Were amos and andy white2/28/2024 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? The show was canceled after one season.Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with writing this script. The following year, Gosden and Carrell created a short-lived TV sequel called “Calvin and the Colonel.” This time, they avoided controversy by replacing the human characters with an animated fox and bear. The final radio broadcast of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” aired on November 25, 1960. These protests led to the TV show’s cancellation in 1953. This did not stop African American advocacy groups and eventually the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) from criticizing both the radio and TV versions of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” for promoting racial stereotypes. With Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams taking over for Gosden and Carrell, the show was the first TV series to feature an all-Black cast and the only one of its kind for the next 20 years. Over the next 22 years, the show would become the highest-rated comedy in radio history, attracting more than 40 million listeners.īy 1951, when “Amos ‘n’ Andy” came to television, changing attitudes about race and concerns about racism had virtually wiped out the practice of blackface. As their new contract gave Gosden and Carrell the right to syndicate the program, the popularity of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” soon exploded. When they discovered WGN owned the rights to their characters’ names, they simply changed them. In 1928, Gosden and Carrell took their act to a rival station, the Chicago Daily News’ WMAQ. When “Sam ‘n’ Henry” debuted in January 1926, it became an immediate hit. Gosden and Carrell, both vaudeville performers, were doing a Chicago comedy act in blackface when an employee at the Chicago Tribune suggested they create a radio show. By that time, white actors performing in dark stage makeup-or “ blackface”-had been a significant tradition in American theater for over 100 years. Though the creators and the stars of the new radio program, Freeman Gosden and Charles Carrell, were both white, the characters they played were two Black men from the Deep South who moved to Chicago to seek their fortunes. Two years later, after changing its name to “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” the show became one of the most popular radio programs in American history. On January 12, 1926, the two-man comedy series “Sam ‘n’ Henry” debuts on Chicago’s WGN radio station.
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