July HBO Doc Explores High-School Segregation
HBO will broadcast a 90-minute documentary in July called Prom Night in Mississippi, for which your newsletter editor helped develop an early marketing strategy. The film – a Sundance Festival audience favorite this year and the winner of any number of big-city “best in festival” awards in recent months – follows the 2007 graduating class at Charleston (Miss.) High School as it prepares for its first-ever racially integrated prom. (Yes, there are still places where there’s a black prom and a white prom.) Morgan Freeman was the spur behind the move in Charleston, and the Canadian filmmakers had access to all the deliberations and to several students’ personal journeys. The film shows a lot of angst (mainly among parents; the students are mostly unperturbed), a couple of fraught detours along the way and, ultimately, a bunch of kids having a good time. (Here's the review in Variety.)
The initial broadcast will take place on Monday, July 20, at 9 p.m. ET, and it will be rebroadcast several times between then and August 1.