The Film That Never Was
Back in November, when I reviewed The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life for The American Interest, I prefaced my discussion of Kenneth Minogue’s analysis of the present discontents with a brief summary of what I had learned from reading Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, which had appeared three years before.
I began by noting that Richard Brodhead, former Dean of Yale College, was President of Duke University “on March 14, 2006 when, not long after midnight, local police picked up a semi-comatose African-American stripper, who worked on the side as a prostitute, and took her for treatment to the Durham Access Center. “ And I went on to report:
There, a nurse, noting the inebriated young woman’s incoherence, broke with established protocol and offered her an opportunity to escape commitment to a detoxification center by asking whether she had been raped. In time it would become clear that nothing of the sort had happened, that the stripper had been hired by a member of the Duke men’s lacrosse team to perform for the team at an off-campus party, that she had arrived in no state to dance, that she had departed unharmed by any of those present, and that to avoid the rigors of rehab she was perfectly ready to lie. But this did not fully become evident until long after an ambitious District Attorney in the midst of a re-election campaign in a city with a substantial black electorate had initiated a concerted attempt to frame three young athletes who were actually guilty of, at worst, poor taste and bad judgment.
There is much that is shocking about this incident: the conduct of the prosecutor, the role played by the African-American community and its leaders in Durham, the demagogic response of the local and national media, and the story’s treatment in the New York Times. But nothing is more remarkable than the comportment of Brodhead and the self-styled progressives on the Duke faculty, who lent the prosecutorial conspiracy a much-needed helping hand.
I will spare you a full recounting, which you can find here. It should suffice to say that I argued that Minogue’s book provides the key to understanding why Brodhead and the Duke faculty conducted themselves in so disgraceful a fashion.
More to the point in this context, if you have not read the book by Taylor and Johnson, you really should. It is testimony to what this country is in the process of becoming.
But here is why I wrote this post. When the book came out, HBO optioned it – and they were right to do so. It would make a terrific movie – To Kill a Mockingbird replayed decades later with all of the roles reversed. But more than three years have passed, no movie has been made, and I fear that none will ever be made.
Perhaps the contributors to Ricochet who hale from Hollywood could explain why the film industry has foregone such an opportunity. Is the story told in the book a truth too politically uncorrect for Tinseltown to swallow? Would it cast unwelcome light on the fact that we have substituted the notion of protected categories for equal protection under the law and that we are now practicing what is euphemistically called affirmative action in the enforcement of criminal law? Or is this what folks in the army used to call snafu?
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Comments :
Sep '10
Re: The Film That Never Was
I vacillate between wondering if I have become a jaundice cynic and thinking portions of society have dawned a new set of clothes that everyone else, but I, can see. An official of an institution that’s purpose is to provide justice perpetrating a grave injustice, sanctified by academic elite and cheered on by a parasitic press. When I saw HBO had obtained the rights to the book I assumed a movie portraying the exact opposite would be produced. After all the entertainment industry has not yet extracted its pint of blood. Sadly I view the Duke incident as symptomatic and not an isolated incident. Not having a movie produced is better than what I see as the only likely alternative.
May '10
Re: The Film That Never Was
It may take some decades, but it will come.
Jul '10
Re: The Film That Never Was
Movies crash and burn for all kinds of reasons. We suspect, with justification, that Hollywood doesn't fight as hard for the politically-incorrect movies as it would for the latest Iraq-themed money drain, but there are a hundred reasons it might have failed.