The Costco Connection - January 2014

By Bryan Reesman

LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER has become the modern “little movie that could.” The $30 million film was initially snubbed by the studios and took four years to make, but it was ultimately backed by 41 different producers, picked up by the Weinstein Company for distribution and has gone on to gross over $125 million worldwide. Director Daniels, previously nominated for an Oscar for Precious, jokes that the cast probably lost money working on the film, but the result is an important, highly acclaimed historical drama that is incredibly relevant today. That’s vindication.

Inspired by the real-life story of Eugene Allen, an African-American butler who served in the White House under eight presidents—1952 through 1986—the film stars Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a Southern plantation worker raised in the 1920s who becomes a servant at the most famous American address in 1952. But his more liberated middle-class life comes with a price. While he works hard to provide for his family, he comes into conflict with his wife (played by Oprah Winfrey) over his long hours and with one of his sons, who has awakened to the injustice of racism and seeks to rebel against and change the system.

The Connection spoke with Daniels, Winfrey and Whitaker about the film and its personal impact.

Daniels says that the civil rights move-
ment was in the back of his head when he
made the film, but he felt it was a father-and-
son love story first. However, when he shot a
scene on a bus where black and white stu-
dents were attacked by Nazis and KKK mem-
bers—on a bridge where black men were
actually hanged in the past—the director had
an epiphany.

“I yelled, ‘Action,’ and I was in the bus with
these actors, these kids, and [then came] the
spitting and the shaking of the bus, and I
yelled, ‘Cut,’ ” he recalls. “They couldn’t hear
me and continued on. For that millisecond I
understood what it was like to be them—not
just the black kids that were there, but the
white kids that were there that were willing to
risk their lives for freedom. They were heroes.
I broke down crying because I knew then that
this was not just a father-and-son love story,
but something bigger.”
Co-star Winfrey acknowledges her debt
to the brave young people who stood up
against racism and paved the way for her and
others. “I’m a student of my own history, and I
understand that had that entire generation not
done that, I wouldn’t be sitting here for sure
and the country wouldn’t be where it is for
sure,” she asserts. “So help me God, you can-
not move forward in your life without a sense
of connection to where you are grounded;
otherwise, the very first time a storm hits, the
very first time you are up against a crisis, you
fall apart. That doesn’t happen to me. Bad
things are going to happen in everybody’s life,
you’re going to have crises, but when you
know where you come from and when you
absolutely understand the legacy, the history
and the ground that’s been laid for you, you
keep standing because you know that other
people have had it worse than you. This movie
allows us to see that. It’s wonderful.”
Whitaker was inspired by the “amazing
story” of Eugene Allen and by Danny Strong’s
script. He felt that Cecil’s character “allowed
me the opportunity to deal with my family—
look at family, my wife, my son, our relation-
ship, and at the same time my own stance on
the world and how I wanted to be able to live
and [how] everyone deserved the quality of a
good life. I started to do research on the
period and the time and looking at that as a
whole so that I could make that an organic
part of myself, so the experiences of the day
would be inside of me.”
A big lesson that audiences can learn
about the civil rights movement from Lee
Daniels’ The Butler is that people’s lives were
more complicated than just dealing with that.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Americans were debat-
ing the Vietnam War, women’s liberation and
other issues, not to mention just trying to sur-
vive. “You know that Marvin Gaye song
‘What’s Going On’? All that stuff was going on
at the same time,” notes Winfrey. “The whole
country was bubbling up. There was a whole
energetic force that was happening.” C

Bryan Reesman is a New York–based freelance writer.

Serving up
histor y
blu-ray picks

Tablet or smartphone? Scan or click here for a trailer from Lee Daniels’ The Butler. (See page 5 for scanning details.)

The Costco Connection Lee Daniels’ The Butler is available at all Costco warehouses in a Blu-ray combo pack.

Forest Whitaker, above right, as the butler, Cecil Gaines, with Oprah Winfrey as his wife and with Robin Williams (inset) as President Dwight D. Eisenhower.