"You flipped it open, and for the first time, it wasn't just filled with horrible things about monstrous gay people. "The first thing I found that seemed universal in the interviews I did is that almost every single person of a certain age could point to the moment they saw Life magazine's year in review hit their coffee table or their mailbox, no matter where they lived, because everybody got that," Black said. Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors) sees it on the battleship he's on in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs) reads it on a plane as she leaves her Peace Corps stint in Africa. The magazine itself becomes the device that connects the series' main characters. Later, he spies - and surreptitiously takes - a copy of Life magazine's "Year in Pictures" issue for 1971 that says "Gay Liberation" in block letters on its cover, counting the nascent movement among the big stories of the year.
McKenzie) is handing out anti-war leaflets at a peace rally in Phoenix. Then it flashes back to 1972, and a high-school-aged Cleve (played by Austin P. "When did you know you had to rise up and fight back?" the kid asks Jones.
#WHEN WE WRISE SERIES#
Instead, the series opens in the year 2006, with activist Cleve Jones (Guy Pearce) speaking to an unnamed young man (Douglas Smith) who's recording the interview. That's Stonewall.'"Īnd so Black decided that Stonewall should be the inspiration but not the root of When We Rise. Everyone kind of made up their own version of it because we fuckin' thought we deserved a story for the first time in our lives. "He's like, 'The day before Stonewall, we didn't think we deserved a fabulous story. … These are all fabulous stories, aren't they?" yes, they were, he agreed. He said the source responded, "Lance, you are completely missing the point. There was a time when he considered trying to depict what happened during those rebellious nights and days of demonstrations, but the recollections from protesters were so hazy and implausible that "none of the stories matched up."īlack asked one source about his experiences at the Stonewall Inn. Though the Stonewall Riots of 1969 are generally understood to be the start of the LGBT civil rights movement, Black intentionally didn’t kick off When We Rise there. Because their audience is my family, their audience is who I grew up with." I guess I exchanged my financial well-being for ABC's audience.
#WHEN WE WRISE FULL#
They agreed he took a full year to do it.īlack called these years in his professional life "not fruitful, financially." He could have gone to a premium cable channel such as HBO or Showtime, and he probably would have earned "more time, and more money." But, he said: "I would have had this nagging feeling the entire time that I was wasting all our energy because it would be preaching to the choir in the end. If you want to tell a story that feels more like a novel or a book, I think miniseries are the home for that."Īnd he wanted ABC to fund an "extensive research period" during which he could find his own source material (rather than adapt other people's work). Movies - you can express a feeling or an idea. It was Black who originally pitched the project as a miniseries. Knight, Phylicia Rashad, and Whoopi Goldberg, among others (including blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos, like Debra Winger as Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan). It stars Guy Pearce, Mary-Louise Parker, Rachel Griffiths, Michael Kenneth Williams, T.R. A dramatic retelling of the story of the LGBT civil rights movement in the United States, it’s massive in scope, but focuses on a few key players who walk viewers through history. and concludes Friday (it will skip a night for ABC to air Donald Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday).
Black moved quickly on the opportunity: His agent set up a meeting with the network, and the result is When We Rise, a four-part, eight-hour scripted miniseries that begins airing Monday, Feb.
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