Return to Roots

MANILA, Philippines -  American filmmaker Mark Wolper has been producing for television and film for almost three decades now.

His company called the Wolper Organization has helmed over 500 productions, which have amassed more than 150 awards. These include two Oscars, 50 Emmys, seven Golden Globes, five Peabody trophies as well as recognitions from Cannes and other international film festivals.

Despite having done so much, there is one project that still got Wolper scared and emotional. Make that very scared and very emotional. It is the retelling of the iconic mini-series Roots on the History channel.

Mark serves as its executive producer, following in the footsteps of his late father, the legendary film producer David Wolper, who was responsible for the original version in 1977.

The first Roots was such a hit, described by US critics as a television game-changer and ground-breaker. It holds the record of having the second most-watched overall series finale in US television history.

A historical portrait of American slavery as adapted from the 1976 Alex Haley novel of the same title, Roots retraces the journey of one family and their will to survive amidst seemingly insurmountable difficulties.

The new Roots will air over four consecutive nights beginning May 31 at 9 and will simulcast on A&E and Lifetime, in addition to History.

With the reimagined Roots, history repeats itself for Wolper, so to speak.

“It’s a very, very emotional journey to try to do something that your father did,” Wolper told The STAR in a phone chat last week.

He hopes Roots will resonate with Filipino viewers because at the heart of this “multi-generational epic” about the slave trade is a family story.

Here’s the rest of the interview:

What was the story behind the Roots reboot? Whose idea was it to bring it back four decades after?

“It was actually my idea (but) it was not something I wanted to do. So, I have to give a little bit of credit to my 16-year-old boy because I wanted him to watch the original Roots. When I sat him down to watch the original Roots, which, by the way, his grandfather, my father, produced,  he did not wanna watch it. He did not connect with it. And he told me when it was over, after I forced him to watch it, almost tied him down to watch it, he said, ‘You know, dad, I understand why it’s important, but it’s like your music: It doesn’t speak to me.’ For him, it was very slow, it was very dated, it didn’t seem as good as TV is today. In that moment, I realized that we had to tell Roots once again because the old one is old.”

How did your son’s comments affect the reboot of Roots? How did it change the way the story is presented today?

“I think that TV today is much better than it’s ever been in the history of television. Television is great right now. It’s really having kind of a renaissance. That means that TV has to be really good. For my 16-year-old son, for young TV viewers now, things have to be in a faster pace. They have to be more energetic. They have to be filmically very, very high quality. We have to get the history right.

“A little bit of the history is wrong in the first Roots. Not because anybody made a mistake, but because we have 40 more years of knowledge. The success of the original book and mini-series sparked a lot of academic work, a lot of archaeology, sociology, so we know much more now than we did then. So I knew we had to be authentic. I knew, we had to be at a faster pace. The music had to be more contemporary. These were the kind of things that would make a new audience watch the show. That is very important for them to see because it is the history of the global slave trade.”

Wolper on why it was high time to bring back Roots: History is never old news because history is what informs us about the future.
 

Why do you think the story of Roots is still relevant today? Why do you think it was high time to bring it back?

“There are a couple of reasons. No. 1 because slavery still exists in a lot of parts of the country today. No. 2, because Roots deals with ... for its time it was called a forced migration of people, in fact, it is the largest forced migration in the history of this planet and it’s exactly what is going on in Europe, in the Middle East right now. A migration, a mass migration not so much forced although perhaps forced by what is going on in the countries. The third reason is, history is never old news because history is what informs us about the future. We can’t make decisions about today and tomorrow unless we understand from where we came.

“So the story has to be told over and over again. Just like in every school and in the entire world, we tell over and over again the story of our country. We teach it again and every year, we add new things to those history books because we learn new things. So just like history books and school, we do that in the story of Roots.”

How was it producing a work that was originally produced by your father?

“Scary, scary, scary, scary. Very scary! It’s very intimidating and frightening to try to reproduce something that your father did very successfully. And were it not for my 16-year-old boy sort of motivating me or inspiring me to do what I might have never done it. It’s a very, very emotional journey to try to do something that your father did. I often wondered --— my father passed away before I decided to do this and it weighs heavily on me — what would he think of me having decided to do it and what would he think about it now if he saw it. But I don’t know the answer to that. I’ll never know the answer to that.”

How old were you then when the original version came out?

“I was 16 years old, the same age as my son when I showed him.”

Do you have any memories of the first time you watched Roots? What was its impact on you?

“When my father was producing it, nobody thought that it was gonna be so successful. He didn’t even have me go visit the filming. Nobody realized how important it was gonna end up being. When I finally did see it, I was shocked by the power of it because myself like most Americans, have never seen this story told. That was really the first time this story had been told in dramatic form. Yes, it was in history books but it was like one paragraph in the history book about the slave trade. Now there were suddenly 10 hours of television. At the time when there were only three channels in America, everybody had to watch this, everybody did watch this and that was the first time any of us actually felt the story.”

How important was it to involve LeVar Burton, who originally played Roots lead character Kinte Kunta, in the remake?

“It was very important. LeVar Burton was sort of the iconic figure of the original Roots. I thought it was important to have some of the legacy of the original Roots involved with this. There was another more important reason that LeVar was great to have as a partner on this. In America, LeVar took his popularity from Roots and became a very famous educator here. He created and was the star of a TV show called Reading Rainbow, which taught most of young America how to read. So, not only was he the face of the original Roots but he was also an educator. And I thought that was a really powerful tool to have as a partner with me because that was part of our goal in the show. Yes, we had to make it really entertaining and a great action-adventure piece, but underneath all of that, it would be great if we could get some knowledge and some education into it as well.”

Why do you think Roots is more than just an American story? Why should it appeal to us, Asians?

“Because it is a story of family. The most important thing about it is about family that overcomes and succeeds against adversity. This is a story of a family that survived and regained its identity, and everybody on this planet can connect with that.”