“Thank god for them”: the 1976 Oscar-winning movie crew who resolved a miner’s strike
While major Hollywood movies tend to focus on the sheer entertainment side of things, and there’s nothing wrong with that, documentaries can often be a force for change by shining a light on important issues and sometimes even bringing justice to previously unremitted situations.
Some notable examples of this over the last decades include 2013’s Blackfish, which completely changed public perception of Florida’s Seaworld theme park and its treatment of killer whales, Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me that prompted McDonald’s to reduce the size of some of their meals, and of course Michael Moore’s series of films including 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which changed widespread opinion on the invasion of Iraq.
Back in the 1970s, there was another documentary made, which would also have a huge impact, certainly on the lives of a group of Kentucky miners who were protesting at the shocking conditions they were being forced to work under.
The film was called Harlan County, USA, and it was made by a director called Barbara Kopple, who had originally set out to make a piece on attempts to unseat the then President of the Union of American Mine Workers, but once miners at the Brookside plant began to strike against the Duke Power Company, she switched focus.
Over a four-year period, she and her cameramen regularly turned up at the picket lines; they were originally treated with suspicion by the miners, but once they had spent time with their families and got to know many of the characters involved, they were accepted into their fold. The miners faced fearsome threats from their own company, including being shot at while protesting, and Kopple followed their protests all the way to the New York Stock Exchange. Kopple also began to realise that the presence of a camera reduced the amount of violence present to some degree, and so would sometimes keep shooting even when they had run out of film.
Many of the strikers suffered from black lung disease and were working under terrible circumstances, living in squalor without any running water, all while the company that employed them saw their profits rise by 170% in a single year. In the end, to come to the negotiating table took a tragedy, after a young miner called Lawrence Jones was shot following a scuffle at the picket line.
Jerry Johnson, one of the striking miners, said at the time he felt the only reason an agreement was reached and the strike brought to an end was because of Kopple and her movie, explaining, “The cameras probably saved a bunch of shooting. I don’t think we’d have won it without the film crew. If the film crew hadn’t been sympathetic to our cause, we would’ve lost. Thank God for them; thank God they’re on our side.”
Kopple was a young director, barely 30 at the time, and an advocate for workers’ rights, who would go on to have a long career in making films that captured the spirit of the French movement of ‘cinéma vérité’, a fly on the wall style lens that literally meant showing the truth of a matter, without intervention from the narrator. Kopple has won two Oscars and also directed some TV, including an episode of the HBO prison drama Oz, and was regularly threatened while making Harlan County, told by company representatives that “If I was ever caught alone at night, I’d be killed”.
In the end, Harlan County won the Oscar for ‘Best Documentary Feature’ in 1976, some reward for Kopple, who had constantly had to battle to finance the feature, going back and forth to her native New York and taking on odd jobs to contribute to getting it finished.
