'Prize' realized for civil rights documentary
http://host.madison.com/entertainment/movies/article_e9f7eb76-53c3-11df-98af-001cc4c03286.html
By ROB THOMAS
[email protected]
May 2, 2010
In the early 1980s, while her brother, Henry, was working on the
landmark PBS civil rights series "Eyes on the Prize," Judi Hampton
had a job in the communications department of a large oil company.
She vividly remembers the time she flew down to a large oil-producing
state - she declines to specify which one - and drove out with a
group of colleagues to a small rural town.
"I remember I was with some white colleagues, and they asked me to
get down in the back of the car," she said in a phone interview.
"They said it's just a precaution. I remember that. And here I was
being sent down there by a major oil company."
That was the racial climate that "Eyes on the Prize" faced when it
aired in 1987, a landmark 14-part series that chronicled black
Americans' struggle for equality between 1954 and 1965. It was
considered essential viewing by historians, and history teachers
would bring in VHS copies of the series to show their classes.
And then, after making such a cultural stamp on the country, it
vanished. While Henry Hampton had secured the initial rights to all
the archival footage and music used in the series, those rights
subsequently lapsed. When he died in 1998, "Eyes on the Prize" could
not be released on DVD or broadcast on television.
"I think it was a different era where he got some agreements on a
handshake," Judi Hampton said. "But now this is a big issue in the
entertainment community, the rights to any music or performance. It's
become quite complicated now. And costly."
Upon his death, Hampton's sisters, Judi and Viva, inherited their
brother's production company, Blackside Inc. They set about the long
process of securing all the necessary clearance rights so that "Eyes
on the Prize" could finally be seen again.
After eight years of work, in 2006, they got the necessary clearance
to have the series available to schools. And, last month, "Eyes on
the Prize" was finally released on DVD and aired on public
television. (Wisconsin Public Television said it currently has no
plans to air the series.)
"I'm euphoric," Judi Hampton said. "It's been a long struggle."
The rights issues surrounding "Eyes on the Prize" are common for
documentary filmmakers, who must pay for every song, every
photograph, every piece of footage they use in their films.
"Everything you see in there, there has to be somebody attached to
it," Judi Hampton said. "You have to go to them and get their
permission for specific parts of the series. For example, Sweet Honey
in the Rock do the 'Eyes on the Prize' song, their version of it, so
we have to get their OK, as well as the publisher and so forth."
UW law professor Shubha Ghosh said securing rights can cause real
headaches for even the biggest entertainment companies, particularly
as new forms of media arise. One of the most famous cases involved
the Walt Disney Corp., which had obtained rights to use Igor
Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" for its 1940 film "Fantasia." The
company had to go back to court decades later to win the right to
include the piece when it released "Fantasia" on laserdisc and
videotape in 1991.
More recently, the issue has come up involving the release of old
television shows on DVD. The producers of "Freaks and Geeks" had to
spend years getting the rights to the songs used in its episodes
before the series could be released on DVD. "WKRP in Cincinnati" was
long-delayed on DVD because of rights issues, and when it was
released, the DVD often used alternate music tracks to replace the
classic rock hits that the show lost the rights to.
But companies like Disney have legal teams and deep pockets at their
disposal. Documentary filmmakers, who often run into these problems
because they rely on historical source material, usually are working
with very limited resources.
"It's a very common problem in documentary film to clear things like
music, photographs, all kinds of copyrighted material," Ghosh said.
"If they were using things that were old recordings, you may not even
know who the copyright owner is."
To clean up the rights issues over "Eyes on the Prize," Blackside had
a team of people, led by attorney Sandy Forman, working to track down
rights holders and secure clearances.
The Gilder Foundation donated $250,000 toward the cause, and the Ford
Foundation, which had supported "Eyes on the Prize" since its
original broadcast, also contributed financially, Judi Hampton said.
Hampton, who currently teaches at several universities in the Boston
area, and her brother weren't just observers of the civil rights
movement, but participants. Henry Hampton told interviewers that he
marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 in Selma, Ala., and saw
riot police beat protesters. That year, he founded Blackside to make
films that dealt with social issues.
Judi Hampton was a civil rights worker, who during her winter break
from Columbia University in 1964 went to the South to volunteer. She
credits that experience with both awakening her commitment to social
justice and to education.
"That was the thing that made me feel like the first time in my life
that I was doing something useful," she said. "I was not like the
people I stayed with in Mississippi. These people were really dirt
poor and here I came in, same skin color, and had an education. I
learned a lot from them."
Hampton said she has plans to market "Eyes on the Prize" through the
year, and expects that interest will be renewed in the series every
February for Black History Month.
While schools are using the series to expose a new generation of
students to an era many know little about, Hampton said she thinks
its reach could be even broader.
" 'Eyes on the Prize' is a study of human rights," she said. "It's
used in a bigger context than just the African-American community.
It's a universal message."
And, not that she or Henry Hampton ever would have wanted it that
way, but she said it's fitting that the series is finally being released now.
"It's the other end of the arc," she said. "You start with the
Awakenings and (murdered African-American teenager) Emmett Till, all
the way up to (Barack) Obama's election. Whether or not you
politically supported him, the fact that an African-American man who
is multiracial sits in the White House and this country elected him,
it's unbelievable."
.
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