This was why In the Heat of the Night was not filmed in Sparta Mississippi but instead in Sparta Illinois
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Ahead of the film's opening night screening at the TCM Classic Film Festival, director Norman Jewison recalls "pleading" with his star to head south to shoot and talks about the movie's fresh relevance in today's political climate.
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Sidney realized that he was working with someone who was a very talented actor, but before we shot he had a problem [with shooting in the South].
Early on, Sidney also had asked, “Where are you going to shoot this picture?” And I said, “Well, I’ve got scenes in cotton-picking fields, I’ve got scenes that are located in the southern United States. All my films, I try to make them believable, and the first thing I have to do is find a believable location.” And he said, “Well, I’m not going south of the Mason-Dixon line.” And he said it with such emphasis that I realized it was very important to him. I said, “Why is that?” And he says, “I had an unsettling experience with Harry Belafonte in Georgia, where our car was chased and we were threatened, and I don’t want to go down there.” So I said, “I’ll do my best to stay north of the Mason-Dixon line. What can I say? I want you to do the picture.”
I didn’t want to make it a deal-breaker, so I started location-hunting, and I went to southern Illinois, and there’s a place where it dips down and it’s on the Mississippi River just across the state line from Missouri, a place called Sparta. I can remember my production designer saying, “Jesus, look at these water towers! They’ve got ‘Sparta’ written all over them. It’s got the Sparta Farm Machine Co. Boy, it’s gonna be a job to try and paint all of these over [with the name of the town in the book].” And I said, “We’ll just make it Sparta, Mississippi. And that solves that problem.” So that’s what we did. And we used that town as our main set piece.
After we’d been shooting for two or three weeks, I said to Sidney, “I’ve got to ask you a personal favor. I cannot find a cotton plantation north of the Mason-Dixon line, but I found a location in Dyersburg, Tennessee. And I’ve got everything there: I’ve got the cotton plantation, I’ve got the Southern ranch that Endicott [one of the characters, played by Larry Gates] lives in, and if we isolate the two scenes that we need, I can shoot in a couple of days. So I’m asking you, if you wouldn’t mind, if we can move the location to the South, just for two days, just for the weekend.”
I remember pleading with him, and Sidney said, “I understand, I understand.” He realized we were up against the gun and the picture was going well. I said, “Don’t worry. We’ll protect you. You’re not going to be out there alone with a lot of protestors.” I tried to explain that he would be surrounded by a very loyal crew — and we had some big guys on that crew. So he agreed to go south, and we went for two days. We were forced to stay in the Holiday Inn because it was the only place that accepted African-American people; the main hotel in Dyersburg was a real Southern hotel and it was whites only. You’ve got to remember, we were shooting in 1966, so things were a little uptight. Martin Luther King Jr. had just done the march on Selma.
