First there was the 1940 novel "Native Son", Richard Wright’s groundbreaking work which explored systemic oppression and its impact on African-Americans.

The novel Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a violent, angry, cynical black youth who lives with his family in abject poverty in Chicago's Black Belt.

He is given the chance for a new job with the wealthy Daltons, the white family who own the tenements in which he and his family live. Their attempts at kindness notwithstanding, Bigger feels afraid and confused in their home, a "trembling dog".

He is given the assignment of driving the daughter Mary; during the course of a wild evening she becomes so drunk that Bigger has to carry her to her bedroom when they get home. There they are nearly discovered by Mrs. Dalton--she smells the alcohol in the air, but she is blind, and doesn't know Bigger is present.

Terrified by the consequences should he be caught in a white girl's bedroom, Bigger holds a pillow over Mary's face to silence her. When Mrs. Dalton leaves and Bigger removes the pillow, he realizes he has smothered Mary Dalton to death.

Desperate, he drags her body to the basement and burns it in the furnace, first decapitating her corpse to make it fit.

After an unsuccessful attempt to extort a ransom for the missing girl, Bigger is found out. He goes into hiding, joined by his girlfriend Bessie.

In an abandoned building, with the manhunt closing in, he rapes Bessie, then the next morning bludgeons her to death with a brick before throwing her down an air shaft. Bigger is caught and dragged to prison.

In court Bigger is defended by a Communist lawyer, to whom he confides his lifetime of anger, desperation, and futility.

He is found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair, a fate he ultimately seems to accept.

Close on its heels was the 1941 Broadway play, "Native Son". Adapted for the Stage by Richard Wright and Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Paul Green. It was directed by Orson Welles and opened at the St. James Theatre in New York. Canada Lee starred in the role of Bigger.

The Problem Of The Hero is the story of a renowned, committed, progressive, white, anti-racist (Paul Green) being brought face to face with his own limitations by a young black writer and activist (Richard Wright) who was well on his way to becoming an icon of the twentieth century.

Their failure to come to terms was a moral tragedy, one which should be all too familiar to us in the time in which we live. At question: in the end, who gets to tell stories, and what are their responsibilities in the telling?

This is a film that does not shy from exploring the deep issues and questions these two men faced together and issues we face today - in our own country and globally.

It would be comfortable to paint Green, a southern, middle-aged, white man, as a stereotypical closet racist, paired with Wright, a salty but saintly black hero: where they experience real peril, they form a heartwarming friendship, and then the white man triumphs over his bigotry so they can form an alliance against the true forces of racism in America…a garden-variety, feel-good, interracial, odd-couple buddy movie, the sort from which audiences can exit the theater feeling heartened by their own empathy.

THIS is not THAT kind of film.

Green and Wright's first major argument was also their last. Green left New York the next day. He and Wright never spoke again.