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Whilst I was there I got an excited call from my Producer colleague Bob Colesberry who had begun researching the background to our film and was eager to share the mountain of material with me. With the thought of all the work ahead I went off to Japan as juror at the Tokyo Film Festival. Orion arranged for me to meet Fred Zollo the producer who had developed the original draft with the writer, Chris Gerolmo. It’s rare that projects developed in the Hollywood system have any potential for social or political comment and the dramatic possibilities surrounding the two FBI agents had possibly allowed this one to slip through. The power of the opening murder scene and the possibilities that the subsequent story offered drew me to it immediately. I had read many dozens of screenplays before before being introduced to Mississippi Burning. I had spent four months, after finishing Angel Heart, newly settled in Los Angeles, trying to write my own script but mostly distracted by the weekly submissions as they arrived, like clockwork, in their seductive brown envelopes. In the opening paragraph that accompanied them, I echoed the above piece saying that the following notes, written in diary form will no doubt be disappointing to the semioticians, but by endeavouring to describe the ‘nuts and bolt’ of ‘how’ might help a little to elucidate the ‘why’.Ĭhris Gerolmo’s draft script of ‘Mississippi Burning’ was first sent to me by Mike Medavoy of Orion Pictures in September of ’87. The following notes were also written in October ’81. It presaged an avalanche of controversy that swamped the film when it opened, and has surrounded the film until this day. Preceding the release of the film, I already appear to be even more apprehensive about the reaction to a new film then is normal. I wrote the above in October, 1988 as production notes for the film. But as we consider how they died we must also ask why they died in order for us to fully understand not just the significance of these three young men’s deaths, but the importance of their lives. Their deaths are the reason for our film. Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered on a quiet bend in a red dirt back road in Neshoba County, Mississippi on June 21 st 1964. But with all its possible flaws and shortcomings, I hope that our film can provoke thought and kindle the debate allowing other films to be made, because the struggle against racism continues.įlyer for the missing Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney This is, perhaps, as much a sad reflection on present day society as it is on the film industry. Our film cannot be the definitive film of the black civil rights struggle, our heroes were still white and, in truth, the film would probably have never been made if they weren’t.
MISSISSIPPI MURDER MOVIE MOVIE
Not Forgotten” on the film headstone – just a movie prop in a movie fiction. His grave is still there in a forgotten corner of a hard to find East Mississippi cemetery and still unmarked.
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But James Chaney, murdered with Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, is buried in Meridian and his grave has also been desecrated his headstone, and his memory smashed by ignorance and cowardice: the broken stones dumped in a nearby ditch. Our grave is the grave of an anonymous individual, a character in a fiction a film a movie. In the concluding scene of Mississippi Burning, as Lannie McBride and the congregation stand amongst the ashes of Mount Zion Church singing ‘Walk On By Faith’, the camera pans across a Mississippi cemetery coming to rest at the grave of a young black, civil rights worker murdered in the opening sequence of our film. The broken headstone of a character in our film: a movie prop in a movie fiction.