Word: oprahization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...What Oprah wants, Oprah gets. She has, after all, earned an Oscar nomination for her first movie part, in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. For more than a decade she has dominated the afternoon airwaves with her syndicated talk show. She is among the nation's most admired and influential people. Now, 11 years after first reading the Morrison novel, here she is as the producer of what she told screenwriter Richard LaGravenese would be "my Schindler's List": a pristine, potent distillation of Beloved, which opens Oct. 16. And there she is onscreen as Sethe. Or rather...
...like a full steamer trunk. She is, as the book puts it, "iron-eyed"; her gaze is an Old Testament judgment, her love a demon that can crush those it enfolds. The actress and the character share intelligence and passion, but in many particulars Sethe is the anti-Oprah. If Sethe were a talk-show host, she would stare down her guests and say, "You think you've had troubles...
...imagine how Jerry Springer would herald her performance: Oprah makes love with a naked Danny Glover! Oprah squats and urinates! Oprah as Sethe: Victim or murderer? The story is based on the true case of Margaret Garner, a renegade slave who tried to kill her children rather than allow them to be returned to the plantation from which she had escaped. In the novel, Sethe is pursued by the spirit of the one child, Beloved, who died at her hand. But the film is really about the things we do for love, about the fatal consequences of moral strength, about...
...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...
...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...