CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 12/28/07

Pros and Cons:
The Great Debaters' Robert Eisele

By peter clines

A long-time television writer talks about what he's learned over two decades, and what brought him to writing this Christmas's big dramatic release for Academy Award winner Denzel Washington.

Robert Eisele was already an award-winning screenwriter when an old college friend mentioned the bare bones of a movie idea—a civil rights story that predated the civil rights movement. The two men did further research and took the idea to Oprah Winfey's production company, Harpo. Interest was almost immediate, and Eisele found himself suddenly struggling to complete the screenplay for The Great Debaters.

The film is set at Wiley College in Texas during the 1930s, when African Americans could claim freedom from slavery but little else. Professor Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington) creates a new debate team that includes an overage carouser (Nate Parker), the dean's underage son (Denzel Whitaker), and even a woman (Jurnee Smollett), coaching them in the ways of rhetoric and argument and putting them up against any school willing to debate them —especially white schools. But when Tolson's personal politics threaten his own freedom and the team's standing, the debaters forge on, facing their greatest challenge alone.

Taking a brief break from his responsibilities as a strike leader, Eisele talks with CS Weekly about his career, how being too loyal to research can kill a story, and why his wife and daughter don't ever want him to wash one of his shirts.

How did you end up in the film industry?
When I was in high school I was always the one writing articles for the school paper and the yearbook. The fellow who I thought was the best writer in my high school ended up telling me I should be a professional writer, and I said, "That's a nice thought." When I went to UCLA, I just sampled the various things, and the thing that really connected to me was playwriting. I felt like I had found a calling there, because I just loved the form. James Joyce once said that playwriting is the poetry of longer fiction. I didn't have a lot of patience for narrative form where people go on and on with descriptions of inner states of mind. The more structural and elemental approach of playwriting spoke to me. I got my BA in film and my MFA in theatre. I tried to be a playwright from the west coast, which is not an easy thing. I remember I was getting a play done at the St. Nicholas Theatre in Chicago, which is David Mamet's theater, but he wasn't there when I was getting produced. I could see my breath in the room they put me up in, and I just said, "I'm gonna go back to LA and write a screenplay."

I finally came back and wrote a screenplay and it got optioned. I got hired to rewrite a feature film called Breach of Contract, and it actually got made. Around 1986, my friends Terry Louise Fisher and Steve Brown asked me to write a Cagney & Lacey. They were producing the show. I wrote their season openers two years in a row, and the first one I wrote won the 1986 Humanitas prize. Michael Mann saw that and hired me to work on Crime Story. I did that show for a year, and after that I went on to The Equalizer and worked two seasons there. After that, I decided I wanted to create my own series. I had overall deals at various studios through the '90s, and I wrote 13 pilots, had two made, and none got on the air. So, my record wasn't superb, and yet I think that some of those pilots are the writing I'm most proud of. And people liked them, or they wouldn't have kept me on these overall deals for nine years. By the end of that, television had changed, and they no longer had overall deals where you were non-assignable. I had to be on shows I didn't like or give up my deal, so I started freelancing.

How did you get involved with The Great Debaters?
My friend Jeffrey Porro was a communication strategist and speechwriter in D.C. I met him at UCLA when I was studying for my MFA and he was studying for his PhD in political science. We became famous friends, and when he moved to D.C. to do his life's work, he still had a strong desire to read history and be a scholar. He's always been very much an intellectual. He read this African-American history magazine called American Legacy in 1997 and read an article by Tony Scherman titled "The Great Debaters." It took in 10 years of a college debate team's history in only two and a half pages. Clearly, there was no narrative there, but there was a title and a few facts and some historical characters. James Farmer, Jr. was a 14-year-old prodigy on the team who later founded the College of Racial Equality. Melvin B. Tolson, who later became a renowned Harlem Renaissance poet, was the coach.

We did a lot of research. At first Jeff wanted to write a screenplay, so he did a lot of research first and he made a stab at a story. I started researching it with him, and I decided, "Look, let's collaborate on the story, but I want to write the screenplay. It's too hard to collaborate trans-continentally." He admittedly did not have my experience, and he respected my work as a writer, so we agreed that I would always protect his story credit. In our two years of research, we ended up interviewing all the surviving debaters that we could find, and I had the great pleasure of interviewing James Farmer, Jr. himself, who, as I said, later became a very important mover in the entire civil rights movement. I talked to him in '98 and he died in '99. Jeff had been inspired to work for progressive causes by hearing Farmer speak at Berkley in the '60s where he did his undergraduate work. It was an honor to interview him. That primary research led us to lots of things, and we were touched by these people. We got deeply involved in their stories.

We walked into Miramax with a lot of research and a title, and they hired me to write the story. When they hired me, I was on Resurrection Boulevard and I was so busy. It usually takes me about three months to write to a script, but because I was trying to run a show, it was about a year before I delivered. It had so much research behind it; it was something I couldn't mail in.

Do you always do a lot of historical research? How much creative room do you like to leave yourself?
I think ultimately story has to dictate story. You can't let the truth ruin a good story, but you can't tell lies, either. When you're writing about real people, you owe them the respect of creating in the spirit of their lives and their story. You don't want to be choked or suffocated by research, but you have to do enough that you completely own the moment. I knew Tolson's poetry before I ever discovered this story with Jeff. I read other poets of the era. I read rhetoric and preachings and debates from the period. I also read a chronology of African American history so I could be completely conversant with where these guys would've been in their own mind about their own history at that time. Even things like finding a list of every known lynching victim. Basically, we took the 10 years of this debate team's history and distilled it down to one season with a great deal of invention. You can't let research dictate story, but you can't ignore research and you have to be honest.

Historically, the Wiley team actually beat USC, yes? Why the change to Harvard for the film?
I'm a southern California boy, so I didn't mind USC being the college. I thought I could use the great jazz scene on Central Avenue at the time and have our characters winding their way through that. But I think maybe wiser minds prevailed. My development people at Harpo—and Denzel when he got involved, because believe me he was the one that ruled the roost and guided all revisions—thought that people think of Harvard as the pinnacle of American education, and even though USC is a fine school, people think it's a football school. So, they thought it would be better to go with Harvard. But we've recognized that, as you know, and have never purported anything else. Maybe a reviewer will use that against us, but we're being honest about it.

You mentioned Denzel. Everyone's heard stories of directors who want changes or actors who want changes—your director is your lead actor. Was that tough?
Here's the situation. When you're the number-three male box office star in the world and you're directing something, you have power. He was not going to act in it at first. He was going to just direct it. Then, from what I've been able to glean, the Weinsteins said, "If you don't star in it, you get X amount of dollars for the movie, and if you do, you get X amount." He was going to get more money if he starred in it, not for himself, but for the movie. Because he felt this was such an important piece of work, he decided to act in it.

Once Denzel stepped on, he became the power. I spent most of my career in television, and there, writers have power. In features, writers do not carry as much power unless they're big writer-directors or big writer-producers. In features, you'll find that it's the director, a powerful producer, or sometimes an actor. It's never just the writer. In this case, you've got a guy who's such a profoundly respected actor—and he had done a good job with Antwone Fisher, too—he had so much respect from everybody, he was totally in charge. This is his movie more than anyone else's. It's a collaborative medium, and you'll notice Denzel did not put "a film by Denzel Washington," so he obviously recognizes that. But he was the force behind what you finally saw on the screen. I enjoyed working with him.

You said the Weinsteins were willing to put a lot more into the film when Denzel agreed to star in it. Did this change the focus of the film, from the debate team to their coach?
I think it was always a shared story. In Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, you could say that family is the protagonist. That's the one thing about screenwriting classes and dramaturgical analysis. It is true and necessary to study structure. It's absolutely a necessity, and anyone who doesn't isn't doing their homework. But, in a like manner, sometimes rules are meant to be broken, and even though The Great Debaters is a very traditional movie in many ways, it was almost a group protagonist, where it was the debaters and Tolson. But you could also say the audience's focal point into the story is James Farmer, Jr., played by Denzel Whittaker. It's not really through his eyes, but he's important.

Oprah is promoting the heck out of this film. Have you been on the show yet?
No, people want to see actors, not writers, but she was very sweet to me and treated me very well. Myself, Oprah, Denzel, and the producers, we saw the director's cut together, so clearly Denzel saw me as his writer. When I spent that moment watching this movie with two of the most powerful people in the film industry, it was very bracing to see the emotional effect it was having on all of us. Oprah cried and left a scar of her makeup on my shoulder, and my wife and daughter said that we should keep it like the Shroud of Turin. [laughs]

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

The Great Debaters courtesy MGM

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