Word: parkers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...knew the moment I read it," he says, "that it was a powerful story. What I did was to strengthen the social and political point of view, strengthen the characters, strengthen the overall quality of the film." And once shooting started, Parker took over, as a director will. The Writers Guild strike required that Gerolmo absent himself from the set; Parker apparently concurred in that ruling. Gerolmo's final arbitration: "The screenplay is mine, but the movie is Alan's. That's the way the world works out here...
...Parker's great challenge was making the world of his movie work in Mississippi. He and co-producer Robert Colesberry stalked 300 towns as likely locations, with the director impishly yelling, "Alabama Burning?" "Georgia Burning?" "Arkansas Burning?" But he selected Mississippi -- to the delight of the state film commission, which was willing to display its old racist scowl in implicit contrast to its fresh new face of many colors...
...been bought and would be rebuilt to the congregation's specifications. "It was freezing that night," recalls Bob Penny, who played the role of one of the white conspirators, "and it was frightening. As the church burned, you could literally hear the silence of the people. At one point Parker shouted out his usual 'Don't act! Stop acting!,' and I said, 'I ain't acting -- I'm scared...
...buddy films as from Warner Bros. melodramas of the '30s, like Black Legion and They Won't Forget, which seized some social-issue headlines and fit them into brisk, dynamic fiction. % It is movie journalism: tabloid with a master touch. And the master, the suave manipulator, is Alan Parker. By avocation he is a caricaturist, and by vocation too. He chooses gross faces, grand subjects, base motives, all for immediate impact. The redneck conspirators are drawn as goofy genetic trash: there's not a three-digit IQ in the lot, not a chin in a carload. These...
...What Parker hopes to show moviegoers of 1989 is a fable about 1964 -- perhaps the very last historical moment when most American whites could see Southern blacks purely as righteous rebels for a just cause. The picture may hold even truer today. Reactionary whites may not want blacks in their schools, neighborhoods or jobs, but they can feel empathy for the film's heroic Negroes. For Parker, that Mississippi summer represented "the beginning of political consciousness, not just in the South or in America, but in the whole world." Can Mississippi Burning help raise that consciousness once again, even...