'The Butler' Announces Its Intent

I can't think of another director who gets as much from actors as Lee Daniels. Even in this trailer the specialness of the performances is apparent. They rise to the occasion and that makes Daniels' movies must-see no matter who is in them or what they are about.

Eugene Allen. Photo by Kevin Clark for The Washington Post

'The Butler' is based on the career of White House butler Eugene Allen and the article about him by Wil Haygood for The Washington Post.

Here's the beginning of that article:

For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land. 

He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen. 

At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn't care; she just beamed with pride. 

President Truman called him Gene. 

President Ford liked to talk golf with him. 

He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week. "I never missed a day of work," Allen says. 

His is a story from the back pages of history. A figure in the tiniest of print. The man in the kitchen. 

He was there while America's racial history was being remade: Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations. 

When he started at the White House in 1952, he couldn't even use the public restrooms when he ventured back to his native Virginia. "We had never had anything," Allen, 89, recalls of black America at the time. "I was always hoping things would get better."

Obviously, this film could go all the way.






















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