry Louis Gates at Harvard and Henry Finder at the New Yorker came to me with this idea about doing a fiction film about Amos ’n’ Andy. What was it about Amos ’n’ Andy that made you want to explore that story in a narrative feature? Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with writing this script. ![]()
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