Award-winning screenwriter and University of Kansas film professor Kevin Willmott was not thinking about winning an Oscar this year for his recent film “BlacKkKlansman.” When the talk surrounding the Oscar nominations came up, he and film producer, director and actor Spike Lee, who worked on the film with him, would try to laugh it off and not discuss the acclaimed award ceremony at all.
“You just don’t want to talk about it,” said Prof. Willmott. “If you start talking about it, you start to think it just might not happen. Spike had a little thing where he’d turn around three times, because it was like this superstitious thing. You just didn’t want to talk about it.”
However, when Samuel L. Jackson, a friend of Lee’s, came onstage to give the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Prof. Willmott realized the award would go to “BlacKkKlansman,” and recalled winning the Oscar a “crazy experience.”
“It was a great moment,” said Prof. Willmott. “It was like a dream come true.”
Through working on “BlacKkKlansman,” Prof. Willmott was able to learn about why people join hate groups and how these groups function. Being assigned to bring these characters to life allowed Prof. Willmott to delve into the complexities of hate groups and the people who join them.
“One of the messages we wanted to send about hate groups was that it’s easy to say they’re crazy or stupid, but your neighbor could be involved in one of these groups, and you don’t know anything about it,” said Prof. Willmott. “They weren’t the scruffy, ugly, trailer park types we like to stereotype them as. I think the film was a wakeup call for Americans to realize this.”
Prof. Willmott believes the release of “BlacKkKlansman” came at the perfect time. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups in the United States have increased by 30 percent in the past four years. In 2018 alone, the number of hate groups increased by seven percent. The Southern Poverty Law Center stated the increase of hate groups came from President Trump, right-wing media outlets and the ease of spreading hate messages on social media. Prof. Willmott also believes Trump is the reason for the increase in hate groups.
“For over 200 years, good people have been trying to close the door on hate in this country. It’s a hard door to keep closed. People have died and sacrificed and gone through hell to try to get rid of hate in this country,” said Prof. Willmott. “It’s really difficult for people to look at someone running for president and the first word that comes out of his mouth is ‘Mexicans are rapists.’ The whole thing should have ended right then. It should’ve been that we showed the American people the crazy, racist thing this guy said today on the news, and not go a step further. But here he is as the president.”
Prof. Willmott believes one reason Trump won the presidency was because people did not want to talk about subjects they saw as “taboo,” including racism and hate groups. For Prof. Willmott, films such as “BlacKkKlansman” and other works of art that bring awareness to these topics may change people’s minds on wanting to stay silent on racism. Prof. Willmott hopes that future films, no matter what genre, will contain messages that make Americans think more on society.
“The best movies, no matter what genre, are about something,” said Prof. Willmott. “You can take any genre and make it a movie that’s very entertaining, but not very stupid.”
Prof. Willmott credited his past film “C.S.A.: Confederate States of America” for helping him prepare for his role as a screenwriter for “BlacKkKlansman.” He stated the film looked at how the South really won the Civil War, and how African-Americans had lost due to segregation and Jim Crow laws. Through working on “C.S.A.,” Prof. Willmott also realized how polarized the United States has become in recent years.
“We’ve always been fighting the Civil War. The Civil War never really ended, we’re just living in a cold Civil War. There’s two Americas: the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.) and the United States of America (U.S.A). We had eight years of the U.S.A. with Obama. An African-American was never supposed to be president. It was a huge American democratic achievement that he got there,” said Prof. Willmott. “The U.S.A. means that we would bring women and the LGBT in and everyone in. The C.S.A., what we have now, is about limiting rights and freedoms and taking things away. It’s about selling fear to justify taking away these freedoms.”
Prof. Willmott believes the way to unify the country is for people to realize what the stakes are in the upcoming election, and everyone comes together to uphold the democratic institution that founded the United States. His future projects may play a large role in bringing more awareness to subjects from racism to a polarized United States. Prof. Willmott and Spike Lee have written a new screenplay titled “Da Five Bloods” about African-American soldiers in Vietnam, and hopes to film a movie this summer called the “Twenty-Fourth,” a film about the Houston Riots in 1917. He especially wants to focus on police brutality against African-American soldiers, and how 150 soldiers eventually marched against the police.
“It was the largest murder trial in American history, and many people don’t talk about it, because it makes them uncomfortable,” said Prof. Willmott. “My shtick is to find stories that people should know.”
