The 150th anniversary commemorations of the Civil War have sanctioned the making of a cluster of films about slavery and abolition. “Django Unchained,” “Lincoln,” and “12 Years a Slave” will be followed by a movie about John Brown.
Ed Harris will play the radical abolitionist, who was committed to the belief that only violence could eradicate slavery, in Giancarlo Esposito’s “Patriotic Treason,” adapted by José Rivera from the 2006 book by Evan Carton.
Esposito will himself play Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and emancipator famed for his oratory. The film is being backed by Spectrum Films and Act 4. Deadline, which broke the news, reported that Spectrum’s Keith Sweitzer studied Brown under Professor Carton at the University of Texas and “helped develop the ‘Patriotic Treason’ book deal” (with the University of Nebraska Press). An early summer 2014 shoot is anticipated.
Two months before Brown led the armed raid at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia on October 16, 1859, he visited Douglass’s home and tried to recruit him as a liaison officer to enlist black recruits. Douglass declined, arguing that the attack on a federal arsenal “would array the whole country against us.” Though she was opposed to the use of arms, Harriet Tubman helped Brown plan the raid but was either too ill to participate or away recruiting slaves or rescuing family members.
Thwarted by marines led by Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee (aided by Lt. “Jeb” Stuart), the raid culminated in the killing of 10 of Brown’s 20 men, six civilians (including the local mayor and two slaves), and two marines. Wounded in the action, Brown was tried for treason, convicted, and hung on December 2 that year; he was 59. Walt Whitman and John Wilkes Booth were in the crowd that witnessed the execution. The heavy military presence included an artillery unit commanded by Major Thomas (later “Stonewall”) Jackson. Six of Brown’s raiders were also hung.
In John Cromwell’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” (1940), the biblically white-bearded Brown was played by Cromwell himself (without a credit). Raymond Massey went from playing Lincoln in that picture to playing Brown in his next, Michael Curtiz’s fictionalized Stuart biopic “Santa Fe Trail” (1940). Massey was Brown again in “Seven Angry Men” (1955), Hollywood’s only significant previous film about his insurrection, which made the war inevitable.
Sterling Hayden, who looked like Brown in “The Long Goodbye” (1973), wound up his career playing him in the 1982 “The Blue and the Grey” miniseries; Johnny Cash followed suit in another series, “North and South” (1985). Royal Dano, a genuine Brown lookalike, played him in the 1971 comedy Western “The Skin Game”; he had been a TV Lincoln in 1952-53. Dano appeared in the Civil War classic “The Red Badge of Courage” (1951) with another great character, John Dierkes, who would have made a formidable Brown but never got the chance.
When Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” opened a year ago, it generated speculation about why there had never been a Douglass biopic. In August, Russell Simmons announced he would be making a seven-part miniseries about Douglass and a series or feature about Tubman. The latter biopic grew out of the furious reaction to the Tubman “sex tape parody” with which the hip-hop mogul launched his All Def Digital Channel on YouTube and subsequently pulled.
In this interview with the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, however, Simmons says, “I was going to do Frederick Douglass and they [HBO] were very excited about it” [italics mine]. The status of the Tubman project is equally vague.
Both have been given short shrift in the movies, an obvious residue of racism. Cicely Tyson starred as Tubman in NBC’s 1978 miniseries “A Woman Called Moses,” which was narrated by Orson Welles. Summer Selby played her in a 1992 TV short, “The Quest for Freedom.”
Douglass has been portrayed on screen 25 times, mostly on TV, according to IMDb. James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, Ossie Davis, Cleavon Little, Don Cheadle, and Richard Brooks are among those who have played him. In 1989’s “Glory,” Brown was portrayed by Raymond St. Jacques, an actor who played a major part in lowering racial barriers for black actors, initially by becoming a series regular on “Rawhide.”
