All have hearts, brains, blood and yup, bladders. “We All Pee The Same Colour!” All 7,530,000,000, yes seven and a half Billion, human beings on Earth pee the same colour. The real life Katherine Johnson also questioned some of the movie’s “accuracy” but acknowledges, it is the real life bigger story that matters! In keeping with their own blunt assessment, this scene was invented to make white people feel better about one of their own becoming a champion for the plight of black people in America! This rather “black biased” website, which is just fine by me, takes this scene to task a bit and they have that right. So Harrison loses it, uses a sledgehammer to remove signage for segregated female washrooms and with a mixture of white male engineers, and black female computers witnessing the rampage take in those words…Īccording to the website, “Vice”, this scene was contrived. In a riveting scene, Harrison is livid that the real-life Katherine Johnson, the only non-white and female in the office, keeps disappearing for unexplained reasons which we learn through cinematography, is for Johnson to literally run over half a mile to go to the “Coloured Women’s Only” washroom located in a different building than the Space Task Group, who by the way, does have a “women’s washroom” but for whites only! Incredible, huh? To “Harrison’s” credit, his personality profile also included a very accurate truth, even in 1961…”Find the best engineer for the job” and though he also struggled, he provided truly courageous and inspiring leadership for the time. There was also predictable misogyny but not by Harrison as much as his underlings, who were Engineers…’nuff said! The explanation is that there were several “bosses” and for screenplay purposes, Harrison was a compilation, not of actual bosses, but the typical, “white male bosses” so common in 1961. He was played by Kevin Costner who himself was even concerned about the “creation” of someone when a real boss for the Task Group actually existed. In the movie, Katherine Johnson is brought in to the “Space Task Group” headed by Al Harrison, for her almost inhuman skills in “analytic geometry” and it’s key to getting John Glenn’s Mercury Rocket safely to and from space during the tense time of Sputnik and the “Race to the Moon”.Īccording to my research, “Al Harrison” didn’t exist. Honestly, do you ever watch a film about the period and see “coloured’s only” signs and wonder if it was real? Seems impossible to believe that America was so racist and completely ignorant! I just felt the energy of the people who read that and thought…”Was?” More on that here in a bit. The book and the movie, which clearly takes some editorial license, are also, unavoidably, about United States race relations in the 60’s. The movie itself is based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book of the same name, and is the true story of three black women, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn who were among literally the first “Computers”, human, not machine! In this case, they were also black and they worked for NASA “computing” formulas for the space race with the Soviet Union in 1961. There is a line from one of our favourite movies, “Hidden Figures” that I believe may be one of the best quotes ever! It’s delivered by Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner.
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