uttered were taken directly from my book. I relaxed. Just an Overnight Guest the book and Just an Overnight Guest the film could stand on their own, separate but equal – though, of course, my book was still better. The film premiered in 1983 in New York and Los Angeles, and on September 30 in Des Moines, Iowa, where I once lived. Ms. Bryant and her entourage arrived with Richard Roundtree. I sat with him in the back of a limousine (borrowed from a funeral home!) while my husband Zack sat in the front, taking pictures. We arrived to join some eight hundred people, including my mother, sister, sisterin-law, daughter, and oldest nephew, Don Tate II (now a successful illustrator of children’s books), crowded into the Des Moines Public Library to see the hometown girl’s film. For four days, I was swept up in school visits (including one to my old high school), radio and television interviews, dinners, and a fun night of roustabouting with Roundtree and Zack at our favorite nightclub. Just an Overnight Guest was shown on PBS in its award-winning WonderWorks Series, on Nickelodeon Children’s Television, and in other venues. The film was included on the “Selected Films for Young Adults” 1985 list of the Young Adult Services Committee of the American Library Association. It also was named “Best” in the Family Issues category at the Birmingham International Film Festival and the National Educational Film Festival; and it was a finalist in the human relations category of the American Film Festival. Looking back to those years, I realize how blessed I was that my book was selected to become a film. Not many children’s films had been produced from books written by African American authors – not in 1983 and not now in 2011. Of such films that were produced, most were television films, like mine, rather than feature films. Some of the other television films based on books by African American
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photograph by Zack E. Hamlett, III, Courtesy of Eleanora E. Tate
North Carolina Literature into Film
children’s book authors that I recall are The House of Dies Drear (by Virginia Hamilton), White Socks Only (by Evelyn Coleman), The Learning Tree (by Gordon Parks), and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (by Mildred D. Taylor). Push, written by Sapphire, and adapted into the film Precious was made into a feature film. I’ve heard that Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 was optioned by Whoopi Goldberg, but I have seen no film yet.2 Perhaps the time will come when more movies will be based on work by African American writers. Certainly there’s a wide choice of such books available to draw from: one could start a list of possibilities just by visiting the American Library Association website listing of recipients of the Coretta Scott King Book Award and the website of The Brown Bookshelf. Just an Overnight Guest, the movie, is still available from the Phoenix Learning Group, Inc. My story began as a book, then became a 16mm film, evolved into a video, and is now on DVD. Packaged with a teacher’s guide and the paperback book version (from Just Us Books), it is a useful amalgam of print and cinematic art. So Margie’s journey is not over yet, as new media reach new audiences. n
Whoopi Goldberg did buy the film rights to The Watsons go to Birmingham – 1963, and the novel has been adapted for CBS, Columbia Tri-Star by Kevin Willmott, who also adapted and directed a successful stage version of the novel, performed in New York and Kansas City, but, to date, the movie has not appeared.
Eleanora E. Tate lives in Durham, NC, and is a writer of several North Carolina–set books including Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! (Watts, 1990), A Blessing in Disguise (Delacorte Press, 1995), and the short story collection Don’t Split the Pole: Tales of Down-Home Folk Wisdom (Delacorte Press, 1997). She was named a Circle of Elders Award recipient at the 29th Annual National Black Storytelling Festival and Conference for her “years of involvement and commitment to the African Oral Tradition” and for her “honored presence in the storytelling community.” Her short story “What Goes Around Comes Around” is included in What Writers Do (Lorimer Press, 2011), an anthology of stories, poems, and essays written by writers in the Lenoir-Rhyne University Writers Series.
ABOVE Eleanora E. Tate and actor Richard
Regular graphic designers for NCLR, DAVE AND PAMELA Cox (of Five to Ten Design in Washington, NC) and NCLR Art Director DANA EZZELL GAY designed the layout of this essay.
Roundtree discuss the film during a radio interview, 1983