Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [180]
In 1997 she found the Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), who said he couldn’t wait to see her play Sethe. Demme was hired on the spot, and Oprah became the producer and star.
“This is my Schindler’s List,” she said, referencing Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece. She felt that she could do for descendants of slavery what Spielberg had done for Holocaust survivors—bring to the screen a story of heroism surrounded by heinous evil. This was to be her first feature film production, although she had been producing made-for-television films on ABC under the banner of “Oprah Winfrey Presents,” and most had won their time slots with high ratings, if not rave reviews.
“Do you suppose anyone has ever had the nerve to tell Oprah Winfrey to go soak her head?” wrote The Washington Post’s TV critic, Tom Shales, about her production of David and Lisa, which was directed by Oprah’s first Baltimore boyfriend, Lloyd Kramer. “[H]er evangelistic tendencies are beginning to spin way out of control.… She’ll improve and nurture and inspire us even if it kills us.” Shales objected to Oprah’s on-camera introduction: “She tells us what the film is about, what the moral message is and how we should react to it.… She also spells out some of the plot, perhaps for people who move their lips when they watch TV.… Winfrey playing national nanny is getting to be a drag. ‘It’s a story I wanted to tell to a whole new generation,’ she says grandly into the camera. Oh, Oprah. Give it a rest already.”
She brought the same high moral fervor to the making of Beloved. “It’s my history. It is my legacy. It is the capital WHO of who I am,” she said of the three-hour film that cost $53 million to produce, plus another $30 million to promote. “It’s wonderful to be in the position to finance the movie yourself,” she said. “I don’t care if two people come to see it or two million. This movie will be done and it will be incredible, one of the great statements in my life.”
To prepare for her role she began collecting slave memorabilia, buying at auction ownership papers from various plantations, which listed the names and purchase prices of humans alongside those of mules and pigs under the designation of “property.” She framed the wrenching documents and hung them in her home and in her trailer during filming. Five generations removed from slavery, she lit candles to “the spirits of the ancestors,” said she heard the voices of slaves and prayed aloud to them every day. She bought as her “first very serious art purchase from Sotheby’s” a painting by Harry Roseland titled To the Highest Bidder, which she hung over the fireplace in her Indiana farm. The canvas shows a black slave and her young daughter trembling with fear on the auction block.
Oprah also enrolled in “The Underground Railroad Immersion Experience,” to reenact the emotions of a runaway slave who has been denied free will and independent thinking. For two days she lived as a fugitive, blindfolded, chased by bloodhounds, and spat upon by whiskeyed slave masters on horseback. “I knew I was still Oprah Winfrey, and I could take off the blindfold anytime I wanted, but the reaction to being called a nigger was just visceral for me. I wanted to quit. But I didn’t. I wanted to feel it all. I touched a dark, hollow place of hopelessness that I’ll never forget. It was a transforming experience for me. I came out fearless because I truly learned where I came from.”
Oprah was determined to present a story that exposed how slaves absorbed the abuse of their masters, turning it on their own—physically, sexually, emotionally. The taboo theme of sexual abuse, so frequently left out of slave narratives, drew her because of her own personal experience, and she resolved to show the horror of sexual molestation on-screen. She wanted audiences