Minstrel Man

It seems that there was a TV movie filmed in Hattiesburg back in 1975 or so. I think this is it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076393/

It'd be cool to get a copy of the movie.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/braddabug/images/doc/minstrelman.jpg
 * LOS ANGELES (AP) -- "Minstrel Man," a two-hour drama with music, is on CBS tonight. The title may conjure the visions of happy, lively entertainers laughing and singing their way through life.
 * But expect the opposite. It's actually a sad show about the off-stage pain of black minstrels in the late 1800s, about how their livelihood depended on perpetuating a racist stereotype, playing the foot-shuffling, joke-cracking darkie for white audiences.
 * Said stereotype came years earlier, when white Northern song-and-dance men blacked up their faces and masqueraded as black men in a uniquely American entertainment form, the minstrel show.
 * Tonight's drama starts in the year 1889, in an era when, as a narrator notes, the only time black entertainers could work in show biz was when they put "burnt cork on their black faces and imitated the white man imitating them."
 * I've heard "Minstrel Man" described as "Roots" in ragtime. It's not quite that. But like "Roots," it's essentially about a quest for black pride, black dignity, in a white world admitting to neither.
 * The tale unfolds via two young black entertainers, Harry and Rennie Brown, who set out to make their way in show business after their father, also a minstrel man, collapses and dies on stage.
 * Harry (Glynn Turner) is the gagman, the singer, the dancer, the optimist who, while he hates "blackin up" and pandering to racism, does it in the name of survival, putting on a happy burnt-cork face while singing about "new coons in town."
 * Rennie (Stanely Clay) is the family pessimist, a brilliant, brooding musical genious who rebels against the traditional blacks-as-baffons sterotype and ultimately pays for it with his life.
 * The gent through which both sides of the story came together is Charlie Bates (Ted Ross), a sly, cheerful black rogue and minstrel man who becomes partners with Harry in a black minstrel show Harry runs.
 * Charlie is the sort of character to whom Harry initially says: "I wouldn't trust you o carry corn to a blind chicken."
 * No drama is complete without a love intrest, and this comes with Jessamine (Saundra Sharp), a lovely black woman with whom Harry falls in love after hiring her out of church to sing in his show.
 * Prodded by the conscience called Rennie, the Brown show develops a black goal - dignity and respect for Negro performers in America.
 * Alas, the script by Richard and Esther Spariro struck me as a very earnest, very unworkable mix of black history, show-biz lore and on-the-road woe. It also seemed oddly disjointed, its pace only slightly brisker than that of a snail.
 * Four reasons to see this show are the fine performances of Turner, Clay and Ross, and the excellent period music by Fred Karlin.

(Source: Hattiesburg American, March 2, 1977, p 10)

Contact info for CBS Entertainment:


 * CBS Entertainment
 * CBS Television City
 * 7800 Beverly Boulevard
 * Los Angeles, CA 90036
 * (323) 575-2345

From here: http://viacom.com/contactus.jhtml

Both my parents vaguely remember this movie, though neither watched it. wtf? a movie filmed in your own city and you don't watch it? -- Brad