We're getting a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers biopic, but I'm still waiting for the Nicholas Brothers' story to be told

Last week, news broke that Amazon Studios has greenlit a biopic about iconic dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It will star Jamie Bell and Margaret Qualley. This move certainly comes off the heels of FX’s successful Fosse/Verdon(which also starred Qualley).

While some might be enthusiastic about the potential of this film, I look at it as another example of Hollywood showcasing careers of white icons while ignoring BIPOC stars of stage and screen whose stories are no less compelling.

In truth, much of the drama in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film will be based on rumors or completely made up. While there was speculation that the two were having an affair, there was never any proof and both denied it emphatically.

So the creative teams will have to come up with something intriguing for viewers, meanwhile, the histories of Black performers in the Golden Age of Hollywood haven’t been highlighted nearly enough.

One such case is The Nicholas Brothers.

Despite only appearing in five films, Fayard and Harold’s careers spanned eight decades appearing in vaudeville and nightclubs, on Broadway, and on television. Their fans included Gene Kelly, George Balanchine, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Fred Astaire himself thought their “Jumpin’ Jive” production number in Stormy Weather the greatest musical sequence of all time.

They were a hit on Broadway appearing in shows such as Babes in Arms and The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936.

Yet, with all of this success and praise, the brothers never headlined their own movie. With segregation and racism ever-present in the United States in the 1940s, studios didn’t invest in Black performers.

Bruce Goldstein, Director of Repertory Programming at New York’s Film Forum, said “Being black made them a specialty act in Hollywood. The Nicholas Brothers got big billing in most of their films for Twentieth Century-Fox, but they never got a featured role. They only made five films for Fox because the studio didn’t know how to use them.”

Charlene DeKalb also wrote about the process in which studios included Black performers only so much.

“Overt racial prejudice held back talented Black performers and it was common for them to be included in films as “featured performers”. Their roles were deliberately not integral to the plot so their scenes could be easily edited out — which often happened for theaters in the South.”

Goldstein confirmed this speaking to Smithsonian Magazine. “Originally in The Pirate(1948) they had speaking roles,” Goldstein said, “but the studio cut them out. You can see snippets of them in the background of shots, but basically, they had one number, ‘Be a Clown.’ And it’s not their greatest piece because Gene Kelly couldn’t do what they could do.”

In fact, in the film Down Argentine Way, their race was changed to Latino in order to smooth over any potential racial issues.

After this, fed up with racism in the industry, the brothers parted ways with Harold moving to Europe for much of the 1050s. But their impact was felt in dance culture. Bob Fosse modeled his first dance act(Riff Brothers) on them and Joseph Jackson hired Fayard to help train his children, The Jackson 5. The great Gregory Hines once remarked that if there was ever a biopic about the duo, they would need CGI to create all the dance moves because no one else would likely be able to do them.

Sadly Harold died in 2000 and Fayard in 2006, and the memory of their greatness is fleeting every year. While biopics aren’t historical documents, they do help preserve the memories of these individuals in popular culture and even renew interest in their work.

So here’s hoping that those with the power to develop film projects give a long look to not only the Nicholas Brothers but many other Black artists who worked through enormous obstacles to work in Hollywood in the early 20th century. The ripple effect of their contributions are endless and absolutely felt today.