3 veteran ‘Roots’ stars look back on making this TV classic
3 veteran ‘Roots’ stars look back on making this TV classic
NEW YORK — ABC bosses weren’t sure anyone would watch.
Suffering cold feet, ABC decided to get it over with on consecutive nights in January 1977, where, if no one tuned in, it would do the least harm to the network’s ratings.
[...] as everyone knows, “Roots” exploded as a TV and social phenomenon, averaging 80 million viewers each night and opening the eyes of millions to a painful swath of history too often overlooked or forgotten.
The Complete Original Series is being rereleased June 7 on Blu-ray by Warner Bros.
Home Entertainment, and, starting Monday, May 16, can be purchased for high-def download from online retail sites.
On the eve of this remastered release (and a four-part remake premiering May 30 on the History channel), a trio of stars from the original “Roots” gathered this week to look back.
“On the set,” recalled Leslie Uggams, 72, who played Kunta Kinte’s daughter Kizzy, there was an energy that I had never experienced before.
“For me, being on the set was almost sacred,” echoed Ben Vereen, 69, who played Kizzy’s son, Chicken George.
[...] he didn’t grasp its impact until arriving at an American Music Awards event where fellow presenter Merv Griffin congratulated him.
“I was in Las Vegas working in a musical,” said Uggams, and I get a phone call from Ann-Margret: ‘Leslie, we had to change the time for my show.
Gossett recalled co-star and pal Vic Morrow feeling obliged to apologize for the scene where, as the plantation’s slave master, he orders Kunta Kinte to be savagely whipped.
[...] Vereen cited the cockfighting scene where he’s told that if his chicken wins, he would be set free: My whole life depended on that chicken winning that fight.
The point of dramatizing the cruelty and hardships suffered by blacks isn’t to stir up rage at these injustices, said Gossett, but to shed light on this chapter of the black experience in the spirit of reaching an opposite response.
“This is another generation it’s speaking to,” said Vereen, and if they like it, they’ll go back and watch the original.