Two award-winning filmmakers are teaming up to tell the story of the first all-Black sales team at a major U.S. corporation. Jacqueline Olive (“Always in Season”) and Stanley Nelson (“Attica”) are directing “The Color of Cola.” The doc counts Viola Davis among its exec producers. Deadline broke the news.
Now in production, the film is based on Stephanie Capparell’s 2008 book “The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business.” “The Color of Cola” “sheds light on the experience of the all-Black sales team at Pepsi” and follows their journey “through the Jim Crow South after being tasked with tapping its African American market,” per the source. The doc “aims to elevate one such story exploring a time when corporate America did not include Black professionals, and the Black experience was stereotypically portrayed. The extraordinary efforts of the individuals on Pepsi’s sales team mirror the courage of many who fought to propel America closer to its aspirations and ideals.”
“What first attracted me to the project was the opportunity to tell the story of this pioneering sales team of Black men whose work launched an effort at corporate diversity that laid the foundation for meaningfully engaging what has become a trillion dollar Black consumer market today,” said Olive. “If you think it doesn’t get much more powerful than that, Ed Boyd and his team, in the process, helped open the American consciousness to just how dynamic Black life truly was in the late 1940s, so the throughline of this story to benchmarks of cultural diversity in the present is remarkable.” She emphasized that she “could not be more excited” to collaborate on the project with Nelson.
Olive participated in a Q&A with us ahead of “Always in Season’s” world premiere at the 2019 edition of Sundance Film Festival. The film examines lynching in the United States. “My advice to female-identified adults who are directing films is to believe in the value of your voice. The very essence of your uniqueness is ultimately the place to create from, and your particular voice as a storyteller is what will make your work extraordinary,” she told us. “That’s true with making narrative fiction films as well as documentaries. It also means there’s no need to be competitive about your work because no one else will be able to make a similar film in the way that you do.”
“Attica,” an investigation into the 1971 Attica prison uprising that Nelson co-directed with Traci A. Curry, is nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the upcoming Oscars.
