A talk with ‘CSA: The Confederate States of America’ director Kevin Willmott

Since the dawn of the new millennium, movies in this country have become as somber as they are readily available. It’s as though all the great comedians went off to war leaving the likes of third-rate, second-banana-wannabes Adam Sandler, Kevin Smith and Ben Stiller to entertain the troops back home. When Albert Brooks’ new film opens (and quickly closes) on just one screen, it becomes blindingly obvious just how disposable intelligent movie comedies have become.

A quick mental scan of able satires released over the past 10 years yielded very few smiles. While there were a number of goofy teen spoofs that brought about unexpected pleasure (Bubble Boy, Slacker, 10 Things I Hate About You), only four satires (Freeway, Bulworth, The Second Civil War and Bamboozled) instantly come to mind. Rejoice, for this year alone nearly doubles the amount of quality reasons to laugh at the movies, and it’s only March!

With nine months left to go, we have already exceeded our projected LPY (Laughs Per-Year) quota. First, Albert found comedy in the Muslim world. Next, we were thanked for not smoking. The smart laughs keep coming with the outrageously brilliant CSA: The Confederate States of America. I leapt at the chance to speak with, and personally thank, the film’s writer-director, Kevin Willmott.

CSA asks what would have happened had the South won the Civil War, gained control of the United States and kept slavery legal. Not since Dr. Strangelove (one of Willmott’s key inspirations), with its ballsy end-of-the-world curtain laugh, has a comedy been this eager to enlighten a delusional country through laughter.

A film professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Willmott devised this gutsy, ultra-low budget spoof of the history of forced racial harmony. In the exalted tradition of send-up gurus “SCTV” and Woody Allen’s Zelig, Willmott imagined a meticulously detailed faux documentary special produced by a pompous pretend broadcasting network.

The obvious antecedent is Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a blackface reworking of Mel Brooks’ bad taste Nazi laugh-getter The Producers. Lee loved what he saw when the film screened at Sundance in January 2004, and did the right thing by lending his name to the finished product.

Was this intended as a continuation of Bamboozled even before Lee signed on? The first of many of Willmott’s easy laughs indicated that he had heard that one before. “I started working on the script in 1997,” he remembered, “several years before Bamboozled was released.” He’s quick to point out that it “became a ‘Spike Lee Presentation,’ but he [Lee] had no involvement in the concept. It took us a long time to make this movie. We only had about $20,000 to work with.”

CSA’s cost would hardly cover the craft services’ tab on an average low-budget studio feature. Willmott lamented, “Hollywood, of course, would never have made this film.”

When the topic turned to financing, he noted: “It’s very difficult to get money for a movie like this. PBS turned us down; everybody turned us down.” Funding was eventually provided through a grant from the National Black Programming Consortium and a private investor.

“That’s what we did the movie with,” he said, before letting loose another long, comfortable laugh. Even after its completion, the History Channel backed down, refusing to air the controversial comedy.

Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting seemed the likeliest target to represent the telecaster of the “documentary,” but Willmott opted instead for the British Broadcasting Service (BBS), a non-existent but real-sounding network.

“The Ken Burns style really helps the film’s credibility. There is something about a British voice that you just believe,” he said, and joked: “They’re clearly smarter than we are. You put a British voice on anything and you go, ‘Well, that’s gotta be true!’”

It was vital that each individual segment also claimed a unique look. Operating with a cast and crew of talented unpaid volunteers, Willmott was proud to point out that “we had worked very hard to achieve each of those looks with literally no money.” A scratchy, sepia-tone, window-boxed print of D. W. Griffith’s The Hunt for Dishonest Abe shows a disgraced Lincoln (he never was able to free the slaves) forced to don burnt cork and book transit on Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad.

And what network cavalcade would be complete without commercials? CSA comes equipped with ersatz ads for such popular Southern-fried products as Sambo Motor Oil and Darkie Toothpaste. The film waits until the final credits to reveal that these, and many more of the products it lampoons, were once actually mass-produced in the good old U. S. of A. As recently as five years ago, Darkie was still for sale on store shelves in Japan. There was a one-letter alteration that renamed the product “Darlie,” but the company’s trademark, a headshot of a grinning picaninny stereotype, remained steadfast.

“It’s a very bizarre phenomenon that’s still going on,” added Willmott before slyly finishing his thought with, “on so many levels.”

In addition to his staged parodies and fabricated newsreels, Willmott skillfully incorporates archival footage to give the film an added sense of authenticity. One of the biggest laughs comes during a commercial billboarding “Beulah,” a long-forgotten TV show that was the first black sitcom, in addition to being a prime-time favorite among CSA viewers.

Willmott agreed that “Amos and Andy” would have been too easy a reference. “We tried to comb what I like to call the hidden history of it all,” he said. “No one knows that stuff … all real things, and we took advantage of the fact that people know so little about it.”

Once again, he emphasized the need to keep a firm foothold on reality. “I wanted the humor to come from the truth of it all, out of the absurdity of our history as Americans,” he said.

There are passages in this film so inappropriately hilarious that had I seen it with a full house, fellow audience members would have mistaken my frequent outbursts for those belonging to a KKK recruitment officer. Willmott knew exactly what I was getting at.

“How the movie functions with an audience is another example of the work we still have to do,” he said.

Prof. Willmott never stands before a lectern; his film wisely presents audiences with a shared experience. “People need to become comfortable with their own reality of race in this country,” he said, then paused for a moment to weigh his thoughts. “The fact remains that to some, white people can’t laugh at the absurdity of it without making black people feel that they’re laughing at our pain.”

None of the ugliness is watered down. Willmott’s intention was “to show you what really happened, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

But were there lines he refused to cross? “I went back and took a lot of jokes out,” he said. “The criterion I judged the humor with was if I thought I was making a joke about slavery, I removed it. To me, I can stand behind all of the film’s humor.”

It is clear that honesty fuels Willmott’s satire, and I was curious to hear his thoughts on the term “the ‘N’ word” and whether or not he saw it as a politically correct way to keep the word “nigger” in common usage.

“That’s a slippery slope,” he sighed. “My kids hear it from their friends at school and want to use it, but they have no understanding what the word means and no connection to the history behind it. To them it’s pop culture.”

Upon further reflection on this total disconnect from reality, he knowingly observed: “We want to jump to a colorblind society without having to go through the pain of the reconciliation. If we can use the ‘N’ word on TV, that means it’s over, right?”

These are commanding insights coming from a guy out stumping a so-called “mockumentary.”

CSA obviously has a great deal to do with race, but the messages don’t stop there. Willmott stresses, “It has to do with the war, gay rights, immigration and all the things that are anti-freedom.”

His otherwise laid-back laugh suddenly takes on a nervous edge when asked how the film will play in Bush country. “It probably won’t,” he answered. “So much of the time Americans live in distraction. We’re told not to think about anything.”

While the overall reaction has been favorable, CSA defines the type of film to which everybody brings their own set of values. People have asked Willmott, “Why is this important today?” and, “Why are you even talking about these things?”

“Well,” Willmott sighed, “you kind of have to be connected to things a bit in order to make those connections.”

Get ready, limb, here I climb: CSA: The Confederate States of America is one of the brightest, funniest, most politically incorrect parody machines of the past 40 years. We’re talking state-of-the-art, “SCTV”-level satire with wall-to-wall Blazing Saddles-sized guffaws.

One of Willmott’s prime comedic influences was Blazing Saddles’ co-author Richard Pryor. “He was always so brutally honest about himself and the world, black folks and white folks, race and everything else,” Willmott said.

If that was the level of satire Kevin Willmott set his sights on, he handily splintered his targets.