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Mississippi Burning
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Mississippi Burning(18) is a 1988 film based on the investigation into the real-life murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. The movie focuses on two fictional FBI agents (portrayed by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) who investigate the murders.
The film also stars Frances McDormand, Brad Dourif, R. Lee Ermey and Gailard Sartain, and was written by Chris Gerolmo and directed by Alan Parker. It won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Hackman), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (McDormand), Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Picture and Best Sound.
The film has been criticized by many, including historian
Howard Zinn, for its fictionalization of history. While FBI agents are presented as heroes who descend upon the town by the hundreds, in reality the FBI and the Justice Department only reluctantly protected civil rights workers and protesters and reportedly witnessed beatings without intervening.
[citation needed]
On June 21, 2005 — 41 years to the day of the murders — Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in the 1964 slayings of the three civil rights workers, and was later sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Mississippi Burning was preceded in
1975 by a
television docudrama titled
Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, depicting many of the same events, and both productions follow the events portrayed in the
1990 TV-movie
Murder in Mississippi.
On the Set
- Two extras hired to play Naval Reservist searchers were nearly killed in Bovina, Mississippi, when they wandered from a temporary holding area onto a high-arch railroad bridge over the Big Black River. Naturally, a freight train came along. They escaped injury by huddling on a small pedestal on the edge of the bridge.
- Scenes in the courtroom and in and around the Sheriff's office were filmed in the old Carroll County Courthouse in Vaiden, Mississippi. A dilapidated, early-19th Century structure, falling brickwork threatened principals, crew and extras. The courthouse was demolished a few years later.
- Though Alan Parker showed great patience with the bottom-rung players, there were limits. When an over-friendly male extra broke on-the-set rules to ingratiate himself with Gene Hackman, and no one could later remember exactly who it was, Parker (or the extras casting director, Shari Rhodes, at Parker's instruction) perused the extras photos and "fired" each one (i.e., no callbacks) thought to resemble the culprit.
- When filming began in 1988, people in Mississippi were excited to hear that Gene Hackman was going to for Mississippi what he had done for Indiana with the 1987 film "Hoosiers."
- Scenes that were filmed around the courthouse square, in the FBI headquarters, barber shop and many others were filmed in LaFayette, Alabama, a small East Alabama town. Through some creative editing during the movie a car chase that took place around the court square in LaFayette lead actors to a railroad crossing that was edited in from parts elsewhere and did not exist in the town.
References
