Transcript
Nate Day: Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast, or today I suppose it's the book-to-TV podcast, because we'll be talking about a television adaptation. But before we dive into all of that, I'm Nate, and today, what are we talking about, Chris?
Chris: And I'm Chris.
Chris: Today we are talking about Roots. Let me find the full... the Roots, The Saga of an American Family is the full book title.
Nate Day: And who wrote it?
Chris: By Alex Haley. Sorry. that's yeah Yes.
Nate Day: Maybe the most important detail in the whole thing.
Chris: Well, usually I say that. Yeah, i don't know. Okay, Roots, The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: There it is. There we go. Yes, we're talking about Roots, which was, of course, famously adapted for television in the late 70s.
Nate Day: But before we get into the history and the how done it and all of that, how have you been, buddy?
Chris: Yeah, wonderful. It's been a massive heat wave out here in New York.
Nate Day: Yeah, I guess so. I've been hearing about that.
Chris: we We literally went to the movies on Friday just to be out of our house because we have a window unit on each end of the apartment and they could not keep up.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: It was 8 p.m. I think it was still like 99 degrees outside. it was just roasting.
Nate Day: Oh, so what'd you go see?
Chris: Went saw back rooms and boy was it weird.
Nate Day: That's crazy. You guys texted me afterwards and I was like, that's the last movie I would have recommended.
Chris: Everybody else also had the same thought. Go to the theater for AC. This was the only film after Blair got back from work that wasn't sold out.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure.
Chris: We wanted to go see Obsession.
Nate Day: Yeah, that's a big one right now. That one's really big.
Chris: i will Blair went up to she went home, went back to Fairfield, and hung out with Lex and her family for the 4th, and they watched Obsession Saturday night.
Nate Day: Oh, they did?
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: Okay, good. I'll have to text her about it and see what she thought.
Chris: Yeah. Well, she certainly enjoyed it more than Backrooms, but also I think we both enjoyed sweating in the heat of our apartment more than Backrooms. That was just that was a strange movie.
Nate Day: It really is strange. i' I've listened to several podcasts and read several articles about it now, and I just still feel like I don't really have my arms around There's some very core parts of that movie that I guess we're just too old to have tapped into.
Nate Day: I think it's a very Gen z maybe Gen Alpha even, piece of storytelling that I just am not plugged into, you know, which I think is really fascinating in and of itself, right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: Like...
Chris: You don't remember that guy's name, do you? The filmmaker?
Nate Day: Kane Parsons, the director? Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. Because we did come back and immediately watch a few reviews online. Like, what the heck did we just see?
Nate Day: Mm hmm.
Chris: And it seemed like if you were current with his body of work, it probably...
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Not probably. Certainly made more sense. Is that the vibe you got?
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah. He made these. This is his first movie ever, but he's made several videos and so several of them are movie length that are sort of set in this back room.
Nate Day: worlds or back rooms world.
Chris: The liminal space?
Chris: Whatever that means.
Nate Day: I know, isn't that kind of funny? Part of me that was like the cynical part of me was like, do you know what liminal means?
Chris: I, it, it just came up 1 billion times.
Nate Day: yeah
Chris: And I was like, this feels like when you ask someone for the definition of a word and they can't give you a definition without using the word.
Nate Day: Oh yeah, yeah.
Chris: you're like, okay, so what is liminal space? Well, great question. Let me tell you, liminal space is when you enter a liminal space. No, I'm learning nothing here.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think I probably liked the film more than the two of you did, but I still don't feel like I said, I don't. It feels like a film that's not in my.
Nate Day: Canon, you know what I mean?
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: Like, I just can't like I'll probably never watch it again and not because I disliked it, but it's just not for me.
Chris: Yep.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah. What have you been reading lately?
Chris: I actually, this was crazy timing. Just it was not deliberate at all. But for book club, I just finished James recently by Percival Everett. Have you heard of that?
Nate Day: The name Percival Everett sounds familiar to me. Why is that?
Nate Day: okay
Chris: It's a it's a take on the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but from the perspective of Jim the Slave.
Nate Day: Oh, okay. That's kind of fun. I mean, I'm sure it was an enlightening way to reread that story.
Chris: Yes, yes. from From every perspective, a crazy, very different look at that. For my personal reading to go from Push to James to Roots, I feel like it's all I've been thinking about for the last three weeks.
Nate Day: no kidding.
Chris: But very, very cool book. Very, very cool book and much more digestible than Roots. But what what have you been you've been getting to the theater?
Nate Day: Yeah, a little bit. I was sort of bummed to not go over Fourth of July weekend. That's usually a pretty big movie going weekend, but I was really not interested in Supergirl or the Minions movie.
Chris: Oh yeah.
Chris: m
Nate Day: Any of that stuff was kind of Not for me. So i'm I'm catching up on on sharing some titles here. I watched, you guys would like this a lot, the Earth, Wind & Fire documentary on HBO Max.
Chris: Ooh.
Nate Day: It was pretty cool. They're a band that I've always really liked and always known, you know, like eight or 10 of their songs sort of, but I didn't really know anything about the band itself.
Chris: Of course.
Nate Day: there's I don't know if your experience is the same, but it was just really interesting, I think, to learn about them and and sort of what this aesthetic that they're known for, this bright, colorful, vibrant aesthetic, what that means, why the band is so huge, kind of interesting.
Chris: Uh-huh.
Nate Day: So if you guys have a second, I would check that out.
Chris: Yeah, very cool.
Nate Day: I think we've talked at least amply enough about Disclosure Day. I thought it was like good, not great.
Chris: Mm hmm.
Nate Day: But I always love a Spielberg movie.
Chris: Mm hmm.
Nate Day: I saw The Death of Robin Hood. Have you seen ads for this?
Chris: I've not even heard about it.
Nate Day: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. sort of flips the script on the Robin Hood narrative. Hugh Jackman plays a late stage Robin Hood. not, not fair, not great.
Nate Day: Not for everybody. It's like, I don't recommend it to you.
Chris: Huh?
Nate Day: Probably.
Chris: OK.
Nate Day: I was sort of disappointed. What else do I have here? Oh, and then this will make you laugh just because it's pretty out of character for me. I went and saw with some friends the final Jackass movie, Jackass Best and Last.
Chris: I mean, I can only name like three movies that are out right now all because of you, but that would have been dead last on my list of what you would go see.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Uh-huh.
Nate Day: and, uh, invited me along and I was like, sure. What the hell? I like movies. So I went and, yeah, kind of rocked my world.
Nate Day: Not totally sure in in a good or bad way, but, they're fun movies. I mean, you, you really have to turn off the part of your brain that, uh, processes ethics and morals and,
Nate Day: some of those things.
Chris: indulges in critical thinking
Nate Day: Yeah, exactly. But you know, it's fun to watch somebody get slung shot across a field in a port-a-potty every once in a while.
Chris: u
Nate Day: Kind of reminds you to be a kid every once in a while, you know?
Chris: That is a heartwarming take on the work of those fine gentlemen.
Nate Day: Well, and you know what, after we went to dinner afterwards and I was talking to them, I was like, you know what, as a concept, it's not a bad documentary series. Not because I'm into the stunts or the gross or whatever it is that they do, but because you're watching the same, largely same group of people, you know, Knoxville and Steve-O and their friends kind of
Chris: Mm hmm.
Nate Day: reacting to the world around them and the way that the world changes. And particularly, you know, there's so much talk about like woke culture and what's politically correct and what's not. And this doesn't concern itself with that.
Chris: Certainly.
Nate Day: What's really whatsoever. So it's just interesting to sort of see culturally how they evolve and and don't evolve over really decades because this started as an MTV television series.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Oh my gosh.
Nate Day: So.
Chris: So long ago.
Nate Day: Yeah. So I actually think as a project, it's at least interesting. Again, maybe it's not really for me, but I don't think it's without like creative merit.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I genuinely want to watch it, and I was not allowed to watch those growing up, so it's not like it's just part of my like adolescent core memories or something.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: I just agree with the first point you made.
Nate Day: Right.
Chris: Sometimes you need to step back and laugh at the world if that's the alternative to crying.
Nate Day: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. These days, especially. Yeah. Check them out.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: See if they're streaming.
Chris: Yeah. Well, it's so funny that you said, like, no interest in the Minions movie. 10 out of 10 want to see that. i love them.
Nate Day: You know what? I actually kind of do too. And this movie is about the minions through, i guess they're immortal through Hollywood history.
Nate Day: I know this is so stupid.
Chris: i guess they're immortal.
Nate Day: I don't know, through the history of Hollywood. And it's actually like a love letter to movie history. So this is one I do intend to watch when it hits Peacock or whatever.
Chris: Okay.
Nate Day: And I will share that when I do.
Chris: Okay. Okay.
Nate Day: But we have something a little bigger than Minions to talk about, but only really a little. Yeah.
Chris: Insane pivot.
Nate Day: Look, I'm running out i'm running out of segues here.
Chris: No, no, no. To be fair, there was no good way to make that transition. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: So why don't you take it away and tell us a little bit about roots?
Chris: Yes, I would love to. Okay. First of all, I feel like we always discuss this. 50 years old, I presume we're not worried about spoilers.
Nate Day: Yeah, no.
Chris: Wonderful. Great. Okay. Yes, Roots. The Saga of an American Family, published in 1976 by Alex Haley. I actually found a very cool audiobook introduction. Yeah.
Chris: He died in the late 90s. So it must have been it must have been the 30-year anniversary probably, or 20-year then.
Nate Day: OK.
Chris: Yeah, massive, massive, massive, massive. it almost I think maybe because I was always thinking about movies, it didn't cross my mind, but it almost shocked me when we went to approach this title. I was like, wow, how have we not considered that yet?
Nate Day: Right, yeah.
Chris: And that being said, I haven't seen the TV series yet, but I imagine after your discussion today, I probably will.
Nate Day: Yeah, I'm interested to hear what your takeaways are.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this one, this one's very unique. There is, in a sense, obviously an insane amount to talk about, but also in a sense, in terms of book review or our standard format, what I typically share about plot, not a lot to talk about.
Chris: And I'll explain that in a second.
Nate Day: OK.
Chris: Okay.
Nate Day: OK.
Chris: So here's the super, super, super fast version. we yeah We spend the majority at the beginning, a large percentage of the book, given the other characters, focused on Kunta Kinte.
Chris: He is Mandinka man living in Western Africa. There's this lengthy exploration of his grandfather coming from Mauritania.
Chris: You ever heard of Mauritania? I had not either, which blew my mind. Massive country in Western Africa.
Nate Day: Okay.
Chris: His grandfather coming and saving the village of Jufre. Do not look at my spelling in the notes. I did it phonetically so that I would remember. That is not how it's spelled.
Nate Day: Okay.
Chris: And this is where Kunta Kinte grows up. We have to skip massive swaths of details here because it is 729-page book.
Nate Day: Yeah, the show reflects that really strongly.
Chris: okay
Chris: Yeah. Okay. Oh, that's Okay. Okay. put a Put a pin in that one. That's interesting.
Nate Day: Okay.
Chris: So we follow seven generations from this first character we're introduced to. I mean, again, first focal character. Again, we are introduced all the way back to his grandfather, but this is where we start, right?
Chris: Kuta Kinte.
Nate Day: With Kunta? Okay.
Chris: Yes. A lot of time and exposition spent on his growing up, his childhood there in the village, but really... The first big, big event is obviously him being captured and sold into slavery.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: And then we continue to follow through the multiple plantations from him first landing in Annapolis, going to the first plantation where he is enslaved, getting married, having children, children being sold to other plantations, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, emancipation, all the way through where we end,
Chris: In the 20th century, if I remember correctly, and I'm not certain I am, but I believe it was literally the 120th chapter, it is revealed.
Chris: Yeah, this thing was massive. We finally find out that this is all Haley's family, the author.
Nate Day: yeah that's cool
Chris: I was going to say you knew all of this. You watched the show. So they got to that point in the show.
Nate Day: Yeah. Like Alex Haley was not a character. There's this like 10 or 15 minute intro to the first episode where they sort of explain what Roots is
Chris: Okay. Interesting.
Nate Day: And, and, and they highlight, i mean, Alex Haley is a big deal in the, the world beyond just literature too. So they, you know, they make it clear.
Nate Day: Yeah. That this is his family's history.
Chris: Okay, very interesting. i I actually really appreciate the order that it's given in the book where you are just starting with... this is i don't I don't want it to feel derivative in any way, but it feels like you're starting with a story about a man being forced into slavery, not you know not a
Nate Day: Right. Yeah. Yes, it does. Yeah.
Chris: Okay. Okay. I'm glad. So then to finally come to still part of the narrative, essentially also here, let's break the fourth wall.
Nate Day: Yes.
Chris: First person, I am the author, Alex Haley. And this was the story of my family. Very, very cool of fun because I did not know any of that going into it.
Nate Day: That's cool.
Chris: I've always known forever.
Nate Day: Oh.
Chris: This was a book I had to get to. Yeah, but I did not know that before I read it.
Nate Day: Oh, so, so you figured it was like historical fiction kind of rather than but nonfiction, I guess.
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Exactly, exactly. And we'll have to get to that a little bit later. I'm not going to make any strong opinions, but we do have to touch on that. But first, who is Haley?
Nate Day: Okay.
Chris: Born Alexander Murray Palmer Haley.
Nate Day: Whoa.
Chris: Great, great. Yeah, cool name. Tons, massive, massive importance is placed on names throughout the entire story. I don't know if that comes through in the show.
Nate Day: probably not as much as it does in the book, but I, it, there are always names that, that sort of strike you. Yeah.
Chris: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and it's not, I mean, each of the individual names is important, but the the big, essentially the opening scene is he's being born.
Nate Day: Oh yeah.
Chris: And the traditional in Jufre is that the father spends seven days in isolated contemplation to make sure they're coming up with the correct name for their child.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah. That that's in the show too.
Chris: Okay. Okay. And then the the family tradition, this tie that we see coming back over and over each generation through the many, many children who are born is the tradition of the father.
Chris: They choose this name and then go and whisper it into this infant's ear three times before anyone else is told and then relay this family tradition.
Nate Day: Oh, that's actually really cool.
Chris: Yeah, it's very cool. Yeah, yeah. So. Alexander Murray Palmer Haley, born in Ithaca, New York in 1921.
Chris: Unfortunately, much akin to the story in the book itself, this dude's life is absolutely extraordinary. And I'm going to include what I think were probably the most pertinent highlights to the title we're discussing. But just like the book, we have to skip tons and tons of information.
Nate Day: Okay. I assume he will come up in later episodes.
Chris: You got to imagine. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: And these are still, you know, still certainly some big, big points that we'll touch on, I hope.
Nate Day: Right.
Nate Day: Sure.
Chris: Essentially attended a couple of universities again for the early 20th century. This is pretty extraordinary. His father was a professor at Alabama A&M that I believe he mentions in the book, because obviously that's the penultimate generation, the book ending with him.
Nate Day: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Chris: attended a couple of historically black colleges, two different ones. And then from what I was reading, essentially his father declared he needed more discipline. And at 20, he dropped out of university and joined the U.S. Coast Guard, did his 20 years required for retirement and then went on to college.
Chris: not start his career as a journalist but continue it in in earnest i suppose uh first for readers digest we're going so fast here uh skipping straight past the cool stuff he did there this led him to doing the first ever i'm sure we've all heard of the playboy interviews
Nate Day: Okay.
Nate Day: Cool.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: What do you mean?
Chris: Starting in the 60s, the first started interviewing famous people to publish.
Nate Day: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Chris: Right, right. And he did the very first one, which is mind boggling to me, was with Miles Davis.
Nate Day: Oh,
Nate Day: that's pretty wild.
Chris: Right? Right? Did interviews. Oh, I should have written it down. There was a second magazine that I guess Hefner also started and then it folded, but he did interviews for them as well. But, oh my gosh, this list.
Chris: I intended not to touch on them because we just have so much to get to, but let me see if I still have the list of who he interviewed for Playboy Up. it's I mean, it's extraordinary.
Nate Day: That's news to me.
Chris: that wasn't in the show.
Nate Day: No. The leader of the American Nazi Party.
Chris: yeah George Lincoln Rockwell.
Nate Day: Maybe it's possible that there were some like television specials created around this because it was such a huge sensation.
Chris: Yes, it was the second one. Sorry, it was the the sequel, The Roots, The Next Generations.
Nate Day: Oh, yeah, i have not got to any of that.
Chris: Okay, no, no, no. Well, I mean, that wasn't part of the book. Yeah, he interviewed. Yeah. So George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, interviewed him and Rockwell famously left a gun on the table the entire interview.
Nate Day: Oh, yikes.
Chris: But started with Miles Davis, interviewed Martin Luther King Jr.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, it absolutely incredible, right? This career in journalism, extraordinary.
Chris: The interview... actually also ultimately led to him doing this massive series of at least 50 in-person interviews with Malcolm X, leading to him ghostwriting what we now know as the autobiography of Malcolm X, which makes it a hilarious title. And also I had no idea because that's a book I read in college and loved and did not know that makes Roots the second Alex Haley book that I've read.
Nate Day: Yeah. And a book that we've considered covering on this show.
Chris: Oh my gosh.
Nate Day: we'll get We'll get to it
Chris: Yeah, boy, that'd be a doozy to reread, but it would be enjoyable. Okay, okay. So I do think it's it's hilarious that that makes it the title, Autobiography of Malcolm X, a little bit hilarious, but absolutely crazy.
Nate Day: Right. It is silly.
Chris: So he was doing all of this journalism, all of these interviews before he went on in 76 to write and publish Roots, the culmination of, I believe it was something like 12 years of research he did going back and forth, going all the way to the village of Jufre in West Africa.
Nate Day: Oh, cool.
Chris: And then in 76, 76, there are asterisks next to all of these statements, but I'm going to state it as the information was presented by Haley, and then we'll talk about criticisms, okay?
Nate Day: Okay. Mm.
Chris: So 76, 200 years after what he believes was to the day, 1776, that his would have been So seven generations, great, great, great, great grandfather, Kunta Kinte, landed in Annapolis.
Chris: And he's been interviewed saying that was the most emotional day of his life. Standing there, he went to the docks where the the slave auctions would have been held and stood there thinking, okay, this is where my ancestor came over.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Absolutely extraordinary.
Nate Day: Yeah, powerful.
Chris: There has been, i'm not even sure how to present this information because I don't know how much can or cannot be proven. Essentially, there's been a lot of criticism and doubt of the historical accuracy of his writing since.
Nate Day: Oh, my God, that really surprises me.
Chris: Yeah, so there are a couple of key factors, one being obviously an area. So Jufre is not actually in his... Kunta Kinte's grandfather in the book comes down from Mauritania and then is captured and sold into slavery in Jufray in the Gambia, way, way western tip of Africa.
Nate Day: OK.
Chris: And so Haley's understanding was that he went there. interviewed all of these people, found a griot, I'm not convinced I'm pronouncing that correctly, G-R-I-O-T, sort of the local individual continuing the oral tradition, right?
Nate Day: Oh, cool. Yeah.
Chris: Because we're talking two centuries now.
Nate Day: Yep.
Chris: And confirmed the existence of this individual and they're leaving. And the argument is that what happened here was a case of what's called...
Chris: They termed it circular history or circular storytelling, where essentially it's believed he went down there saying, has anyone heard of my ancestor Kunta Kinte? Enough times that someone else had heard it and it made it into their history. And they said, oh, yes, Kunta Kinte. Right.
Nate Day: Yeah, okay.
Chris: Again, i say it the way that I do, because first and foremost, I am not a historian. I'm not here to tell Haley he was wrong.
Nate Day: Right, sure.
Chris: Second of all, I think it's a little bit besides the point.
Nate Day: I think, yeah, it in fact, I think it sort of helps what the story was trying to do, which is saying that capturing this epic tale of, you know, black lineage all the way through countries in Africa that you and I hadn't heard of is Herculean, right?
Chris: Yes, that that's exactly it. Yep, I agree. That's why as I read these ideas and people have gone back and claimed like, because he gives very specific names of the the landowners, plantation owners, counties in South Carolina and Tennessee and Virginia where these family members were supposed to be and who they were marrying and who their kids were and people are arguing about these locations and individuals could not possibly line up with the dates being given for the Civil War or the specific battles or anything. And it's like, fuck off.
Nate Day: Yeah, what do you care?
Chris: Who cares? Exactly, exactly, exactly. there There was a more important claim that actually did end up bearing out the writings of a
Chris: Mr. Harold Corlander, who brought a plagiarism lawsuit and ultimately ended up settling outside of court two two years after it's published, so just 1978. Haley ended up paying him $650,000 for,
Chris: I mean, they settled out of court, so no one can say for sure or not, but it was pretty regarded that he plagiarized some of the writing. So that's where all of these questions have come from. You put it in such a good, I'm not going to restate it.
Chris: Yeah. from From my perspective as the reader, I don't care.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: Which I'll talk about a little bit more later when I ask you some questions.
Nate Day: Okay. Okay.
Chris: But the last part I want to talk about, because I thought it was so funny, I could not remember why Kunta sounded so familiar because I did not know anything about the book.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: The Kendrick Lamar song.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, so this was, maybe this will only be funny to me, but I'm going back to look it up because I remembered very specifically one line from it. And I found a cool interview with Kendrick asking him why this name.
Chris: And he talked about growing up and loving this miniseries, Roots, on TV.
Nate Day: Okay. Yeah.
Chris: And I guess they go through pretty specifically a scene. So Kinte, after he's brought in, he tries to escape a few times. And then it's either the third or fourth time right away when he's first brought to a plantation. And they just say, OK, you've tried this too many times and chop one of his feet off.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: OK, so that's in the show.
Nate Day: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Chris: Yeah, so Kendrick talks about, i just remember this show and this, you know, they go all the way to chop the man's foot off and he still continues andriives and thrives
Nate Day: yep yeah
Chris: And so that's where the inspiration for this song that we all love, I hope, came from. But then there's also a very interesting line where he says, he talks about rappers with ghostwriters.
Chris: And then just because it's stuck in my head so vividly. he says, I could dig rapping, but a rapper with a ghostwriter, what the fuck happened? So funny.
Chris: The connection on Rap Genius. I don't know if you've used that website. Shout out Jay for showing me that 15 years ago. Awesome website. They're talking about how. Kendrick probably did not intend it this way.
Chris: He's talking about literal rappers in America, contemporary times.
Nate Day: Sure.
Chris: But this show that he's referencing was a arguably plagiarized from Coralander by Haley, at least parts.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: not No one's argued in full, but at least parts.
Nate Day: All
Chris: But then also, Haley was a ghostwriter for Malcolm freaking X.
Nate Day: right.
Chris: I just thought that was so funny and a cool way to bring it full circle. Not particularly part of the book, but so fun to research and learn a bit little bit more about it.
Nate Day: That is cool, especially because Kendrick is, I mean, you know, he's like the only rapper or something to have won a Pulitzer, right, for his music.
Chris: Yes, yes, correct. For to pimp a butterfly.
Nate Day: So kind of interesting, yeah, the ways that that, I mean, it clearly had an impact on him, maybe even in ways that he didn't clock, you know what I mean?
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Mm. Mm.
Nate Day: If it turned him into that good of a writer that he's winning Pulitzers.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Uh-huh. You don't call it. Do you do you really say Pulitzer?
Nate Day: That's the first time I've ever said it that way. I think if you roll back the tape, I said Pulitzer one second ago.
Chris: Okay.
Chris: Yes, you did, in fact. Yeah, I was like... which Which, of course, Haley himself also received not a regular Pulitzer. that It had a special name.
Chris: Oh, that's literally what it's called. A special Pulitzer Prize in 1977.
Nate Day: Oh, okay.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the connections were just so fun to me. Yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Truly, absolutely sprinting here. I mean, that it's a mammoth, mammoth book. It is a mammoth undertaking to read, certainly not what it was to write, but I tried to hit the important parts.
Nate Day: Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I'm sure we'll we will revisit him. The Malcolm X movie stars Denzel and it's known as like one of the best biopics ever made.
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Ooh.
Nate Day: So I'm sure we'll get to it at some point.
Chris: Ooh. and i I have to have read 400 books since I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, and it still stands out vividly in my mind. That is also an extraordinary piece of writing.
Nate Day: Really interesting. Good. OK, cool. Is that is that the book?
Chris: Yes, tried to keep it tight.
Nate Day: Okay, you did a great job. Let's take a quick break and we will be right back.
Nate Day: Welcome back to Adaptation, the Booked Movie Podcast. Today we are discussing Alex Haley's Roots, which Chris just gave us a great rundown of. And I'm going to dive into 1977 miniseries that was adapted from that text. Before I do that, Chris, did you ever have to watch any of this in school?
Chris: No, not a sniff. Can I tell you hilariously, the only reference I've actually ever had to it that stuck out enough for me to remember is, do you remember the episode of that 70s show?
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: No.
Chris: This show was like brand new and first coming out and Red and Kitty want to watch it and he just bought a brand new VCR that can record TV shows on the VHSs.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: So he makes her sit and not watch it so that it'll record and then they'll watch it. And then he forgets to put the VHS in there.
Nate Day: a
Chris: And that's all I ever knew about it.
Nate Day: That sounds about right. That's hilarious. I remember learning about this in school when we talked about slavery, which is sort of interesting because I think you could also talk about it in the history of like
Chris: Uh-huh.
Nate Day: the 1970s because of how big a deal this show was and and we watched a few clips from it which i didn't realize were clips from this show until re-watching it for this discussion and i was like why have i seen this before and then was flashing back to like i think seventh grade seventh or eighth grade and was like oh yeah we watched this in miss green's classroom uh so kind of interesting yeah
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: Really? Which scenes or which parts?
Nate Day: Specifically, what I remember is the auctioning scene once Kunta Kinte is brought over here and he's auctioned off. And then a scene that stuck out to me and also actually my parents remembered watching this scene on television as well when he's whipped for using his name.
Nate Day: they They try to rename him Toby, i think, right, is the name he's given.
Chris: Aha, aha, yep.
Nate Day: And he just insists, insists, insists on being called Kunta. And so he gets punished very severely for it. And that's a scene i that I imagine a lot of people will remember, because it's visceral and obviously terrible and
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: really stands out. But anyway, this was a tough title to sort of pull my notes and thoughts together for because we are normally a movie podcast and this is our first TV show that we're covering.
Nate Day: And the chains of command of television are a little bit different.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: Who's important in producing a television show is a little bit different than it all is in movies. So you'll have to bear with me here as I probably stumble through some of these explanations.
Nate Day: Because on top of those differences, it's also changed a lot since the 1970s when this aired. For example, the showrunner of this show was a man named David L.
Chris: hu
Nate Day: wopper excuse me Wolper,
Nate Day: he was just an executive producer of the show. These days, an executive producer of a television show is not terribly involved. The show runner instead is usually the, the head of the writing staff, the person that comes up with the idea and they're sort of in charge of things.
Chris: Oh.
Chris: Okay.
Nate Day: there's still a director for a TV show. Sometimes it's a show runner, sometimes not, but, they're sort of beholden to what the showrunner wants, which was again, different 1977. So I'm hesitant to even say that this is like David L. Walpers baby, because I just don't know that that's really how it was seen back then. But nowadays showrunners are people like Tina Fey is a showrunner, ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, Taylor Sheridan, some of these people that does all the, you guys kind of like some of the Yellowstone and its spinoffs, right? Those all have the same showrunner, that's Taylor Sheridan.
Chris: I would have, if you had said all of those names to me, I would have said, oh yeah, they're the executive producers, right?
Nate Day: They probably also are.
Chris: Oh, oh, it's a, okay, okay. Yep, yep.
Nate Day: But again, that's just that's sort of weird because they're like super producers. not, not, right.
Chris: Right. I mean, Shonda Rhimes is like not comparable to the rest of TV at this point.
Nate Day: Not many people elevate to that. Yeah, exactly.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: just because it was kind of his story that was adapted.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: Right.
Chris: Right.
Nate Day: This was really known as the first super mainstream depiction of the horrors of slavery in America.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: Before this, slavery was kind of glossed over or even kind of depicted as like not that bad for slaves. You know, if you think about movies like Gone with the Wind, the slaves in that movie are
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Chris: yep
Nate Day: So this was a really big deal because people that, you know, really white people were getting a glimpse at how just fucking awful people slaves were treated and how bad slavery really, really was for the first time ever in 1977.
Nate Day: That's pretty wild to consider that like our parents lived through a generation that kind of learned what slavery was, you know, that's wild.
Chris: Wow.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy.
Nate Day: aired over eight consecutive nights in January of 1977. That's not very common for a miniseries to air back to back like that.
Chris: Uh-huh.
Nate Day: This aired on ABC and it was done back to back because ABC got really nervous after seeing how brutal it was. They sort of thought we've got to just, like we've we've invested millions in this, so it needs to hit the airwaves, but they kind of wanted to, I don't know, if sweep it under the rug is the right way to put it, but they didn't want it to be an eight week conversation about how brutal this was
Chris: Uh-huh.
Chris: Wow. oh
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: Massive show in every sense of the words, eight episodes, like I said, about 10 hours of content. Four of the episodes are an hour and a half, an hour, 45 minutes, and would occupy a two hour block of television.
Nate Day: and then the other four episodes are roughly an hour and would occupy an hour block of television.
Chris: Right.
Nate Day: So just a lot to consume, and I'm not even talking about subject material, I'm just saying it's a lot of time in front of the television and a lot of characters, a lot of time span because of the sort of nature of the story.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: It was it was just a big pill to swallow. And then on top of that, you add that you're watching some of the worst sides of humanity and we're having a pretty serious discussion.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: But what's really remarkable about this was that in some capacity, it doesn't sound like this number applies to all eight episodes, but in some capacity, this show was watched by over half of the population of the United States during its initial run.
Chris: Holy crap.
Nate Day: That's enormous. Nothing does that. Shows don't do that. Maybe a news broadcast, you know, about something like, I don't know, probably the January 6th newscast had similar numbers, but even then you're divided between networks, right?
Nate Day: This was half of the United States, more than half of the United States watching the same show at the same time, experiencing the same feelings at the same time.
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: Pretty, pretty unbelievable. And it's still the largest ratings ever tallied by Nielsen, which is the sort of preeminent or I'm sorry, not preeminent, but like most prominent ratings counting system in the nation.
Nate Day: I don't know if you've ever heard of a Nielsen family or a Nielsen device. Sometimes they'll email you or email snail mail you a device that you'll put on top of your TV so it can kind of track what you're watching.
Chris: I've always wondered how that worked.
Nate Day: Yeah, that's that's pretty much how they...
Chris: huh
Nate Day: It's evolved a lot since then. i actually just got a call from them the other day because I've filled out surveys for them in the past. And they wanted me to wear a device all day, every day that would record...
Nate Day: what I was listening to so that it could, like if I was at work and a TV, I walked past a TV that was playing cheers, it would pick that up. And I, of course, was like, yeah, you're not getting me to wear a listening device all day long.
Chris: Yeah, that's that's crazy. that's That's a little out there. Yes.
Nate Day: But but they're they're doing what they can to really try and very accurately measure how many people are watching something.
Chris: Wow.
Chris: ahha
Nate Day: Also has a giant cast. Kunta Kinte as a young kid is played by LeVar Burton, who of course you and I know as the host of Reading Rainbow, which I think actually kind of an interesting, I didn't really know he was an actor because I've never seen him in anything besides Reading Rainbow and now this.
Chris: yes wow
Nate Day: But I think it's so, oh yeah, he did have a big career in Star Trek, which I only looked up
Chris: Star Trek, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: after realizing that he was an actor. But I think it's kind of cool that he went on to do Reading Rainbow after such a huge adaptation put him on the map.
Chris: Just kept making the world better.
Nate Day: Yeah. And then as Kunta got older, he was played by John Amos, who is the star of a sitcom called Good Times, and actually went to CSU, my alma mater, for a little while.
Nate Day: So fun connection there.
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: Yeah. And then the supporting cast included a lot of Other big names, Louis Gossett Jr., excuse me Leslie Uggams, Ben Vereen, Ed Asner, Robert Reed, Cicely Tyson, and then some really fun cameos.
Nate Day: Maya Angelou has a couple of lines, appears as his...
Chris: wow
Nate Day: grandmother. And then sort of bizarrely in a retrospective sense, O.J. Simpson makes a cameo in this. Speaking of news broadcasts that got a lot of attention, he plays the father of, is it Fanta?
Chris: what
Nate Day: Fanta? The girl that Kunta sort of, I guess, has a crush on for a minute before he gets kidnapped in Africa.
Chris: oh in in jufre yeah yeah yeah
Nate Day: Yeah. And it was a scene... It makes me wonder you know if it was like written so that OJ could be in it because Kunta sort of runs through their lunch, really, where they're hanging out.
Nate Day: And this character played by OJ has to chase him down and catch him. And I was like, well, yeah, of course they've hired a football player to do that.
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: you know And this, again, 1977, was long before we knew what we know. now. But also speaks to how incredibly zeitgeisty it was that they were getting like the, you know, I mean, the one of the biggest stars in the world that was not an actor to act in this.
Nate Day: He kind of was an actor, but you know what I mean?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: The music was mostly written by Gerald Freed, or maybe it's Fried, with some contributions from Quincy Jones, who we've talked about a little bit on this podcast as well.
Chris: Yes. Who Haley also interviewed.
Nate Day: Oh, really? I'd love to see a Quincy Jones movie.
Chris: Oh my gosh. Yes.
Nate Day: As long as they did something interesting. You know, I can read his Wikipedia page anytime I want, but I'd be interested to.
Chris: As long as it's starring Rashida Jones.
Nate Day: Oh, yeah, that'd be cool if she was in it or if she were.
Chris: Right.
Nate Day: I think she actually directed a documentary about him.
Chris: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Nate Day: I'll have to double check that, but I think that's the case. The show is very well reviewed and is, of course, like I've alluded to many times now, now regarded as one of the most important television events of all time.
Chris: h Wow.
Nate Day: It's been re-edited a few times to to condense it from those eight lengthy episodes into four still very lengthy, but somewhat less lengthy episodes and been re-aired a handful of times as a oh, I'm sorry, six episodes, not four episodes. So they've they've really just trimmed it down just a little bit and has re-aired a number of times on a number of networks, including BET and even that re-airing of it set records for BET specifically viewership.
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: So even it's its legacy is just, incredible.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: At the time and in the 70s, it was nominated for 37 Emmys, which is the most nominations for a miniseries ever, and ended up winning nine of those, including, of course, Outstanding Limited Series, and got a few prizes for some of the actors, the writing, the directing, editing, music, and sound editing.
Chris: Goodness.
Nate Day: and
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: Yeah, I mean, just Titanic, you know, spawned a number of sequels, as you talked about.
Chris: Oh,
Nate Day: Roots, the next generation, i believe covers the last seven chapters of the book. So that's probably where we get Alex Haley's father, as well as
Chris: okay.
Nate Day: some information about Alex's career, like you you mentioned.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: There was also a TV movie called Roots the Gift, which was set between episodes two and three, followed young Kunta Kinte and, oh, I'm going to forget his name now. The guy that was sort of a mentor that played the violin
Chris: Oh, oh, oh. Oh, no.
Nate Day: see in this it's like a nickname right and i knew this is one of the things that i think is a flaw is that it's almost impossible fiddler of course his name is fiddler because he plays the fiddle one of one of the flaws i think is that it's it's almost too much just to to remember and i'm not even talking about
Chris: there were There were so many characters.
Chris: Oh, my gosh.
Chris: Right. Yes, yes, yes.
Nate Day: the content, I'm just talking about the the way the story is structured. I'm like, whose kid? i don't I couldn't even tell you right now what generation this show ends on. I think it's Kuntz's great grandkids, I think, but I'm not positive because i i believe it was,
Chris: So was that Chicken George or is that Kizzy No, cause Kizzy Kunta's daughter and then Chicken George was Kissy's daughter?
Nate Day: o son, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: I think it was chicken George's kids, right?
Chris: And then, so Tom the blacksmith.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah. Is that the end?
Chris: Oh, interesting.
Nate Day: I think at it is.
Chris: I mean, that is the lion's share of the book.
Nate Day: Yeah, and that's what I assumed. But like I said, I'm getting a little ahead of myself at getting into criticisms here, but what it's very difficult for me to remember who's who, especially post, I guess, post Kizzy in the story and and what happened to who.
Chris: I mean, Chicken George has like 10 kids.
Nate Day: Right, right, exactly.
Chris: Like, it expands so fast.
Nate Day: And the The last names change sometimes because of marriage, sometimes because these people are sold.
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Right, right.
Nate Day: Sometimes it's not a clear, right?
Chris: They just have the last name of the, yeah.
Nate Day: Because sometimes it's, biological and sometimes it's just legal. I don't know. It's, it's complicated. It's a long, complicated story. but I also wanted to mention that there was sort a sort of spinoff in, i believe the nineties, mini series called Alex Haley's queen, which follows some of the lineage.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: I think a very limited amount, but some of the lineage on the other side of his family, I think it's like his maternal grandmother or great grandmother that he's tracking in this extra.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: story. And that was Halle Berry. So I assume that that was also a story, probably about similar to chicken George probably about being the child of a slave and slave master is my assumption because Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much, I think.
Chris: Whoa.
Chris: who Like right right before emancipation probably.
Nate Day: I again, I'm just not a television expert, so it's I don't know the workings quite as well. It's a little confusing to me where when and where this exactly aired.
Chris: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Nate Day: This remake was four episodes, an hour and a half each. And also just to keep in line with what the original did, it aired on four consecutive nights.
Nate Day: Still very respectable in viewership from my understanding, but it was really difficult to track how many people actually watched it because it was split between so many different networks.
Chris: ahha
Nate Day: So i I don't have a number, like half the population of America, but my understanding is that it was still, considered a success, especially because it ended up with semi seven Emmy nominations, including outstanding limited series.
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: So yeah, just really big. It's just kind of crazy the way that it's lasted all this time. You know, I told my parents that we were doing this one and we talked all night about what they remembered and
Chris: yep
Nate Day: how they would go to school one day and, and you know, talk to kids and teachers about what they watched the night before and then they'd go home and do it again. And, you know, my dad's the youngest of eight. And so I asked him, I was like, was this something that everybody that was like living at home at the time sat down and watched? And he was like, yeah, I mean, that's, that's how we did TV at the time. So, you know, my dad and all,
Nate Day: maybe not all, but a majority of his siblings watch this. My mom's family was much smaller, but I'm, I'm sure they all watched it too. pretty, pretty big deal.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah. So kind of cool. And, and it, it really does hold up. I know I, I kind of just poked some holes in it a minute ago, but there were several times where I was like, damn, this is good. Like really started the wave of movie quality television, you know?
Chris: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Nate Day: Yeah, which obviously it's a story that deserves that. So that's great.
Chris: Did it feel different considering, you know, that we were going to have this discussion as we have so many times, but with just such a sheer quantity of content more?
Nate Day: Yeah, I will tell you, i meant to watch both shows, actually, but I severely underestimated how long the first show was. So I was like, well, then I won't watch the remake because I just can't.
Nate Day: There's just not enough hours in a week.
Chris: It was so much information.
Chris: This was like two Saturdays back to back of me sitting here at home for like six hours straight reading, trying to get through this puppy.
Nate Day: Yeah. Watching it too, because I did a handful of episodes, need to rewatch parts of it, if not all of it, just because my attention span would drift a little bit and I don't know necessarily if that's the the quality so much as it is the quantity of, you know, I mean, this is like essentially yeah it's like it's similar to Game of Thrones.
Chris: hmm.
Nate Day: I felt a lot of similarity to Game of Thrones in the incredibly epic nature
Chris: yep right
Nate Day: of the story. And so imagine consuming six seasons worth of Game of Thrones in six episodes. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I got to remember who Chicken George is now.
Nate Day: So I would go back and rewatch, you know, the second half of the first episode about Kizzy and be like, okay, I think I've got it now. I think I can remember now who Chicken George is.
Chris: yeah trying to like draw the family tree
Nate Day: Yeah. And in fact, I had to look up a family tree a few times. And it's unbelievable. I mean, yeah, it's a big, big show. So a little different to answer your question.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: But what other discussion discussion questions did you have written down?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah Okay. this Well, this is kind of exactly what we were talking about. it' such It covers such a vast quantity of time, essentially two centuries. We get into Haley at the very end, but not all the way up to publication.
Nate Day: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So I don't know, give or take a little one and a half centuries, a lot of time.
Nate Day: Sure, yeah.
Chris: And so there is a need at times to make kind of some skips where the beginning is day by day, week by week, month by month of Kunta's life to having to make some substantial leaps.
Nate Day: Oh, yeah.
Chris: It's, it's shockingly seamless in the writing, which is just masterful how Haley did that. I imagine they have to have some of these same aspects in the show. Does it feel like that? Were there any parts that felt kind of bifurcated just due to simply having to cover such a timeline?
Nate Day: Yeah, that's funny. That's basically a question that I wrote down for you. it's It works very well with television because basically every basically every patriarch or matriarch of the family that's living or living as far as we know, like a two episode arc, in the show.
Chris: okay.
Nate Day: so it, it, it works well that way, whether it's seamless. I mean, I guess technically it is because you wrap up a story with Kunta as far as we know, and then we've, we switched to Kizzy's,
Chris: Right.
Nate Day: story and through Kizzy's story, we're able to find out that there wasn't much more to tell of Kunta's story. For those that are a little bit lost, Kunta Kinte's daughter, was named Kizzy. She was sold away to another plantation, i think, when Kunta was probably like in his forty s or Yeah.
Chris: I think he says he's in his 50s. Yeah, because Bell was older than him. They had stopped having kids and then they were like wondering if she was going to get together with Noah. And then they find out that she helped him try to escape.
Chris: She drew a map for him. So they sold her and then we follow her instead.
Nate Day: Yeah. Right.
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah. And yeah, like Chris said, we switch protagonists at that point.
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: And we find out later, actually, it might be when Kizzy's an old woman that she goes and finds her dad's grave and finds out that he didn't live too much longer. And, you know, I mean, the life of a slave is hardly a life, so it's not like he had anything going on that, that she necessarily missed out on, right? Besides time.
Nate Day: So i don't know. I had a lot of issue staying engaged with it after, for sure. After Kizzy's first episode is when I kind of started being like,
Nate Day: distracted by other things and then had to find myself going back to, to get answers to these questions and who is that guy? And when, when did that guy come in? And, especially with, some of the slave masters and some of their, like, I don't even know neighbors or, or people that are, i guess, hired help on the farms plantations.
Nate Day: so I don't know if I would say it's seamless, but it does, fit in naturally to the television format.
Chris: Okay. Yeah, yeah, I guess episodic like that, that makes more sense. Maybe I'm picturing more of a movie style that it would feel a little jolting.
Nate Day: Yeah. And, and by the way, this was when television would finish and they would go on next, or on the next episode of roots, Kizzy and her son, chicken, George get in to a fight over whatever, you know, whatever.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, little previews.
Nate Day: And, yeah, so so, what that does, I think is sort of pull you out of the story enough to, to, uh,
Nate Day: maybe make some of those transitions seem a little bit less jarring. Like I knew that we were going to start following Kizzy, for example, because that little preview told me, right?
Chris: who
Chris: Right, right.
Nate Day: If I had just gone episode to episode without those little bumpers, I maybe would have been like, whoa, what happened to Kunta?
Chris: yeah Yep, yep.
Nate Day: You know? So they did a good job of making it work considering nobody had really done TV like this before.
Chris: Uh-huh, right, right.
Nate Day: Yeah. No. Yeah. I assume that this must, you have alluded to this already, must have been completely overwhelming to read because that's how it was to watch. Do you feel at all inclined to read the novel about his other side of the family?
Chris: Hmm, interesting.
Chris: I actually only just found out about that other one in preparing the research for this one.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: i
Chris: In the middle of reading this, I probably would have said no. Now, as I'm like thinking back on this, it truly was... And for the sheer quantity of content, it is miraculous how engaging it remained.
Chris: And I think I would be very happy to read more of his writing.
Nate Day: yeah
Chris: Yes, it's it's truly unbelievable that he made 730 pages. There were no parts where I was like, I don't know, should i just like jump to the next chapter or something? You know what I mean?
Nate Day: Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Chris: And especially now that I can't believe I had never realized he did all the ghost writing for autobiography of Malcolm X. I mean, truly masterful writing. Yeah, I would definitely read more of his, i mean, fairly limited bibliography.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: He didn't write a ton of books.
Nate Day: Yeah. it sounds sounds like he knew what he was interested in, you know?
Chris: Yeah. Well, and the I, again, not disregarding, but more or less ignoring the criticism, was it fully historically accurate, was it not, to recreate each of these individual scenes crossing literally hundreds of years.
Chris: And it was brilliant. There was no point that I was like, There's no way. You know, we've talked about with certain fictions, the suspension of disbelief or suspension of reality, right?
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Again, not knowing that this was history. And, you know, he's it's not like he's claiming he he thinks everything that he portrayed as taking place in Jufre was...
Nate Day: No, of course. Yeah.
Chris: Right, right? He never claimed that.
Nate Day: yeah
Chris: but it But it's so vivid, so direct. And again, as we were discussing of... you know, the history of American slavery and this abhorrent institution that we have inherited the leavings of, right?
Nate Day: Yeah. huh
Chris: This was such a fresh and unique perspective on that to me. Yes, I would absolutely read anything else he's written.
Nate Day: I asked that question because when I learned that this, that Roots was sort of the first honest depiction of slavery, I looked up other
Nate Day: stories, but mainly film and television that sort of qualify and as as honest depictions of slavery. And the list is really bare. I mean, it's kind of embarrassing how few depictions there are.
Chris: o
Nate Day: And, i you know, to some degree, I understand that, like, it's completely unpleasant to watch. It's not like anybody's itching to see more, but you know, as, as a piece of history, it's one that we certainly need to confront and prevent from happening again.
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: But anyway, I was like, well, maybe his, these sequels and spinoffs and stuff need to be talked about as much as roots does. If, if Alex Haley is the only one that's like,
Chris: o
Nate Day: creating stuff that's this honest, then maybe those need to be lifted up more. and you know, it's like I said, it was Halle Berry. So Oscar winning movie star in this show.
Nate Day: So maybe there were attempts to, but I was just curious, kind of if it overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion, you know?
Chris: I definitely would need a break. It could not be the next book that I read. Now, that's also coming off of reading nearly back-to-back Bush and then James and then this.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: Right.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, certainly writing that I will return to.
Nate Day: Well, your next book is a doozy too, I think. So hopefully that's,
Chris: Well, yeah, but at least that's one that I've read already. you know Do the in an entirely different way.
Nate Day: yeah yeah. And it's less about race. Right. Exactly. not it's Not a racial epic.
Chris: Because that's... i you You already... yes, yes, yes. You stated this quite eloquently earlier. The fact that this is the sheer quantity that it is and consistently engaging and challenging.
Chris: You know, Anna Karenina was longer, but you are not chapter by chapter being faced with the the lived experience of these individuals, right?
Nate Day: Oh.
Nate Day: Right.
Chris: There are still pages where...
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: people were just kicking it and going to a restaurant.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: And that is not really the case here.
Nate Day: No.
Chris: You know?
Nate Day: In fact, the few moments of joy that are sort of sprinkled throughout this all get punctuated by usually something pretty awful. There's, there's very few moments where I've felt like, you know, cheering or, or felt relief or anything like that, watching this.
Chris: oh my gosh.
Chris: The disappointment I felt when the fiddler had finally raised all of the money he needed to buy his freedom and then, you know, came back dejected saying, oh, no, he just told me no.
Nate Day: Hmm.
Chris: Like, oh, and that's just one.
Nate Day: I know.
Chris: Right.
Nate Day: I know.
Chris: That's one of dozens. Oh, hard.
Nate Day: I know. i think my, my favorite part in the whole thing was when Kizzy is older and, she, she finally basically, i don't know if this is really the right word.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: She finally gives in to this other slave that's kind of been pursuing her and trying to flirt with her. And she finally kind of, agrees to get to know him better and spend time with him. And it's so rewarding to see her get that after all of these years.
Nate Day: But, you know, that's a pretty small moment in terms of the the triumphs that are, yeah, depicted cinematically throughout history.
Chris: Yes. In like a lot of moments.
Nate Day: We're like, really, when the old lady gets a boyfriend, that's the happiest, best part of the whole thing.
Chris: I mean, kind of, yeah
Nate Day: Yeah, it really kind of is.
Chris: Oof, da.
Nate Day: What do you have any more questions?
Chris: Yes, this one. And as I was writing it, I wasn't sure if we would, you know, end up kind of going over it or not. And we sort of did. But all I'll present it anyway.
Nate Day: OK.
Chris: As I told you at the beginning, I did not know it was essentially this autobiographical tale going into it. For me, it was a cool surprise finding out at the end.
Chris: It's again, you kind of answered this already. So they covered it at the beginning of the show. That's correct.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Do you think that changed how you viewed the rest of the story, knowing at the outset this is where the information is coming from?
Nate Day: You know, what I think it did a little bit. I don't know that I ever realized that this book was published in the 70s, that it was published so close to my lifespan.
Chris: Okay.
Nate Day: I assumed that Alex Haley was much older and that, you know, Kunta Kinte was like his grandfather or something like that.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: So it I think it did help to recontextualize for me just how insane it was to put some of this stuff, not insane, how bold it was to put some of this stuff on screen and and in a book for that matter.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Nate Day: And
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: for that to be, like the seventies weren't, they were very different than today, but well, less so than you might think.
Nate Day: But it's it's not like this book was published in the 1770s when I don't have any idea what life was like, you know what I mean?
Chris: Yep.
Chris: Yes. Yep.
Nate Day: So you can read a book and or or watch a show that comes from this time period and sort of not place yourself in it literally. Again, i didn't live during these times that are depicted, but like I could understand the lens that it was being told through.
Nate Day: I think a little bit better. And that's not even exactly what I mean to say, because of course I don't understand Alex Ailey and his family history, you know, as, as my, I do my own, but I mean that it, it wasn't Shakespeare that wrote this.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: It wasn't Henry David Thoreau that wrote this.
Chris: Right. Right.
Nate Day: It was like somebody whose goal was to make this accessible for modern audiences, whether that was a reader or a watchr
Chris: Yes. And you and I were both alive within his lifetime.
Nate Day: Right. So yes, I think maybe not as, it probably didn't like rock the boat as much for you as it did for you, but it did. I was like, oh my God, that guy, like, look at his clothes.
Nate Day: He was alive, you know, at a time that I could visually recognize, you know?
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Yep.
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: Yeah. So interesting for sure.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: What did you rate this on Goodreads?
Chris: This was a very big four.
Nate Day: Okay.
Chris: As is often the case, definitely. Well, I shouldn't say definitely. i I am very hard pressed to repeat this.
Chris: a book of this length just because of the sheer time commitment.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: But i mean, so incredible. I've already said all of the things, whether it was accurate or not, I don't care. It was absolutely eclipsed by how captivating his writing is.
Chris: You feel the years of research that he did to cover such a tremendous amount of time in such detail. There are not these big holes, these big gaps. You're not... sitting there thinking, wow, this character was a little flat.
Chris: I mean, truly, truly incredible writing the biggest of fours.
Nate Day: That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. i mean I'm in pretty much the same boat.
Chris: What about the show?
Nate Day: I gave it a four and I said actually maybe a 4.5.
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: Its biggest flaw is its length, which is also kind of, it like that's the point, you know, that's also kind of its biggest strength.
Chris: hmm. It's called a saga.
Nate Day: So it's a really interesting, Yeah. And it makes me wonder if maybe adapting it, I mean, obviously that's the way most people have connected to it is by watching the show, but it makes me wonder if maybe it wasn't really built to be outside of the the format of literature, just because I, like I said, I i think it's a strength and a weakness simultaneously, but it does some really cool things.
Chris: Oh, wow.
Nate Day: One of the things I didn't mention was that some of the casting was was super interesting one of the slave masters was played by the dad from the brady bunch and another one was played by ed asner who was mostly known as a comedian at like a sitcom comedian and and um
Chris: oh wow Yeah, yeah.
Nate Day: i just lost my train of thought Oh, really interesting because I thought, you know, they're, they're taking these people that we know basically as part of our family and making them like really the villains in, in the story.
Chris: Uh-huh.
Nate Day: And, I thought it was just an interesting way to engage the audience mentally and, and sort of make them consider themselves as somewhat complicit in what, what has happened and all of the ways it's unfolded since then.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Uh-huh. Wow.
Chris: Wow.
Nate Day: Yeah, and and just really cool of those actors too to to do that, you know, to understand that. So anyway, little there were a lot of little things like that that really elevated it to to that four or maybe 4.5 status because, or or despite anything that I thought was a flaw, which at this point are almost not even worth
Nate Day: complaining about, like i could point to some weird performances or or stumbles in the writing, but it's kind of like, I don't know, we're how many, 50 years later? And that's not the point anymore, you know?
Chris: Yep. Yep.
Nate Day: So yeah, would you whod you recommend this to?
Nate Day: Right.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: So I think if I was talking to somebody about
Chris: maybe the historical fiction lens or American history, but not a textbook. I think this is something I would certainly point to. And the the more obvious one immediate to me is if you are that avid reader and you're really into the, uh, the shifting protagonist, the family lines, especially the two foremost, uh, examples of that to me are Pachinko, which I recommend to anybody that I can very, very similar vibes.
Chris: And then not exactly the focus of it, but I'm still going to argue Dune
Nate Day: Okay. Oh, yeah.
Chris: because part of, that That family line.
Nate Day: Yeah, totally. I can see it.
Chris: You know, I mean, children of where we start, the movies do such a bastardized, horrific job of showing it. But the books, you get much more attached to Paul Atreides and then or later Duke Atreides.
Nate Day: Sure.
Nate Day: but The dad is Lado and Timothy Salome is Paul.
Chris: Who's yes. yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: We, I mean, they skip straight past him in the movie, which is crazy.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: You get that dude to play and then skip anyway. But that was what drew me into the books of Dune initially.
Nate Day: Was how much history you were getting?
Chris: I thought it was so cool going through this family line.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: And suddenly the protagonist is someone who was just a kid at the beginning and you didn't know what role they would play.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: So those are two examples that I would say, If this, then that and vice versa.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, such a cool book. if If someone's willing to stick out, maybe I would say, you know, read the first 30 chapters.
Nate Day: Oh, and see what, yeah.
Chris: And see, you know, rather than suggesting someone. I mean, you look at a table of contents that says chapter 120, and I don't care how much you enjoy reading. You stop and consider.
Chris: You know.
Nate Day: I'm curious, is the part about Kunta, you said that's the lion's share of the book, is it probably also the best part of the book?
Chris: Oh,
Nate Day: Or is that too big a question?
Chris: It's that's too big a question. The the problem to me is the different. The problem and the brilliance in the writing, very, very different focuses.
Chris: Kunta is the only one that we get such a vivid, and again, truly, we're going nearly day by day initially in his childhood, to months, years, adulthood, many, many actions involving him, and then it kind of necessarily accelerates, right?
Nate Day: Right. okay
Chris: But that's because we're focusing on we're focused on more or less just him. We get a lot about his mom, Binta, and his dad and his siblings. But then as it moves on, it just obviously, as family trees do, it grows exponentially. And we simply can't get that great a glimpse at each individual.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, duh. I almost want to say Chicken George is really the peak to me because that's where we get the most, the internal struggles of what what does this life truly look like and mean for us or what could it.
Nate Day: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Chris: That I think was also a very unique perspective to me, because, again, as you were talking about, it wasn't this whitewashed, nonsensical slavery wasn't that bad, but also not this.
Chris: unrealistically optimistic struggle because there, you know, he has paired him alongside Tom Lee.
Nate Day: right
Chris: Oh, oh my gosh. No, definitely my favorite part of the storyline, because I think he also touches on what was ahead of his time, in my experience, in the political discourse in this country of exposing that deliberate wedge on the part of the wealthy and the elite between, black and poor whites, uh, which I was not prepared for, especially being written 50 years ago.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Like that felt like a pretty new concept for me. Again, the disclaimer I always give perhaps out of my own ignorance, but that was like a new concept for me. I want to say within the last 10 years,
Nate Day: yeah
Chris: Oh, boy, I bet you I'm going to be off by a few years. But I mean, this is right around the time that people like Nixon and Reagan and Newt Gingrich were like,
Chris: deliberately doing that here and then and he's writing this epic saga about it historically freaking cool i have no idea if that was the question you asked i just had totally forgotten that there were some thoughts that i had stowed away
Nate Day: Yep.
Nate Day: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Chris: There was just so much about, I mean, we could we could do an episode about every 10 chapters of the book.
Nate Day: Section. Yeah.
Chris: There's so much information. I'm glad they chose to make it a series and didn't try to, yeah.
Nate Day: Yeah. Instead of a movie. Yeah.
Chris: Oh my goodness.
Nate Day: I know.
Chris: Imagine, oh, it'd be horrific.
Nate Day: one of the One of the things that I really loved was some of those nuanced perspectives. Fiddler, specifically as a character, you know when we meet him, for a minute, you're sort of like, what is this guy's deal?
Chris: Yes. Yes.
Nate Day: Because he's like telling Kunta basically to fall in line and like kiss the slave master's ass and all this stuff.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: And then you realize that it's because he's built...
Nate Day: basically as nice a life as he can for himself by doing those things.
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: And by the way, it's still not a nice life. but I don't mean anything by that.
Chris: No, I think you said it appropriately.
Nate Day: But, I just thought, you know, the the actor that plays at Luis Gossett Jr., i was like, how did they get this guy? He's like hugely representational in in black cinema.
Nate Day: I couldn't believe he was playing this character that was like a total pushover.
Nate Day: And then I was like, he's not a pushover.
Chris: He's not, he's doing what he, yep.
Nate Day: He's the smartest guy in the book.
Chris: But you're presented with both parts so vividly.
Nate Day: this
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: First, you get Kunta's perspective. That's like, I think he literally says, he's like, why are these, they're, they're acting like they like being here.
Nate Day: had
Chris: And you are not just confronted. You are smacked in the face with an entire Hoover Dam worth of cement with the duality of the situation
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: From his perspective, that's right. And from his perspective, that's right. And from her perspective, that's right
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Over and over and over. Absolutely incredible.
Nate Day: Yeah. Right. And like chicken George, uh, You know, his whole story was so complex, being close with his father, who is, of course, also his owner.
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: and the And the way that's manipulated, i just thought it was so nuanced.
Chris: Yep.
Chris: Oh my gosh. And then the part where he's, he's like finally earning some money and trying to make his own way.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: And they're talking about seriously buying their family. And then this horrific human who raped his mother comes up and mentions, well, that's weird.
Nate Day: Mm-hmm.
Chris: You haven't named any of your sons after me yet.
Chris: i mean, it's obviously.
Nate Day: And his name is Chicken George, by the way. Like, that's what they call him. I mean, like, seriously, to say that to somebody named that?
Chris: Yep.
Nate Day: And, I mean, his birth name is George, but he's called Chicken George.
Chris: Who is your biological son that you've not acknowledged his entire life and treated his family like her?
Nate Day: Yeah, unbelievable.
Chris: Yep. Yeah. And again, storyline of, I don't know what, 30 family members that we meet in greater and lesser degrees of intimate. Just extraordinary. Just absolutely extraordinary.
Nate Day: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: Tough.
Chris: But yes.
Nate Day: And my recommendation, by the way, is very similar to yours. I think the the main thing that you need to have is an interest in history and how and why it unfolds.
Nate Day: And you can sort of watch through that lens, right?
Chris: I
Nate Day: This is the story of America, for the most part.
Chris: i mean, it's all of it. Yeah, you you get. Yes, you that. I'm sorry, I don't need to interrupt you. I agree with you.
Nate Day: Yeah, that's...
Chris: A lens of literally all of America's history.
Nate Day: Yeah.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: So as long as you can get on board with that, I think you would enjoy the show. If you're not into that, it it can get a bit weighty for sure.
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: But I mean, if you it's the same as like, I mean, I did, I compared it to Game of Thrones for a reason.
Chris: Yeah.
Nate Day: We've got three Game of Thrones shows now and all of them, we have to remember who's related to who and But, you know, Shogun too is sort of in this vein. Pachinko, I think, is a great example that you mentioned.
Nate Day: Yeah, these historical epics that span oh decades and decades and decades are really the best comp.
Nate Day: I mean, like, this is about slavery, but it's about so much more than that, right?
Chris: Yes. Yep.
Nate Day: Interesting. Well, thank you for joining our conversation on Roots. We very much enjoyed this conversation. And speaking of historical epics, our next title that we'll be covering is The Odyssey, as well as Christopher Nolan's adaptation.
Chris: Yes.
Nate Day: And I assume we'll end up talking about The Coen Brothers, O Brother, Where Art Thou, as well.
Nate Day: Okay, thanks for joining us.
Chris: Bye.
