CastingĪllen began his service as a pantry worker in 1952 during Truman's second term. Allen didn't speak to journalists about his childhood, and there is nothing to suggest anything like this happened to his parents. Meanwhile, the rape and murder make for a dramatic opener, but they aren't real. He should have stuck around for the rest of the movie, because there are loads more tin-eared lines to come and nobody else on screen seems to notice. Perhaps the plantation owner doesn't like anachronistic cliches: he shoots Cecil's dad dead. 'We're just living in it.' The line 'It's X's world, we just live in it' seems to have originated around the 1940s and was popularised by Dean Martin (who said it about Frank Sinatra). 'It's his world,' his father says, indicating the white man. When the white plantation owner rapes his mother ( Mariah Carey), his father doesn't react. The Butler fictionalises Eugene Allen as Cecil Gaines ( Forest Whitaker), and relocates his 1920s plantation childhood from Virginia to Georgia. Eugene Allen served as a butler in the White House through eight presidencies, from Harry S Truman to Ronald Reagan.
