The year’s best musical dramas, including A Star, Is Born, and Bohemian Rhapsody, will compete for the night’s most special honors at the 2019 Oscars alongside Green Book. The late 1960s Jim Crow South is the setting for Green Book, which centers on the unexpected friendship between Dr. Don Shirley, a piano prodigy, and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, his driver.
The Peter Farrelly-directed movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture and original screenplay.
The Film Green Book Is Based On An Actual
The film draws its name from The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide that Harlem postal worker Victor H. Green produced between 1936 and 1966. Green wrote the book as a tool for Black travelers to deal with prejudice in “sundown towns,” the term for communities that erected racist signs warning African Americans not to go after sunset in their towns.
The book was used to help persons of color locate secure hotels, petrol stations, and eateries when traveling around the United States, particularly in the South.
The Real Story Behind The Film “Green Book”
On a Saturday night in January 1963, the Don Shirley Trio performed in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, well after it had been dark. According to the local newspaper, the show tunes, jazz, and classical music program were “brilliant and thrilling and warmly appreciated by the enormous crowd.”
Don Shirley, its pianist and well-known leader, was black, but he understood that his acceptance was restricted. At the edge of Manitowoc’s city limits, a sign reading “N——-, don’t let the sun go down on you in our town” stood.
Later that year, when the group embarked on another tour, Shirley hired a white driver, a chatty Italian-American bouncer by the name of Tony Lip, to deal with potential issues in the “sundown towns” of the North and the Jim Crow-era South.
According to Lip’s son Nick Vallelonga, who transformed their experience into Green Book, a new movie generating Oscar hype, “my father claimed it was nearly regularly they would get stopped because a white man was driving a black man.”
As Vallelonga’s father set out on the road with the pianist, the boy was five years old. The men continued to be friends even when they left more than a year later and went their separate ways—Lip became an actor, and Shirley played to critical acclaim in Europe. When Vallelonga visited Shirley as a youngster in his Manhattan studio, he was told tales of their journey.
He recalls thinking, “That’s a fantastic movie.” “One day, I’m going to succeed.” Actor and occasional screenwriter Vallelonga spoke with Shirley and his father in his 20s to learn how these two individuals from radically different backgrounds dealt with prejudice. But Shirley insisted that the tale wouldn’t be shared until after his passing.
Both men passed away in 2013, and Green Book, which stars Mahershala Ali as Shirley and Viggo Mortensen as Lip, is based on those talks and letters that Lip sent to his wife. The Negro Motorist Green Book, an African-American travel manual produced from 1936 to 1967 and promised a “holiday without irritation,” is referred to in the title.
The movie’s powerful message about overcoming prejudice hasn’t been diminished because it was made more than 50 years after the events it portrays. A product of his period, Lip. He was living alongside other Italians. Together, the Irish made their home. African Americans cohabited together, according to Vallelonga. As a result of the journey, “my father’s eyes were opened, and he altered the way he viewed people.”
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