While some people attempt to affect civil rights change through radical activism, others take a quieter, more cerebral approach. And then there’s Cecil Gaines—the fictitious namesake behind Lee Daniels’ The Butler, who flies completely under the radar, with a somber demeanor that verges on reticent. Yet we hardly fault Cecil for the quiet obedience he brings to more than 30 years of White House service, given the lifetime of racial travesties he’s experienced. In a depressingly racist world, toeing the line is pure survival instinct for a man like Cecil—played to nuanced perfection by Forest Whitaker.

Danny Strong, screenwriter of Lee Daniels’ The Butler

As screenwriter Danny Strong (HBO’s Recount and Game Change) marches us through a parade of defining moments in civil rights history—from sit-ins to riots, from Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, from the Freedom Riders to the Black Panthers, Cecil remains safely cloistered within the walls of White House civility. And if his polite presence puts a face on the black struggle and consequently influences seven presidents in the process, well, that’s fine by Cecil. By getting his hands dirty washing White House dishes, he doesn’t have to dirty them on the front lines.

Cecil’s approach doesn’t quite scan with his headstrong anti-establishment son Louis (David Oyelowo), whose feisty activism counters Cecil’s quieter long game. Of course, the lines of miscommunication run both ways. And in an age of lynchings, bombings and police attack-dogs, Cecil justifiably resents the pain of worry Louis has caused the family. However their generational rift may also owe to Cecil’s latent envy over Louis’s courage to walk the proverbial walk, while Cecil’s default impulse is to don his work tuxedo.

Click Here to Read Creative Screenwriting‘s Interview with Screenwriter Danny Strong

In some ways, Cecil’s unwavering workplace loyalty echoes Anthony Hopkins’s head butler character from The Remains of the Day. And just as Hopkins’s compulsive devotion to his employer costs him a chance at true love with Emma Thompson, Cecil’s propensity to clock in overtime with the First Family takes a toll on his marriage to Gloria (Oprah Winfrey). Rarely without a whiskey glass in hand, is it any wonder Gloria strays into the arms of a squirrelly Terrence Howard? Gloria is tired of waiting for Cecil to change, and resigned to the idea that he never will. But look closely as Cecil’s face drops ever so slightly, each time his plea for equal pay for black White House staffers is shot down. Even a creature of habit has his limits. And in his twilight years, when Cecil realizes that perhaps the squeaky wheel does get the grease, it’s a well-earned moment for him—eclipsed only by his joy in watching the 2008 presidential election results. While life doles out struggle, it also delivers triumph—the latter made all the more poignant by the existence of the former.

Producer Laura Ziskin

Nowhere is the aforementioned ideal truer, than the behind-the-scenes saga that brought Lee Daniels’ The Butler from concept to screen. Plagued with false starts, financing setbacks, acts of God, and sadly, the death of the film’s beloved producer Laura Ziskin, The Butler’s extraordinary journey first began when Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal read reporter Wil Haygood’s 2008 Washington Post article entitled “A Butler Well Served by This Election”, about real life African-American White House butler Eugene Allen, who served under eight presidential administrations. Intrigued by the premise, Pascal optioned the property for Sony, and immediately brought the project to Ziskin, whose venerable hits include Pretty Woman, To Die For, As Good As it Gets and the Spider-Man franchise. Ziskin and her producing partner Pam Williams wasted no time in commandeering Emmy-winning (Recount) Danny Strong to create an original screenplay, using Haygood’s article as inspiration.

Initially overwhelmed by the wide-open nature of the assignment, Strong dove deeply into researching several real-life White House butlers, and when he proposed a composite character with father-son issues, Ziskin and Williams were sold. “We caught magic at that writing stage with Danny, that really launched us the rest of the way,” avers Williams.

In choosing a director, Ziskin gravitated to Lee Daniels—fresh off of his success with Precious, which earned Daniels a Best Director Oscar nomination, and won statues for star Mo’Nique and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher. But when Daniels revealed he was tied up in pre-production with Selma—the biopic about Martin Luther King’s 1965 landmark voting rights campaign, Sony angled for Steven Spielberg to direct The Butler instead. Then when financing issues stalled out Selma, Ziskin leaned hard on Sony brass to tap Daniels over Spielberg.

Director Lee Daniels

“That’s a pretty big deal for her not to fight for Steven Spielberg,” says Daniels, who credits Ziskin not only for backing him, but also for boosting his confidence, amid his deep insecurity. Because despite successes with smaller indie fare like Shadowboxer and The Woodsman, Daniels was anxious about taking on a project so epic in scale, with a sweeping timeline that ran from 1926 through 2008.

Click Here to Read Creative Screenwriting‘s Interview with Lee Daniels

“Lee is a wonderful man of contradiction,” says Williams. “To him, he’s just a guy who grew up in Philly, in what he describes as ‘the ghetto,’ making movies in Hollywood today. He does an incredible movie like Precious, that really platforms him, but still needed someone to encourage him. That’s the magic of Laura Ziskin.”

And lest people think Daniels’s moniker in the film’s title suggests vanity, the film was originally entitled simply The Butler, however the Motion Picture Association of America’s Title Registration Bureau forced The Weinstein Company to change it, after Warner Bros. filed a lawsuit, claiming they retained rights of title, due to a 1916 same-named short film. And in response to the MPAA mandate, Daniels personally penned an impassioned letter to Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara asking him to drop the lawsuit, to no avail.

But an even bigger stumbling block occurred midway through development, when quite unexpectedly, Sony unceremoniously pulled the plug on the project. Amid concerns that a period drama about American politics might not have enough global appeal, Sony worried that the proposed budget of $35 million—not including cast, posed too big of a financial risk.

Pam Williams

“Sony loved the script, they loved Lee Daniels, and they loved Laura. But it just didn’t fit the financial model of the types of movies they had on their release schedule,” explains Williams, who harbors no hard feelings over the decision. “Look, I give Amy Pascal a lot of credit for finding the article and for bringing it to Laura in the first place.’”

Calls to Pascal went unreturned, however an anonymous source within Sony says Pascal “loves the movie and is happy for its success.”

In any case, after dropping the project, Sony relinquished the property to Ziskin, blessing her to carry on without their studio backing, leaving Ziskin and Williams to fish for cash, indie style, in what proved to be an exasperating ordeal.

“I literally had Post-it notes all across my desk, and every day I would count the money people committed. I’d be like, ‘One thousand plus two thousand, plus five hundred,’ and by the next week, those guys would be totally out, and you’d never get them on the phone again. Even if they sign on the dotted line of a contract, until the money hits escrow, it isn’t real,” says Williams. “We kissed so many frogs, I can’t tell you the amount of warts I have.”

Enter Lee Daniels, to save the day. With vast personal experience raising independent financing, Daniels put Ziskin and Williams through fundraising boot camp, teaching them how to tap into the urban community. And although Ziskin unfortunately had become sick by then, she proved a star pupil, successfully soliciting funds from BET co-founder Sheila Johnson and dozens of others.

Recalls Daniels: “Laura had found this black woman who had just won the lottery and wanted to invest in the film. I said to Laura that day, ‘How do you do this? You’re a gangster!’ She told me she was just learning from me. Several days later she went into a coma, and that was it. She passed away that Sunday evening.”

For Williams, the decision to press on with The Butler after Ziskin’s death proved a valuable coping mechanism and a way for her to honor her friend and colleague of over 12 years.

“In a way, the movie saved me the extreme grief of losing her, because I could put all of my energy into it, and even though she had passed away a full year before we began production, Lee and I talk about how Laura produced this movie with us. She knew where she stood and that guiding compass really pulled us through the challenges.”

Jane Fonda and Alan Rickman star in Lee Daniels’ The Butler

And the challenges were many. Locked into a narrow shooting window, the scheduling puzzle became a Byzantine nightmare, as the production had to navigate the availabilities of more than a dozen cameo players, including Mariah Carey, John Cusack, Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr., Elijah Kelley, Minka Kelly, Lenny Kravitz, James Marsden, Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Redgrave, Alan Rickman, Liev Schreiber and Robin Williams. And with principal photography shot entirely in Louisiana, the film also had to accommodate Mother Nature by filming the cotton field scenes only when the cotton plants were in full bloom. And then came Hurricane Sandy, which shut down production full stop, for several days.

“We all went home, and here I am back in Los Angeles watching the news, and all of the sudden, the hurricane stalls, and looks like it’s going to be downgraded to a tropical storm,” remembers Williams. “And I knew our hurricane insurance would only activate for Category One storms, so I was sitting there, praying for a Category One, but also praying nobody got hurt. It was crazy.”

On the flipside, scheduling limitations also led to some wonderful unplanned moments. During filming, Daniels would often interrupt takes by shouting “Fake! Stop!”, if he detected false performances. But his standards of authenticity also spilled over to costumes and set design, as well. [SPOILER WARNING] And in a key scene involving the death of Winfrey’s character, Gloria, that was slated to take place in the Gaines’s living room, circa 2008, Daniels showed up on set and found the production design to be period inauthentic. But with Winfrey due to board a plane for South Africa only hours later, there wasn’t enough time to re-dress the set, so Daniels made the impromptu decision to relocate the scene to the Gaines’s kitchen, where the timeless décor logically would not have been renovated. And as a consequence of this decision, Gloria took her final breath while seated at the kitchen table, in what turned out to be one of the film’s most heart-tugging moments.

Lee Daniels and Oprah Winfrey on set

“It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie because it takes place in the kitchen,” says Williams. “Cecil—a butler, is serving his wife, who he loves so dearly, and then moments later she passes away. Had that been in the living room, it would have been a lesser scene.”

The film clearly resonates with moviegoers, as well, evidenced by the fact that they’ve made The Butler the number one the box office earner, three weeks running. So far it has taken in more than $80 million—handily recouping its final budget of $25 million.

“This is the hardest movie I’ve ever directed,” said Daniels. “There’s no sexual content, little profanity and the violence is at a minimum, though we’re dealing with a very violent period in time. It’s hard to do a PG-13 movie being Lee Daniels, but we did it.”