Actor urges 'Cold Mountain' boycott, claims slavery ignored

Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | 1.27.04 | Bob Longino

[mhking]

When Oscar nominations are announced this morning, the popular Civil War romance-drama "Cold Mountain" is expected to be competing for multiple awards.

If Miramax Films' 155-minute epic, starring Hollywood heavyweights Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renée Zellweger and based on Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel, gets a best picture nod, it will surely make aggressive studio chief Harvey Weinstein happy. But some moviegoers who saw "Cold Mountain" won't be smiling.

Erik Todd Dellums, an African-American actor from Washington who has appeared on TV shows such as "Homicide: Life on the Street" and in films like "Doctor Dolittle" with Eddie Murphy, is calling on moviegoers to boycott "Cold Mountain," claiming it's a Civil War film that fails to address the issue of slavery.

"This has less to do with 'Cold Mountain' per se than Hollywood missing another prime opportunity to tell some truth," Dellums said recently by phone from Birmingham, where he's making the indie horror film "Camp D.O.A."

Earlier this month, the San Francisco Chronicle published Dellums' anti-"Cold Mountain" message, and his opinion piece has since appeared on various Internet sites.

Calling the film "a sham, a slap in the face of African-Americans," Dellums wrote that "Cold Mountain" "plays like 'Saving Private Ryan,' another Hollywood epic in which black contributions to history -- namely the Battle of Normandy -- are left out." (The full text of Dellums' statement can be found at www.commondreams.org/views04/0104-06.htm.)

Dellums is not alone. In an opinion piece headlined "A cold, white mountain" in Raleigh's The News & Observer, staff writer Barry Saunders wrote that "all during the movie, I ruminated on our absence from it, even though the main backdrop -- the Civil War -- was ostensibly about us. For black people, the movie, one could conclude, was like having a party thrown in your honor -- and not being invited."

"Cold Mountain" includes appearances by a couple dozen black characters, including several who toil on the farm where Kidman's character lives. Blacks are mentioned in the dialogue, and the main white characters at times voice their displeasure with slavery. But the African-Americans who appear never speak.

Dellums said public reaction to his call for a boycott has been "extraordinary."

"I just sent my thoughts out to a select group of friends and colleagues, and it's gone all over the place, including Germany, France, England," he said. "I find it disheartening and disconcerting to be in a free society and working in an industry that has been stereotyped as liberal and then find the powers in this media are very conservative. They're more concerned with the way a film will play in certain demographics as opposed to telling the truth and just letting the art come through."

He's calling for a boycott, he said, because "we as a people don't have the power to tell them how to change unless we pool our dollars. And I find it humiliating to not allow our history to be told honestly."

So far, it seems apparent Dellums' cry for a "Cold Mountain" boycott has gone mostly unheeded. The film has earned more than $70 million since opening on Christmas Day and will most certainly pass the combined box office of two major Hollywood films in recent years that did focus on slavery -- Denzel Washington's "Glory" (1989), which made $26.8 million, and Steven Spielberg's "Amistad" (1997), which pulled in $44.2 million in North America.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard University's department of African and African-American studies, recently saw the movie at the studio's invitation and didn't share Dellums' criticism.

"Certainly we need more films about the African-American experience during the Civil War and about slavery in general," he says, speaking in response to Miramax's request to address the issue. "And I have to confess, it is remarkably difficult for me as an African-American to sympathize with a Confederate soldier. However, it strikes me that 'Cold Mountain' is essentially a love story between two white people who live in a rural area where slavery was not a fundamental aspect of the economy. It's a mistake to think that most white people in the South had slaves. They didn't. So while I understand the criticism, I think we should be directing our efforts toward having films made where slavery was more essential a part of that story."

He adds that the film's box office success might help pave the way for those other sorts of movies to be made.

"Cold Mountain" has faced other issues, too, including another recent boycott call from some in the western North Carolina movie community, since the $80 million film was made in Romania as opposed to the story's main setting, the mountains of North Carolina.

Miramax Executive Vice President of Worldwide Publicity Amanda Lundberg says the studio shot for three weeks on location in North Carolina and Virginia, spending almost $20 million in the United States. But the film needed a location that would guarantee four distinct seasons and also snow -- something that isn't a predictable quantity in the North Carolina mountains. Ultimately, filming entirely in the United States would have cost around $120 million. "It would have been an irresponsible budget, and the movie would not have been made," Lundberg says.

In another spark of controversy, a recent Washington Post story reported the opinions of three University of Virginia professors on the film's historical accuracy.

One, Gary Gallagher, affirmed the film's opening, the depiction of an 1864 battle during the siege of Petersburg, Va. But he also said one of the keys to the battle was the involvement of African-American troops, which is virtually ignored both in Charles Frazier's book and director Anthony Minghella's film.

Another professor, Edward Ayers, said that on the issue of race and slavery, the filmmakers simply "ducked."

While Dellums and others question the film's historical presentation, Gary Moss, an Oscar voter who lives in Atlanta and was a 1989 Academy Award nominee for the short "Gullah Tales," wonders whether "Cold Mountain" is, at its heart, a Civil War movie.

"On one level it's an odyssey story," he said. "And it's also a film about recoiling from modernity. This isn't about the American South so much as it is about the conflict between the power of machinery and human power. The battle involves a massive explosion and mass slaughter like the world has never seen before."

What Jude Law's character does, Moss said, is attempt to flee from the onslaught of modern machinery -- to return to simplicity.

Moss said he understands why some African-Americans would be upset that the film doesn't forthrightly address the issue of slavery.

"But it would be a terrible shame to boycott the movie for that reason," he said. "I don't like criticizing films for what they are not."

Tara Roberts, of Atlanta, publisher of the multicultural women's magazine Fierce, said her reaction to "Cold Mountain" has been, basically, "whatever."

"The racial history of this country is so complex and painful it can be very challenging to even want to step into it," she said. "I decided at some point that I haven't experienced growing up seeing many images of African-Americans in this country in that period. Slavery is a part of what we experienced and has shaped the mindset of a lot of people in this country."

But she said there is much more on her mind.

"I am more interested in telling and hearing broader stories about us as a people," she said. "Our history is huge. . . . As a black woman, I want to make sure the depth of who we are is expressed."

As for "Cold Mountain," she said, "I wasn't interested in it in the first place. I thought it would be treated that way.

"It's the same reason," she said, "I can no longer go to see 'in the 'hood' movies anymore."

[aristeides]

William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 has a map of 1855 slave density in the South on pp. 10-11. It was very low in the mountain country of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.

[SauronOfMordor]

Four tons of powder? Five hundred feet? What were the Confederates doing that they didn't catch onto this plan????

Tha Battle of the Crater

[aodell]

Thanks for the link. It's a fascinating story! It's just too bad so many had to die in order to write it.