That’s in addition to his role as president of U.S.A. Now 82 and a business consultant in Los Angeles, he considers it the “biggest accomplishment” of his professional life. A former talent manager whose clients included Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie, Kragen was the event’s main organizer. There is no dark side to Hands Across America for Ken Kragen. Yet as he reflected on it these years later, Peele said it struck him as an event “more for the people who are holding hands to cure hunger than for the people who are hungry themselves.” “I don’t think the notion is an evil one,” he explained. In his “satirical poke” at Hands Across America, Peele said he wasn’t calling into question the “well intentioned, good people” behind it. Eventually, the initiative distributed about $15 million to various charities, lower than its target of at least $50 million. “There’s like an insistence that as long as we have each other, we can walk blindly past the ugliness and evil that we may be a part of.”īy infusing Hands Across America with malevolent power, Peele is cinematizing one of the main criticisms it faced in 1986: that it was “a superficial gesture that offered no long-term solution to poverty in the United States,” as The Times described homeless advocates’ objections in a front-page article the day after the event. “There’s something cultlike about the imagery that makes me think of the Manson family singing folk songs as they leave the courtroom,” said Peele, who was 7 when the nationwide gathering happened. In an interview, Peele said that as he was writing “Us” he stumbled across a commercial for the event and “got this really eerie feeling.” A Hands Across America commercial of the director’s own making plays at the beginning of the film. “I thought that when we were holding hands, I was holding hands with people in California and New York.” (The line actually had gaps in some areas states not on the route organized their own similar events.) “I was really pumped about it,” said Shrout. Peele “draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times.įor Katy Shrout, 9 at the time and now a 42-year-old eighth-grade English teacher in Atlanta, Hands Across America was a joyful moment “of epic significance.” With a mixtape booming in her boombox, Shrout joined hands with her parents, sister and her sister’s Cabbage Patch Kid, Iva, along a roadway in St. That formation is a motif in the film’s advertising and a recurring, nefarious force in the story. Her life is violently upended when a wicked version of her family shows up to hatch plans that, according to Peele, imagine “the dark side of Hands Across America.” The family first appears standing hand-in-hand like paper dolls, as did Hands Across America’s participants. In the movie, Lupita Nyong’o plays a mother haunted by a traumatic encounter she had as a girl in 1986.
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