|
A SIX PART SERIES The plan for this project is to initially complete 6 hours of high quality programming, turning the following six classic short stories into films: Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible,” Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” and Richard Wright’s “The Library Card.” Along with original dramatizations of each story with name actors, each program will feature an interview with the author of the story or a scholar to shed light on the story’s intentions. Each production will be one hour, designed very much like the P.B.S. American Short Stories Series of the l980's, executive produced by Calvin Skaggs and introduced by Henry Fonda. (Mr. Skaggs is an advisor to our project). Our programs, too, will open with an introduction to the author by a celebrity host, either Morgan Freeman or Edward James Olmos. Bruce R. Schwartz is producing the six films. For that series, Mr. Schwartz adapted and directed Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” John Updike’s “A&P,” and “An Interview with Tillie Olsen.” Detailed budgets and production schedules are also available for each new program. A short description of each new project follows: Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” concerns Sylvia and her group of African-American teenage friends who live in a suburb of New York City and make a visit to a F.A.O Schwarz toy store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the coaxing of Ms. Moore. Ms. Moore’s a teacher who lives in their neighborhood and wants to expose these kids to class differences. To what it means to be a “half” or “a half not.” The story has become a classic of American Literature, anthologized in over thirty-five textbooks, and is taught at both the high school and college level, a sassy and funny tale about growing up in the ghetto. James Baldwin’s story “Sonny Blues” takes place in 1957 Harlem. This story of drug addiction in the inner city’s black ghetto is as valid today as it was when it was written. Narrated by Sony’s older brother, a math teacher, we are allowed to bare witness to the physical and emotional distance between the two brothers until Sonny’s plight is revealed and illuminated in a remarkable moment of empathy and insight by the older brother. By juxtaposing the straight math teacher and Sonny, a heroin addict blues pianist, Baldwin makes it possible for readers to enter the world of the story regardless of their racial background or their opinions about drugs. The author doesn’t judge Sonny’s plight. Instead, through the older brother, he helps us understand it, sympathize with it, and transcend it in a brief shared experience of Sonny’s inspired musical improvisation on the piano which happens late one night in a jazz club. Baldwin’s eloquent style moves the reader along, capturing the African-American culture of strong family allegiances in the face of American racism. Both Sonny and his brother are trying to survive and we respect them for their courage. Thematically, the piece sets forth the need for family values even under the most difficult of circumstances; the Harlem l957 overlay comes passionately alive in Baldwin’s hands. It is a masterpiece of American short story literature. An interview with a scholar will further illuminate and probe the story’s meaning. “The Red Convertible” is a self-contained chapter from Louise Erdrich’s award winning novel Love Medicine. Lyman, the narrator, and Henry, the older brother, live on a Chippewa Indian reservation. Henry is drafted to Vietnam as a soldier and when he returns from the war in l974 he is nothing like his old self. As Lyman (the narrator of the story) says laconically, “the changes in him from the war were no good.” We witness these changes as Lyman attempts to bring Henry back to spiritual life by the connective link they share in owning a shiny red Olds convertible together. The car, an ever-changing symbol, is at first their freedom from reservation life, then it’s meant to show their close bond, and finally it holds the key to their ultimate separation. This stingingly painful tale of the plight on these two young men trying to succeed under difficult circumstances is a contemporary masterpiece. Lyman is inventive, clever, and hard working but he cannot, ultimately, help Henry overcome his maiming from ‘Nam. Lyman tries but Henry’s hopes and dreams slowly fade out. Thematically, the effects of war have rarely been shown more clearly or more movingly. This film will be shot on a Chippewa Indian Reservation in North Dakota. An in-depth interview with author Louise Erdrich will follow. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” a blind man comes to visit the home of a couple at the wife’s invitation. The wife once worked for the blind man and they have a relationship which goes back ten years. The tale is narrated by the husband who is very uptight by the visit but unexpectedly adjusts his own vision of the blind as he and the blind man draw a cathedral together. By extending himself into a new territory where prejudice and stereotyping are left behind, the narrator and the blind man Robert find new meaning from the visit. An interview with Tess Gallegher, Carver’s surviving spouse, will follow, rounding out the program. Ms. Gallegher was the prototype for the wife in the story and wrote a version of events herself in “Rain Flooding Your Campfire.” This second story will also be dramatized and included in the program as a contrasting companion piece. Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” takes place in Georgia on a small farm where the Hopewell family lives; mother and daughter Joy/Hulga. The story is a comic and darkly satiric masterpiece of loneliness, petty values, and the loss of expectations in the rural South. We witness man’s inhumanity to man as one young Bible salesman takes advantage of thirty year old Hulga/Joy when she is at her most vulnerable. An interview with an O’Connor scholar will follow. “The Library Card,” is a self-enclosed chapter from Richard Wright’s classic of African-American Literature, Black Boy. The book describes Richard’s coming of age in 1945 Memphis, in the segregated South where he has to find ways to overcome racial barriers to gain access to the local library. In his battle to succeed, Richard cleverly forges a note which allows him to check out books so he can fulfill his need for self-education. As we witness his intellectual awakening to every great writer he can now get his hands on, we realize what all of us now take for granted as our inalienable rights. Richard’s world becomes illuminated to what it means to be white or black in the pre-civil rights South and how far education might take him in erasing those barriers. Following the dramatization will be an interview with a Wright scholar. |