The Butler

Lee Daniels built this from Wil Haygood’s November 2008 Washington Post piece “A Butler Well Served by This Election”. Its subject was Eugene Allen, who entered as a pantry man in 1952, served under eight presidents, rose to head of service in 1981, and under Reagan became the first White House butler invited to a state dinner as a guest rather than staff. On screen he is renamed Cecil Gaines and the roster shrinks: only five presidents are played by actors, with Ford and Carter in archive footage alone. The larger invention is the son: Allen’s was not the radical activist the film gives him, and that quarrel is the spine the screenplay added. Cecil raises the unequal pay of Black White House staff with his supervisor repeatedly, and resigns over Reagan’s opposition to sanctions on South Africa. Raising the $30 million budget took 41 producers and executive producers. The title was contested too: Warner Bros. objected citing a 1916 short of the same name, so it could only be used with the director’s name attached. A good fit if you want the central conflict to be a choice between silence at the table and shouting in the street, not the history itself. Not for anyone who wants Eugene Allen’s life as it was, since the son is invented.