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WORK TITLE: True South
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1944
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/else/ * http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0255613/ * https://www.macfound.org/fellows/333/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1944.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 1968; Stanford University, M.A., 1974.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, camera operator, and educator. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, consulting professor of communication, 1993-96; University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, currently professor of journalism, North Gate Chair in Journalism, and head of documentary program. Series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1987; cinematographer for the films Top Gun and Tupac: Resurrection, for documentary films such as the History of Rock and Roll (BBC), and for music videos; director of photography of Fruitvale Station. Creative advisor for films and documentaries.
AWARDS:MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“Genius Grant”), 1988; Academy Award; Emmy Award (four-time recipient); Alfred I. DuPont Award (multiple recipient); Peabody Award (multiple recipient); Prix Italia; Sundance Special Jury Prize; Sundance Filmmaker’s Trophy.
WRITINGS
Writer of films, television programs, and documentaries, including Journeys from Berlin/1971, 1980; The Day after Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, 1980; Mulholland’s Dream, 1997; The Mercy of Nature, 1997; Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic, 2008; Have You Heard from Johannesburg: The New Generation, 2011; Have You Heard from Johannesburg: Free at Last, 2012; Have You Heard from Johannesburg: The Bottom Line, 2012; and Have You Heard from Johannesburg: The Road to Resistance, 2012.
Writer, producer, and director of documentary films, including Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, 1989; The Great Depression, 1993; Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature, 1997; Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle, 2000; and Open Outcry, 2001.
Contributor to newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Jon H. Else is a writer, documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, screenwriter, and educator. He serves as a professor and the North Gate Chair in Journalism and head of the documentary program at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Journalism. He has also been a consulting professor at Stanford University. Else holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. from Stanford University.
Else has had a lengthy career in film, working as cinematographer on such films as Top Gun and Tupac: Resurrection. He has also had a similar role on documentary films, including the BBC’s History of Rock and Roll, and on numerous music videos. He worked as a cinematographer for several well-known television documentary series, such as American Experience, Independent Lens, American Masters, and National Geographic Explorer. His credits also include multiple jobs as camera operator and as a member of the electrical department of films and television programs. Else is a sought-after creative advisor for film and documentary projects. As a writer, producer, and director, he has created films such as The Day after Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature; and Open Outcry.
He is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as the MacArthur “genius” grant, a highly prestigious and lucrative award presented to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” noted a writer on the MacArthur Foundation Web site. His other awards include an Academy Award, four national Emmy Awards, multiple Alfred I. DuPont and Peabody Awards, and the Sundance Filmmaker’s Trophy.
Else is the author of True South: Henry Hampton and “Eyes on the Prize,” the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement. In this book, Else depicts the making of the landmark 1987 civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize and the life of Henry Hampton, the man who spent decades working to get the film made, produced, and broadcast. Else has an uncommonly close perspective on the documentary since he was a friend of Hampton’s and worked directly with him as the series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize. This inside view gives the book a depth of truth that could not be accomplished any other way. He “tells the remarkable story in vivid detail, with some detours into the actual movement history, his own activism in the South in the ’60s, and the back-and-forth between his Eyes on the Prize work and his career in Hollywood,” commented Mark Reynolds in a review for the Web site PopMatters.
In his book, Else describes Hampton’s struggles to get the film made and the tremendous effort it took to create a documentary that matched Hampton’s vision for it. For example, Hampton was such a stickler for accuracy that he insisted that any film clip about a particular date, location, or event must actually have been from that specific date, time, or event; no stock footage was allowed. The author describes Hampton’s exceptional charisma, a personality so strong that it drew in talent to work on the film despite a difficult management style and a perpetual lack of funds. He notes that Hampton was more concerned with documenting the views and reactions of everyday citizens involved in race relations of the day than rehashing material that had already been thoroughly covered and perhaps even become iconic. Along with detailed material on the making of the documentary, Else also discusses his own role in the civil rights movement of the time, providing on-the-scene reminiscences from an active participant during a critical period of U.S. history.
Else makes the importance of Eyes on the Prize clear to his readers, both in terms of race relations in the United States and in the field of documentary filmmaking. Hampton’s work changed the way documentary films were made in the United States and provided a standard of quality, accuracy, and insight that gave other documentarians an extremely high goal to reach.
With True South, Else “has written a book that honors not only the stories within the series but also the gargantuan task of making that series a reality and the unfinished business of the civil rights movement,” remarked Chris Vognar in the Dallas Morning News. “What makes the book so indispensable is that by not relying simply on memory, but by doing extensive original research himself, including conducting dozens of interviews and poring through the Henry Hampton Collection at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University in St. Louis, Else is able to transcend memoir to create his own lasting documentary in book form,” noted Ken Jacobson in a review on the International Documentary Association Web site.
Else’s combination of “memoir, civil rights history, and film history provides another layer to the unforgettable series it documents,” commented John Rodzvilla in a review for Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that Else’s “account feels thorough and important as a part of both social and documentary film history.” Reynolds concluded, “True South functions as a reminder of how great and important Eyes on the Prize is, and why it remains essential.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Dallas Morning News, February 9, 2017, Chris Vognar, “True South Is a Fresh Look at Eyes on the Prize—and a Reminder of the Ongoing Civil Rights Struggle,” review of True South.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2016, review of True South.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, John Rodzvilla, review of True South: Henry Hampton and “Eyes on the Prize,” the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement, p. 104.
New York Times, January 18, 2017, Dwight Garner, “Review: True South Illuminates the Man behind Eyes on the Prize,” review of True South.
Publishers Weekly, November 7, 2016, review of True South, p. 51.
San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, 2017, Nancy Kates, review of True South.
Seattle Times, February 26, 2017, Chris Foran, “New Book True South Looks Back on Civil-Rights Movement and Eyes on the Prize,” review of True South.
ONLINE
International Documentary Association Web site, http://www.documentary.org/ (April 14, 2017), Ken Jacobson, review of True South.
Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/ (July 22, 2017), filmography of Jon Else.
MacArthur Foundation Web site, http://www.macfound.org/ (July 22, 2017), biography of Jon H. Else.
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/ (March 12, 2017), All Things Considered, Lakshmi Singh, “Eyes on the Prize Producer on Making a Civil Rights Documentary before Its Time,” interview with Jon Else.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com (April 4, 2017), Mark Reynolds, “True South and the Foot Soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement,” review of True South.
University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism Web site, http://journalism.berkeley.edu/ (July 27, 2017), biography of Jon Else.*
Jon H. Else
Documentary Filmmaker
Portolo Valley, California
Age: 44 at time of award
Published August 1, 1988
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Jon Else is a documentary filmmaker.
Else’s highly-acclaimed film, The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (1980), exemplifies his considerable analytic sophistication. He has been the cinematographer on hundreds of documentaries, including the BBC’s History of Rock and Roll, and several feature films, as well as numerous music videos. He was the series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1987). Else wrote, produced, and directed Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven (1989), A Job at Ford’s for the PBS series The Great Depression (1992), Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature (1997), Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle (2000), and Open Outcry (2001). He is at work on Wonders Are Many, a feature-length documentary that chronicles the making of Peter Seller’s and John Adam’s opera, Doctor Atomic, and presents a visual history of nuclear weapons.
Else is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he heads the documentary program. He was a consulting professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University (1993-1996).
Else received a B.A. (1968) from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. (1974) from Stanford University.
Jon Else (I)
Cinematographer | Camera Department | Producer
Jon Else is known for his work on Top Gun (1986), Tupac: Resurrection (2003) and Fruitvale Station (2013). See full bio »
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Known For
Top Gun
Top Gun
Camera and Electrical Department
(1986)
Tupac: Resurrection
Tupac: Resurrection
Cinematographer
(2003)
Fruitvale Station
Fruitvale Station
Camera and Electrical Department
(2013)
Cadillac Desert
Cadillac Desert
Cinematographer
(1997)
Show Show all | | Edit
Filmography
Jump to: Cinematographer | Camera and Electrical Department | Producer | Writer | Miscellaneous Crew | Director | Editor | Thanks | Self
Hide HideCinematographer (35 credits)
1999-2016 American Experience (TV Series documentary) (7 episodes)
- The Perfect Crime (2016)
- The Big Burn (2015)
- Silicon Valley (2013)
- Soundtrack for a Revolution (2011)
- Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film (2002)
Show all 7 episodes
2011 Last Call at the Oasis (Documentary)
2009 Woodstock: Now & Then (TV Movie documentary)
2009 Soundtrack for a Revolution (Documentary)
2009 Minotaur (Short)
2008 Inside Operation Wildfire (TV Movie documentary)
2008 Inside (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Unabomber: The Secret History (2008)
2008 Undercover History (TV Series) (1 episode)
- Unabomber: The Secret History (2008)
2007 National Geographic Explorer (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Inside Bethlehem (2007)
2007 Wonders Are Many (Documentary)
2003 Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Bird by Bird with Annie (2003)
2003 American Masters (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution (2003)
2003 Tupac: Resurrection (Documentary)
2002 Crime & Punishment (TV Series documentary)
2002 Nova (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Fire Wars (2002)
2002 Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film (TV Movie documentary)
2000 They Drew Fire (TV Movie documentary)
1999 Bird by Bird with Anne (Documentary)
1998 Life Beyond Earth (TV Movie documentary)
1998 America's Endangered Species: Don't Say Good-bye (TV Movie documentary)
1998 The Irish in America: Long Journey Home (TV Mini-Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Success (1998)
1997 Cadillac Desert (TV Mini-Series documentary) (2 episodes)
- The Mercy of Nature (1997)
- Mulholland's Dream (1997)
1993 Dancing (TV Mini-Series documentary)
1993 The Great Depression (TV Series documentary) (2 episodes)
- We Have a Plan (1993)
- New Deal/New York (1993)
1992 Look at It This Way (TV Mini-Series) (3 episodes)
- Episode #1.3 (1992)
- Episode #1.2 (1992)
- Episode #1.1 (1992)
1991 Circle of Recovery (Documentary)
1987 Eyes on the Prize (TV Series documentary)
1984 Booker (TV Short)
1980 Can't It Be Anyone Else (Documentary)
1980 The Golden Honeymoon (TV Movie)
1980 Cardiac Arrest
1979 Rust Never Sleeps (Documentary)
1977 Who Are the DeBolts? [And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?] (Documentary)
1977 I'm a Fool (TV Movie) (as Jonathan Else)
1977 Off the Wall
Camera and Electrical Department (23 credits)
2015 The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements (TV Mini-Series documentary) (camera operator - 3 episodes)
- Into the Atom (2015) ... (camera operator)
- Unruly Elements (2015) ... (camera operator)
- Out of Thin Air (2015) ... (camera operator)
2014 Merchants of Doubt (Documentary) (addditional cinematography)
2013 Fruitvale Station (director of photography: second unit)
Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (additional photography - 1 episode, 2012) (camera operator - 1 episode, 2008) (additional cinematographer - 1 episode, 2005)
- Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream (2012) ... (additional photography)
- Wonders Are Many: The Making of 'Doctor Atomic' (2008) ... (camera operator)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) ... (additional cinematographer)
2011 Nova (TV Series documentary) (camera operator - 1 episode)
- Power Surge (2011) ... (camera operator)
1992-2009 American Experience (TV Series documentary) (camera operator - 4 episodes)
- The Kennedys (2009) ... (camera operator)
- Vietnam: Parts IX & X - Peace Is at Hand/Homefront USA (1997) ... (camera operator)
- The Kennedys: Part 2 - The Sons, 1961-80 (1992) ... (camera operator)
- The Kennedys (Part 1): the Father, 1900-61 (1992) ... (camera operator)
2008 Food, Inc. (Documentary) (additional photography)
2007 The War (TV Mini-Series documentary) (additional cinematography - 5 episodes)
- A World Without War: March 1945 - September 1945 (2007) ... (additional cinematography)
- The Ghost Front: December 1944 - March 1945 (2007) ... (additional cinematography)
- A Deadly Calling: November 1943 - June 1944 (2007) ... (additional cinematography)
- When Things Get Tough: January 1943 - December 1943 (2007) ... (additional cinematography)
- A Necessary War: December 1941 - December 1942 (2007) ... (additional cinematography)
2006 Shut Up & Sing (Documentary) (additional cinematographer)
2005 Frontline (TV Series documentary) (camera operator - 1 episode)
- The O.J. Verdict (2005) ... (camera operator)
2005 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Documentary) (additional cinematographer)
2004 Tell Them Who You Are (Documentary) (additional camera operator)
1996 The West (TV Series documentary) (additional cinematography - 9 episodes)
- Ghost Dance (1996) ... (additional cinematography)
- One Sky Above Us (1996) ... (additional cinematography)
- The Geography of Hope (1996) ... (additional cinematography)
- Fight No More Forever (1996) ... (additional cinematography)
- The Grandest Enterprise Under God (1996) ... (additional cinematography)
Show all 9 episodes
1994 Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm (Documentary) (additional photographer)
1994 Crumb (Documentary) (camera operator)
1991 In the Shadow of the Stars (Documentary) (additional camera)
1987 Grateful Dead: So Far (Video documentary) (camera operator)
1987 Eyes on the Prize (TV Series documentary) (camera operator - 6 episodes)
- Bridge to Freedom: 1965 (1987) ... (camera operator)
- Mississippi: Is This America?: 1962-1964 (1987) ... (camera operator)
- No Easy Walk: 1961-1963 (1987) ... (camera operator)
- Ain't Scared of Your Jails: 1960-1961 (1987) ... (camera operator)
- Fighting Back: 1957-1962 (1987) ... (camera operator)
Show all 6 episodes
1986 Top Gun (assistant camera: USFX)
1984 Merton (assistant camera: California)
1984 The Times of Harvey Milk (Documentary) (additional camera operator)
1983 Hells Angels Forever (Documentary) (additional cinematographer - as Jonathan Else)
1983 Vietnam: A Television History (TV Series documentary) (camera operator - 1 episode)
- Homefront USA (1983) ... (camera operator)
Hide Hide Producer (12 credits)
2011 The Island President (Documentary) (executive producer)
2008 Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (producer - 1 episode)
- Wonders Are Many: The Making of 'Doctor Atomic' (2008) ... (producer)
2008 American Experience (TV Series documentary) (series producer - 4 episodes)
- Eyes on the Prize II (Parts VII & VIII): The Keys to the Kingdom/Back to the Movement (2008) ... (series producer)
- Eyes on the Prize II (Parts V & VI): Ain't Gonna' Shuffle No More/A Nation of Law? (2008) ... (series producer)
- Eyes on the Prize II (Parts III & IV): Power!/The Promised Land (2008) ... (series producer)
- Eyes on the Prize II (Parts I & II): The Time Has Come/Two Societies (2008) ... (series producer)
2005 The Weight of the World (TV Short documentary) (executive producer)
2002 Life 360 (TV Series) (producer - 1 episode)
- Money (2002) ... (producer - segment "Creating Desire")
2001 Open Outcry (TV Movie documentary) (producer)
1997 Cadillac Desert (TV Mini-Series documentary) (producer - 2 episodes)
- The Mercy of Nature (1997) ... (producer)
- Mulholland's Dream (1997) ... (producer)
1995 America's War on Poverty (TV Mini-Series) (consulting producer)
1993 The Great Depression (TV Series documentary) (producer - 1 episode)
- A Job at Ford's (1993) ... (producer)
1987-1990 Eyes on the Prize (TV Series documentary) (series producer - 14 episodes)
- Back to the Movement: 1979-Mid 1980s (1990) ... (series producer)
- The Keys to the Kingdom: 1974-1980 (1990) ... (series producer)
- A Nation of Law?: 1968-1971 (1990) ... (series producer)
- Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More: 1964-1972 (1990) ... (series producer)
- The Promised Land: 1967-1968 (1990) ... (series producer)
Show all 14 episodes
1981 The Day After Trinity (Documentary) (producer)
1975 Arthur and Lillie (Documentary short) (producer)
Writer (8 credits)
Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (4 episodes, 2011 - 2012) (writer - 1 episode, 2008)
- Have You Heard from Johannesburg: Free at Last (2012)
- Have You Heard from Johannesburg: The Bottom Line (2012)
- Have You Heard from Johannesburg: The Road to Resistance (2012)
- Have You Heard from Johannesburg: The New Generation (2011)
- Wonders Are Many: The Making of 'Doctor Atomic' (2008) ... (writer)
2006 The Rape of Europa (Documentary) (additional writer)
2001 Open Outcry (TV Movie documentary)
1997 Cadillac Desert (TV Mini-Series documentary) (written by - 2 episodes)
- The Mercy of Nature (1997) ... (written by)
- Mulholland's Dream (1997) ... (written by)
1993 The Great Depression (TV Series documentary) (writer - 1 episode)
- A Job at Ford's (1993) ... (writer)
1989 Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven (Documentary) (written by)
1981 The Day After Trinity (Documentary)
1980 Journeys from Berlin/1971
Miscellaneous Crew (10 credits)
2015 The Georgia Girl (Documentary short) (advisor) (completed)
Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (creative advisor - 1 episode, 2014) (consultant - 1 episode, 2009)
- A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at the New York Times (2014) ... (creative advisor)
- Tulia, Texas (2009) ... (consultant)
2009-2010 Frontline/World (TV Series documentary) (creative advisor - 4 episodes)
- Ecuador: Dreamtown (2010) ... (creative advisor)
- France: Outlawing Ana (2009) ... (creative advisor)
- 30,000 Feet: Frequent Flyer (2009) ... (creative advisor)
- Jamaica: Girls on Track (2009) ... (creative advisor)
2009 Woodstock: Now & Then (TV Movie documentary) (interviewer)
2008 Food, Inc. (Documentary) (stock footage & photographs provided by)
2007 Sally Gross: The Pleasure of Stillness (Documentary) (creative consultant)
2006 The Rape of Europa (Documentary) (advisor)
2004 All Our Sons: Fallen Heroes of 9/11 (Documentary short) (production consultant)
2004 When the Storm Came (Documentary short) (advisor)
1982 The Atomic Cafe (Documentary) (additional archival researcher: Los Alamos)
Hide Hide Director (11 credits)
2009 National Geographic Explorer (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Inside Guantanamo Bay (2009)
2008 Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- Wonders Are Many: The Making of 'Doctor Atomic' (2008)
2007 Wonders Are Many (Documentary)
2001 Open Outcry (TV Movie documentary)
1999 Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle (Documentary)
1997 Cadillac Desert (TV Mini-Series documentary) (2 episodes)
- The Mercy of Nature (1997)
- Mulholland's Dream (1997)
1993 The Great Depression (TV Series documentary) (1 episode)
- A Job at Ford's (1993)
1989 Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven (Documentary)
1981 The Day After Trinity (Documentary)
1980 Stepping Out: The Debolts Grow Up (TV Movie documentary)
1975 Arthur and Lillie (Documentary short)
Hide Hide Editor (1 credit)
2005 The Weight of the World (TV Short documentary)
Hide Hide Thanks (5 credits)
2015 The Hunting Ground (Documentary) (special thanks)
2012 Past Their Prime (Documentary short) (very special thanks: academic advisor)
2004 Independent Lens (TV Series documentary) (special thanks - 1 episode)
- Refugee (2004) ... (special thanks)
1993 Loaded Question (Documentary short) (special thanks)
1989 Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Documentary) (special thanks)
Self (1 credit)
1981 The Day After Trinity (Documentary)
Interviewer
Jon Else
PROFESSOR AND NORTH GATE CHAIR IN JOURNALISM
510-642-7392
E-MAIL
TEACHING SCHEDULE - FALL 2017:
Course # Title Units Time Location
J219 Videography 1 W 3:00 - 5:00 142/Library NG
Jon Else produced and directed the documentaries The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, A Job at Ford’s part of the PBS series The Great Depression, Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature, Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle, and Open Outcry. He was series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years. Else served as cinematographer on documentaries for PBS, BBC, ABC, MTV and HBO, including the BBC/PBS History of Rock and Roll, the Paramount/MTV feature documentary Tupac: Resurrection and Afghanistan: Hell of a Nation, and numerous commercials and music videos. He is directing a feature documentary about nuclear weapons.
Else was a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and has won an Academy Award, four National Emmys, several Alfred I. DuPont and Peabody awards, the Prix Italia, the Sundance Special Jury Prize and Sundance Filmmaker’s Trophy. Else received his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and his master’s degree in communication from Stanford University.
Published Work:
The Museum of Attempted Suicide (The San Francisco Chronicle - Aug. 22, 2004)
Around Kabul by Submarine (The San Francisco Chronicle - Feb. 15, 2004)
Tupac: Resurrection (New York Times Movies - Nov. 14, 2003)
The Man Who Gave Us the Bomb (San Francisco Chronicle - Nov. 26, 2002)
'Eyes On The Prize' Producer On Making A Civil Rights Documentary Before Its Time
Listen· 8:52
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March 12, 20175:53 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Lakshmi Singh
LAKSHMI SINGH
The 14-part PBS series covered 30 years of the civil rights movement, winning two Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards. Producer and cinematographer Jon Else says only primary sources were on screen.
LAKSHMI SINGH, HOST:
In 1987, the documentary series "Eyes On The Prize" changed the way Americans remembered the civil rights movement. The 14-part series on PBS covered 30 years of the civil rights movement from Emmett Till to the Black Panthers. It won two Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards. "Eyes On The Prize" recounted the struggle for civil rights through almost forgotten footage and interviews with people who lived through it.
Now, 30 years later, series producer and cinematographer Jon Else has written a book "True South" about the making of "Eyes On The Prize" and about Henry Hampton, the filmmaker who spent decades bringing the project to the screen. Jon Else joined us from the campus of University of California, Berkeley where he is the Northgate chair of the UC, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
I started by asking him about what sparked Henry Hampton's idea to explore the civil rights movement in a documentary.
JON ELSE: Henry, standing there on the Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, looked around him at all the television cameras, and he thought to himself someday this is going to make a great story. He tucked that idea away for about 10 years and made his first attempt at "Eyes On The Prize" in 1978.
SINGH: Can you think of the moment, though, that you think finally sort of catapulted him into the frame of mind of making this film?
ELSE: I mean, the deep roots of "Eyes On The Prize" for Henry Hampton go back to his teenage years. When he was 15 years old in 1955, a young man, Emmett Till was murdered by two white men in Mississippi. Henry had grown up in relative privilege in St. Louis, Mo., and suddenly he realized that his young, black life was worth nothing in a lot of parts of this country. That same year, Henry was struck with polio, and he emerged first as a quadriplegic and then finally after about a year of physical therapy was able to regain the use of everything except one leg. So he spent the rest of his life walking with a brace.
His sister told me Henry never understood what it was to be an outsider until he had polio. And I think the combination of the polio and Emmett Till really set the course that led him to that revelation in Selma. He started a film production company in Boston, a documentary production company. And out of the blue in 1978, he got a call from Capital Cities television, and they were casting around for minority producers to do a project of their choice. And Henry said it took him about 10 minutes to decide that he wanted to do the history of the civil rights movement.
Now, this was at a time when virtually no one knew how to do big, historical programming on television. This was long before Ken Burns. It was long before the "American Experience," before the History Channel. No one knew how to do it, including Henry Hampton. But off they went.
SINGH: And the production company that he eventually opened, Blackside, it went through one heck of a turmoil in those years to finally get to "Eyes On The Prize." Can you just take us through a little bit on what Blackside had to go through to get from point A to point C?
ELSE: The first attempt to make "Eyes On The Prize" went down in flames, and the company came within an inch of completely folding. It was down to one employee that was Henry Hampton. But he, you know, he refused to let this thing die. He just was not going to let it go away partly because there were - there had been other documentaries about civil rights that were being made in the late 1980s, but they were all about Martin Luther King and his charismatic leadership. They were all by white producers, most of them with white presenters on camera.
And Henry was determined that he was going to put the ordinary, Southern black folks who drove the civil rights movement into the forefront of their own story. And that's why he refused to give up. You know, and he was - you know, funding documentaries has always been a struggle, but in the 1980s, funding documentaries about the African-American experience with an African-American executive producer was tripley (ph) hard.
SINGH: And in this particular way because the interviews in "Eyes On The Prize" are only with people who were actually there when the events occurred.
ELSE: Yeah.
SINGH: It doesn't really include historians, academics or, you know, experts of any kind, only the key players themselves. Those were the experts. So what was the thinking behind that decision first?
ELSE: You know, the rule of Blackside was if you weren't there, you can't be in the movie. If you were not in Birmingham, Ala., in the summer of 1963, you can't be in that episode of "Eyes On The Prize." But it's really important to remember that we had tremendous ongoing, lengthy, detailed input from lots of academics and scholars. There - they were never on camera, but Henry employed this wonderful device that he called school.
And before we started any big project at Blackside, we convened in Boston for about a week or two all of the very, very best scholars, academics and journalists to really have a sort of a graduate seminar about the subject. And that's exactly what happened with "Eyes On The Prize." So the academics and the scholars are there, but they're there behind the scenes.
SINGH: Jon, some of the most riveting interviews I found in "Eyes On The Prize" are with white Southerners who fought hard against the progress civil rights workers were trying to make.
ELSE: Yeah.
SINGH: And you talk about these heated debates with the film crew about what to call the segregationists and the film's narration. And eventually the decision was made to refer to them as resistors - right? - instead of racists. Why did the filmmakers choose to soften the language it seems and use resistors?
ELSE: Yeah. Throughout the making of "Eyes On The Prize" Henry Hampton was determined that he was going to make this television series accessible to ordinary Americans of all political persuasions, of all colors, of all ages, of all classes. And so he was very, very gun shy about alienating any of his potential audience, and he felt - and I think he was right that the minute a narrator in this film began to describe segregationists as white supremacists - that would be a channel changer for a lot of the people that Henry wanted to reach.
It was decided after a lot of debate back in Boston that it was our job to let them speak their truth, not our truth. It was our job to - if we really wanted to get at what happened in the 1960s, we had to create an atmosphere in which people would not edit their own speech because of who was in the room.
SINGH: You know, you talked about "Eyes On The Prize" when it emerged it was one of kind. Nothing like it had ever been done before. But since then, there have been other documentaries, productions that sort of tried to capture what "Eyes On The Prize" managed to capture. What's your take on the legacy of that project, of the legacy of "Eyes On The Prize?"
ELSE: When Henry started his company way back in 1968, he founded the company partly to produce films about the African-American experience, but also to produce young filmmakers of color, and he succeeded in both. I mean, he did that until his dying day. And one of the great legacies of Blackside is the diaspora of hundreds of filmmakers of all colors who went through the shop in Boston over the 20 years that it was in operation. And they are now out there all over the United States, all over the world actually making films. And, you know, I think they try to keep that Blackside spirit alive.
SINGH: Jon Else joined us from Berkeley, Calif. He was here to talk about his new book "True South: Henry Hampton And Eyes On The Prize, The Landmark Television Series That Reframed The Civil Rights Movement." Jon, thank you.
ELSE: Thank you.
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Else, John. True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement
John Rodzvilla
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Else, John. True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement. Viking. Jan. 2017.416p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781101980934. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781101980958. HIST
In 1987, Henry Hampton's landmark television series, Eyes on the Prize, premiered on PBS, mixing archival footage with current interviews on the U.S. civil rights movement. The series changed documentary filmmaking and the country's understanding of the movement. Yet, the production of the series pushed Blackside, Inc., Hampton's film company in Boston, to its limits. Cinematographer Else (journalism, Univ. of California, Berkeley) has written a history of the making of the groundbreaking film in time for its 30th anniversary. Chapters move between Else's time working with the civil rights movement and his work on the documentary, where he revisited some of the worst atrocities of racism in the 20th century. While this book provides insight into the work of rediscovering forgotten stories from the movement, Else does not shy away from controversies such as the intellectual property lawsuits that were filed by the Martin Luther King Jr. estate. VERDICT This mix of memoir, civil rights history, and film history provides another layer to the unforgettable series it documents.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Rodzvilla, John
True South: Henry Hampton and 'Eyes on the Prize,' the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Series
Publishers Weekly. 263.45 (Nov. 7, 2016): p51.
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True South: Henry Hampton and 'Eyes on the Prize,' the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Series
Jon Else. Viking, $30 (416p) ISBN 978-1-10198093-4
Else, an accomplished documentarian, chronicles the making of the 1987 TV civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, created by Henry Hampton, in this ambitious, sweeping chronicle. Hampton emerges as a charismatic leader whose vision was inspiring enough to draw in an amazing team despite his scattered management style. Else, a producer on the series, also describes his own time participating in the 1960s civil rights movement as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In recounting how Hampton and his colleagues treated various turning points--the murder of Emmett Till in 1954 and of three civil rights workers in 1963; the 1955-1956 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott; the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches; and many more--Else finds a new perspective on famous events. In effect, the reader gets to ask the same narrative questions as the documentarians, and feel the same mixture of satisfaction and disappointment when one narrative avenue is chosen over another. Footage isn't unavailable or is mislabeled; eyewitnesses die or exaggerate or don't want to speak at all. Doubtless there were struggles in Prize's making that Else doesn't cover, but his account feels thorough and important as a part of both social and documentary film history. Agent: FlipBrophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)
Else, Jon: TRUE SOUTH
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Else, Jon TRUE SOUTH Viking (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 1, 24 ISBN: 978-1-101-98093-4
Memoir, history, and biography meld in this account of the creation of a famed civil rights documentary.Producer and cinematographer Else (Journalism/Univ. of California Graduate School of Journalism), a MacArthur Fellow whose honors include several Peabody awards and four Emmys, offers a revealing chronicle of the making of the 1987 PBS series Eyes on the Prize. The author became involved in the civil rights movement in 1963 when he was a 19-year-old college student and took up political activist Allard Lowenstein's challenge to "draw fire and publicity in Mississippi" by registering black voters. John Kennedy and Medgar Evers had just been shot, and Else was filled with "missionary zeal." In 1964, he left school to work in Mississippi full time, courting danger in an area where the Ku Klux Klan flourished. Twenty years later, responding to an article in a Corporation for Public Broadcasting newsletter, he "cold-called" Henry Hampton, involved in a project to produce a TV series about the civil rights struggle. Else characterizes Hampton, who had joined the NAACP as an undergraduate at Washington University and who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. on the Pettus bridge in Selma, as nothing less than a genius, a "visionary leader" who "insisted on a bold multicultural, multiethnic, collaborative production process" that involved men and women, blacks and whites: "For him, diversity in teams trumped the powerful statement that an all-black production would have made." Hampton also privileged the voices of ordinary men and women who participated in the movement rather than focus on people and images that had, by 1985, become iconic. Hampton viewed the civil rights movement "as a patriotic story of America's realization of its ideals" and wanted white Americans to react positively to it. In detailing the financial struggle involved and the arduous process of finding interviewees and eliciting their stories, Else reveals the complexities of any such production. An illuminating look at racial strife and TV history.
Review: ‘True South’ Illuminates
the Man Behind ‘Eyes on the
Prize’
Books of The Times
By DWIGHT GARNER JAN. 19, 2017
By all accounts, the documentary filmmaker Henry Hampton (1940-1998), the force
behind the pathbreaking civil rights series “Eyes on the Prize,” was larger than life.
He was athletic, easy on the eyes, a public intellectual, a sharp dresser and a mensch.
He was possessed of a big-bearded bonhomie.
As a child, he’d had polio and mostly lost the use of his left leg. Soon he was
playing on championship wheelchair basketball teams. In his 20s, as lay director of
information for the Unitarian Universalist church, he marched with the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., while wearing a steel leg brace.
He opened his film company, Blackside, in Boston in 1968. He slowly gathered
around him an assortment of young people who would become many of America’s
leading documentarians. They loved him like a father, Jon Else suggests in his new
book, “True South: Henry Hampton and ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ the Landmark
Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement.” He also drove them
insane.
Mr. Hampton was bad at giving orders. He thrived on chaos. He paid people late
5when he paid them at all. A typical quotation about him in Mr. Else’s book is, “I love
ARTICLES
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the brother, but he still owes me money from 1978.”
He changed dozens, if not hundreds, of lives. “Virtually every person I know who
ever worked at Blackside says being there was a high point — if not the high point —
of their careers, our miniature version of the Bauhaus in 1925, the Left Bank in 1930,
Motown in ’65, American Zoetrope in ’75, Apple in the ’80s,” Mr. Else writes.
It’s hard to imagine a better person than Mr. Else to tell this story. He left Yale
in 1964 to go to Mississippi to register voters; he was arrested for his troubles. He
later worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He has skinprickling
stories to tell about late-night drives through Georgia in 1964, alongside
Stokely Carmichael.
Mr. Else became a filmmaker and directed a well-regarded documentary, “The
Day After Trinity” (1980), about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. He
won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Most essentially for the story he tells here, he was
series producer and cinematographer for “Eyes on the Prize.”
His book does several things at once. On one level, it’s a biography of Mr.
Hampton, who grew up in an upper-middle-class black family in St. Louis. On
another, it’s a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement.
It’s also a book about how a long and complicated documentary is made. In the
age before the internet, it was a mighty task to plow through newspaper morgues
and sometimes crumbling and mislabeled television footage, and to track down
through telephone books many observers who’d nearly been lost to history.
This task was made both more difficult, and more urgent, because at this time
most of the major histories of the civil rights era, including Taylor Branch’s
magisterial three-part biography of Dr. King, had yet to be written.
Mr. Hampton had a strong vision for his series, which was actually two linked
projects. The six-hour first part, shown on PBS in 1987, was titled “Eyes on the Prize:
America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965).” The eight-hour second part, “Eyes on the
Prize: America at the Racial Crossroads (1965-1985),” was broadcast in 1990.
7/9/2017 Review: ‘True South’ Illuminates the Man Behind ‘Eyes on the Prize’ - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/books/review-true-south-eyes-on-the-prize-henry-hampton-jon-else.html 3/4
He didn’t want experts on screen to distract from his film’s immediacy. His
mandate was, “If you weren’t there, you can’t be in the movie.” Because the music of
the era was so potent, he urged that it be used sparingly, so as not to dilute its
impact.
He wanted a lot of American flags onscreen, especially when held in historical
footage by black boys and girls. “It’s our flag, too,” Mr. Hampton would say. “Don’t
let them take it away.” He asked his filmmakers constantly, “What will make a 70-
year-old white lady in Peoria care about this film?”
He wanted his film’s style to be straightforward. “Nothing daring or
experimental, no genre busting, no avant-garde, no re-enactments, no postmodern
mirrors upon mirrors, no animated scenes, no original music, no 20-20 hindsight,
no fancy dancing,” Mr. Else writes.
To this sort of observation, Mr. Else brings a practiced filmmaker’s streetwise
sensibility. About loading and unloading film in “changing bags” during shoots in
the South, for example, he writes: “God help the assistant who let a speck of dust
into the bag, mixed up two types of film, let even a hint of light in, failed to run a
scratch test, failed to seal the magazine with tape.”
Mr. Else, who has a clear and easygoing prose style, has things to say about
many topics: the bravery of the network cameramen who filmed in Selma and
elsewhere; the roadblocks to documentary work set up by misguided intellectualproperty
laws; and the difficulty of getting old segregationists to talk on camera.
I wish this book were 75 pages shorter. I wish it had gotten a bit closer to Mr.
Hampton. Mr. Else chronicles his subject’s youth and early adulthood but doesn’t
probe much into his later personal life. Mr. Hampton never married (work was his
abiding love) but had several long relationships with women. Yet “True South” is a
series of braided stories that are each well told.
Mr. Hampton, who had lung cancer, died at 58. His documentary company, its
finances typically in disarray, shut down soon after. He lives in his documentaries,
and in this warm and intelligent book.
7/9/2017 Review: ‘True South’ Illuminates the Man Behind ‘Eyes on the Prize’ - The New York Times
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Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
True South: Henry Hampton and ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ the Landmark Television Series
That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement
By Jon Else
Illustrated. 404 pages. Viking. $30.
A version of this review appears in print on January 20, 2017, on Page C25 of the New York edition with
the headline: The Man Behind ‘Eyes on the Prize’.
'True South' and the Foot Soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement
BY MARK REYNOLDS
4 April 2017
TRUE SOUTH FUNCTIONS AS A REMINDER OF HOW GREAT AND IMPORTANT EYES ON THE PRIZE IS, AND WHY IT REMAINS ESSENTIAL.
cover art
TRUE SOUTH: HENRY HAMPTON AND EYES ON THE PRIZE, THE LANDMARK TELEVISION SERIES THAT REFRAMED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
JON ELSE
(VIKING)
US: JAN 2017
AMAZON
Dorothy Cotton was none too pleased with us young folk.
We’d been making a stink all summer, during our internship at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change in Atlanta, about not wanting to hear not one more tale about the bad old days of the Civil Rights Movement as much as working on the here and now. Cotton, a veteran of those bad old days as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s head of voter education, was trying to tell us to take those stories more seriously, to look beyond the heroics of Dr. King and all the other great men (and yes, the history handed to us in those days included all men and no women) and understand the second-liners and foot soldiers who toiled beyond the TV cameras to achieve profound societal change.
We ended up reaching a tentative détente to make it through the internship without imploding everything. Years later, I wonder if each side wasn’t so emotionally invested in our respective strands of self-righteousness—they with their need for validation (and perhaps some after-the-fact shine), us with our need for building on the war stories we’d already fully ingested—that we ended up talking past each other, and missed an opportunity for real learning and exchange.
But at least Cotton and her colleagues got a large dose of that validation years later, with the 1987 PBS broadcast of Eyes on the Prize, an eye-opening documentary series on the pivotal moments of the movement, from Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 to the Selma conflagrations ten years later. The six-part series didn’t assume prior knowledge of the history as much as find a new way to tell it—through the voices of those very second-liners and foot soldiers Cotton tried to get us to acknowledge.
True South, Jon Else’s thorough telling of the Eyes story, celebrates another set of foot soldiers: the ones who created Eyes on the Prize.
It begins with Henry Hampton, a polio survivor who was among the Selma marchers in 1965. Hampton, a child of St. Louis’ black middle class, was in Selma representing the Unitarian Universalist Association as its director of information. On this occasion, two days after the “Bloody Sunday” brutality, Hampton had an epiphany: “Someday someone is going to make a great story of this,” Else reports Hampton thinking to himself, “This is going to make great television.”
But first, Hampton had to learn the television ropes. He parlayed his PR experience with the Unitarians into doing pieces and occasional hosting for a black public affairs program on Boston’s public TV station in the late ‘60s. He had already filed papers to create Blackside, Inc., a corporation out to produce films about the black experience. Blackside picked up some industrial and government film work, and Hampton set about building his first team. Blackside slowly built up a nice portfolio during the ‘70s (and a matching set of collection notices as well), but Hampton eventually tired of contract work, and started thinking big.
He went back to his Selma epiphany, and in 1978 got seed money from Capital Cities Communications, which was about to merge with ABC Television, to produce a two-hour documentary on the Civil Rights Movement, America, We Loved You Madly, to be aired prime-time. The Blackside team headed south, to film as many activists from the movement as they could locate (and convince to sit down for an interview). But the project never gelled, Cap Cities/ABC wanted something far different from what Blackside was shooting, and nothing ever came of the project.
Well, not exactly. The failed experience turned out to be the genesis of Eyes on the Prize.
That almost didn’t get off the ground either. Hampton turned to PBS this time, took on some experienced advisors, and still had to sweat bullets until the foundation checks came in. Else explains Hampton’s brilliant conception for both the show and its making. Each episode would be overseen by a pair of producers (one male, one female, one white, one black). Hampton dispensed with an on-screen narrator (Julian Bond performed that role in America, We Loved You Madly, and offscreen in Eyes on the Prize), and opted to let the interviews and archive footage tell the story. The goal wasn’t to recite a staid chronology of events, but to capture the emotional arc of the key moments and battles.
Else, Eyes on the Prize’ series producer and cinematographer, chronicles how challenging that work was, and its eventual payoff. Eyes on the Prize, widely acclaimed and eventually beloved, received a pair of Academy Award nominations, and set many of the participants off on their own careers. It also put Blackside in a fine position too. Hampton produced a sequel covering the post-civil rights years, and several other documentaries about black life in America.
We’ve all seen the grainy photos and footage: white mobs screaming at black children trying to enter a previously all-white school, black protesters assaulted with water cannons, Dr. King at the Washington Monument. Eyes on the Prize transcended all that in three important ways. First, it gave as much time to the everyday people who stood up for themselves as the leaders and strategists who skillfully orchestrated the tactics. It brought together extant footage from all over the globe into one unified package (the revolution might not be televised, but the Civil Rights Movement was, and by many outlets). Finally, it brought an epic American story back to life at just the moment when it was beginning to fade from our collective memory. (Indeed, many of the hoped-for interview subjects were either gone or no longer well, and some important footage was rescued at the last minute.)
Eyes on the Prize itself almost faded from memory, even as stations routinely re-aired it every Black History Month. Blackside negotiated short-term rights for all the period music it incorporated, but not long-term rights, and Eyes on the Prize was thus unable to be aired for many years after those temporary rights expired. By the early ‘00s, it was all but impossible to find a copy of the series on a decent videocassette. It took several more years, some nascent internet activism, and large grants to secure all the clearances in perpetuity. (That trouble actually began with King’s family, with what would be their first salvo in their campaign to retain the intellectual property rights to the filming of the “I Have a Dream” speech and his other writings. Hampton ended up going to court against the Kings, and achieved a settlement for use of the footage.)
Else tells the remarkable story in vivid detail, with some detours into the actual movement history, his own activism in the South in the ‘60s, and the back-and-forth between his Eyes on the Prize work and his career in Hollywood. We get to know many of the individual personalities that managed to make Eyes on the Prize happen even if they didn’t know when the next paycheck would happen. But above them all is Hampton, driven by a passion to tell black people’s stories, and in a singular and pioneering way at that. For anyone more likely to think of Ken Burns than Hampton (or Burns and no one else) when considering historical documentaries, True South sets a proper context.
Else recommends watching Eyes on the Prize to fully appreciate True South. That’s true, but every American ought to watch it whether or not they read his book. True South functions as a reminder of how great and important Eyes on the Prize is, and why it remains essential. As much as we King Center interns learned about the movement, we would have better understood what our elders were trying to tell us had Eyes on the Prize been around back then.
TRUE SOUTH: HENRY HAMPTON AND EYES ON THE PRIZE, THE LANDMARK TELEVISION SERIES THAT REFRAMED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Rating: 8/10
‘True South,’ by Jon Else
By Nancy Kates Published 11:39 am, Thursday, February 2, 2017
"True South" Photo: Viking
Photo: Viking
IMAGE 1 OF 2 "True South"
Rummaging around my office the other day, I found an early 1990s primer on how to make historical documentaries, written by Jon Else. As the series producer and one of the cinematographers of the landmark television series “Eyes on the Prize,” Else, his boss Henry Hampton and their colleagues wrote the book on how to make history come alive on the small screen.
“Eyes,” along with a handful of other series, including “Vietnam: a Television History” and Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” represents the high-water mark for historical public television series. Now Else has written “True South,” a sort of “making of” book, published on the 30th anniversary of the original “Eyes” broadcast.
“True South” combines Else’s behind-the-scenes production memoir and reminiscences about his own civil rights activism as a white college student with biographical details about Hampton, a groundbreaking African American producer, layering in rich details about civil rights history and how the series covered it.
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Finding a story, and deciding which stories to tell, is critical to the art of documentary. This is a book about that process, and the complicated, messy experience of crafting this history for television.
Before we go any further, I have to confess: I have known and admired Else, a senior statesman of documentary, for many years, as well as other people mentioned in these pages. As a young reporter in Boston, I desperately wanted to work at Blackside Inc., Hampton’s scrappy South End production company.
I never got my foot in the door, but some years later, I, too, made a Blackside-esque documentary on the gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin with my friend Bennett Singer, who worked at the company for years, and some other Blackside alums. (Else praises “Brother Outsider,” but doesn’t mention me as co-producer. This was clearly just an oversight, but it hurts a little, given that the project was originally my idea.) Reading this book feels like reliving the great stories of a legendary party from days gone by, one that continues to inspire.
Else goes into detail about “the Blackside method.” Hampton worked closely with scholars and historians to craft the stories told in the series, but, inspired by Howard Zinn and other advocates of “bottom-up” social history, interviewees were limited to participants: There would be no experts on camera.
Instead, Hampton and his team sought out eyewitness storytellers and invited them to reveal what happened, often tracking down interviewees from deep obscurity. For example, “Eyes” finally gave gifted activist Diane Nash her due, as a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizer of Nashville’s Children’s Crusade, a Freedom Rider and a key strategist in Selma and elsewhere.
The team also spoke with better-known stars of the movement, people like Martin Luther King Jr.’s lieutenant Andrew Young, John Lewis (who has served as a Georgia congressman for decades, and recently found himself a target of President Trump’s ire) and Coretta Scott King. They told the heroic story of King’s evolution, while other interviews revealed the depth of the movement, depicting the hard and persistent work of thousands of unsung foot soldiers.
Blackside approached the use of archival materials with great rigor: If you were telling the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, you had to use shots of people actually walking in Montgomery in 1956, not generic shots of walking feet.
Hampton’s brilliance was partly about attracting talent and mixing things up, though he was not a great businessman, often disorganized and chronically short on cash. “Eyes” started out as a six-episode series, but eventually expanded to a total of 14 episodes. Based on the success of the Selma episode, produced by Callie Crossley and Jim DeVinney and nominated for an Oscar, Hampton assigned two producers to make the later episodes, one white and one black, and usually a male-female team. This social engineering led to a lot of arguments, but Hampton felt the creative tension made for better television.
Else, a producer par excellence, is also a talented writer, even if his book occasionally lapses into what feels like TV “voice of God” narration. His memories are rich with detail and surprisingly candid; he has also delved deeply into the Blackside archives. He lovingly evokes the people he worked with and interviewed, contrasting recollections of movement work in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s with his nonstop travel in the region for “Eyes” in the mid-1980s.
Early in the book, Else writes eloquently about his idealism as a young activist, and the disillusionment he experienced fairly quickly. His credentials are impeccable: After the Ku Klux Klan murdered civil rights organizers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in June 1964, Else was sent to Meridian, Miss., ostensibly to replace Schwerner. He was even assigned to sleep in the bed Schwerner had been using. Else describes his shift from idealism to despair, starting with the 1965 Watts riots:
“Nothing in the 1960s turned out quite the way we hoped. The swing from hope to despair was swift and devastating. ... I could feel the naive faith in the self-correcting power of American democracy rupturing, faith that I and Henry Hampton had soaked up in our high school civics classes, faith that had been our engine of resolve through the movement days.
Blackside took a measured approach to the history of the civil rights movement — celebrating its glorious victories, but not hiding from the hard stuff, and one can’t help wondering how that loss of faith in American democracy, which rings so true to our present moment, influenced their filmmaking decades later.
I can’t tell whether this book would appeal to a “civilian,” i.e. someone who does not work in documentary, history or racial justice. I hope so, but it is hard to know; parts of it, like the 1998 demise of Blackside — after Hampton’s untimely death from lung cancer at 57 — are inside baseball. Researching and writing history can feel like a lonely pursuit these days, in an America bound and determined to erase its past and avoid the realities of racism.
In the current climate, the story Else tells is once again strangely relevant. Even a year or two ago, while this book was being written, few could imagine that an overt racist supported by the Klan and the alt-right could be elected president.
The other day, I met someone my age who had never heard of “Eyes on the Prize.” This shocked me, because in the days before VCRs and on-demand viewing, “Eyes” was appointment television writ large. If you were curious about American history or even mildly concerned about race relations, you didn’t miss an episode.
Public television producers are always talking about the prototypical viewer — Else refers to her as a 70-year-old white woman in Peoria. To succeed, you have to hook that typical viewer, whether or not she thinks she is interested. “Eyes on the Prize” did that brilliantly, as few other series have. If you want to know how they did it, read this book.
Nancy Kates co-produced and directed “Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin” with Bennett Singer. She also produced and directed the 2014 HBO film “Regarding Susan Sontag.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com
True South
Henry Hampton and “Eyes on the Prize,” the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement
By Jon Else
(Viking; 404 pages; $30)
New book ‘True South’ looks back on civil-rights
movement and ‘Eyes on the Prize’
Originally published February 26, 2017 at 7:00 am
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7/9/2017 New book ‘True South’ looks back on civil-rights movement and ‘Eyes on the Prize’ | The Seattle Times
http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/new-book-true-south-looks-back-on-civil-rights-movement-and-eyes-on-the-prize/ 2/6
By Chris Foran
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“True South: Henry Hampton and ‘Eyes on the Prize,
’ the Landmark
Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement”
by Jon Else
Viking, 404 pp., $30
Two days after the “Bloody Sunday” march in 1965, when African-American protesters
in Selma, Ala., were battered by police on national television, Martin Luther King Jr. led
another march across the same bridge.
Among those at that second march was Henry Hampton, a 24-year-old official with the
Unitarian Universalist Church. Hampton was proud to be there — and then, like many in
the march, was baffled when King and the march’s leaders halted, knelt in prayer and
turned around.
The turnaround was part of a political deal to avoid further bloodshed. But at the time,
Hampton thought: This is going to make a great story to tell on TV.
And it was.
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7/9/2017 New book ‘True South’ looks back on civil-rights movement and ‘Eyes on the Prize’ | The Seattle Times
http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/new-book-true-south-looks-back-on-civil-rights-movement-and-eyes-on-the-prize/ 3/6
In his book “True South,” Jon Else, a former civil-rights activist and series producer on
“Eyes on the Prize,” tells Hampton’s story, and his own, in recounting the making of the
landmark PBS series. In the process, he also relates the movement’s journey and the
challenges in telling America’s central narrative.
As an industrial filmmaker in the late 1960s and 1970s, Hampton formed his own
production company, Blackside, with the stated mission of “serving democracy,
diversity, culture and civil society … by producing powerful, dramatic, engaging and
accessible stories about American social progress.”
In the late 1970s, Blackside worked on a documentary on the civil-rights movement for
ABC; that project imploded, but it formed the roots of “Eyes on the Prize.” Combining
his own remembrances with extensive interviews, Else crafts a compelling, sometimes
cautionary tale of what it takes to take on such a mammoth storytelling task.
Else is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. Before that, he
was a college student who, in 1964, went to Mississippi to help African Americans
register to vote. Else also is white — a fact he neither dwells on nor hides from readers,
although it sits over his narrative like a prism.
In Else’s telling, the strengths and weaknesses of “Eyes on the Prize” all come back to
Hampton: his insistence on racially balanced production crews, which allowed for more
accessible narratives but also friction; ambition fueled by optimism, which opened
unexpected doors while creating unnecessary headaches; a very personality-driven
process, fostering a clearer vision of what “Eyes on the Prize” should be but leaving a
lot of stories, and egos, on the cutting-room floor.
Else weaves Hampton’s story, and his own, into the narrative of the making of “Eyes on
the Prize” in ways that give that tale depth and insight. Else’s retelling of his time as a
young activist in 1964 Mississippi helps explain why he stuck with Hampton’s project
amid years of frustration. Hampton’s biography — from young striver overcoming polio
to award-winning filmmaker to a victim of cancer, which finally took his life in 1998 at
age 58 — reveals how he managed to power his way through all the difficulties.
Although Hampton’s production company faded with his death, Else notes “the
Blackside diaspora,” the hundreds of filmmakers who got their start telling important
stories working for the company, is Hampton’s “most lasting legacy.”
7/9/2017 New book ‘True South’ looks back on civil-rights movement and ‘Eyes on the Prize’ | The Seattle Times
http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/new-book-true-south-looks-back-on-civil-rights-movement-and-eyes-on-the-prize/ 4/6
Chris Foran
APRIL 14, 2017
'True South' Tells the Story of 'Eyes on the Prize'
BY KEN JACOBSON
SHARE:
True South
By Jon Else
Illustrated. 404 pages. Viking. $30.
A corollary of the old adage, "You can't tell a book by its cover," may be, "You can tell a book by the length of its subtitle." At 17 words, the subtitle of documentary filmmaker-turned-author Jon Else's indispensable and richly layered new book, True South, is a long one: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement. But given the multiple tasks that Else has set out for himself, it is also justified. With True South, Else tells both the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the most important television series ever made about the US civil rights movement and the behind-the-series story of Henry Hampton, the man whose vision gave rise to both the series and his production company, Blackside, Inc. Both are engaging stories, and it is impossible to gain a full understanding of one without delving into the other.
What makes the book so engrossing is that Else was deeply involved with both, as a close friend of Hampton's and as series producer on Eyes on the Prize. What makes the book so indispensable is that by not relying simply on memory, but by doing extensive original research himself, including conducting dozens of interviews and poring through The Henry Hampton Collection at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University in St. Louis, Else is able to transcend memoir to create his own lasting documentary in book form. It's exactly the kind of deep immersion that Hampton insisted of the team that made Eyes on the Prize. (Full disclosure: I was an intern on Eyes on the Prize II.)
While many in the documentary community are familiar with Eyes on the Prize, it's useful to remember that, with the passage of 30 years and for copyright clearance issues that effectively shelved the series for over a decade, a large number of people—especially those newer to the field—are not.
In a nutshell, the 14-part Eyes series brought the US civil rights movement to public television in 1987. More precisely, Eyes on the Prize encompasses two series: The six-part Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, often referred to as Eyes I, which focuses on the years 1954 – 1965; and the eight-part Eyes on the Prize: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, or Eyes II, which aired in 1990.
By the end of 1987, approximately 20 million people in the US and 100 million worldwide had seen Eyes I. Used in nearly half of America's colleges, it would become the country's main source of education about the civil rights movement and pave the way for numerous other documentaries, books, movies and TV shows.
Wide viewership and deep cultural penetration are indicative of reach and impact, but in and of themselves, they don't justify a book-length retrospection, especially for a series that even Else concedes may seem somewhat outdated in its stylistic approach. But Eyes is special, for both on-screen and behind-the-screen reasons and, as Else states, worthy of re-examination: "Eyes on the Prize may be a grainy old fossil of a movie, but you can learn a lot from fossils if you understand where they sit in the layers of rock and how they got there."
What made Eyes special is largely visible on screen: its formal approach and its commitment, path-breaking at the time, to telling history from the perspective of the lesser known working people and organizers who were largely responsible for the gains made by the movement, rather than simply serving up a top-down, "great man" approach to history that begins and ends with Martin Luther King Jr. As Else states, "Most critics probably missed one of its greatest achievements: a subtle change in the form of prime-time documentary television, pushing ordinary people to the forefront of their own story." Smartly, Eyes didn't try to be encyclopedic, instead choosing a few riveting stories, freighted with critical thematic baggage, to carry the episodes along.
Demonstrator at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. From Eyes on the Prize, produced by Blackside, Inc., and presented in 1987 on PBS by WGBH-Boston. Photo: National Archives and Records Administration
Demonstrator at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. From Eyes on the Prize, produced by Blackside, Inc., and presented in 1987 on PBS by WGBH-Boston. Photo: National Archives and Records Administration
On screen, the film featured a visual and aural arrangement of elements intended to be beyond reproach as historical storytelling. As Else describes it, "Henry insisted that our cinematic style would be antistyle, the deliberately unadorned braiding of four simple ingredients:
Archive footage from the period
Interviews with people who were there
Narration, thoroughly fact-checked
Music from the period
Equally significant was what was not included: on-screen interviews with experts or academics, or anyone who was not an eyewitness; music from outside the period; and generic use of archival footage. According to Else, who admits that it was only later that he came to believe fully in the approach, "The form of Eyes on the Prize would be in no way disruptive as it laid out a clearly disruptive history. The only thing bold or stylish about Eyes was the integrity of story itself, and therein lay the wisdom of the choice."
Holding the remarkable interviews together was the meticulously researched and painstakingly uncovered archival footage. Again, it was the approach to the archival that was key, not just the quality of the footage itself. By design, no generic footage was ever used. According to Else: "Every single image and sound had to be the real thing, certified genuine for time, place and content…My wake-up call about just how serious they [Hampton, Senior Producer Judith Vecchione and Archive Supervisor Kenn Rabin] were on footage accuracy came when I sensed they really did mean that every shot of feet walking in the Montgomery bus boycott film had to have been actually shot in Montgomery, and actually during the month in question. I thought they were joking…A shot the audience would take to be in Birmingham in May 1963 had to actually be captured in Birmingham in May 1963. You couldn't snatch a close-up from one march and drop it into another march. The burden was…a deep sense that we were constructing a historical record."
Hampton and the Eyes team were equally committed to depicting the "messiness" of the movement and its behind-the-scenes fights. This was history in its ambiguous, raw state, not cleaned up for the audience's benefit. One example discussed by Else is the ending of Eyes I. Many filmmakers would probably have chosen to end on the ultimately triumphant march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, and the subsequent introduction of the Voting Rights Act legislation in Congress. Instead, the team chose to end the series on a much more cautious note. According to Else, "[Hampton] knew it would be dishonest to put a happy face on the harsh realities and messy history of 1965…Television viewers in 1987 would have to take the triumph of Selma with a lump in their throat."
Of course, as with every great work of art, the process that led to Eyes' triumphant end result was pretty messy too, and Else fills the pages with many fascinating stories of how the sausage got made. These stories are not just interesting DVD-type "extras," however, but fundamental insights into how Blackside made films and why its approach was both revolutionary and of lasting importance. First and foremost in significance is the story of how Hampton chose to organize his producing staff: "He insisted on a bold multiethnic, collaborative production process of his own devising," Else writes, "in which each film team would be led by one woman and one man, one white and the other black. The ‘salt-and-pepper' teams would consume great volumes of Blackside's time, money and anxiety, but gave most of us confidence that we were honestly giving each story our best pluralist shot. In short, no single filmmaker—black, white, male, female— could comprehend the whole. And is not the conundrum of race a problem of white American as well as black America? No team would get to the heart of the story, but to the multiple hearts of the story. This unique Hampton-devised process, in play for the next ten years, became known and was hotly debated as ‘the Blackside Method.'"
Hampton himself fully understood the benefits and costs of such an approach: "We are … integrated simply because integration provided us with much better program product for the national audience . . . I know it is inefficient to have two chiefs for each hourlong program, two visions that must be shared and compromised. I also know that many of the conflicts and frustrations of the larger society are played out within those teams . . . I know that such a system costs me money and time. It also creates oceans of stomach acid for those who have to work together. . . Still I insist on it."
As Else's book makes its way through the documentary community, including film schools, it will be interesting to see whether any future documentary film production companies are inspired to experiment with their own versions of the Blackside Method.
The March on Washington, August 28, 1963. From Eyes on the Prize, produced by Blackside, Inc., and presented in 1987 on PBS by WGBH-Boston. Photo: National Archives and Records Administration
The March on Washington, August 28, 1963. From Eyes on the Prize, produced by Blackside, Inc., and presented in 1987 on PBS by WGBH-Boston. Photo: National Archives and Records Administration
Told by Else with refreshing candor and with the insight that the passage of three decades can provide, stories highlighted in True South include:
Hampton's youth growing up in St. Louis as the son of a prominent African-American surgeon. In 1955, "He was visited by two events that would jolt his 15-year-old universe to its core, set the course of his life, and eventually lead to Eyes on the Prize." First was the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, killed by two white men in Money, Mississippi, and the second was coming down with polio, which would require Hampton to wear a steel brace on his left leg for the rest of his life.
The fascinating similarities between Blackside and the civil rights movement itself. Else and Eyes producer Judy Richardson were both veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). According to Else, "Blackside was SNCC's documentary twin, a multiracial laboratory for setting the world right, often functioning at the edge of chaos." Else's own stories about being a young SNCC worker in Mississippi in 1964 are harrowing and, like Hampton's and Richardson's experiences, clearly informed the man and filmmaker he would become.
The Eyes creation myth, which dates back to Hampton's experience marching in Selma in 1965. According to Else, what inspired Hampton to want to make the series was not the triumphant march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, nor the famous Bloody Sunday march, but the so-called "Turnaround March," which had a much more ambiguous, "messy" outcome: "As sweet as their victory would eventually be, it was the process itself, the messy workings of history, that fascinated Henry."
The ill-fated America We Loved You Madly. Eyes was actually Hampton's second attempt to tell the civil rights story. Surprisingly, his first attempt was a commission from Capital Cities Communications (in the days prior to its merger with ABC Television). Public television only came on board after Capital Cities pulled the plug on what all agree was a dreadful first attempt.
The strong influence that WGBH's excellent 1983 series Vietnam: A Television History had on Hampton and the approach he and Senior Producer Judith Vecchione (who came over from WGBH, where she produced two of the Vietnam episodes) took on Eyes.
The license issues and legal entanglements that embroiled Eyes I and II for years after their early broadcast runs. Martin Luther King Jr.'s heirs filed suit against Blackside for illegal use of King's speeches. Later, after fighting off that challenge, Eyes was sidelined for years when its 10-year licenses for copyrighted material expired, keeping the series off the air and unavailable for home video purchase. "An entire generation of young Americans coming up through school was now shut off" from seeing Eyes. A large grant from the Ford Foundation paved the way for a PBS rebroadcast of the series in 2007. [ Eyes I and II are both available for DVD purchase as a seven-disc set via PBS Educational Media, and all 14 episodes are currently available on YouTube.]
The last days of Blackside, Inc., which followed only four years after Hampton died of cancer in 1998.
True to its subtitle, True South covers a lot of ground, and is a bit of a shape-shifter. At times, while depicting the rise and fall of Blackside, Inc. and Hampton's own struggles, the book reads like a tragedy; at other times, it is an elegiac tribute to a man and his legacy; and at still other times, it reads like an integrationist's dream: a "bromance" between two men, Hampton and Else, one black, the other white, united by a common cause and a shared passion for storytelling. It is also a study of how (or how not) to run a business; a meditation on success, failure and the cost of leadership; and a playbook of lessons learned for documentary filmmakers of this and future generations.
Perhaps Else (and his editor) could have heeded his own "rants" to Eyes I's producers about "shortening, thinning, dumping, squeezing their shows for maximum cinematic power," and trimmed a few less-than-essential anecdotes from the final text. Nonetheless, Else masterfully balances and interweaves the book's multiple themes and threads. Hampton and Eyes on the Prize set one course for truth. Else follows the same path, not only doing justice to and securing Hampton's and Eyes' legacies, but creating his own prize worth keeping our eyes on.
Ken Jacobson, IDA's former Director of Educational Programs and Strategic Partnerships, is a documentary programmer for the Palm Springs International Film Festival and VR/AR Programmer for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.
'True South' is a fresh look at 'Eyes on the Prize' — and a reminder of the ongoing civil rights struggle
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I first encountered Eyes on the Prize in high school, as many children of the '80s did. The stories and images of the civil rights movement made their mark on me: The savage murder of Emmett Till, the courage of marchers who faced down beatings and police dogs, and the dogged persistence (and occasional failing) of Martin Luther King Jr. came to vivid life before my eyes. At the time I assumed this six-hour documentary series was merely the latest look at this recent history. I had no conception of the mountains that were moved to bring all of it to the screen.
Eyes on the Prize was a big deal when it premiered on PBS in 1987. It was a big deal for television, for civil rights history and for documentary filmmaking. This much is made clear in True South (Viking, $30), Jon Else's new book on the series and its mastermind, the late documentary maverick Henry Hampton. Else, the series producer and cinematographer of Eyes, has written a book that honors not only the stories within the series but also the gargantuan task of making that series a reality and the unfinished business of the civil rights movement.
"This is a bit of a postmodern hall of mirrors," Else says by phone from Berkeley, Calif. where he's now a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. "It's a history of a history, and a history of how we did a particular history."
True South, by Jon Else(TNS)
True South, by Jon Else (TNS)
If that sounds highfalutin', True South is anything but. The book keeps a lot of balls up in the air, from the life of Hampton and the invigorating, dysfunctional day-to-day of his filmmaking company to the struggle for voting rights in the Jim Crow South, and the struggle to track down and interview civil rights players. But Else proves a skilled juggler. He's also uniquely qualified to tell this story: he volunteered for The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and ventured to Mississippi to register black voters before becoming a filmmaker and Hampton confidant.
The book reflects the series, and the movement, in its grassroots focus on workers and grinders. "It was neither a 'white people to the rescue' television series, nor was it a series that was all about the iconic leaders, particularly Dr. King," Else says. "He gets his due, as he certainly deserves, but the real heroes of the series are these maids and janitors and sharecroppers and local organizers who labored in obscurity for years."
Making Eyes also required some laboring in obscurity, and an uphill push for fundraising. Nobody participated in the civil rights movement because it looked easy, and nobody went to work at Hampton's production company, Blackside Inc., seeking fame and fortune.
Hampton, like King, was a charismatic visionary. But he was also chronically disorganized, perpetually in debt and prone to workplace chaos. Else's production responsibilities included recruiting minority crew members. Hampton was highly respected, but he also had a reputation. "I love the brother," a potential Eyes recruit told Else, "but he still owes me money from 1978."
In this 1992 photo, Henry Hampton, right, speaks with Spike Lee as Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing listens in.
((AP/Paula Scully))
In this 1992 photo, Henry Hampton, right, speaks with Spike Lee as Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing listens in. ((AP/Paula Scully))
Hampton was determined to enlist a racially integrated crew. He wanted multiple viewpoints, and multiple arguments, and he got them. He also got an impassioned collection of filmmaking talent. To a person they saw Eyes as a mission, an excavation of recent history that had to be done right. A few years before Ken Burns redefined the longform documentary series with 1990's The Civil War, the Eyes team created the most comprehensive civil rights chronicle ever brought to the screen.
"I knew it was going to be important because we would be capturing these stories from people who had suffered mightily for a cause bigger than themselves, and who were really brave to me," says Callie Crossley, who shared an Oscar nomination with James A. DeVinney for making the series' final episode, "Bridge to Freedom." "These people did not know what the outcomes would be. They never expected any victory. They just thought, 'I cannot be silent anymore. I can't just sit here and take it. I've got to stand up in some way.'"
Jon Else(Courtesy of Lincoln Else)
Jon Else (Courtesy of Lincoln Else)
Both Else and Crossley wish Eyes wasn't quite so relevant to current events. The Voting Rights Act, covered in the series' final episode, took a big hit from the Supreme Court in 2013. White supremacy is again on the rise. Three decades after Eyes first aired on PBS, five decades after the last of the events depicted, civil rights still can't be taken for granted.
"I think the legacy of Dr. King slammed up against the legacy of George Wallace in this last election," Else says. "A lot of people are now doubting that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. I'm not in that camp. I think over the long haul, America will get back in touch with its better self. But the glass is half full of poison right now."
But there are also lessons to be learned from Eyes, which can now be seen on DVD and streaming services after several years lost in copyright. For one: Immediate gratification doesn't make for long-term solutions. Protest movements need nurturing and sustenance.
"The big thing is focusing on the long game," Crossley says. "That's not two weekends, that's not a month, that's not even a year. That's years."
Near the end of True South Else digs into the making of Eyes on the Prize II, which moves from civil disobedience to Black Power, from marches to riots. As Else writes, "Depending on how you looked at it, Eyes II was either a collection of loosely connected stories that lacked Eyes I's biblical trajectory toward redemption, or it was a powerful anthology of Black Power's lurching vital energy, as the movement transitioned from mass protest to rebellion and electoral politics."
That transition continues, except the mass protests and marches are once again part of the equation. And so the arc of the moral universe keep bending.
An image from the "No Easy Walk" episode of Eyes on the Prize. Angered by demonstrations in protest of segregation in Birmingham, Ala., stores, the city's Commissioner of Public Safety, 'Bull' Connor, ordered the fire department to turn its hoses on young demonstrators--which turned world attention on the civil rights struggle.
(Charles Moore/Black Star)
( )
An image from the "No Easy Walk" episode of Eyes on the Prize. Angered by demonstrations in protest of segregation in Birmingham, Ala., stores, the city's Commissioner of Public Safety, 'Bull' Connor, ordered the fire department to turn its hoses on young demonstrators--which turned world attention on the civil rights struggle.
(Charles Moore/Black Star)