Alan Parker might seem like a strange choice to direct Mississippi Burning. A former advertising copywriter born and raised in England and steeped in British tradition, the most obvious question to ask is why he—out of all the other potential candidates—had been tapped to direct a uniquely American story stepped in the traditions of the Confederate States of America. Alan Parker directing a movie about the mysterious disappearance and murder of three young civil rights workers from the north trying to end the racist Jim Crow policies of denying access to votes to poor blacks in Mississippi might appear as only slightly less responsible than getting hiring Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa.
Parker made explicitly clear why he was a much better choice than perhaps anyone else. As controversy and criticism began to rise in the face of the momentum that Mississippi Burning briefly enjoyed as the front-runner for the Oscar for Best Picture of 1988 concerning its historical accuracy, Parker responded in the most ideal way possible:
“There have been a lot of documentaries on the subject. They run on PBS and nobody watches them.”
The essential point that Parker was making is that if people wanted to learn the details of the historical record about the events on which the film was based, plenty of opportunities already existed. Opportunities that the overwhelming bulk of the American population had steadfastly ignored or paid little attention to for more twenty-five years. Mississippi Burning grossed 35m dollars in box office revenue at a time when the average movie ticket in American cost about four bucks. A little simple arithmetic means that—not accounting for repeat viewers and dollar-theater screenings, somewhere between seven and eight million people saw the film inside a theater. That doesn’t even account for those who subsequently have rented the film, watched it on TV or streamed it over the internet. By now, the assumption that the number of people who’ve seen the movie has double is likely a woefully inadequate supposition.
In other words, more American probably know what they do know about the racist murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney as a result of Parker’s film than all the documentaries combined. While those who watched the documentaries are almost certainly more knowledgeable about the facts and details, the point of a movie like this lies no in the details. A film about any historical event on the scale of what is presented in Mississippi Burning should—by definition—be committed to presenting the big picture to as broad an audience as possible.
And that means telling a great story rather than reciting a history book. Alan Parker is not a documentarian and that is actually an important distinction to make because the documentary is practically the only major film genre in which Parker has not worked. He’s made multiple feature-length musicals, each of which is uniquely different from each other (Fame, Bugsy Malone, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The Commitments and Evita), crime thrillers, war romances, biographies, black comedies, character studies, a devastating tale of divorce, a horror-mystery noir and an indictment of the death penalty.
Alan Parker covers the waterfront and despite no two of his movies being even remotely alike, his batting average is well above average. In fact, of his major films, one would be very hard-pressed to describe a single one as uninteresting, much less boring. If the resume of Alan Parker identifies him as anything at all—except for iconoclastically average to repeating himself—it is that he is a great storyteller. Whether that story is purely fictional and grounded in the domesticity of marriage crumbling in mid-life or the imaginative flights of fancy of an emotionally disturbed veteran convinced he’s a bird, Parker puts the story first. He has looked back to specific points in history and real life stories in Midnight Express and Angela’s Ashes as well as Mississippi Burning and if the facts of that history cannot pass the muster demanded of a documentary it is equally true that few documentaries are viscerally exciting as the tale told in Mississippi Burning…or Fame…or even Angel Heart.
