In a piece below, I mentioned an early movie made by the Sci-Fi Channel that has not seenthe light of day since. It had a blond hero madly in love with a black woman.
When I wrote how silly that was, back in those days when the computer world was tiny enough so I got answers, the spokesman for the scifi channel gave me two answers:
1) The black woman was the biggest star they could get and 2) I was the only person who said anything about race.
The bottom line is that 1) they lost a lot of money on that movie and 2) if you are going to launch a new network your first original movie makes a LOT of difference, and this was a BAD mistake.
Black and blond is UGLY. No one is going to tell you so.
Vincent Price made a chiling film in the 1950s called “The Last Man on Earth.” As with so many black-and-white cheap movies in the 1950s, they decided in the 1980s to remake it with a Big Star and in color.
So Charleton Heston starred in “The Omega Man.”
But Charleston Heston, like any other respectable conservative, wanted desperately to prove he was no racist. So the girl in the film was black. Even National Review, this was twenty years ago, referred to her as “his equal opportunity girlfriend.”
The movie disappeared without a trace. It could have been a hit.
But you see, as with the scifi channel, nobody would SAY that people really don’t want to watch a smooch session between a blond and a black.
Everybody says they would like nothing better.
The only problem is that they DON’T. The only problem is the truth.
If you keep threatening people with damnation if they tell you the truth, they won’t tell you the truth.
That’s a Whitakerism.
Allie McBealle was a runaway hit with the yuppies. Then Allie, the blond female lawyer, kept showing she would slurp up black males.
Well, she had to do that. So far, so good. Good, solid patronizing.
But THEN she got INVOLVED with a black lawyer. Her audience raised hell.
Everybody said, like John McCain, “I thought we were BEYOND that.”
Even with yuppies, ugly is still ugly.
So the gentleman black decided he couldn’t have sex with Allie.
I remember the comments on newsgroups: “Allie wouldn’t have a relationship with a black because of class…” and so forth.
Black and blond is UGLY. No one will say that.
Not saying what you see is a costly business.
Which is probably one reason I got paid for saying what no one else would.
#1 by Mark on 01/30/2006 - 5:55 pm
I saw Omega Man a long time ago and was appalled at it as well.
I’ve noticed it’s easier for hollywood to sell a movie with a white male/black female love interest rather than a white female/black male angle. While I’m personally against any black and white mixing, I sometimes think the white male/black female pitch is easier to sell because of the fact that more white males are against mixing white females with negroes than white females are of mixing with negroes. Also, it may have something to do with how back in the days of United States slavery, an occasional slave master would take a black female slave for amorous pleasure. Didn’t Jefferson Davis have a black female love interest at one time?
#2 by Simmons on 01/30/2006 - 7:27 pm
Give Heston a break, he appeared in the first two “Planet of the Apes”
movies, and they were replete with “Whitakerisms.” The ending of the
second movie could have been scripted here on Whitaker Online.
It is where the apes get past the defenses of the weakling white
“Wordists” of their era, kill the beautiful white woman that was with
the two leading white men (one which is Heston who showed up at the end)
and in the end the two white men knowing that all was lost ended it all.
#3 by joe rorke on 01/30/2006 - 10:01 pm
Excellent point. Instead of making them free, truth, which they refuse to face, has put them in bondage. As you say, Bob, the only problem is the truth. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? Truth cannot be avoided forever. Actually, it cannot be avoided even instantaneously. But the longer term consequences of attempts to avoid truth are much more grave.
If John McCain said, “I thought we were BEYOND that,” I can understand that. But I think he is seriously mistaken. Why should we be BEYOND that? Beyond what? I have long thought they did his mind in the Hanoi Hilton. These things happen. But he is the spokesman for whom? He thought we were BEYOND that? Who is “we?” I hope he lives in that world. But I’ll bet he doesn’t. He wants the folks in the mountains of North Carolina to live in that world. Better that he should live in that world if he thinks that’s how things ought to be.