Students Gate

Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.

I'm your host, Karina Longworth, and this is another episode of our ongoing series,

Six Degrees of Song of the South.

Walt Disney got serious about Song of the South in the summer of 1944.

The first writer he hired to adapt Joel Chandler Harris' stories was Dalton Raymond, a historian from Louisiana,

whose previous Hollywood resume consisted of largely uncredited consulting on southern set films of the 1930s, such as Jezebel and The Little Foxes.

Before Raymond's screenplay was even finished, Disney became aware that the black community was skeptical of the project.

The Negro situation is a dangerous one. A Disney publicist wrote in an internal memo further explaining between the Negro haters and the Negro lovers,

there are many chances to run a foul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.

The Disney executives made an attempt to commission research that would help them to tow the line between the two factions.

They met with distribution officers from 20th Century Fox, who had worked on the all black musical Stormy Weather,

and who shared the challenges that film had faced in the deep south, where movie theaters were segregated.

Fox had booked the film in white theaters and black theaters, and reported that neither audience was happy about the film's representation of African Americans.

Stormy Weather, of course, wasn't anomaly in the 1940s, as a Hollywood film made to showcase black talent, and when such films received mixed responses,

the studios generally decided they weren't worth making. Hollywood claimed that it was risky to cast black performers in any kind of prominent role as anything but a subservient worker.

Because if they did, those movies would be censored or boycotted in the south.

The conventional wisdom is that studios made these concessions to southern racists, because the southern box office was so valuable.

But it actually wasn't. Sure, if a movie was a middling success elsewhere in the country, you'd want it to do okay in the south to the south.

Because the difference between half-full houses or empty houses in New Orleans or Memphis could mean the difference between just breaking even or losing money on a film.

But in general, the people in Hollywood who were making decisions based on southern box office returns were doing so without a lot of reliable empirical data.

They were likely to take a bad and rouge theater owners' word for what sold tickets and what didn't, in lieu of hard numbers.

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