Sudie and Simpson is an American television film that originally aired on Lifetime on September 11, 1990. Directed by Joan Tewkesbury, the film stars Louis Gossett, Jr. and Sara Gilbert. Set in a WW II Georgia small town, Sudie and Simpson focuses on the friendship between Sudie Harrigan (Gilbert), a 10-year-old girl who had never seen a "nigger" in real life, and Simpson (Gossett, Jr.), a black man living surreptitiously in an abandoned shack in the woods. Sudie who finds to her surprise and pleasure that Negroes are not all 9 feet tall, that they know what they do, and that their skin color doesn't rub off. Moreover, the gentle, harmless and moral character of Simpson is contrasted with the town child molester (a white man). The themes of racism and morality are compared and contrasted, dramatically. If the whites, who "don't allow no niggers" in town, discover the presence of Simpson, they will likely expel him or string him up. If the victims of the white child molester complain to their mothers, they fear getting "a whipping". People said, "Gossett towers over the cast of this sexually frank but lax melodrama.