Amos and andy alvin childress series#
Amos and andy alvin childress tv#

And I know that you all has loved him as much as I has. “You and me has always considered him one of our greatest friends. Here is Calhoun, for example, speaking from notes at a lodge banquet in honor of the Kingfish, a scene at once hilarious because he begins by mistakenly reading a funeral eulogy and offensive because his stereotypical dialect and language (this guy is a lawyer, no less) denigrates blacks as illiterate:

Amos and andy alvin childress series#

Pop in a cassette and you get some idea of why the series was so popular in its day, and also so loathed. Many “Amos ‘n’ Andy” episodes are available on video. Calhoun (Johnny Lee) and Lightnin’ (Horace Stewart), the slow-moving janitor at the Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge, where males in the series often hung out.

Other prominent characters included shifty, fast-talking lawyer Algonquin J. NBC’s “Sanford and Son” became the second-21 years later.

Amos and andy alvin childress tv#

“Amos ‘n’ Andy” was hugely popular for years before moving its segregated universe to TV in 1951 minus Correll and Freeman, becoming the small screen’s first sitcom with a nearly all-black cast. It began in 1928 as a series about African Americans in Harlem, created, written and starred in by Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, a pair of white performers who posed for publicity photos and appeared in two movies as their characters in blackface. Just as Beulah’s roots were in radio, so, too, did “Amos ‘n’ Andy” start there, only much earlier. Beulah’s boyfriend was shiftless, moreover, and her flighty best friend, Oriole, was also a domestic. Another of these was the heroine of “Beulah,” a stereotypical sitcom about a good-hearted black maid who was only moderately less bumbling than her white employers. One significant difference: Whereas contemporary African American comedies have projected a variety of images, from derisive to uplifting, “Amos ‘n’ Andy” characters headed a very short list of blacks consistently visible on TV in that show’s era. You know? These guilty pleasures.And second, “Amos ‘n’ Andy”-which has come to symbolize the essence of TV bigotry in the medium’s first two decades-seems no more racially demeaning than some black sitcoms of the ‘90s sometimes do. I can’t help myself.” So I think that kind of tension is dramatized in the movie-how it would even split some families, and people would almost be watching it like pornography. But then when he would leave, the grandmother would be like, “I know it’s bad for us, but I love them so much. It would come on the air, and his dad’s own mother would be like, “Oh, let’s watch this show!” And he’d be like, “Mom, we can’t watch this show.” He’d pull young David Alan Grier and his brothers and sisters away from the TV screen, so they couldn’t see it. In the ’60s, was just as red, black, and green as you can get-really a towering intellectual figure. David Alan Grier, whose father was a very famous black psychiatrist-wrote a famous book called Black Rage -tells this great story. It’s funny: The actors-especially comic actors-know much more about it, obviously, than I ever did and than most people did. What have the conversations been like in the room while you’ve been directing? What have you guys been talking about and mining while putting this together? Just when it was about to do really great things, the NAACP came in and really shut it down.Īnd the cast includes David Alan Grier and Jesse Williams-Īnd Mykelti Williamson, Yvette Nicole Brown from Community. So certainly, the story is the rise and especially the fall of these three comic geniuses and this really important black television show. And the cast of characters-the act of Amos and Andy and Kingfish-were some of the greatest comedians of all time. It’s all the #OscarsSoWhite, and every season with the new TV shows, where we look to see, “How are these images? How diverse are they?” And so, the more I looked into it, it just became an irresistible story. Such a rich world to explore, and so current.

After I dove in and started reading about them and finding out about these black actors, with an all-black cast, and how beloved it was by working-class black people and how reviled it was by upper-class black people-or at least publicly reviled, and maybe secretly they liked it. So my line about this choice and making it: Everything I thought I knew about Amos ’n’ Andy was wrong. As soon as they said the name, I just kind of recoiled, like, “That seems like Stepin Fetchit, Uncle Tom.” It’s like, “I don’t want to open that door.” Because I knew nothing about it. Professor Henry Louis Gates at Harvard and Henry Finder at the New Yorker came to me with this idea about doing a fiction film about Amos ’n’ Andy. What was it about Amos ’n’ Andy that made you want to explore that story in a narrative feature? Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with writing this script.