Changing Hues of Hollywood: How Issues of Color Influenced the Screen Adaptations of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”
When Lorraine Hansberry finished the last pages of A Raisin in the Sun in 1957, she recalled pressing them in a pile and stretching out face down on the floor, and thinking, “I had finished a play; a play I had no reason to think or not think would ever be done; a play I was sure no one would quite understand.”
Two years later, A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway as the first of its plays written by an African-American. Two days after that, producers were burning phones off the hook in a bid for exclusive filming rights. It created a huge buzz in the entertainment industry, and everyone wanted a piece of the pie. But when Hansberry’s prize play crossed the line to film, it went through changes that became the lot of continuing criticism.
In order to get a sense of A Raisin in the Sun’s transformation — both the striking and the subtle — it’s important to have at least a broad picture of the times it was born into. When the play premiered on Broadway in 1959, the civil rights movement was roiling. Race-based riots and bus boycotts were rife. Public schools were desegregated yet even President Eisenhower had to send armies to schools to force acceptance of colored students. Civil rights activists were kidnapped, their bodies later found buried in some remote area. Martin Luther King’s speeches were evoking passionate responses from blacks and whites alike. True, America was moving beyond “separate but equal,” but the changes were slow in coming.
The field of entertainment was no different. In addition to legal reforms, Hollywood increasingly widened the crack for black artists only because of social and political events beyond its control. After the World War II, white middle-class families moved away from the cities and into the suburbs, leaving a predominantly colored population in the downtown areas where the theaters flourished at the time. The growth of television as a major form of household entertainment posed a threatening competition for viewership. The pressure forced the Hollywood establishment to cater to a black audience and accommodate black art into the entertainment scene. It was this somewhat unwilling and unenlightened industry that Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in The Sun set forth to conquer.
When Raisin came out on Broadway in 1959, the socially agitated public was generally receptive to the play that, as James Baldwin put it, “had so much of the truth of black people’s lives seen on the stage.” However, not everyone agrees: some critics accused Raisin of being “a shopworn ethnic soap opera” and “a disorganized integrationist drama.” Black art critic Harold Cruse criticized it as being bourgeois and assimilationist, contrary to character Beneatha’s outspoken opposition to assimilationism. To some, it was not a truly Negro play and lacked a straight comment on the prevalent “whiteness” of the time. When Columbia Pictures finally bought the filming rights to A Raisin in the Sun and hired Hansberry as the screenwriter, these criticisms would affect the shaping of Raisin’s first major movie adaptation.
The main dilemma in the 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun was not in how much change the stage play suffered in its transformation, but in how it suffered little.
“Its central fault is the essentially staged quality of the production,” commented movie critic Colin Jacobs. The dialogues included in the film were by and large replicas of the original text. The acting style remained exuberantly theatrical, not toned down to adapt to the new medium. Sidney Poitier’s performance, for instance, although definitely an aesthetic pleasure, was perhaps too animated, lacking appreciation for the camera’s ability to draw attention to the smallest details. This is unsurprising, considering that the major actors in the film came from the original Broadway cast.
Most of the action in the film transpired in only one location as in the text, even when the camera afforded more freedom than the spatially constrained stage set. Only four scenes took the Youngers out of their home: two at the bar Walter Lee frequented, one while Walter Lee drove Mr. Arnold around Chicago, and the family’s visit to Clybourne Park. Apart from these forays into the outside world, the viewers found themselves mostly in the Youngers’ Southside apartment.
“[A Raisin in the Sun] does almost nothing to take advantage of the extra possibilities provided by film,” assessed Jacobs. Indeed, when Raisin crossed over from stage to screen, it brought a lot of theater along with it.
Yet although the 1961 film did not ultimately maximize the “extra possibilities” of the film medium, Hansberry certainly made attempts to take advantage of the camera, not just as a communication tool but also, significantly, as a response to the more adverse criticisms received by the original play. Although undocumented, it was believed that these criticisms prompted Hansberry to create a screenplay that was in several ways more radical in nature, a commentary-laden script that influenced Columbia’s decision to adhere to the original text. For example, Hansberry specified that the film open with shots of the poor Chicago Southside landscape: boulevards, steel mills, backyards and kitchenettes, with superimposed lines from Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” She added a political-economic comment, “This is the ghetto of Chicago…rents in their ghetto are proportionately higher than any other place in the city.”
After reading her full draft, the studio bigwigs cut generous chunks off Hansberry’s screenplay through a memo from Columbia executive Arthur Kramer. A sweeping shot of Walter Lee’s employer, Mrs. Arnold, in her luxurious living room was dismissed as “pretentiously arty and of dubious value.” Lena’s last day in her white employers’ house and the bad service from the fruit store clerk were abandoned as it was “strongly recommended that no white person be shown in the screenplay until the appearance of Lindner.” The Clybourne Park scene, which was supposed to show white people staring at their new black neighbors, was checked with the note, “It was agreed that we will not show the white neighbors looking at the family.” The Kramer memo also stated, “It was agreed that the addition of race issue material in the screenplay should be avoided.” These and other restrictions imposed by Columbia produced a film that was largely faithful to the letter of the original text of A Raisin in the Sun, but effectively repressed its spirit by practicing the very oppression that the play hoped to unmask.
Half a century later, A Raisin in The Sun was produced in a completely different adaptation. The 2008 teleplay, which starred Sean Combs, Sanaa Lathan and Phylicia Rashad, was technically and rhetorically freer. On the technical aspect, tailoring a 1961 film to the twenty-first century viewer made it unwise to rigidly follow the original text. The very theatrical dance by Walter Lee and Beneatha, which would look odd to a viewership more acquainted with television than theater, was cut out.
Unlike the 1961 film, the 2008 version fully utilized the advantages of the video camera. Some scenes were changed to make the story flow naturally or give way to inserted segments, mostly the scenes outside the Youngers’ apartment, which made for a less stageplay-like atmosphere. There were school scenes of Beneatha, Asagai and George, Lena walking on the street and riding a bus, and Ruth’s two visits to the abortionist, Ms. Tilly. Travis was seen running down the street to meet the mailman, Bobo broke the news about Willy Harris outside the apartment building and Asagai found Beneatha slumped on the stairs outside the family’s unit.
But the 2008 version was produced in a scenario that allowed freer expression of racial messages and has, to some degree, fulfilled Lorraine Hansberry’s unrealized original screenplay. The scenes suppressed by Columbia executives in the 1961 film were conspicuously present in the teleplay: Lena’s last day at work in her employers’ house, shots of Mrs. Arnold lounging in her beautifully furnished home, a fruit store clerk’s discriminative treatment of Lena, and even the following close-up of “large, red, voluptuous apples.” Also added was Hansberry’s depiction of the Clybourne Park scene: white people staring apprehensively at their new neighbors from behind curtains and windows. Such additions crafted by Hansberry, aimed to illustrate the contrast between white and black lifestyle and the rampant racism of the period, were finally allowed broadcast in a less racial time.
Side by side, the 1961 film and 2008 teleplay of A Raisin in the Sun demonstrated how the hues of Hollywood changed over the years. While the playwright’s attempts of advancing the play’s central issues were hindered in the racial fifties and sixties, they found freedom in the radically freer and more equal world of the present. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was rendered in dissimilar productions not only because of the technical demands of crossing from one medium to another but, more importantly, because of the distinctly different racial landscapes of the times.
REFERENCES
Lipari, Lisbeth. “Fearful of the Written Word: White Fear, Black Writing and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.” Quarterly Journal of Speech February 2004: 81–102
Jacobs, Colin. . “Review of A Raisin in the Sun.” dvdmg.com 18 December 2006 dvdmg.com
31 October 2008 <wwwdvdmg.com/raisininthesun/shtml>.
Reid, Mark. “The US Black Family Film.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. May 1991: 81–88
Garcia, Morgan. “A Dream Deferred: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in Film.” www.unc.edu February 2006 <http://www.unc.edu/~mdgarcia/documents/raisin.pdf>.
Morrin, Maxine. “Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun “ www.books.google.com 31 October 2008 http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=epqv4aoLLN0C&oi= fnd&pg=PA1&dq=hansberry+nemiroff+raisin&ots=1gH7BVESjG&sig=-5NCWsR0tu TushBja3cR58K8rI4#PPA2,M1.
