Word: morrisons
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...another sense, Winfrey's production of Beloved is a logical extension of her TV book club; it brings a novel she loves to millions, who can read it at the movies. Morrison was an early beneficiary of Oprah's literary saleswomanship; her 1977 Song of Solomon was the book club's second selection. "Sales were thunderous!" the author says. "It sold more in three or four months than it had in its entire 20 years...
...none of Morrison's novels had been filmed, and that was fine with her. "I was always annoyed," says the author and Princeton professor, "when my students would ask, 'When is there going to be a movie?' I told them that a novel is not what happens before the movie. Why can't it just be a book?" Morrison knows the page and the screen are only distantly related, especially in the adaptation of a novel like Beloved--dense, elliptical, teeming with allusion and metaphor, leaping from now to then and back again, in pain. Turning a book into...
...Oprah? Recalls Morrison: "She said, and this is kind of charming, 'I am going in my pocketbook and write a check.' I wasn't talking to a studio or a lawyer but to another human being. If you'll excuse it, it reminded me of myself. A single black woman who said, 'Well, I'm doing this. It's going to be hard for me, but that's beside the point.' This was a big project and, for her, a big deal. And she was deadly serious about every aspect...
...becomes a freed slave, not unmindful of Sethe but unchained to her. If Beloved is to succeed with viewers, it will be in part because they recognize that the film belongs, eventually, to Elise; she is the hope that can rise from hurt. "Watching her was so gratifying," Morrison says. "Every time she was onscreen I was happy. You know that feeling: 'Oh, she's back...
...these things, and it was great theater every day watching her do it. There were times when Oprah the person would be so overwhelmed with compassion and empathy for Sethe the character that her emotions would take her far away from where Sethe needed to be. As Toni Morrison told me, 'Remember, Jonathan, Oprah cries. Sethe doesn...