In Black America; Images of Blackness with Orlando Bagwell

you From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. The chill is right that I don't make films to, I mean, I make a living making films, but I don't think that the purpose of making films is necessarily to make a million dollars.

I think that there's much more important business to take care of and part of that is to have something to say about how you're seeing and how you're remembered. I don't think that this film, Malcolm X, make it plain could have been made 10 years ago. First of all, as because I make films for public television, I have to raise money to produce these films. This film costs a lot of money to make, to buy archival footage, to do the necessary research, to spend two years, two and a half years with a staff doing the research and collecting the materials and do this film, it costs quite a bit of money. We have to go around to individual foundations and public television stations and even private people to try and raise the money to do these films. I also don't think that this film would have been made 10 years ago because we wouldn't have been able to raise the money 10 years ago. Orlando Bagwell, producer of the Curliquia Claim documentary Malcolm X, make it plain. This past spring, the University of Texas at Austin held its eighth annual human sweat symposium on civil rights.

A human sweat symposium originally focused on civil rights in this country, but now addresses the broadly issues of the African-American struggle for freedom and equality around the globe. This year's symposium focused on what could be considered one of the most basic civil and human rights, the right of a people to construct and promote their own self-images. This issue of how and who will represent and control the representation of those images have become more important to African-Americans as it has become clear that the ability to control perception of identity is real power. I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, images of blackness with television and film producer Orlando Bagwell in Black America. In fact, the idea to make this film came out of an experience I had in working on the Eyes on the Prize series in 1986, how many of you have seen Eyes on the Prize and know about it? That makes me very happy. Actually, I produced two programs during that series, and in the course of making that series, we recognized that there were a lot of people and a lot of events that really

needed a much more in-depth treatment. We began to develop a long list of people and events that we wanted to do additional films on, and actually Malcolm was at the top of that list. In 1988, we attempted to try and get people interested in this idea, and actually no one was interested at all. We couldn't raise any money at that time, but this was before the second series of Eyes on the Prize was made. In that second series, the second eight hours, it ended up being 14 hours and all. We actually looked at the Black Power Movement, and we looked at, there was a small segment on Malcolm X in that series. We looked at Attica, and I think in a certain way, we began to kind of set the scene and establish a kind of playing ground in territory for films like this to be made, and at the same time for films like the Spike Lee film to be made. In 1949, a little-known postal worker named Heamingham Sweat applied for a mission to the law school at the University of Texas at Austin, but was denied on the basis of a race.

A team of NAACP lawyers led by the late Thurgood Marshall represented Mr. Sweat and a lawsuit that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result of the decision in favor of Mr. Sweat, he was admitted to the University of Texas law school in 1950. In an effort to pay tribute to Mr. Sweat, the first Heaming Sweat symposium on civil rights was held eight years ago. This year's symposium explored the negative images of blacks from the past as well as those that persist in the present and threaten the future. These images impact us all and are generated through all media, from television news to situation comedies, Hollywood movies, print media, and all other casserole media outlets. Positive images generated by blacks themselves and by others were also explored. Mr. Orlando Bagwell is co-owner of ROJA Blackside Production, the people that brought us eyes on the prize to PBS series. Mr. Bagwell holds a BA in film and an MA in broadcast journalism from Boston University.

At this year's symposium, he explained the making of Malcolm X, make it plain production. I think during that time while Spike was promoting his film and his film went on the air, Malcolm suddenly, this memory of Malcolm that we all had suddenly changed and Malcolm was suddenly going through this major transformation and it was happening really rapidly. In the last three years, I think all of us have seen all the young and old blacks and whites walking out their ex caps on and Malcolm all over their front of their shirts and on the back of their shirts and on their pants and on their shoes. We got ex-Nike's and all that kind of stuff going around. I know that I watched and saw this going on and was kind of perplexed with how it really made me feel because I looked at a lot of these people and I wondered whether they really knew him. I asked myself sometimes whether these people really had the understanding of him or the knowledge that I felt that they should have and at a certain point it kind of disturbed

me because I felt that maybe we were doing something that someone was so very important to us or at least was important to me and I wasn't sure what was really happening. So then I realized that in fact seeing him on the jackets and the shirts and the caps and all that meant that in some way many of these people were embracing him whether it was just as a friend or as some form of inspiration or as an example or as a hero in a certain sense it meant that they were embracing him and then for me it was something very positive because in fact I was encountering every day almost and that made me very happy. So I felt that although there was a level of disturbance in me around what was really going on I think that in the long run I felt that something good was going on. But it also made me realize I think about how fast and how amazingly fast the image and memory and significance of Malcolm had changed. I remember back in 1988 I produced a film called Racism 101.

Have any of you seen that film? It's about college campuses and racism on college campuses but there was a student in that film a young white student from the University of Michigan and he was very disturbed because during one of the demonstrations the black students were walking around with placards with Malcolm X on the posters walking around the student union building and they were chanting by any means necessary and the young white student he called the use of Malcolm and a front against him. He said that it was a clear message to him that the black students were hostile and this was in 1988 and he was very serious I mean he saw Malcolm as something that was very threatening to him and even the use of Malcolm as something very threatening. Yet I don't think he realized nor did I realize that in less than four years Malcolm would become this kind of popular icon and not only would he be embraced by a whole generation and a whole lot of people in America who had really kind of turned their back on him

or weren't really dealing with him but he even had traveled all around the world and even places like Japan the Japanese and the youth there were wearing him on their heads as a part of American fashion. So I was kind of playing in my head what does that really mean or what does that say for us and I was looking at a paper by a friend of mine a historian by the name David Light and he said something quite interesting about history and about the translation of history into films whether it's feature films documentary or whatever and he says in quote historical memories can be severely controlled can undergo explosive liberation or redefinition redefinition from one generation or even one year to the next. He went on to say that the study of historical memory might be defined as a study of cultural struggle of contested truths of interpretations, moments, events, epics, rituals or even texts in history that threshold rival versions of the past which are in turn put into service

for the present. People often ask me well why do you make documentaries? I mean it's like Sheila said I could be probably making films, making other kinds of films and making a lot of money it was a time I was living in LA and I was making quite a bit more money but I feel that documentaries and especially television and film right now impact and shape our historical memory more today than almost anything else. I feel that the historical documentary has in fact helped to redefine our historical memory by making our relationship with history much more personal, much more powerful and a direct dramatically charged experience. I don't think that any of us can deny the real changes that have taken place in American media and in fact in how we have the presentation of African Americans in that media over the last say five to ten years. I'm 42 years old and I grew up doing the 50s and 60s and I remember watching Amos and

Andy on television and I'm quite surprised when after growing up and experiencing shows like that that not long ago there was a guy named Cliff Huckstable and Cliff could come one weekend and week out and tell all of America how to raise their children and America listened. I thought that was pretty phenomenal and not only and recently within the last two years it was a show that came one called Out Fly Away and I thought Out Fly Away was a pretty interesting program because in fact in that show that show weekend and week out it kind of grappled with the very real difference between a black and a white vision of what freedom, justice and equality meant in America and I think clearly in that show you saw a very clear difference every day between how each of the you know blacks and whites in that show saw the same situation I thought that was quite powerful. I don't look at these programs and not recognize the dominant image of especially African

Americans on television, actually most Latino Americans, Japanese Americans, anyone that's non-white. I mean in fact most of the time the dominant image is one of a clown, a plume, you know oftentimes you just see us playing sports but you can't ignore those programs and you can't ignore the fact also that many of those programs are produced and directed by us by black people and that's disturbing. Because in fact we are allowing ourselves to affect how we are seen by a dollar and you can't buy, you shouldn't be able to buy your dignity or you shouldn't sell your dignity but it seems on a certain level we've gotten into the business of doing that. But it's interesting there's a program that came on or a film that was made recently, I don't know how many of you have seen, how many of you have seen Philadelphia. I was quite excited by Philadelphia because I saw in Philadelphia Denzel Washington and

in a certain sense although I was unhappy with the character that he had to play because in fact he had to represent for all of us all of our discomfort around AIDS and our real clear homophobic attitudes, there's so much a part of the American culture and American people but in fact Demi Moore cast him and Denzel Washington played a performance did a tremendous performance and in fact he kind of stood in for all of American public in that film and I felt that was quite historical and quite something very important to recognize because it's very rare that you've seen an African American character kind of lose that African before his name and a character and suddenly become the American public in any real sense, usually even if we are cast in films, we are still African Americans in that role.

I'm a little shaky right now and I got to stop for a second because something happened a day that's got me a little upset and I didn't find out about it until I came into the room but as a documentary filmmaker and in the work that I do and also I lost a very dear and important friend of mine today. He's a filmmaker and he died of AIDS today as well and all of us have been watching his films. I mean he's like one of the most important young and exciting filmmakers in our country right now and I think tomorrow you're going to be watching some of his films and I hope you all come out to see him, I mean I'm sorry I'm just a little bit upset by the fact

that I'd heard that just coming in today, let me try and continue on. After a series of eyes and the prize was completed, it received a lot of major awards for documentary filmmaking and journalism, it won the gold baton from the Columbia School of Journalisms, Dupont Awards and it won other awards, you know, Emmys and Peabody Awards and I think even TV Guy gave it a program of the year award. I think the irony and all the accolades was that, in fact that series itself was almost not made, in fact I think probably you guys would be surprised to know that we couldn't raise the money to do that one either. In fact most of the funders and as well as the programmers, they argued that America would not watch black history, they would not watch six hours of black people unless of

course we were you know playing sports or singing, dancing or acting like fools. You have to remember that this was also in the 1980s and eyes and the prize was made when Ronald Reagan was still in the White House, it was also made when David Duke was running for mainstream offices and I think that there was something called welfare queens at that time that were kind of replacing Archimime as our mother during that time. So this was the kind of climate that we were out trying to raise money to get a series like eyes and the prize produce. But I think that one of the things that we had to recognize that was a part of the code words that the programmers were using was that they were saying America wouldn't watch this six hours of history and what they weren't saying to us is that they were leaving out all the people who were kind of hyphenated Americans, you know like Native Americans and Latino Americans and Asian Americans and African Americans, suddenly it was Americans when he said Americans they were saying white people would not watch six hours of African

American history. But I don't think that was what was really what was that issue at that time, I think what was the problem was that we were trying to produce a series that we saw not as black history but as a part of American history and that we were insisting that an African American film company could analyze, interpret and define what we felt was a critical moment in American history and that we black filmmakers were attempting to invade this province that we called historical memory. We proposed an interpretation and an analysis in a dramatic kind of provocative documentary recreation of this critical moment in history and we wanted to look at it through a prism of race and I think that that was something that had not been done before was not being allowed to be done, it wasn't being allowed at that time especially in a major series form.

I think what was noteworthy about eyes in the prize was that in fact this black perspective, this black interpretation of American history was being made available to a large American public and in fact the American public welcomed it, watched it and enjoyed it and was moved by it. David Bright, again, puts in the words I think what was that very sensitive and really kind of volatile territory that we were invading, he says quote the historical memory of a people in a nation evolves over time in relation to present needs and ever changing context. Societies and the groups within them remember and use history as a source of coherence and identity as a means of contending for power or place and as a means of controlling access to whatever becomes normative in society. Now if you begin to think about historical memories of the source of identity I think we can all understand that, that in fact we need to know not just where we've come from and all that but how we interpret our role in the history of our community, history of

our country, history of the world to get a clear idea of who and what we are, our significance. Historical memory as a way of contending for power, what does that mean? I mean if you are memory of history does not include you, how much power do you have, how powerful do you feel? If you feel that you are a significant part of a history and that memory of that history includes you, you see yourself in it as a significant part of it that it's affecting it and changing it there's a sense of empowerment and as a means of controlling access to whatever becomes normative in society then in fact if we see ourselves in it and we see ourselves as active players in it then in fact we are active players today and we take a much more responsible role in how things are interpreted and acted on today. When I began the production of Malcolm X make it plain. I was concerned which the ways and the ways I felt my audience understood Malcolm. On one hand there was the autobiography which in its closest and most was to me the closest

and most revealing portrait of Malcolm. Then there was the heightened interest and the popular understanding of Malcolm that had been incited by the use of Malcolm in rap songs, public enemy and things like that as well as the real and much anticipated and promoted film that Spike Lee was making. When we started making Malcolm we were making it and the same time Spike was making his film which made the making of our films almost impossible because number one everyone thought that anything that had to do with Malcolm was going to cost a lot of money and meant it was worth a lot of money so even to get an interview or to get a picture or anything like that the price went way up so we had to do maybe twice or ten times as much negotiating just to get people to sit down and to talk to us or to sit down and let them know that in fact that picture you know you can't put a price on history, you can't put a price on historical stories that in fact we can't pay from any way because we're public television so we had to negotiate our way through all of that and that was very difficult.

But at the same time I also realized that I had to contend with that notion of Malcolm that was a part of what was going on but at the same time I also realized that there was a young generation of blacks and whites who were aggressively searching history for meaningful and useful analysis of what freedom, justice and equality meant in this post civil rights movement era. I feel that the most difficult part for me and the most it was the weight of the autobiography that became my most difficult hurdle to overcome. When a person tells their own story you know how do you move beyond that story? Where is there a room to expand without distorting the story? You think that everyone knows, I mean we've all, many, I knew that after Spike made this film especially the autobiography, the sales of autobiography went way up so I knew that we all walked into the theater with some sense of Malcolm and in fact I couldn't invade that but so far because you know if I did it wrong you would all say well that's wrong

that's you know your history is way off and I had to recognize that and feel that in fact I needed to, I wanted to offer something more. How could I contribute to the historical memory of Malcolm in a way that expands our understanding of him as well as allows his presence in our mind to become more vivid, more real as well as becoming more complex? There were obvious areas in the story even looking at the autobiography that gave me a lot of room. I felt number one that it was extremely important for everyone to get a clear understanding of Malcolm as a young child, where did he come from? What was his family like? What kinds of things that he gained from his parents that helped him to become whatever he became later in his life? What was he drawing on later in life? I felt that was very important and would represent a real discovery for the film. The second piece I thought was very important or valuable was after he left the nation

of Islam, very little had been done on that last year of his life, which I felt was the most significant period of his life in the sense that that is what we carry on. That is why Malcolm had such a major impact on the movement and went after 1965, that this was the moment, this is the part of Malcolm that people needed to know the most about and I felt that would be another great discovery. The other piece I thought was very powerful and we represent a discovery in a film was to give a much better treatment of the nation of Islam and to help people to understand just how powerful and influential the nation of Islam was for the northern, especially in a northern urban black community in the 1950s and 1960s, that in fact it wasn't a fringe group, it wasn't a group that was kind of wacko with a strange kind of mythology and stuff, but it was an organization where many African-American saw a real possibility that

it had real solutions to real problems that we saw that were actually a part of the urban reality and I wanted to bring that to the film. But the real breakthrough for the film was when I made contact with his family and first broke with his brothers Wilfred and Philbert and his sister Yvonne. Suddenly, I saw a side of Malcolm through them that I had never seen before. I saw a relationship with him that I knew that I could only be brought through in this film because I realized that when I looked at them, when I was in their presence, I saw Malcolm and I felt that if I was able to get them on film and gave them time on film, you could see him in them and not only that, but you began to understand to gain an understanding of a man who, like all of us, has these complex relationships that have so much to do with family.

There's a troubling element in this film and many people ask me to say, well, no one wants to accept the fact that in a family, you could feel that someone might not be loyal to your brother or your sister. All of us think about that and say, well, what would I do if something happens to my brother I'd be right there with him? Well, history shows us over and over again where that very, what we feel is that is one of the closest relationships that could possibly exist among men and women is constantly compromised. It's constantly called in the question and constantly put on the line and oftentimes, which way will move? We're not really sure because there are other things that are very important or extremely important to us as well and I wanted to bring that complexity to this story. I didn't want to try and explain it all. I didn't feel that I had any to explain it, but I felt it was important that you understood that in fact, with all the things that were going on around his life and all the things

he was involved with, consider how important this was to him at that stage of his life too. Or the place this took up, or the time this took up in his life in that last year as well and then begin to think about all the other things that he was doing. So I wanted that to be a prominent part of the storytelling. It was interesting that when I visited Wilford to talk with him and I had to visit him quite a few times to finally convince him to sit down and do an interview with us. He said to me, he said, when you make the film, make sure you let Malcolm speak for himself. Don't get in there and start trying to analyze him. Malcolm explains himself, let people just hear him, let them decide for themselves what they think, but give him enough time to speak for himself. And I thought that Wilford would give me a real breakthrough as well. It's just in that one statement that in fact, it wasn't my role as a filmmaker to stand up and say, well, let me tell you about Malcolm. Rather, let Malcolm tell you about himself and to give him plenty of time to do that. And if I was able to do that, half the battle of the film would be solved.

After visiting his brothers and sisters and doing their interviews, and I could tell you, doing the interviews was a very difficult and complicated process, getting them to finally trust me to the point where they would sit down and tell their story. And then finding the archival footage that I felt in many ways represented him, I felt that was two-thirds of the way there. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to take these elements and really move our historical memory of Malcolm beyond that idea of a myth or just a hero, but to present him in all his complexity as a very complex person, yet at the same time as a very available person, a person that we felt that any one of us could become, could be, could touch, could walk up to and talk to. Orlando Bagwell, producer of Malcolm X, make it plain, speaking at this year's Hemenswet Symposium on Civil Rights.

If you have a question or comment or suggestions, ask the future in Black America programs, write us. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. News and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA Technical Producer David Alvarez, I'm John El Hansen Jr. Thank you for joining us this week and join us again next time. Cousette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America Cousettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712, that's in Black America Cousettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is

the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John El Hansen Jr. Join me this week on in Black America, but that's the creative part, that's the fun part of filmmaking. You have to come up with ideas or with that, but the information and how you deliver it is something that doesn't really change. Images of Blackness is TV and film producer Orlando Baguel this week on in Black America.