Free The Butler: A Witness to History by Wil Haygood

in American films was Laura Ziskin, a powerful producer in Hollywood. Among her best-known produced works were Pretty Woman, As Good as It Gets, and the Spider-Man films. Ziskin was in London when she first read my article “A Butler Well Served by This Election” in the Washington Post. She and her producing partner, Pam Williams, tracked me down in a hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where I was on assignment.
    Ziskin and Williams were immediately drawn to the article as a potential movie and imagined The Butler as an epic, a story that would encompass modern civil rights history through the eyes of a White House butler. “We sentthat article around to potential investors for the film and eventually met with several prominent directors, including one no producer can afford to ignore—Steven Spielberg,” Williams remembers. But Spielberg finally admitted he could not squeeze the movie into his schedule of projects already lined up. Other directors were called in for meetings with Ziskin and Williams. None impressed as much as Lee Daniels, who came with a vision, which he laid out over several hours, that nearly brought the two producers to tears.
    Lee Daniels, who directed Precious, his dynamic and blistering Harlem-set drama about an abused teenager, imagined a movie that would sweep from the White House to the streets of the civil rights movement. It would feature many of the major players from the 1960s; the unsettling footage of Birmingham and Selma and night riders would be brought to life on screen. (The gifted Danny Strong wrote the script.) Such a movie would require a decent-sized budget.
    That didn’t deter Ziskin, who gritted her teeth and adopted another strategy when she was told by a big studio that she was asking for too much money to mount the film they all wanted to make. If she had to, she’d raise the money independently. In risk-averse Hollywood, that is a common maneuver for many serious filmmakers. Daniels himself was adept at going hat in hand for the sake of art; he had raised much of the money for Precious by that method. That movie had taken home two Oscar statuettes, for best supporting actress and adapted screenplay—and had earned him his nomination for best director.
    Ziskin and Williams began their new strategy by reaching out to Sheila Johnson, the former cofounder of Black Entertainment Television (BET). The story of a humble, long-serving butler appealed to Johnson: she owns Salamander Hotels and Resorts in Virginia, which employs many domestic workers. “I met Lee at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City,” Johnson recalled on the film set one evening. “I was committed before I sat down with Lee. I knew this story had to be told. It is such a layering of history.” (It was Johnson’s seed money that initially opened the financial gates.)
    The quartet—Ziskin, Williams, Daniels, and Johnson—began talking to and bringing in other investors. But as the late winter of 2010 turned to the early months of 2011, it became painfully clear that Ziskin’s health—she had been diagnosed years earlier with breast cancer—was worsening. Still, the weaker she grew, the more ferocious she became. She made phone calls late at night and was at it again early in the morning. Between calls, she’d gulp down her medicine, ready to strategize the next move to get her movie made. She’d turn to her daughter, Julia, then to Lee Daniels, who would be visiting, then to Pam Williams, who never seemed to leave her side. After gathering strength from her, they’d each get back on the phone, raising the money needed to make the movie. Laura herself would plead with investors to come to her home, and she told them, as they nibbled on sandwiches, that the story was too important to not be told. The money started to come in. Sitting there on her couch, bent, exhausted, Laura Ziskin, for the worldto see, was standing tall. Some evenings, David Jacobson, one of the coproducers, would bend down, lift her