I had to read the book this movie is based on in grade school. Like Robin Kestrel said he took pills and laid under a sunlamp to turn black. I remembered him as having shaved his head but maybe I'm wrong, it was a long time ago. It's cool to see the diary dramatized but the book was better. For example, in the book the scene were he's washing his face in the wash bowl he was trying to prove it was all real.
The real part 1 that StanleyPain mentioned has the infamous bus scene. The part the movie left out is where a black guy who had to use the toilet and was told he couldn't get off just urinated all over the back of the bus. My teacher told us the author said in an interview when he was changing back into a white guy he both the whites and the blacks treated him badly.
I don't remember the guy in the cafe but he's one seriously scary individual, isn't he?
In real life, it was 1959 and it wasn't bootpolish... John Howard Griffin, under the care of a dermatologist, underwent a regimen of large oral doses of the anti-vitiligo drug Oxsoralen and spent up to fifteen hours daily under an ultraviolet lamp. He only used dyes to cover up some uneven areas. (from the Wikipedia article)
Who would have thought that a mere four decades later, a Harvard-educated half-black man with reassuringly white features would win 52% of the popular vote and be elected to our nation's highest office?
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