Making Virginia Durr Less Blue: Preserving <em>Eyes on the Prize</em>

Abstract

I 2011, the Wash ing ton University Libraries Film & Media Archive, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, began the arduous task of preserving the first six episodes of the seminal documentary series, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, 1954 to 1965 (1987) and the approximately seventyfive hours of never before seen outtakes from more than the one hundred interviews featured in these episodes. Over the course of four years, the series negatives—known as A and B rolls—and origi nal interview camera negatives, were transferred from highly unstable acetate stock to stable polyester stock, allowing for future digitization and reassembly of the complete interviews. Eyes on the Prize creator Henry E. Hampton Jr. (1940−1998) was a St. Louis native and Wash ing ton University alumnus. In 1968, he founded Blackside, Inc., which grew to become one of the most successful Af ri can American production companies of its time. Blackside primarily produced industrial training and government sponsored films, until 1978, when Capital City Communications requested series proposals from minorityowned production companies. Traveling from Boston to Selma in 1965 to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Hampton had witnessed firsthand the courage of those fighting for equality and the resulting violence that would take the life of his friend, Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb. It was this experience that inspired Hampton to propose a series chronicling the civil rights movement, through telling the stories of those who lived it. Blackside won the contract and began filming interviews, gathering stock footage, and conducting research. However, it became clear early on that Hampton and Capital City had very different visions. Eyes on the Prize scriptwriter Steve Fayer recalls,