RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK BOY
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Film Treatment and Grant
Written by Kwyn Bader
1992
Awarded an Emmy by the Southern Region
for Best Documentary
Soon after graduating from Columbia University, Kwyn began working on projects for Emmy award winning documentary producer Madison Davis Lacy, Jr. Tapping his English major skills and passion for American literature, Lacy asked Kwyn to co-write a proposal for the National Endowment for the Humanities on Richard Wright, the author of Black Boy and Native Son. The grant, with treatment and narration by Kwyn, succeeded in raising over a million dollars in production monies for the film from NEH and other public television entities.
Below is text from the proposal introduction by Kwyn:
Black Boy tells the story of the American author Richard Wright. Wright was the first major black writer of the 20th century to express the anger and alienation of African-Americans in stark, forceful, and violent terms. Wright used words as weapons. He protested racial injustice in America with a naturalistic style that layed open for its readers fears, hatreds, and pains of black Americans which had not been dealt with so coldly and honestly. Along with his contemporaries, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, he questioned the fundamental idea of America.
Our film will examine how Wright's work, driven by intense personal feelings, ushered in a new era of black literature and black literary figures. It will look at how Wright's work affected its audience socially, emotionally, and politically. It will portray him as an heroic figure who escaped the Jim Crow south for Chicago and New York, who by the strength of his mind and talent became a world renknowned writer living out his last thirteen years in France.
The narrative of our story is driven by a collage of story telling witnesses. These principal story tellers will include writers--those who knew and worked with Wright. The words of Margaret Walker, John Henrik Clarke, Albert Murray, Constance Webb Pearlstein and others will paint pictures of Wright's emotional and attitudinal landscape as he struggled to shape his rage as literature. His daughter Julia, his wife Ellen, and close personal contacts Herb Gentry, Helene Bokanowski, Essie Lee Ward Davis, Minnie Farish,and Ollie Harrington will allow us to enhance those pictures with intimate detail. To help move the narrative along and provide analysis, we will turn occasionally to scholars, such as Arnold Rampersad, Kenneth Kinnamon, Michel Fabre, and Joyce Ann Joyce. Because of the power of Wright's words, at critical points in the film we will hear key passages from Wright's works evoked by a voice that serves as Wright's throughout the film. All will help us try to comprehend the anger and fear that animated Richard Wright's creative use of words as weapons against injustice.