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An Interview with "Cora Unashamed" Producers Marian Rees and Anne Hopkins:
Capturing the Essence

How do you take a short story like "Cora Unashamed" and make it into a full-length feature film?  Marian Rees and Anne Hopkins, principals of ALT Films, the nonprofit production company responsible for making the majority of movies in the AMERICAN COLLECTION, lend their insights into this process.

Q:  Why did you choose to do "Cora Unashamed?"

Marian Rees:  This interests me because of its theme:  the conflict of people within a social struggle.  Also, there is such powerful poetry hidden in these ten pages. One haunting quotation is this: "Cora was humble in the face of life. Cora was not humble in the face of death." It is the essence of the poet who repeats this. It builds and comes to a crescendo in which Cora is indeed not humble in the face of death.

Q:  Ten pages to two hours is a substantial transformation. Where do you see that expansion?

M:  This will not be the full 115 minutes; it will be 90-plus.  Because the story is so slim, there was a tendency in the outline process for inventionnd we determined that this was precisely what not to do. We wanted to extend the voice of Langston Hughes, not to invent it.

Q:  How do you work with the writer Anne Peacock to generate the story's outline, and what do you want that outline to accomplish for you?

Anne Hopkins:  We begin by coming to agreement with the writer that we're telling the same story, that there isn't a different interpretation or emphasis on theme or character.

M:  For instance, we needed to address the unrelenting acerbic nature of Mrs. Studevant, who bears the possibility of becoming a caricature. That would be inappropriate and it would not serve Hughes well.

A:  It would be easy to make Cora a saint and Mrs. Studevant unrelentingly unlikable, but they both have foibles and values and pain and vulnerabilities. Ultimately, our success in telling this story will be if both characters are humanized.

M:  This is not a racial story, but the story would be different if Cora were not black. Race is a factor in the visual sense because Cora is black, and Mrs. Studevant is Scandinavian. In the larger context, this work is set against the Harlem Renaissance, and there is a subtext in which this subculture is used as a backdrop.