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Oprah Winfrey starred in the non-musical version of The Color Purple in 1985 and is currently the producer of the film released in November last year.
However, she's not one to rest on her laurels. She just optioned the rights to the best-selling novel and Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The mogul spoke to the entertainment magazine and said that she's about “to have a hell of a time getting that done because it's also a story about people of color.”
Oprah Winfrey and Hollywood's racial reckoning
Winfrey also spoke about The Color Purple's box office performance and how it would most likely affect the future of projects whose subjects are Black or brown people. She said that even after the racial reckoning that happened with George Floyd's death and Hollywood's response by investing in the stories of people of color, it would still be a challenge to get those films off the ground.
“I think that everybody is so afraid and controlled by what they feel is going to work. There is a great loss in people understanding the true power of storytelling that has brought us through eras in Hollywood where you could tell a story like The English Patient and you could tell a story like the original Color Purple and audiences would respond,” Winfrey said.
“And now if you don’t have a brand, already marketable brand behind it, it's hard to sit in a room and pitch a story. Because unless you're saying, ‘I'm bringing Rihanna or Beyoncé or Taylor or one of the people who have 200 million followers, people are like, ‘What's the hook?'” she continued.
“So I think that that is true for certainly telling stories about people of color. And I think it's also true for everybody who's trying to do some serious filmmaking about all stories. It's challenging,” Winfrey added.
Winfrey's take on The Covenant of Water
Another challenge she's bound to face is that while The Covenant of Water is a best-seller, it tackles a pretty heavy subject.
“There’s nothing we can sell in that, inside that. There's no dolls you can make and there’s no product you can conjure from it,” she explained.
“So listen, I am here in the space of finding and creating stories as an offering to the world to show the world to itself and to try to do that in a way that lets in particular, not just exclusively, but in particular people of color see the reflection of themselves in the highest light,” Winfrey concluded.
The Covenant of Water follows the story of an Indian family living in the Kerala state. The novel spans three generations, from 1900 to the 1970s. In each generation, the family lose a member to drowning, a fate they call “The Condition.”
Later in the book, it the condition is revealed to be NF-1 or Neurofibromatosis Type I, also known as the Von Recklinghausen Disease, after the German pathologist who first documented the ailment, Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen.
