Color Adjustment
What does the American dream look like? Where do Black Americans fit into it? And what is television’s role in shaping our views of racial progress and the idealized American family? Picking up where the groundbreaking Ethnic Notions left off, this pioneering work of media studies by Marlon Riggs presents a complicated, challenging, and nuanced view of evolving racial attitudes as reflected in popular programs such as Amos ’n’ Andy, Julia, All in the Family, Good Times, Roots, and The Cosby Show. Narrated by Ruby Dee and featuring interviews with actors Diahann Carroll, Tim Reid, and Esther Rolle; African American historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.; and producer Norman Lear, among others, Color Adjustment looks beyond the whitewashed, middle-class mythologies peddled by prime-time entertainment to track the ways in which Black Americans have been assimilated into a new but no less harmful racial narrative.
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Cast
- Steven Bochco
- Featuring interviews with
- Diahann Carroll
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Herman Gray
- Bob Henry
- Hal Kanter
- Norman Lear
- Sheldon Leonard
- Denise Nicholas
- Bruce Paltrow
- Alvin Poussaint
- Daphne Maxwell Reid
- Tim Reid
- Ester Rolle
- Patricia A. Turner
- David L. Wolper
- Ruby Dee
- Narrator
- Ernie Fosselius
- Voices
- Allan Snitow
- Andrew Stern
Credits
- Director
- Marlon Riggs
- Produced by
- Marlon Riggs
- Written by
- Marlon Riggs
- Producer, research director
- Vivian Kleiman
- Editor
- Deborah Hoffmann
- Associate producer
- Anna Vega
- Original music
- Mary Watkins
- Videography
- Michael Anderson
- Rick Butler
- Sound recordists
- Michele Zaccheo
- Christiane Badgley
- Dwight Kiyono
- Sound editor
- Richard C. Bock
- Footage researchers
- Anna Vega
- Kenn Rabin
- John Grybowski
- Still art director
- Chris Robbins
- Still photographer
- Karen Steffens
- Online editor
- Ed Rudolph/Video Arts
- Sound mix
- Mark Escott/Robert Berke Sound