Civil Rights Era Film Dramatizing Black Boxer Jack Johnson "The Great White Hope" Original Script, 1969

The Great White Hope

Book

Original final studio script for The Great White Hope (September 26, 1969). Adapted from Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, the film dramatizes the career of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson through the fictional Jack Jefferson, portrayed by James Earl Jones. The production candidly explored the white supremacist backlash against Black athletic dominance and interracial intimacy in the early 20th century. The narrative’s central conceit—the organized search for a “great white hope” to reclaim the heavyweight title from a Black champion—exposes the racial anxieties embedded in early twentieth-century America.

Sackler, Howard. The Great White Hope. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, September 26, 1969. FINAL shooting script. Quarto studio typescript in original blue studio wrappers stamped “Property of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation,” with brass fasteners at left margin. 196 pages, printed rectos only. Title page present; dated “FINAL September 26, 1969.” Set against the historical model of Jack Johnson’s 1908–1915 reign as heavyweight champion, the screenplay situates Jefferson’s victories within a national climate determined to reassert white athletic supremacy. His romantic involvement with Eleanor Bachman, a white woman, becomes the catalyst for legal persecution, echoing the Mann Act prosecution used against Johnson. The script stages both Black community tensions—fear that Jefferson’s visibility and defiance endanger collective safety—and the calculated response of white authorities weaponizing morality laws to halt Black success. The film emerged during a period of intense public reckoning with race, state power, and interracial relationships following the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967). As such, the screenplay operates simultaneously as historical drama and contemporary commentary, making it a key artifact in the evolution of Black representation in American cinema and in James Earl Jones’s early screen career. Light creasing and edge wear to wrappers; minor rubbing and small areas of surface abrasion; interior leaves clean with occasional handling wear; binding secure; overall very good condition. A substantive production document from a landmark Civil Rights–era film interrogating racialized spectacle, state surveillance, and the policing of Black achievement.

Item #23023

Price: $1,250.00