The Color Purple (1985 film)

CTL-E-5476 · Work · film · 1985

PROVISIONAL evidence grade of this record

The Color Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg with a score and co-production by Quincy Jones and adapted from Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was released by Warner Bros. on December 18, 1985, following Celie — played by Whoopi Goldberg in her breakthrough role — across decades of rural Georgia toward her own voice. It stands in awards history by an anomaly: nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it won none, tying the record for the most nominations without a win, with Spielberg's absence from the directing slate the standing oddity inside the record. Goldberg won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama, and the film was the screen debut of Oprah Winfrey, Oscar-nominated in support. It was also a major commercial success, though the precise worldwide gross is reported inconsistently across sources and is left unstated here rather than blended. The graph files the film beside Walker's novel as the 1980s' central Black literary adaptation — a work whose shutout the culture has spent forty years treating as the Academy's error, not the film's.

The record

• Also known as: The Color Purple

Notes

Statistics: Warner Bros., 1985; 11 Academy Award nominations, 0 wins (tied record). GOV-004 note: the worldwide gross is reported inconsistently across sources ($98.4M vs. $142M per the research file) and is deliberately NOT stated in this record. A 2023 musical adaptation exists in the wider culture; this record is the 1985 film only. · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: Eleven nominations and no statuette is the kind of fact a citation graph exists to keep straight, because the culture keeps rounding it into a win. The record refuses the rounding: the shutout is the document, and the film's endurance is the verdict that outranks it. · Photo slot: HELD — poster/key art and production stills for this title are copyrighted studio material and were NOT pulled (per CTL-PHOTO-001 and the wave brief: never force non-free key art); no cleared Commons image was verified for this title in this run. Slot honestly HELD pending a cleared visual.

Sources

• Wikipedia, 'The Color Purple (1985 film)' — supports: director, the Jones score/co-production, the Walker novel basis, Warner Bros., the December 18, 1985 release, the eleven-nominations-no-wins record, Goldberg's Golden Globe, and Winfrey's debut — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_Purple_(1985_film)

Record CTL-E-5476 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: PROVISIONAL · 1 source · CTL research: MEDIA-001.
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