Word: coonskins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...month gave one unexpected prize to the Washington Post (a well-deserved one to Editorial Writer Meg Greenfield), and two to the Times, including the most controversial of all, to Columnist William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter whose persistence, the judges concluded, had helped pin Bert Lance's coonskin to the wall...
...coonskin cap and buckskin breeches, Daniel Boone has to remain constantly on the alert against the Shawnee and Cherokee Indians who are threatening the little settlement he is helping to develop along the Kentucky River. (Two white men were murdered last December, and more than half of the 500 original settlers have returned home.) When no hostile Indians are in sight, Boone forages for food, but friends claim that he is too softhearted to shoot small animals. Instead, he prefers a trick called "barking off squirrels." Says one Kentucky taleteller: "The whiplike report resounded through the woods. Judge...
...COONSKIN...
Before it was released, Coonskin was a "controversial" movie. Representatives of CORE who saw it in preview denounced it for trafficking in vicious racial stereotypes, and this anger caused its original distributor, Paramount, to relinquish it gratefully to a smaller, less visible competitor. Once this happened, of course, the film was defended by other black groups charging censorship. They claimed that although Coonskin indeed showed blacks as hookers, hoodlums and con artists, it also showed the principal characters as tough, smart and ultimately victorious over still worse oppressors-mainly, corrupt cops and vile mafiosi...
...often happens when hassles like this break out, people get so busy taking a position that they lose sight of the fact that the object of their contention is not worth the hot air they expend on it. In the case of Coonskin, a slovenly ineptitude of design and execution, not a desire to affront, should be the subject of all the debate...