The Rare
Use of 'Strange Fruit' in 'The Birth of a Nation' Previews
Melinda Newman and Thom Duffy / Justin Chang
Monday, June 13, 2016
Billboard / Variety
Melinda Newman and Thom Duffy
Billboard
The song is
one of the most haunting in American history. "Strange Fruit,"
recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday [2], was
written by New York poet-activist Abel Meeropol after seeing a
photograph of a 1930 lynching -- "black body swinging in the Southern
breeze," he wrote.
"Strange
Fruit," which Time named as the song of the century in
1999, now is heard in the preview promoting the October release of the
slave-revolt movie The Birth of a Nation, distributed by Fox
Searchlight Pictures. It is a rare example of a synchronization license for use
of the song, says Miles Feinberg, executive vp at Music Sales
Corp., which owns rights to the work.
"The
importance of the song is certainly not lost on us," says Feinberg.
"It contributed to the civil rights movement, so we've been very protective
of it."
Feinberg
reports that licensing requests for "Strange Fruit" have increased in
recent years. His theory? "The song captures an anger and feeling of
injustice that's appearing in American culture right now," he says. But
Music Sales Corp. turns down most requests, he adds, saying that few match the
prestige of the tune.
One
opportunity, however, that captured the song's spirit arose after
director-actor Nate Parker premiered The Birth of a
Nation at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Music supervisor Maura
Duval Griffin solicited songs for its trailer, seeking music that was
"dark and menacing, but with elevated lyrics about race struggles and
history." She referenced Kanye West [3]'s 2013
track "Blood on the Leaves," which itself had sampled Nina Simone [4]'s 1965 version [5] of
"Strange Fruit."
In fact,
West's request to license "Strange Fruit" was one of the few times
that Music Sales Corp. approved sampling of the song. The publisher suggested
use of Simone's version for the film preview as well, since it is "a
little bit darker and more menacing" than Holiday's original, says
Feinberg.
With few
suitable licensing opportunities available for "Strange Fruit," the
song "is not a big money earner," says Feinberg. "But it is an incredible
one to have in your catalog."
Portraying
Nat Turner's 1831 slave uprising, The Birth of a Nation is promoted by a
preview featuring "Strange Fruit." The iconic song was first recorded
by Holiday (inset center) and written by Meeropol (left), with a 1965 version
by Simone (right) used in the trailer.
Abel Meeropol: Courtesy of Robert Meeropol; Holiday: Michael Ochs
Archives/Getty Images; Simone: Daily Mail/Rex
More often,
synch deals -- the use of music in films and TV, as well as advertising and
video games -- drive significant revenue. The licensing of "Strange
Fruit" is just one of the most notable recent examples of synch licensing,
which is now a $202.9 million business in the United States, according to 2015
figures from global music trade organization IFPI. And the United States
accounts for 57 percent of the $355 million generated by synch deals
worldwide.
Music
publishers don't reveal terms of individual deals and synch fees can vary
widely, based on factors including the popularity of the song, the medium in
which the music will appear, the duration of the piece and the geographic
scope of the deal. A copyright used in a trailer may earn $30,000 to $100,000,
while an ad typically may earn $50,000 to $500,000.
It speaks
to his ambition that the writer, director, producer and actor Nate Parker [7] chose
to title his slavery drama “The
Birth of a Nation [8],” though
the film would be a significant achievement by any name. Arriving more
than a century after D.W. Griffith’s epic lit up the screen with racist images
forever destined to rankle and provoke, this powerfully confrontational
account of Nat Turner [9]’s life and
the slave rebellion he led in 1831 seeks to purify and reclaim a
motion-picture medium that has only just begun to treat America’s “peculiar
institution” with anything like the honesty it deserves. If “12 Years a Slave”
felt like a breakthrough on that score, then Parker’s more conventionally told
but still searingly impressive debut feature pushes the conversation further
still: A biographical drama steeped equally in grace and horror, it builds
to a brutal finale that will stir deep emotion and inevitable unease. But the
film is perhaps even more accomplished as a theological provocation, one
that grapples fearlessly with the intense spiritual convictions that drove
Turner to do what he had previously considered unthinkable.
Certain to
be the most widely discussed and rousingly received film in the U.S. dramatic
competition at Sundance this year, “The Birth of a Nation” comes to us at
a particularly fortuitous cultural moment; not unlike “12 Years a Slave” and
“Selma” before it, the movie occupies that rare space where our
ongoing conversation about racial injustice converges with the film
industry’s slow-dawning awareness of the lack of diversity in its ranks. As a
result, this artfully modulated but fitfully grueling picture presents
both an obvious challenge and a potentially rich commercial prospect for a
distributor willing to match Parker’s passion with its own. Careful
positioning, too, will be needed to target open-minded faith-based audiences,
and also to address the inevitable backlash in some quarters, given that the
film presents its climactic violence in complicated but unmistakably heroic
terms.
No film
worthy of this particular historical subject could hope or expect to avoid
controversy, and Parker’s well-researched screenplay (based on a story he wrote
with Jean McGianni Celestin) offers its own bold take on the widely
contested narrative of Turner, a Virginia-born slave and Baptist preacher who
led the uprising that claimed 60 white lives and led to the killings of 200
blacks in retaliation, and served as a crucial moment of insurrection en route
to the Civil War three decades later. But “The Birth of a Nation”
commences long before those fateful events, with a series of scenes
observing the Nat’s childhood on a cotton plantation in Southampton County,
Va., owned by the white Turner family from which the boy took his surname.
In opening
and recurring scenes that remind us of the land and traditions from which these
black men and women were uprooted, young Nat (Tony Espinosa) experiences
eerie dreams of his African ancestors, anointing him as a future leader and
prophet as marked by the circular scars on his chest. “It’s not real,” his
mother (Aunjanue Ellis) tells him when he awakens from one of these startling
visions, though there’s no relief from the nightmare of their everyday
reality — and as it is, they have a somewhat easier time than
many of the other plantation slaves in Southampton County. Nat is allowed
to run and play with the young Turner heir, Samuel (Griffin Freeman), and he’s
treated kindly by Samuel’s mother, Elizabeth (Penelope Ann Miller), who, upon
discovering that Nat can read, encourages his studies by giving him a Bible.
Years
later, despite having grown up picking cotton alongside his family in the
fields, Nat (now played by Parker, superbly) is a soulful preacher with enough
of a rapport with his master Samuel (Armie Hammer) to persuade him to buy a
young slave, Cherry (Aja Naomi King), sparing her from a fate even worse than
what she’s already endured. Cherry is brought to the plantation, and before
long she and Nat fall in love, marry and have a daughter, in scenes that
afford a warm glimpse of their close-knit, God-fearing community. Far from
sentimentalizing their experience, however, these moments offer only fleeting
respite from a life of continual hardship and menace, whether it’s Nat making
the mistake of addressing a white woman, or Cherry falling into the hands of
the cruel Raymond Cobb (a terrifying Jackie Earle Haley), with devastating
consequences.
It’s no
surprise the white slaveowners are getting antsy, with talk of insurrection and
rumors of violence in the air. Spying an opportunity, the sleazy,
self-interested Rev. Walthall (Mark Boone Jr.) convinces Samuel to rent Nat out
to other plantations as a visiting preacher, as many slaveowners will pay good
money to have a black man address his fellow brothers and sisters, and
hopefully quell any revolutionary impulses with a gospel of peace (aka
subservience). What makes this development so bracingly ironic is that
it’s Nat’s exposure to the appalling mistreatment of blacks in other parts of
Virginia that convinces him a few encouraging sermons will no longer be enough.
After a borderline-unwatchable scene in which he sees a slave being
brutally tortured and force-fed, Nat experiences a reawakening. “I pray you
sing to the Lord a new song,” he instructs his humble congregation, and it’s
clear that he means to take his own advice.
Parker
demonstrates a fine touch with actors (Dwight Henry, Esther Scott, Roger
Guenveur Smith and Gabrielle Union round out the excellent cast), and his
command of mise-en-scene would be impressive even coming from a more seasoned
filmmaker. While the movie was shot entirely on location in Savannah, Ga., the
visual reconstruction of antebellum Virginia is outstanding: From the drooping
willows and white plantation houses of Geoffrey Kirkland’s production design to
the muted, bluish cast of Elliot Davis’ widescreen compositions, the movie
offers a vision at once nightmarish and painterly. As edited with measured
intelligence by Steven Rosenblum (with the exception of one too-slick
montage) and set to the stirring if sometimes overly vigorous accompaniment of
Henry Jackman’s score, these images conspire to lure us into a world even when
the barbarism pushes us away.
But the
film’s most resonant element isn’t its physical realization so much as its
spiritual and intellectual acuity, and it skillfully draws us into Nat’s
endless internal debate as he presses himself and God about his next
course of action. If “12 Years a Slave” astutely mapped out both the
ruthless economic machinery of American slavery and the complicity of white
Christians who used the Bible to cow their slaves into silence, then “The Birth
of a Nation” delves even further into this unholy nexus of capitalism and
religion, and Parker’s performance becomes a study in escalating
outrage. A figure of warm, earthy saintliness for much of the movie, the
actor (“Beyond the Lights,” “Arbitrage”) slowly traces Turner’s moral hardening
by incremental degrees, driven by his deepening engagement with Scripture (“Do
not become slaves to men,” he quotes at one point, and some believers in the
audience might well also turn to “Faith without works is dead”). But he is also
driven by his own worsening mistreatment at the hands of Samuel, whom
Hammer convincingly embodies as a man whose decency turns out to be strictly
conditional.
Turner’s
own shift from Christlike grace to Jehovah-style wrath is not without its
heavy-handed moments: One crucial scene, in particular, would play infinitely
better without the obtrusive positioning of a stained-glass window, and the
cutaways to Turner’s ancestral visions begin to verge on kitsch. But at its
core, this is as intelligent and probing an inquiry into the uses and abuses of
organized religion as we’ve seen in recent American movies, and also the rare
slavery drama in which it’s the ideas, far more than the whipping and lynching
scenes, that provide the deepest impact. Historians will have a field day
debating the accuracy of the man’s dramatic trajectory (as they have since even
before the publication of William Styron’s much-disputed 1967 novel, “The
Confessions of Nat Turner”), and the urge to contradict a black
filmmaker’s interpretation of history will of course be a hard one for many
commentators to resist.
The most
vigorous discussion will center on the film’s ferocious, frustrating and
inescapably cathartic climax, in which the tremendous strengths of its
classical storytelling, as well as its dramatic lapses, stand in perhaps
the sharpest relief. Parker’s filmmaking suddenly shifts into the brutal,
blood-soaked idiom of the war movie, in which various shades of moral gray are
resolved in a queasy eruption of red (at the first Sundance screening,
the applause that greeted certain killings proved as telling as the
anxious hush that followed others). The Christ-figure overtones hover ever
more stirringly, and disturbingly, over the movie’s final moments, and you may
be forgiven if your mind drifts for a moment toward “Braveheart.” The movie can
be forgiven as well. “The Birth of a Nation” exists to provoke a serious debate
about the necessity and limitations of empathy, the morality of retaliatory
violence, and the ongoing black struggle for justice and equality in this
country. It earns that debate and then some.
Sundance
Film Review: ‘The Birth of a Nation’
Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (competing), Jan. 25, 2016.
Running time: 118 MIN.
Production
A Bron Studios, Phantom Four, Mandalay Pictures, Tiny Giant Prods.
presentation, in association with Novofam Prods., Follow Through Prods.,
Infinity Entertainment, Oster Media, Point Made Films, Liberty and Justice
Prods., Yesternight Entertainment, Hit 55 Ventures and Creative Wealth Media
Financing. Produced by Nate Parker, Kevin Turen, Jason Michael Berman, Aaron L.
Gilbert, Preston L. Holmes. Executive producers, David S. Goyer, Michael
Novogratz, Michael Finley, Tony Parker, Jason Cloth, Andy Pollack, Allan J.
Stitt, Jane Oster, Barb Lee, Carl H. Linder III, Derrick Brooks, Jill Ahrens,
Ryan Ahrens, Armind Tehrany, Edward Zwick, Mark Moran. Co-producers, Zak
Tanjeloff, Matt Lindner, Harrison Kreiss, Ike Waldhaus, Benjamin Renzo.
Co-executive producers, Brenda Gilbert, Steven Thibault, Lori Massini.
Crew
Directed, written by Nate Parker; story, Parker, Jean McGianni
Celestin. Camera (color, Arri Alexa/Red Dragon HD), Elliot Davis; editor,
Steven Rosenblum; music, Henry Jackman; production designer, Geoffrey Kirkland;
art director, Jack Ballance; set decorator, Jim Ferrell; costume designer,
Francine Jamison-Tanchuck; sound, Whitney Ince; supervising sound editor/sound
designer, Mac Smith; supervising sound designer, Brandon Proctor; re-recording
mixers, Proctor, Zach Martin; special effects supervisor, Heath Hood; special
effects coordinator, Trey Gordon; visual effects supervisor, George A. Loucas;
visual effects producer, Joshua Spivack; visual effects, Baked FX; stunt
coordinator, Guss Williams; associate producer, Dan McClure; casting, Mary
Vernieu, Michelle Wade Byrd.
With
Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Mark Boone Jr., Colman Domingo,
Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Aja Naomi King, Esther Scott, Roger Guenveur
Smith, Gabrielle Union, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Tony Espinosa,
Jayson Warner Smith, Jason Stuart.
[moderator:
'Birth of a Nation" will be released October 7, 2016]
Links:
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
