I watched HBO's newest show, Watchmen, and I was absolutely blown away. I've never read the comics by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons before or watched the movie in 2009 (my mom said it was too violent), so I was really excited to get into the Watchmen Universe this time around. Watchmen falls under DC and originally takes place during the Cold War in which egos and politics nearly ended humanity as we know it. But, the creator, Damon Lindelof, decided that the best application was to focus on race conflict in the US. And what's a better opening to a series about race than to open with a sequence focusing on the Tulsa Massacre, an event rarely mentioned in textbooks.
So what was the Tulsa Massacre?
Memorial Day, 1921, and a young black man is accused of attacking a white woman in an elevator. A white mob assembles to lynch him, and a group of African Americans assembled at the courthouse to protect him. As tensions rose, shots were fired that led to a two day terrorist attack on a predominantly black neighborhood in Tulsa known as the Black Wall Street. The Ku Klux clan used firebombs, planes, and militia to destroy the neighborhood. Experts estimate that anywhere from 100-300 people were killed and thousands more were displaced as a city was destroyed.
The attack is hardly ever mentioned in history books and I'm ashamed to admit that I had never heard of it until watching the episode.
How did they do it?
Retelling an extremely important aspect in film comes with a lot of challenges. For creators, the idea of respecting a racist riot that is unrepresented in education with truth and urgency (in 2019, Oklahoma school's still don't even teach it). Pilot director, Nicole Kassell, said in an interview with Vulture she consulted The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. They also visited the Greenwood District and consulted with historians to follow the story of a young boy and his parents while escaping the violence.
Kassell made it point to emphasize the sensationalized newspaper that started the whole riot in the opening and in real life. You can see a copy of the newspaper in the clip above at :58. It reads, "To Lynch Negro Tonight". The newspaper was essentially eradicated after the article was later recalled, similar to other information on the massacre.
The sequence draws on actual images depicted in the Burning, such as airplanes firing down on African Americans, firefighters being held up, white terrorists looting black businesses, a dog running by with it's tail on fire (poor doggo), and even white people standing by as spectators.
How can you recreate the look?
For the average filmmaker, this would be impossible to recreate without a big budget. But you can take some tips away with how filmmakers did this. They first scouted out the location to a small town in Georgia that they could recreate famous landmarks of the Greenwood District. In the article by Vulture, Kassell says they used long lenses hidden throughout the set, “It’s pretty amazing to me,” Kassell says, “how much we got in a very tight sequence.” They also used cameras with high shutter speeds and low stabilization to create the sense of chaos. A similar effect is seen in Kingsmen: The Secret Service in which a fight scene was created in a church.
For a pilot, Watchmen packs a punch. You better believe this is going to be my new favorite Sunday night show.
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