By Christine Westwood
Excited and emotional, Bob Hercules and Rita Coburn Whack were keenly mindful of the responsibility of creating the first film biography on this major America. They each brought many years of experience to the project. Hercules has produced and directed documentaries for over 25 years, from America’s Great Indian Leaders (1994) to Senator Obama Goes To Africa (2007) and festival favourite, A Good Man (2011), on the work of director/ choreographer, Bill T. Jones. Whack, meanwhile, was awarded Emmys for producing the documentaries, African Roots (1995-6) and Remembering 47th Street (2000-1). But it was her role as producer and director of Special Projects for Oprah Radio that led to her producing The Maya Angelou Show from 2006 to its final run in 2010. Under Whack’s direction, the show won two American Women In Radio And Television awards.
“I had a long connection with Maya, and was drawn to her story,” Whack tells FilmInk. “Ever since I began to work in film and television, it was really important to me to listen to and promote the voice of women, and the voice of African American women in particular. History hasn’t been chronicled enough from that perspective. Maya was born in 1928 in the Jim Crow south, she became part of the arts community in New York, and she toured with the state department with Porgy And Bess in the 1950s. We want people to walk away seeing how richly she lived her life, and by the same token, how much potential we each have inside us. She was an overcomer. One of her quotes that we start the film with is, ‘You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.’ That’s what she did with her life.”
The film took four years to complete, and was funded on Kickstarter with more than 1,200 backers who raised over $150,000. It depicts the extraordinary life of a totally unique woman. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928, Angelou was raped at age 7, and her ensuing five years of silence led her to become a precocious reader. Her life in the south led to her early radicalisation. She was a teenage mother, a sex worker, and during her long life (she died in 2014, age 86), she was married three times, to a Greek, a South African freedom fighter, and an Englishman. Above all, the film shows her as a massively expressive personality who found her outlet in performing, from her career as a calypso dancer in the 1950s to her role as The White Queen in the controversial Jean Genet play, The Blacks, in the 1960s, and most famously through her many lectures and readings, including being awarded the first of three Grammy awards for her poem, “On The Pulse Of Morning,’ which she performed at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993.
Many of the speakers in the film, including Cicely Tyson, Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hilary Clinton, and James Earl Jones, are celebrities in their own right. Speaking to the audience after the film’s screening at The Sundance Film Festival, Hercules explained that he and Whack “weren’t trying to make a film that was star studded. It just so happens that her life intersected with all these people. They were key figures in her story.” Added Whack: “She came up at a time when all the people that you see were not known. Cicely Black, Lou Gosset Jr…they were all starting out. The places that she happened to be attracted that type of audience and those types of friendships. As she became voiced in her own purpose, she drew these people to her. She mentored people, and at the same time, she wanted to stay current, so she wrote things like the poem when Michael Jackson died; she knew his mother. What we don’t have in the film is that she was a country music aficionado. She wanted to keep current with everybody who was out there. Because of the things that happened to her, she sincerely opened her heart to respect other people, and it was across racial lines.”
The strength of the documentary is in the chronological narrative, much of it narrated in Angelou’s own voice and words, known to readers worldwide from her poetry and novels, beginning with the autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969). The cumulative effect is a compelling, rich portrait. Straddling both sides of the black movement, Angelou was friends with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and she hosted parties and gatherings for many other thinkers and creatives of the time. The film treatment adds up to a strong, unromantic biography, and a cultural document of black and feminist consciousness spanning the activist’s life from her birth in 1928 to her death in 2014.
“We tried to keep ourselves out of the way of the film,” Hercules says. “We tried to tell this very complex story so that it would be understandable, and accessible to people. If you try to inject too much of your artistry in the wrong way, it can muddy up the process. This film is a huge story. It’s so meaningful to people, and so inspirational, so why get in the way of it? Maya is basically the narrator through all of the great interviews that we got hold of. You don’t need to get in the way of Maya Angelou – she’s the greatest storyteller ever.” Adds Whack: “Not only the greatest storyteller, but the greatest voice. As documentary filmmakers, we’re extending history. It’s a very big responsibility. What we have an opportunity to do is extend into generations the living words that Maya put out there. They are so inspirational. She worked through her own racism, she worked through forgiving herself and forgiving others, and she became a proponent of everybody. She would say, ‘We are more alike than unalike.’ I think that the film will fuel people to read more about her because you’ll need to fill in the gaps. We tried to create a rich tapestry of her life with some things that you didn’t know. People will find a lot of surprises in the film. They will get to know Maya as a woman, as a mother, as a lover, as an activist, as an artist, and how those things came into being.”
Colin Johnson – Angelou’s grandson, and also present at Sundance – has a physical similarity to his famous grandmother, and spoke warmly of the positive impact that the documentary has had for Angelou’s whole family. “This is a special moment,” he says. “Finally, someone is telling my grandmother’s story from the factual documentarian point of view, and to educate people on how she became this amazing woman. We want new generations to understand who she was, but also to show all the people that know and love her elements of her life that they might not have known before, to further their love and appreciation. For my family, it’s an amazing first step. It has never been done before, and it could not have been done by better people. It’s been done with the right context and the right reverence for who she was and for her voice. My grandmother used to say, ‘Courage is the most important of all human characteristics because without courage, you can’t put anything else into practice.’”
Adds Whack: “Personally, I began to feel closer to her through the project. The time period that I spent with her was really at the end of her life, so this was about getting to know her family and getting to know her more fully as a person. It became a very personal story, and I wanted to make sure that I was being authentic, because I knew that there was a responsibility; we had to be careful to be truthful and not to sugar coat anything. I also came to recognise the hard things that she did, like fighting racism and fighting sexism. Seeing what she did has taught me to stand up even taller for myself, and not to be defeated on any level. We hope that people walking out of the film are inspired to see that they can overcome anything, because that is what she did and what she said.”
Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise will be released later this year.
