Abstract
The Tuskegee Airmen has had an influence out of all proportion to its relatively modest origins. It was made by a cable TV network (Home Box Office) whose programming at the time drew only between 3 and 7 per cent of the US television audience, but generated what was, by television-movie standards, extensive coverage in the national press around the time it first appeared in the mid-1990s and went on to become perhaps the prime means through which ordinary Americans came to understand a hitherto relatively unknown facet of the ‘Good War’.1
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Notes and References
See Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): pp. 102–125;
Stephen Vaughn, ‘Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in the Cinema, 1937–1953’, Journal of African American History, 1 (2002): pp. 86–88.
Edward Guerrero, Framing Blackness (Philadelphia, 1993): p. 166.
David E. Wilt and Michael Schull, ‘African Americans after World War II’, in Peter C. Rollins, ed., The Columbia Companion to American History on Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003): p. 215.
Orieux quoted in Jean Oppenheimer, ‘Flying Against Fascism’, American Cinematographer, November 1995: p. 77.
On the aerial photography see also Jeff Ethell, ‘Tuskegee Airmen’, Warbirds Worldwide, May 1996: pp. 24–26.
Markowitz quoted in David L. Robb, Operation Hollywood (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004): p. 108.
also see Tom W. Hoffer and Richard Alan Nelson, ‘Docudrama on American Television’ in Alan Rosenthal, ed., Why Docudrama? (Carbondale, IL, 1999): p. 72.
Sandler, American Historical Review, 101 (1996): p. 1173;
V. Hopson as reported in Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 27 May 2002;
See also, for example, Jason Alston, ‘Famed Tuskegee Airmen pay a visit to Carver Elementary’, Henderson Dispatch, 7 December 2005, 1A, 6A.
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© 2007 S.P. Mackenzie
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Mackenzie, S.P. (2007). ‘This Film is based on a True Story’: The Tuskegee Airmen. In: Paris, M. (eds) Repicturing the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_8
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