Multi-awarded actors Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali star in the buddy road trip movie Green Book, which takes its title from The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual travel guide published annually from 1936 to 1966.
The travel guide listed businesses and other establishments that served Black customers and enabled Black travelers to plan their road trips to help them avoid harassment, arrest, or violence.
The Green Book, as it was called, was created and published by an African-American New York City mailman, Victor Hugo Green, and became an indispensable survival tool for African Americans travelling by car.
Originally it covered only the New York area, but it gradually expanded to cover most of North America, the Caribbean and Bermuda. In the U.S, it became invaluable in the South, where Jim Crow segregation laws varied by county and state, and unofficial rules in “Sundown towns” forbade Black Americans from being out after dark.
After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation between black and white became illegal, The Green Book was no longer needed, and it slowly faded into history.
It is a movie 50 years in the making, now comes a story about an unlikely friendship which the book was a major part of. Mortensen takes on the role of Tony Vallelonga and Ali dons the ironed out character of Dr. Shirley.
Based on stories told by Tony to his oldest son Nick, grew up hearing about his father’s journey with Don Shirley. Tony had grown up in The Bronx and had landed a job at the Copacabana night club, where he worked for 12 years, rubbing elbows with mob honchos and celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Bobby Darin. Although he stopped going to school after the seventh grade, he was garrulous and charismatic, and earned his nickname for his reputation of being able to persuade anybody of just about anything.
Green Book opens today in cinemas from Pioneer Films.