Boxoffice Pro - August 2020

INDUSTRY A CENTURY IN EXHIBITION
in Lilies of the Field. Writes journalist and
author Mark Harris in his book Pictures at
a Revolution, Poitier was worried that his
win would only lead to complacency, as the
industry would busy itself with self-congratulation
instead of working toward
additional progress. Poitier’s fears proved
correct: he did not get another offer for a
year after winning the Academy Award.
But the actor was also internally
conflicted over the kind of parts he was
playing. Was portraying one-dimensional
Black characters a necessary sacrifice to
open the way for more actors of color in
Hollywood? Some civil rights activists
were indeed condemning the portrayal
of African Americans on the silver screen.
The NAACP led discussions with major
studios to ensure progress on the issues of
job access and on-screen representation.
Other groups, including women and
Latinx communities, began protesting as
well. A 1962 Boxoffice Pro article reported
that leaders of indigenous peoples
in New Mexico had been “long frustrated
over [their] treatment” in American film
and were planning to open their own
production companies. After the 1968
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., a coalition of industry stars including
Poitier, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and
Candice Bergen created a nonprofit group
to produce films on racial and social issues.
The proceeds were to go to the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.
Poitier became the top box office draw
of 1967 with the interracial romantic
comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
(which became Columbia’s biggest success
to date), To Sir, With Love, and the Oscar-winning
In the Heat of the Night. The
success of these films proved two things:
Black moviegoers could be a lucrative audience,
and films about and starring Black
people could play in the South. Exhibitors
did not accept these truths without resistance.
Some theaters edited moments, like
Poitier and Katharine Houghton’s kiss in
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, out of their
prints. More alarmingly, the KKK picketed,
and even considered planning attacks on,
theaters that played these films.
The new social context created by the
civil rights movement and the counterculture
revolution produced an appetite
among younger audiences for films that
spoke to the reality of the decade. The
catastrophic flops of expensive films
like Cleopatra (1963) and Doctor Dolittle
(1967) proved the desire for something
new. In 1952, the Supreme Court had ruled
that Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle, a
controversial film that drew criticism from
the Catholic Church, was an artistic work
protected under the First Amendment.
With that decision, the threat of government
censorship was eliminated, opening
the gates for a wave of foreign films that
Black-only theaters, which
were run by African American
managers but often owned
by whites, were less numerous
than their white-only
counterparts and mostly ran
second- or third-run films.
Some cities, like Charlotte and
Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
had no theaters for Black
audiences at all.
42 August 2020