The color white has been a big part of the evolution of “The Color Purple.”
The film version got made in 1985 because Steven Spielberg, the most important filmmaker on the planet at the time, wanted to make it.
Twenty years later, the guardian angel shifted from a white man to a black woman, Oprah Winfrey. The “Purple” stage musical got made in 2005 because the most influential woman on the planet wanted it made.
“I think that’s actual, real change,” said Marsha Norman, the Pulitzer-winning white woman who wrote the stage book. She also credits the relentless belief in the project held by a white producer named Scott Sanders.
“After the movie, you can imagine what a precious piece of cultural iconography this had become, and Alice Walker just didn’t want to do it,” Norman said of a stage reincarnation. “So Scott rented a boat and invited 100 of the most wonderful people of New York, like Gloria Steinem, all to tell Alice why a musical version was possible — and that Scott was the person to trust with it.”
But just as Spielberg drew criticism in 1985 for being the film’s white director, Sanders and Norman also would field the race question.
Norman had lobbied hard for the screenwriting job, but lost out to a white man. So she stuck her hand up again when the stage job came up.
“I said, ‘Please take me — and I will take all the guff that I get for being a white writer on this great, iconic black piece of fiction,’ ” she said. After a few stabs with other writers, Sanders tapped Norman.
“I would have hired a black writer first, too, but there are very few black playwrights trained in the musical theater,” Norman said. “That’s a shame, and maybe it won’t be so forever, but it is so now. I got the job because I had the training.”
And because she was from the South, a woman who saw Celie’s story as in some ways her own.
“I relate to it in a huge way,” she said. “I see it as this Southern girl with no chance, and no voice, and that’s certainly who I was. I think Celie is a perfect example of people who feel invisible, which is what I felt as a kid growing up in a little house in Kentucky.”
The fact that Spielberg wanted to be involved in the film? “That was a good thing,” Norman said. “That fact that Scott Sanders wanted to be involved in the musical? That was a good thing, too. And the fact that Oprah even exists? That’s brilliant.
“But Steven and Scott need to be credited for the fact that they didn’t let their whiteness get in the way of their love for this story — and that’s where I come from, too.”
