Two award-winning filmmakers are teaming as much as inform the story of the primary all-Black gross sales crew at a serious U.S. company. Jacqueline Olive (“Always in Season”) and Stanley Nelson (“Attica”) are directing “The Color of Cola.” The doc counts Viola Davis amongst its exec producers. Deadline broke the news.
Now in manufacturing, the movie relies on Stephanie Capparells 2008 ebook “The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business.” “The Color of Cola” “sheds light on the experience of the all-Black sales team at Pepsi” and follows their journey “through the Jim Crow South after being tasked with tapping its African American market,” per the supply. The doc “aims to elevate one such story exploring a time when corporate America did not include Black professionals, and the Black experience was stereotypically portrayed. The extraordinary efforts of the individuals on Pepsis sales team mirror the courage of many who fought to propel America closer to its aspirations and ideals.”
What first attracted me to the mission was the chance to inform the story of this pioneering gross sales crew of Black males whose work launched an effort at company range that laid the inspiration for meaningfully participating what has change into a trillion greenback Black client market in the present day, mentioned Olive. If you suppose it doesnt get rather more highly effective than that, Ed Boyd and his crew, within the course of, helped open the American consciousness to simply how dynamic Black life actually was within the late Nineteen Forties, so the throughline of this story to benchmarks of cultural range within the current is outstanding.” She emphasised that she “could not be more excited” to collaborate on the mission with Nelson.
Olive participated in a Q&A with us forward of “Always in Season’s” world premiere on the 2019 version of Sundance Film Festival. The movie examines lynching within the United States. My recommendation to female-identified adults who’re directing movies is to consider within the worth of your voice. The very essence of your uniqueness is in the end the place to create from, and your specific voice as a storyteller is what is going to make your work extraordinary,” she informed us. “Thats true with making narrative fiction films as well as documentaries. It also means theres no need to be competitive about your work because no one else will be able to make a similar film in the way that you do.”
“Attica,” an investigation into the 1971 Attica jail rebellion that Nelson co-directed with Traci A. Curry, is nominated for Best Documentary Feature on the upcoming Oscars.
