The truth of law enforcement groups in the usa, is all have a history of severe abuses which when you parallel them to the crimes they prevent, i argue far outweighs what they prevent, sequentially making them dysfunctional. The tragedy is the populace in the usa who actually need aid by law enforcement is a fraction of a percentage of the whole but their mouthpiece is amplified by the communication channels of the wealthy in the usa who know false problems make great news. 

A police officer took a teen for a rape kit.

Then he assaulted her, too.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers have been accused of sexually abusing children over the past two decades, a Post investigation found

A teen who was sexually abused by a New Orleans police officer.

Story by Jessica Contrera, 

Jenn Abelson and 

John D. Harden

Updated March 14, 2024 at 5:54 p.m.Originally published March 14, 2024

The 14-year-old did not want to go to the emergency room. Her mother had begged her. Her therapist had gently prodded. And now there was a police officer in her living room.

“You really should think about it,” he said.

He introduced himself as Officer Rodney Vicknair. His New Orleans Police Department cruiser was waiting outside, ready to take her to the hospital for a rape kit. Early that morning, the girl said, a 17-year-old friend had forced himself on her.

Under the police department’s rules, a case like this was supposed to be handled from the start by a detective trained in sex crimes or child abuse. But on this afternoon in May of 2020, it was Vicknair, a patrol officer with a troubled past, who knocked on the girl’s door.

He tried to coax her into changing her mind. “If I’m a young man that has done something wrong to a young lady and she doesn’t follow up and press the issue,” Vicknair said as his body camera recorded the conversation, “then I’m gonna go out and do it to another young lady.”

“And it’s gonna be worse, maybe, the next time,” Vicknair said, “because I’m gonna think in my head, ‘Oh, I got the power. I can go further this time.’ ”

The girl didn’t want that. She just wanted this to be over.

She didn’t know it was only the beginning. Four months later, police would arrest a man for sexually assaulting the girl. But it wouldn’t be her teenage friend. It would be Officer Rodney Vicknair.

The day the 14-year-old met 53-year-old Vicknair was the day the officer began a months-long grooming process, prosecutors would allege. Within hours of meeting the girl, Vicknair wrapped his arm around her while they took a selfie. He let her play with his police baton. He joked with her about “whipping your behind.” He showed her multiple photos of a young woman dressed only in lingerie.

Officer Vicknair talks to teen at the hospital

0:23

The Washington Post blurred the teen’s face to protect her identity. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Americans have been forced to reckon with sexual misconduct committed by teachers, clergy, coaches and others with access to and authority over children. But there is little awareness of child sex crimes perpetrated by members of another profession that many children are taught to revere and obey: law enforcement.

A Washington Post investigation has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of police officers have preyed on children, while agencies across the country have failed to take steps to prevent these crimes.

At least 1,800 state and local police officers were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022, The Post found.

Abusive officers were rarely related to the children they were accused of raping, fondling and exploiting. They most frequently targeted girls who were 13 to 15 years old — and regularly met their victims through their jobs.

The Post identified these officers through an exclusive analysis of the nation’s most comprehensive database of police arrests at Bowling Green State University, as well as a review of thousands of court documents, police decertification records and news reports.

In case after case, officers intentionally earned the trust of parents and guardians, created opportunities to get kids alone and threatened repercussions for broken silence. Unlike teachers and priests, they did it all while wielding the power of their badges and guns.

Chuck Wexler, who leads the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy and training organization, said the number of officers charged with these crimes is “very troubling.”

“Whatever we can do to prevent this and hold those accountable will help restore the trust in the police,” Wexler said.

But while many school systems and churches have created practices and policies to root out predators, law enforcement agencies have largely treated child sexual abuse as an isolated problem that goes away when an officer is fired or prosecuted — rather than an always-present risk that requires systemic change.

There is no national tracking system for officers accused of child sexual abuse. At a time when police departments across the country face staffing shortages and are desperate to hire, there are no universal requirements to screen for potential perpetrators. When abuse is suspected, officers are sometimes allowed to remain on the job while investigations of their behavior are left in the hands of their colleagues.

In the New Orleans Police Department, child sexual abuse has been a problem before. The city recently paid $300,000 to settle a lawsuit over its 1980s Police Explorers program led by a lieutenant who was accused of sexually exploiting 10 boys. The case was investigated by the head of NOPD’s juvenile sex crimes unit — who in 1987 was convicted of child sex crimes, too.

In more recent years, two officers remained on the force after they were accused of abusing young girls. Then they sexually assaulted other children. They are among six NOPD officers who have been convicted of crimes involving child sexual abuse since 2011.

Vicknair is the latest. His case reflects larger problems that police departments confront in conducting background checks, identifying red flags and responding to complaints of inappropriate behavior. To reconstruct what happened in New Orleans, The Post obtained hundreds of internal law enforcement records, hours of video footage and dozens of text messages.

Vicknair was hired in 2007 despite a record that included multiple arrests and a conviction for battery on a juvenile. His sexually charged interactions with the girl he drove to the hospital, though witnessed by another officer, went unreported to superiors. He frequently visited the girl’s home in the summer of 2020, telling new cops he was training that they should stay in the car while he went inside alone. And when concerns about Vicknair’s behavior were reported to the department, police officials allowed him to remain on duty for a week. During that week, the girl said, Vicknair sexually assaulted her.

Reached by phone last year, Vicknair declined to comment for this story. In November of 2022, he pleaded guilty to violating the girl’s civil rights, admitting that he locked her in his truck and touched her under her clothing.

The city of New Orleans and its police department also declined to discuss the case with The Post, citing pending litigation. The victim and her mother filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city and its superintendent of police in 2021.

In court filings, the city has repeatedly denied that the police department is responsible for the girl’s abuse, arguing that Vicknair was not on duty at the time of the assault he pleaded guilty to and was not acting on behalf of NOPD “while performing any of the inappropriate actions alleged against him.”

Soon, the case will go before a jury. A trial over what, if anything, the girl is owed by NOPD was scheduled to begin March 18. But hours after The Post published this story online, a judge ordered that the trial be delayed.

With the permission of the victim and her mother, The Post is identifying the girl only by her middle name, Nicole.

At 14, Nicole was barely 100 pounds. She hadn’t yet gotten braces. A large stuffed giraffe still watched over her bedroom.

She’d spent her preteen years in custody battles between divorced parents, in a domestic violence shelter with her mom and in a hospital for self-harm. She believed all adults just wanted to tell her what to do. But on the day Vicknair persuaded her to go to the emergency room and then sat with her and her mother for hours, Nicole felt like he actually wanted to listen.

“If you ever just want to shoot, talk, text me,” he told her as his body camera continued recording. “You having problems, just need somebody to talk to, if I’m working I’ll come swing by and talk to ya, okay? ... We’ll go get some ice cream in McDonald’s or something.”

Nicole saved Vicknair’s number in her phone as “Officer Rodney.”

“Now hit call so I know it’s you and I can save you as a contact,” Vicknair said before leaving. He lifted his phone and aimed his camera down at her. Her bare legs were dangling off the hospital bed.

“No,” Nicole objected, raising her hand to block his view.

Vicknair took the picture anyway. “There we go,” he said. “Perfect.”

icole was just a year old when Vicknair applied for the job that would make it possible for him to meet her and other children.

“I always wanted to be a police officer in New Orleans,” Vicknair wrote on his NOPD application in 2006. “I truly love helping + serving my community.”

He was far from the typical police recruit. He’d worked as an EMT and a hospital security guard, but he was about to turn 40 — an age that would have disqualified him from joining some departments at the time. At 5-foot-11, he weighed 237 pounds. He had lifelong tremors that regularly made his hands shake.

A department spokesperson told The Post that, today, NOPD has some of the most stringent hiring requirements in the state of Louisiana. Since entering into a consent decree with the Justice Department in 2012, NOPD has been working to reform its policies and practices.

But at the time Vicknair applied, NOPD was in disarray following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Public outcry over officers’ actions had resulted in intense scrutiny from the outside and low morale on the inside. Recruiters needed to find people willing to wear the badge. According to the Justice Department, NOPD began lowering hiring standards and performing less rigorous background checks.

In his application, Vicknair disclosed to the department that he’d previously been charged with disturbing the peace and aggravated assault. Just the year before he applied, deputies from the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office were called when Vicknair reportedly brandished a knife at his ex-girlfriend and beat a man she was dating.

Citing the “potential for future violence, as well as threats made by Mr. Vicknair in the presence of deputies,” law enforcement seized Vicknair’s knife and his gun before taking him to jail, according to a police report included in his background check.

The charges were eventually dropped. Vicknair’s ex-girlfriend, Denise Trower, told The

that she asked authorities to stop pursuing the case because she was afraid of what Vicknair might do if she didn’t. During their relationship, she said, Vicknair choked her and held a loaded gun to her head.

“He had threatened that he would make sure somebody did something to my son,” Trower said.

Without calling Trower to learn more about what happened, the NOPD background investigator wrote that the arrest “should not reflect poorly” on Vicknair’s application.

The incident was not the only time Vicknair had been charged with a serious crime. In 1987, he was convicted in Ascension Parish of simple battery on a juvenile — a part of his past he did not disclose to NOPD. He was sentenced to $50 in fines or 10 days in jail.

Three of Vicknair’s family members told The Post that he was charged after he had what they described as a sexual relationship with a minor. Vicknair was 20 years old. The girl, whom The Post is not identifying, was a preteen at the time. She did not respond to interview requests.

There is no indication that the background investigator looked into the simple battery conviction; he didn’t appear to know it existed. Though The Post obtained a record of Vicknair’s conviction from the court, the background investigator reported in his notes that Vicknair had no criminal record in Ascension Parish.

Records show the NOPD background investigator also did not contact anyone in Vicknair’s family.

Vicknair’s sister, Kim Vogel, said that if she had been contacted, she would have told the department not to hire her brother. She described him as loyal, generous and eager to help other people. But she also said his history of anger and violence still gives her nightmares.

“I don’t think he should have been a police officer, and I hate even bringing that out there,” Vicknair’s sister said. “But I also blame that on the police department, because I know they do background checks, they do psychological tests and all that. And they missed all of it.”

Vicknair did undergo a computerized voice-stress analysis, a type of lie detector test.

“Did you intentionally withhold any information from your employment application?” the examiner asked.

Vicknair answered no. The NOPD investigator rated his application as “acceptable.” He was hired onto the force in March 2007.

During the next 12 years, he was internally investigated for allegations of misconduct a dozen times, according to NOPD records.

In eight of the cases, which included accusations of unauthorized force, theft of $1,000 and drug possession, the department found no evidence of misconduct, could not determine whether the wrongdoing occurred or deemed his actions justified. Vicknair was not disciplined.

Records show he was formally punished twice for reckless driving and twice for acting inappropriately toward women who claimed he had mocked or harassed them while on duty. The most severe consequence he received was a five-day suspension.

In 2016, he was promoted to become a mentor to new officers while he patrolled the neighborhood where he would meet Nicole.

After the swabbing was over, after she stopped hyperventilating, after she stayed at the hospital to ensure she didn’t hurt herself, Nicole was discharged. Then she called Officer Vicknair.

“Let me know when back home and I’ll come check on you,” Vicknair texted the 14-year-old on May 26, 2020. He’d started messaging her the night he met her, by sending a GIF of a waving puppy.

In the weeks that followed, he began showing up at her house in uniform. He’d sip a Dr Pepper while talking about the headlines on Fox News. He’d lecture Nicole about staying out of trouble.

Nicole’s mother, Rayne, witnessed it all. Rayne — The Post is identifying her by her first name to protect Nicole’s privacy — had grown up with a sheriff’s deputy for a grandfather. She trusted law enforcement and raised her daughter to feel the same way.

So Rayne encouraged Vicknair to follow up on his idea to take Nicole out for ice cream. She called him when Nicole was having a breakdown. She invited him to visit Nicole on her 15th birthday.

Rayne didn’t worry when she discovered that the 53-year-old officer was talking to her daughter on the phone late at night that summer. She was grateful that Nicole, who had become silent and surly in the weeks following her sexual assault report, was finally opening up to someone. Someone who could be a role model.

“She would be like, ‘Oh, I had the best talk with Rodney last night, Mom. He’s so nice,’” Rayne remembered.

The interest Vicknair was taking in her daughter was so different from how NOPD first responded. On the morning in May when Rayne discovered her daughter on the couch with her 17-year-old friend, two other patrol officers were the first to be dispatched to a report of attempted rape at her house.

It was 5:21 a.m. The teenage boy had already fled. Records show the officers spent 11 minutes at the house before leaving. They appeared to take no further action.

Their response was exactly what the federal government had spent years trying to fix at NOPD. As a part of the 2012 consent decree, the Justice Department’s investigators found that officers were repeatedly mishandling reports of sexual assault. NOPD’s investigations were “seriously deficient, marked by poor victim interviewing skills, missing or inadequate documentation, and minimal efforts to contact witnesses or interrogate suspects.”

Years later, NOPD’s special victims unit continued to be understaffed and overwhelmed. According to a recent Justice Department report, the unit closed out 3 percent of cases in 2022.

Several hours after the first officers left Nicole’s house, her therapist called to report the assault a second time. NOPD sent Vicknair and two other patrol officers to her house. Then a special victims detective, Kimberly Wilson, arrived. Body-camera footage shows she spent a total of four minutes with Nicole before saying she had somewhere else to be.

She left Vicknair and another officer to drive and sit with the teen at the hospital. Wilson stopped by later that afternoon, but didn’t interview Nicole until two days later.

“I told him to stop,” Nicole said about the 17-year-old. “He said ... ‘No, let me get it over with.’ ”

Wilson declined to comment on her investigation. There is no record that Wilson ever interviewed the 17-year-old, and it is unclear from the case file whether Nicole’s rape kit DNA was tested by the crime lab.

Instead of progress in her case, Nicole got visits from Vicknair.

The first time Vicknair came over when her mother wasn’t home, Nicole remembered, he asked if she owned any booty shorts.

“What was running through my mind at that time was ‘Oh, he’s just a guy,’ ” Nicole said. “You know, that’s how guys think.”

The more he came over and called, the more he learned about what Nicole had been through in her life. Rayne told the officer that her daughter was the “textbook poster child for daddy issues.” Nicole told him about sneaking into bars on Bourbon Street while her mom worked nights — and about the older men who bought her drinks there.

Vicknair began warning her, Nicole said later, that he could report her mom for child endangerment and get her thrown in jail. He told Nicole he could arrest anyone. He whacked her with his baton.

She’d been taught to be afraid of strangers who might want to kidnap her, not adults in positions of authority who increasingly tested her boundaries.

So she told no one when Vicknair’s texts shifted from “Lion King” GIFs to tongue emojis. Or when he confided in her about his own childhood trauma, then asked her to send nudes. Or when he went from telling her he wanted to touch her to actually doing it.

“I passed your house earlier,” Vicknair texted Nicole on Sept. 7, three and a half months after he met her.

“Stalker,” she replied.

“You like it,” he texted back.

Later, she would wish she had told him to leave her alone. “I just kept going along with shit,” Nicole remembered. “He knew where we lived, you know?”

Vicknair would admit to investigators after he was arrested that he visited Nicole at her house at least a dozen times.

But it wasn’t anyone within NOPD who raised concerns about Vicknair’s behavior. It was Nicole’s mother, who in September found a photo on her daughter’s phone. In it, Vicknair’s tattooed arms were wrapped around Nicole, pressing the back of her body into the front of his.

Nicole told her mom only that Vicknair once followed her in his police cruiser while she was on a run, yelling “Nice ass!” out the window. Rayne consulted with Nicole’s therapist. They both worried there was more going on.

How, Nicole’s mother began to wonder, do you report the police to the police?

On Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, nearly four months after Vicknair met Nicole, the head of the New Orleans Police Department received a text.

“It’s about potential sexual abuse of a minor by an officer,” read the message to then-Superintendent Shaun Ferguson.

The text was sent by Susan Hutson, then the city’s independent police monitor, a civilian oversight agency created after Hurricane Katrina. Hutson’s job included listening to citizens’ complaints about police and trying

When the interview was over, investigators did not immediately seek a warrant for Vicknair’s arrest. Instead, they asked Nicole to call the officer who she had just said assaulted her — and ask him if he would do it again.

She was deeply uncomfortable. But she did as she was told. She pulled up “Officer Rodney” on her phone.

[Excerpt from call]

Nicole:

Can we do what we did in your truck again?

Vicknair:

Um.

In the background, a girl’s voice can be heard saying, ‘Love you, Dad!’

Nicole:

Can we?

Vicknair:

I don’t know if it’s your phone or my phone, it’s breaking up.

[Vicknair ended the call.]

Vicknair already knew that Nicole was going to the child advocacy center for a forensic interview that day. Nicole told him the interview was about another man, one she’d met on Bourbon Street.

Now, Nicole feared, Vicknair knew what was going on.

Less than an hour after Vicknair hung up on Nicole, he got into his Toyota Tundra, the same vehicle Nicole said she’d been assaulted in two nights earlier. He was followed by an officer who’d been sitting outside his house, conducting surveillance.

The officer quickly lost sight of Vicknair’s truck.

When the truck returned, it was gleaming, with fresh gloss on the tires and exterior. The officer wrote in his surveillance report that it appeared Vicknair had gone to get his vehicle detailed.

If there was any evidence — or underwear — remaining in the truck, it had just been washed away.

to get something done about them.

Often, that meant contacting NOPD’s version of internal affairs, known as the Public Integrity Bureau. While some police departments turn to outside agencies to conduct investigations when one of their officers is suspected of committing a serious crime, NOPD investigates its own.

Hutson notified Ferguson and then-integrity bureau leader Arlinda Westbrook that same Friday evening. Sgt. Lawrence Jones, a criminal investigator with the public integrity bureau, did not begin looking into Vicknair until the following Monday, Sept. 21. (Jones and Westbrook did not respond to interview requests from The Post. Ferguson, who retired in 2022, declined to comment.)

Jones first spoke with Nicole and her mother that Monday. Sitting in on the call was Stella Cziment, the deputy police monitor at the time.

Listening to Nicole talk, Cziment later told The Post, she could tell the girl was afraid to speak honestly about Vicknair. She called him her friend, and was clearly trying to protect him. They weren’t certain that sexual abuse had already occurred. But the red flags about the officer’s behavior were obvious, Cziment said. She assumed that NOPD would act to remove Vicknair from duty as quickly as possible.

“What we were scared of was the amount of access he had to the child,” Cziment said.

But Vicknair was not removed from active duty that day, even after Jones, the investigator, visited Nicole’s house and saw the photo of Vicknair, in uniform, pressing Nicole into his body and texts in which the officer called her sweetie, honey, buttercup, baby girl and boo.

Vicknair remained on patrol the next day, even after Jones reviewed the body-camera footage from when Vicknair took Nicole to the hospital and showed her photos of a nearly naked woman.

The entire week, Vicknair kept his job, his badge, his gun. Not until Friday, Sept. 25, seven days after the text to the head of police, was Nicole interviewed by someone specially trained in child abuse at the New Orleans Child Advocacy Center.

“I try to keep him happy,” Nicole told the forensic interviewer, according to a videotaped recording obtained by The Post. “He’s a cop, so it’s not like he’s going to get in trouble for any of this.”

The last time she’d seen Vicknair, she said, was just two days earlier. He’d come to her house while on duty, then returned after his shift. She went out to his truck and got inside.

“Did something happen?” the interviewer asked.

Nicole squirmed in her chair, her Converse high-tops shaking.

“I just can’t say it,” she said.

“I’m not gonna put words in your mouth,” the interviewer said.

“Fine,” Nicole said. “He stuck his finger in my, in my — ”

She pointed downward. At 15, she was too embarrassed to name her own body parts. The interviewer asked her one more time, and then her story came rushing out. How weird it felt. How scared she was.

She tried to hug him goodbye, she said, but then, “He stuck his finger in one more time and was like, ‘Just one more taste.’ ”

That night in Vicknair’s truck, Nicole said, he asked her for a favor. He wanted to keep her underwear.

He still had them, she said.

By 2 a.m. the next day, Vicknair was inside an interview room, handcuffed to a table.

“Rodney, first of all, I want to thank you for sitting down and talking with us,” said Jones, seated across from his colleague.

“I didn’t have much choice,” Vicknair balked.

Sheriff’s deputies had knocked on the door of Vicknair’s home just before 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 26.

Vicknair came out in only his boxer briefs and lit a cigarette. He kept smoking as they cinched cuffs behind his back.

When he learned during his recorded interview that his arrest was related to Nicole, he laughed.

“On her?” he said. “Okay.”

Over the next hour and a half, Vicknair switched between denials and explanations for what he couldn’t deny. Yes, he’d gone to Nicole’s house just before midnight two nights earlier — but only because she’d asked him to sniff her to see if she smelled like weed, he said. Yes, he had sexual photos of her on his phone — but he’d only taken screenshots of her Snapchats “in case something ever did happen,” he said. Yes, he told her which of her thongs were his favorite and that she had “a nice ass for your age.”

“If that was inappropriate, then so be it. It was inappropriate,” he said. “But there was never nothing sexual.”

Vicknair was adamant that he did not penetrate her or take her underwear.

“I care about her the same way I cared about several other girls and boys that I’ve given my business cards to and talked to them,” Vicknair said.

He accused Jones of trying to “make a case or something of a disturbed child.”

“The issue is that we have a 52-year-old, 15-year, veteran police officer who’s seeing … this 15-year-old girl regularly,” Jones said.

“That ain’t nothing,” Vicknair said. “I talk to a lot of younger people four or five times a week.”

At no point during the interview did Jones ask for the names of the other young people Vicknair claimed to be talking to, including a runaway girl he mentioned specifically. There is no indication in the internal case records that NOPD ever conducted a review of other children Vicknair had interacted with.

“We just hope,” Jones told Vicknair, “none of them come calling here.”

Charged with sexual battery, indecent behavior with a juvenile and malfeasance in office, Vicknair spent a week in jail before posting a $55,000 bond.

He submitted a letter of resignation to the police department in January 2021.

His wife of five years filed for divorce. He suffered three heart attacks and a stroke.

The Justice Department, which took over his prosecution from Orleans Parish, charged him with deprivation of rights under the color of law, the same federal charge often filed against officers who use excessive force. In November 2022, Vicknair agreed to plead guilty.

In his plea, he signed a statement admitting that he made sexual comments, requested and received sexually explicit photos and touched Nicole’s genitals under her clothing without her consent inside his locked vehicle.

In exchange, prosecutors asked the judge to send him to prison for seven years.

On March 8, 2023, Vicknair shuffled into a federal courthouse for his sentencing hearing using a cane. For the first time since the night in his truck, he was in the same room as Nicole.

She was 17 years old. She wouldn’t stick with therapy. She and her mother fought so often that she’d moved with a boyfriend to California. There, she reasoned, she would never have to see an NOPD cruiser again.

She spent her days sleeping and watching documentaries about sex crimes and murders, telling herself that what happened to her wasn’t as bad as what happens to other girls. She spent her nights playing “Call of Duty” online with strangers, nearly all of them boys and men. She shot and swore and screamed at them, and reminded herself that none of them knew where she lived.

“Is there something you would like to say to the court?” the judge, Lance Africk, asked her.

She stood at a microphone in a stiff white button-down shirt she’d purchased just hours before. She hoped it would make the judge take her seriously.

All day, people had been telling her how “strong” she was. She thanked them, saying nothing about her recurring nightmare in which uniformed, tattooed arms were wrapping around her again. Or the knife she kept in her closet in case they ever did.

“To her, he appears as a helping hand, but little does she know he had other plans,” Nicole said, reading a poem she’d written as her victim impact statement.

Vicknair, coughing behind a mask, was watching her.

“He tears her down and makes her suffer, yet she comes out 10 times tougher. Now every night the light stays on, scared he will return. She hopes he has had a change in heart and that he has learned.”

The judge told her she was strong. He told her mother not to feel guilty. Then he began to narrate, in graphic detail, everything Vicknair had done to Nicole.

“I guess he was thinking: Who is going to believe a 14- or 15-year-old over me, a New Orleans police officer?” the judge said. “He served himself, not this young, trusting child.”

But the child he was talking about was no longer there. The moment the judge began describing it all again, Nicole ran out of the courtroom in tears.

While she hovered over a bathroom sink, trying not to vomit, the judge announced that he was refusing to accept the plea. He believed seven years was not enough time. He told both sides to come back the next week.

When they did, Africk agreed to a new deal. He sentenced Vicknair to prison for 14 years, Nicole’s age when he met her.

Two months later, Nicole was scrolling on her phone when she started to shake. She rubbed her eyes, thinking she must be imagining the notification that had just appeared on her screen.

A Snapchat account with a familiar name was trying to contact her.

A bitmoji of a dark-haired man was waving at her, surrounded in confetti.

“Officer Rodney,” the notification said, “added you as a friend.”

Vicknair was not yet in prison. The judge had granted him time to seek medical care before he turned himself in.

Vicknair’s heart problems had become something more. After he was sentenced, doctors had discovered a fast-growing tumor in his brain. It appeared that Vicknair was trying to contact Nicole from his hospital bed. She did not reply.

Vicknair had two brain surgeries before his brother and ex-wife drove him to Massachusetts to report to federal prison. He continued to deny to his family members that he had sexually abused Nicole. He continued to be paid police retirement benefits of more than $2,700 per month, records show. Louisiana has no law that automatically disqualifies police officers convicted of serious crimes from receiving their pensions.

Days after Nicole’s 18th birthday, Vicknair was rolled into prison in a wheelchair.

Most of his sentence was spent at a federal prison medical facility in North Carolina, where he received chemotherapy and radiation.

He served less than six months. Vicknair died on Jan. 1, 2024.

Nicole was at a restaurant in California when she heard the news from an attorney in her civil rights lawsuit. She wanted to feel relieved. Instead, she kept thinking about how little time Vicknair served. And how, before he died, he’d given a deposition in her civil case. Under oath, he returned to denying that he’d ever assaulted her.

Now, it felt like not a single adult was taking responsibility for what happened to her. If she gave up her lawsuit against the city, no one ever would.

She’d already endured a day-long deposition in December, when an attorney representing New Orleans asked her questions such as, “Was there any sexual meaning to him hitting you with the baton?” In January at a settlement conference, she listened to the lawyers debate just how much her trauma was worth.

The same city that had once charged Vicknair with sexual battery and malfeasance in office was now claiming his assault was “wholly unrelated” to his job.

But a judge disagreed, ruling in February that the city was, in fact, liable for Vicknair’s actions. It would still be up to a jury to decide how much New Orleans owed Nicole — and whether NOPD was at fault for hiring Vicknair in the first place.

As the March trial date crept closer, Nicole’s stomach started to ache. The pain kept getting worse, until it was so agonizing that she couldn’t sleep. But for days, she refused to go to the emergency room.

When she finally gave in, she reminded herself that this ER was different. That she was no longer 14. That Vicknair was not beside her. She still hyperventilated through every exam.

She learned that what could have been a relatively minor issue had become a serious kidney infection. It would take weeks for her to recover.

While she waited for the pain to ebb, her attorneys in New Orleans prepared for her trial by deposing the city’s police officials. Why, they asked, had the city hired someone with a history of arrests? Why had no one flagged an officer repeatedly returning to the home of a child who had reported a sexual assault? Why hadn’t Vicknair been pulled from active duty as soon as the photo surfaced of his body pressed against Nicole’s?

They wanted to understand what NOPD was doing to ensure that what happened to Nicole didn’t happen to another child. But when the sergeant in charge of all department policies was asked that question, he could not cite a specific policy or training method that had changed because of the case.

“You don’t know of anything NOPD has done differently,” the attorney confirmed, “to prevent another Officer Vicknair?”

The sergeant’s answer was one word:

“Correct.”

URL

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2024/new-orleans-police-child-sexual-abuse-rodney-vicknair/

Lupita Nyong'o On Why She Decided Not To Star In 'The Woman King'
Bre Williams
October 19, 2022

Lupita Nyong’o is talking about why she decided to not star in The Woman King.

The actress was set to star alongside Davis in the upcoming historical film The Woman King. But back in 2020, the actress walked away from the film in which she was to play an Agojie warrior.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nyong’o opened up about why she decided against starring in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film.

Nyong'o didn't feel like the role was right for her.
According to IndieWire, Nyong’o was set to play an Agojie warrior in The Woman King starring Viola Davis, who also produces. The Agojie tribe inspired the fictional Dora Milaje female army in Black Panther.

After she was cast in the film, the actress made a short documentary about the Agojie tribe called “Warrior Women With Lupita Nyong’o.”
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Academy Award winner “grapples uncomfortably with the tribe’s legacy of violence.” After the documentary, Nyong’o decision to exit The Woman King though she hasn’t specifically revealed why.

“It was very amicable, the departure from it,” Nyong’o said. “But I felt it wasn’t the role for me to play.”

Thuso Mbedu took over the role Nyong’o was slated to play.
After her departure, Lupita Nyong’o’s role was given to Thuso Mbedu.

In addition to The Woman King, Nyong’o also exited the upcoming Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake, which stars Natalie Portman. Moses Ingram replaced her in that series.

“I’m desperate for small projects,” Nyong’o told THR. “They’re harder to get off the ground, they’re harder to stay on track. Bigger movies elbow them out of the way. The pandemic and the fiscal stress on the industry has made it even harder for those movies to get made.”

Nyong'o is currently balancing large projects with smaller independent roles.
“I think to be culturally prosperous, to be artistically prosperous as a people, is to have options. I personally love a good Marvel movie, but it doesn’t take me away from really wanting the little character-driven film,” the Us actress shared. “I believe in the fight for those things to be kept alive because the one thing we always want, the ultimate privilege, is choice.”

She concluded, “It becomes a philosophical question about what is art and what is its purpose. I believe that art plays a role in moving the people that experience it, and a lot of people are moved by Marvel. Is you being moved by this thing less important than me being moved by Picasso?”

Bre Williams
October 19, 2022

ARTICLE
https://shadowandact.com/lupita-nyongo-on-why-she-decided-not-to-star-in-the-woman-king

THE BLACK DRAGON'S REVENGE - RON VAN CLIEF - FULL HD MARTIAL ARTS MOVIE IN ENGLISH
imdb
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072858/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16

film
 

LINK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeOoWRtASY4

Is Kanye Finally CANCELED? from Bad Faith
 

LINK
https://youtu.be/wxHAm-bgFyM
Referral
https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1580952441839026179
 
Art Block and Burnout from chrissa bug
 

LINK
https://youtu.be/e_tYHhkjC4s
REFERRAL
https://www.deviantart.com/chrissabug/status-update/New-Video-about-Art-Block-933740572

28 Stories You Can Read Online for Black History Month

“Anything Could Disappear“
By Danielle Evans
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/anything-could-disappear-danielle-evans/

“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere“
By Z.Z. Packer
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/06/19/drinking-coffee-elsewhere

“The Era“
By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-era/

“Suicide, Watch“
By Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Dissent Magazine
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/suicide-watch-heads-colored-people-social-media

“French Absolutism“
By Brandon Taylor
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/french-absolutism/

“What’s For Sale“
By Nicole Dennis-Benn
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/5/14/whats-for-sale-by-nicole-y-dennis-benn?rq=What's

“Sunflowers“
By Bryan Washington
Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/bryan-washington-sunflowers

“Dangerous Deliveries“
By Sidik Fofana
Epiphany
https://epiphanyzine.com/features/dangerous-deliveries-fofana

“Williamsburg Bridge“
By John Edgar Wideman
Harper’s Magazine
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/11/williamsburg-bridge/

“The Key“
By Nnedi Okorafor
Enkare Review
https://enkare.org/2016/11/14/key-nnedi-okorafor/

“Milk Blood Heat“
By Dantiel W. Moniz
Ploughshares
https://www.pshares.org/issues/spring-2018/milk-blood-heat

“Bear Bear Harvest“
By Venita Blackburn
Virginia Quarterly Review
https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2018/12/bear-bear-harvest

“Beg Borrow Steal“
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Kenyon Review Online
https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2015-summer/selections/maurice-carlos-ruffin-342846/

“How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949)“
By Kim Coleman Foote
Missouri Review
https://www.missourireview.com/how-to-kill-gra-coleman-and-live-to-tell-about-it-vauxhall-nj-c-1949-by-kim-coleman-foote/

“Allentown, Saturday“
By Gabriel Bump
Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/06/fiction/Allentown-Saturday

“Books and Roses“
By Helen Oyeyemi
Granta
https://granta.com/books-and-roses/

“God’s Gonna Trouble the Water“
By Randall Kenan
Oprah Magazine
https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/a33350187/randall-kenan-short-story-gods-gonna-trouble-the-water/

“What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky“
By Lesley Nneka Arimah
Catapult
https://catapult.co/stories/some-mathematicians-remove-pain-some-of-us-deal-in-negative-emotions-we-all-fix-the-equation-of-a-person

“The City Born Great“
By N.K. Jemisin
Tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/

“202 Checkmates“
By Rion Amilcar Scott
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/202-checkmates-by-rion-amilcar-scott/

“All This Want and I Can’t Get None“
By Tia Clark
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/all-this-want-and-i-cant-get-none/

“Wet Paper Grass“
By Jasmon Drain
Terrain
https://www.terrain.org/fiction/26/drain.htm

“Emperor of the Universe“
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/10/10/emperor-of-the-universe-by-kaitlyn-greenidge

“Ark of Light“
By Victor LaValle
Lightspeed Magazine
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ark-of-light/

“False Cognates“
By Ladee Hubbard
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/false-cognates-1991/

“Whiskey & Ribbons“
By Leesa Cross-Smith
Carve Magazine
https://www.carvezine.com/story/2011-fall-cross-smith

“A Selfish Invention“
By Donald Quist
Storychord
http://www.storychord.com/2017/03/issue-140-donald-edem-quist-tracy.html

“Best Features“
By Roxane Gay
Barrelhouse
https://www.barrelhousemag.com/onlinelit/2010/11/1/best-features

ARTICLE
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/02/01/28-stories-you-can-read-online-for-black-history-month/

Lupita Nyong'o On Why She Decided Not To Star In 'The Woman King'
Bre Williams
October 19, 2022

Lupita Nyong’o is talking about why she decided to not star in The Woman King.

The actress was set to star alongside Davis in the upcoming historical film The Woman King. But back in 2020, the actress walked away from the film in which she was to play an Agojie warrior.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nyong’o opened up about why she decided against starring in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film.

Nyong'o didn't feel like the role was right for her.
According to IndieWire, Nyong’o was set to play an Agojie warrior in The Woman King starring Viola Davis, who also produces. The Agojie tribe inspired the fictional Dora Milaje female army in Black Panther.

After she was cast in the film, the actress made a short documentary about the Agojie tribe called “Warrior Women With Lupita Nyong’o.”
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Academy Award winner “grapples uncomfortably with the tribe’s legacy of violence.” After the documentary, Nyong’o decision to exit The Woman King though she hasn’t specifically revealed why.

“It was very amicable, the departure from it,” Nyong’o said. “But I felt it wasn’t the role for me to play.”

Thuso Mbedu took over the role Nyong’o was slated to play.
After her departure, Lupita Nyong’o’s role was given to Thuso Mbedu.

In addition to The Woman King, Nyong’o also exited the upcoming Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake, which stars Natalie Portman. Moses Ingram replaced her in that series.

“I’m desperate for small projects,” Nyong’o told THR. “They’re harder to get off the ground, they’re harder to stay on track. Bigger movies elbow them out of the way. The pandemic and the fiscal stress on the industry has made it even harder for those movies to get made.”

Nyong'o is currently balancing large projects with smaller independent roles.
“I think to be culturally prosperous, to be artistically prosperous as a people, is to have options. I personally love a good Marvel movie, but it doesn’t take me away from really wanting the little character-driven film,” the Us actress shared. “I believe in the fight for those things to be kept alive because the one thing we always want, the ultimate privilege, is choice.”

She concluded, “It becomes a philosophical question about what is art and what is its purpose. I believe that art plays a role in moving the people that experience it, and a lot of people are moved by Marvel. Is you being moved by this thing less important than me being moved by Picasso?”

Bre Williams
October 19, 2022

ARTICLE
https://shadowandact.com/lupita-nyongo-on-why-she-decided-not-to-star-in-the-woman-king

THE BLACK DRAGON'S REVENGE - RON VAN CLIEF - FULL HD MARTIAL ARTS MOVIE IN ENGLISH
imdb
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072858/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16

film
 

LINK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeOoWRtASY4

Is Kanye Finally CANCELED? from Bad Faith
 

LINK
https://youtu.be/wxHAm-bgFyM
Referral
https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1580952441839026179
 
Art Block and Burnout from chrissa bug
 

LINK
https://youtu.be/e_tYHhkjC4s
REFERRAL
https://www.deviantart.com/chrissabug/status-update/New-Video-about-Art-Block-933740572

28 Stories You Can Read Online for Black History Month

“Anything Could Disappear“
By Danielle Evans
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/anything-could-disappear-danielle-evans/

“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere“
By Z.Z. Packer
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/06/19/drinking-coffee-elsewhere

“The Era“
By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-era/

“Suicide, Watch“
By Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Dissent Magazine
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/suicide-watch-heads-colored-people-social-media

“French Absolutism“
By Brandon Taylor
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/french-absolutism/

“What’s For Sale“
By Nicole Dennis-Benn
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/5/14/whats-for-sale-by-nicole-y-dennis-benn?rq=What's

“Sunflowers“
By Bryan Washington
Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/bryan-washington-sunflowers

“Dangerous Deliveries“
By Sidik Fofana
Epiphany
https://epiphanyzine.com/features/dangerous-deliveries-fofana

“Williamsburg Bridge“
By John Edgar Wideman
Harper’s Magazine
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/11/williamsburg-bridge/

“The Key“
By Nnedi Okorafor
Enkare Review
https://enkare.org/2016/11/14/key-nnedi-okorafor/

“Milk Blood Heat“
By Dantiel W. Moniz
Ploughshares
https://www.pshares.org/issues/spring-2018/milk-blood-heat

“Bear Bear Harvest“
By Venita Blackburn
Virginia Quarterly Review
https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2018/12/bear-bear-harvest

“Beg Borrow Steal“
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Kenyon Review Online
https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2015-summer/selections/maurice-carlos-ruffin-342846/

“How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949)“
By Kim Coleman Foote
Missouri Review
https://www.missourireview.com/how-to-kill-gra-coleman-and-live-to-tell-about-it-vauxhall-nj-c-1949-by-kim-coleman-foote/

“Allentown, Saturday“
By Gabriel Bump
Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/06/fiction/Allentown-Saturday

“Books and Roses“
By Helen Oyeyemi
Granta
https://granta.com/books-and-roses/

“God’s Gonna Trouble the Water“
By Randall Kenan
Oprah Magazine
https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/a33350187/randall-kenan-short-story-gods-gonna-trouble-the-water/

“What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky“
By Lesley Nneka Arimah
Catapult
https://catapult.co/stories/some-mathematicians-remove-pain-some-of-us-deal-in-negative-emotions-we-all-fix-the-equation-of-a-person

“The City Born Great“
By N.K. Jemisin
Tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/

“202 Checkmates“
By Rion Amilcar Scott
Electric Literature
https://electricliterature.com/202-checkmates-by-rion-amilcar-scott/

“All This Want and I Can’t Get None“
By Tia Clark
Joyland
https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/all-this-want-and-i-cant-get-none/

“Wet Paper Grass“
By Jasmon Drain
Terrain
https://www.terrain.org/fiction/26/drain.htm

“Emperor of the Universe“
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kweli Journal
http://www.kwelijournal.org/fiction/2014/10/10/emperor-of-the-universe-by-kaitlyn-greenidge

“Ark of Light“
By Victor LaValle
Lightspeed Magazine
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ark-of-light/

“False Cognates“
By Ladee Hubbard
Guernica
https://www.guernicamag.com/false-cognates-1991/

“Whiskey & Ribbons“
By Leesa Cross-Smith
Carve Magazine
https://www.carvezine.com/story/2011-fall-cross-smith

“A Selfish Invention“
By Donald Quist
Storychord
http://www.storychord.com/2017/03/issue-140-donald-edem-quist-tracy.html

“Best Features“
By Roxane Gay
Barrelhouse
https://www.barrelhousemag.com/onlinelit/2010/11/1/best-features

ARTICLE
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/02/01/28-stories-you-can-read-online-for-black-history-month/

viola davis lashana lynch thuso mbedu sheila atim in "the woman king"

Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s
The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine on the legacy of boomers and why he chose only white men for his book on rock’s “masters.”

In 2019, Jann Wenner officially left Rolling Stone, the magazine he co-founded in 1967, but he hasn’t left it behind. Since stepping away from the iconic publication, where I briefly worked as an online editor a decade ago, Wenner, 77, has written two books rooted in his time there. The first, a hefty, dishy memoir called “Like a Rolling Stone,” was a best seller after it was published last year. The second, “The Masters,” which will be published on Sept. 26, consists of interviews that Wenner conducted during his Rolling Stone years with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bono and others, as well as a new interview with Bruce Springsteen.

Those interviews — lengthy, deeply informed, insightful — are the kinds of pieces that helped Rolling Stone earn the reputation it held for so long as the music publication. Under Wenner’s guidance, the magazine also developed a reputation as a source of crucial and hard-hitting investigative journalism. But it has taken some reputational hits over the years. Chief among them a widely read investigative piece on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia — which turned out to never have happened.

As befits a man who has been held up as an avatar of his generation’s achievements and failings, Wenner has left behind a complex legacy. But it’s one that he’s happy to defend. Talking to Wenner, who spoke from his home in Montauk, N.Y., I couldn’t help but suspect that he missed the cut-and-thrust of his journalism days. He was very willing, eager even, to engage in discussion about his approach to interviewing his famous rock star friends, his own and his magazine’s possible missteps and what the baby boomers really achieved.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Q: You developed personal friendships with a lot of the people you interviewed in “The Masters.” I’m curious how you think those friendships helped the interviews, and are there any ways in which they hindered them?

A: By and large, they helped. Because the interviews I did, they’re not confrontational interviews. They’re not interviews with politicians or business executives. These are interviews with artists. They’re meant to be sympathetic, and they’re meant to elicit from the artist as deep as possible thinking that they’re willing to reveal. I think that the friendships were critical. I mean, the example of Mick Jagger — he just didn’t give interviews to anybody, and he still doesn’t. It’s because we were friends, I got him to do it. I had a particular kind of relationship with Bob Dylan. Jerry Garcia, we were old buddies from years ago. So, it really works. The only place it hurt was with Bruce. That was the interview I did for the book, not for the magazine. And my friendship with Bruce is very deep at this point. It makes it difficult to ask questions that you know the answers to. You’re trimming your sails to the friendship.

Q: = Question

A: = Answer

Q: In the Maureen Dowd profile of you last year, you said that the Rolling Stones look like “Lord of the Rings” characters. Did Mick Jagger give you a hard time about that?

A: Oh, yeah.

Q: What did he say?

A: He couldn’t believe I had said that. I had to say, Look, I’m so sorry. I was just, in the pursuit of publicity, trying to be super clever and please forgive me. Of course, he did. But it was one of those careless remarks. A friend shouldn’t say that kind of thing. You don’t want to read it in Maureen Dowd’s thing in The New York Times. Oh, Mick Jagger looks like he’s Gandalf the wizard. He was absolutely right and I felt terrible.

Q: In the introduction to the Bono interview in “The Masters,” you mentioned that he edited and reviewed the transcript. What does editing mean in that context?

A: Looking for grammatical stuff, usage stuff; changing a word here and there, if he’d want to use a different word that’s more precise; maybe something was too intimate and he decides he doesn’t want to put it on the public record. I’m happy to do that with these subjects. As I said before, these are not meant to be confrontational interviews. These are profiles in a way. If I have to trade the level of trust that is necessary to get this kind of interview, to let people put a few things off the record, nothing of any value, maybe something about their kids or their family or not wanting to put down somebody. I let John Lennon edit his interview, and everything he said in that interview ——

Q: Oh, is that true? This is a famous interview from 1970. He unloaded his public feelings about the Beatles. But I didn’t realize that you let him edit it.

A: Yes. He went through, and he made changes here and there. Basically, it’s interview subjects clarifying what they want to say, making it more precise. Because it’s a long stream of yap and verbiage and you sometimes don’t think through every word. I want them to have the opportunity to say precisely what they meant.

Q: I think it’s fair to say that the average reader assumes that what shows up in the publication is basically what was said. But you’re saying, actually the subjects go over the transcripts. And, for example, you got pilloried for reviewing Mick Jagger’s “Goddess in the Doorway,” giving it five stars, when the critical consensus on that album was that it was kind of a dud. The broader question is, when it comes to interviews with the people that you admire, who are also your friends, are you shading into something that’s a little more like fan service, or a kind of branding, than objective journalism?

A: Look, nothing was ever substantively changed from the original interviews. These are all minor changes that really get to accuracy and readability and all that stuff. Secondly, these were not meant to be confrontational interviews. They were always meant to be cooperative interviews.

Q: But there aren’t two kinds of interviews.

A: Yes, there are. The kind of interview I wanted to do was to elicit real thinking, not to confront or challenge or get somebody defensive. But let’s go to the underlying thing: Did my too-cozy relationships alter our coverage?

Q: That’s right.

A: OK, let’s go to the example of the Mick Jagger thing. The editors themselves put it at four stars, and there was not a critical backlash to the thing. The only backlash to it was from Keith Richards, who, instead of calling it “Goddess in the Doorway,” called it “Dogshit in the Doorway.” It’s still quite a good album. So I personally intervened. Having sat there and listened to Mick make it, I was in love with it. I confess: I probably went too far. So what? I’m entitled.

Q: Rolling Stone had a history of producing certain kinds of stories that ended up being definitive. But there were a handful of stories that raised questions of integrity. The U.Va. campus rape story would be one of those. Even Hunter S. Thompson — I don’t know that anyone would hold him up as a beacon of factual accuracy, regardless of the literary merit of his stories. Was there anything endemic to Rolling Stone that caused you to put the pursuit of the juicy story ahead of concerns with accuracy?

A: One word answer: no.

Q: Is it just one-offs?

A: The University of Virginia story was not a failure of intent, or an attempt to be loose with the facts. You get beyond the factual errors that sank that story, and it was really about the issue of rape and how it affects women on campus, their lack of rights. Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof. It wasn’t for recklessness. I mean, we made one of those errors — every publication in the country, including The Times, makes every 50 years at least. You get slammed for it. We took our beating. But it wasn’t indicative of how we operated. It wasn’t an error of being casual with the truth, or trying to stretch it, or mission creep, or anything like that.

Hunter, well, you know, sui generis. Hunter, in fact, was as accurate a reporter as I’ve ever had, but it’s just that his stories went beyond facts, into areas of the truth and spirituality and pharmacology that none of us are really able to judge on our own. My mission always, journalistically speaking, was the truth is the most important thing. As we all know now, if somebody really wants to hoax you, there’s very little you can do about it. Except have the kind of hypervigilance that would mean you could probably publish nothing.

Q: So almost a decade later, there are no lessons that you drew from that experience? In your mind, it’s just wrong place, wrong time? That seems like sort of a glib response.

A: There are two main things in the story. One was the account of this gang rape given to us by this source, Jackie. That turned out to be a fabrication. Because we didn’t want to identify her, we didn’t demand to meet people to corroborate her story. Our mistake was to let her out of that demand, not wanting to put her through the trauma again. That was one story that ran through the long piece. The other story, having nothing to do with Jackie, was about the handling of rape on that campus by other people — handling rape in general across the country. It was a conscientious, serious attempt to do that issue, and that was like the third piece by that particular individual on sex crimes and one of our second or third pieces about campus rape. So then the hoax was discovered and we lived with the consequence of that. It was one of the most miserable professional experiences I’ve ever had. I don’t mean to be glib about it, but I don’t feel wholly to blame for this, or that it’s some terrible black mark. I think the lesson I learned is, yes, it does happen to everybody. The other thing is, of course, we could have been tighter. So, you know, there’s a series of circumstances. I can’t pull out the hara-kiri knife for that one.

Q: To go back to the book now, in the introduction to the book ——

A: Am I let off the hook, David? Am I forgiven?

Q: That’s not for me to decide.

A: History will speak.

Q: History will speak. This is also a history-will-speak kind of question. There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going — not in your zeitgeist? What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?

A: Well, let me just. …

Q: Carole King, Madonna. There are a million examples.

A: When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.

Q: Oh, stop it. You’re telling me Joni Mitchell is not articulate enough on an intellectual level?

A: Hold on a second.

Q: I’ll let you rephrase that.

A: All right, thank you. It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.

Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as “masters,” the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.

Q: How do you know if you didn’t give them a chance?

A: Because I read interviews with them. I listen to their music. I mean, look at what Pete Townshend was writing about, or Jagger, or any of them. They were deep things about a particular generation, a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock ’n’ roll. Not that the others weren’t, but these were the ones that could really articulate it.

Q: Don’t you think it’s actually more to do with your own interests as a fan and a listener than anything particular to the artists? I think the problem is when you start saying things like “they” or “these artists can’t.” Really, it’s a reflection of what you’re interested in more than any ability or inability on the part of these artists, isn’t it?

A: That was my No. 1 thing. The selection was intuitive. It was what I was interested in. You know, just for public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism. Which, I get it. I had a chance to do that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a [expletive] or whatever. I wish in retrospect I could have interviewed Marvin Gaye. Maybe he’d have been the guy. Maybe Otis Redding, had he lived, would have been the guy.

Q: The last interview in the book — Springsteen, you ask him: Did we change things? You were talking about the boomers. And he has this humble, positive answer: We didn’t fix all the world’s problems, but we moved some social ideas and practices forward. What’s your answer to that question?

A: Bruce is a little more modest than I am. I think that we made striking changes socially and morally and artistically. I don’t think rock ’n’ roll changed everything. I don’t think rock ’n’ roll overturned segregation or the war in Vietnam, but we played huge parts in it. Both consciously and unconsciously. Despite the Trump thing, despite the Republican presidents of the last 30 years, which have held back enormous amounts of progress, society has become so much more liberal. I think rock ’n’ roll played a huge role in that. Did it do everything? No. Was it the sole thing? No. But we did a lot.

Q: So what are valid criticisms of your generation?

A: What didn’t the rock ’n’ roll generation do? I mean, it didn’t get everything done. But I have no fundamental, deep criticisms. Is there something that you think we didn’t get right?

Q: I did one of these interviews a few years ago with Pete Townshend, and I asked him a similar question about the promise of rock ’n’ roll — how it ended up playing out. He was much more negative and, I think, realistic about that — basically saying that the promise ended up being abandoned as soon as there was enough money and stardom. I think that’s a valid criticism. Something that had potential as a social force was reduced to entertainment.

A: Well, God bless Pete. I could have predicted what he’d say. Pete has got a pox on everybody.

Q: But a smart man who has some good ideas.

A: Smart, articulate, a wonderful person to talk to. So you are saying, and Pete is saying, Oh, it became commercial?

Q: That it ceased to have meaning beyond itself.

A: So it became commercial. It became successful. I think I say this somewhere in my introduction to the book that, despite the fact that it became a billion-dollar business, the ideals and goals were never abandoned. I mean, to reach the peak in our society is now being called becoming a rock star. Yes it became commercial, but so what? It’s still a music that speaks to people’s deepest desires and innermost thoughts. It’s still a music of political consequence.

The financial success that these people had didn’t require them to sell out. It required them to do more of the same. Be just as outrageous; do what you’re doing. Nobody said, You have to tone back your message now. I mean, God bless Pete, and I know he’d say that. But it’s not true. The work was worthwhile, we had fun doing it. It was meaningful. We were very lucky. We’ve lived really privileged lives. Now we get to rest. At the same time, we can look at our kids and the world we leave behind as being as motivated and as inspired to do the same thing. In that sense, rock ’n’ roll still lives — and will live.

Q: Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

A: I enjoyed doing it. I wouldn’t mind seeing the written transcript. I’d be curious to look it over.

Q: Yeah, right!

A: After it’s published. God, forgive me.

URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/arts/jann-wenner-the-masters-interview.html

MY THOUGHTS

AS a writer and someone who has interviewed a few people. Wenner is correct, the fact that most interviews don't allow for the interviewer to edit exposes the baiting commercial culture in most news firms. Notice I said baiting commercial. The issue isn't making money, all who live in fiscal capitalism are trying to make money de facto but can one make money while not using baiting techniques? Can one be true to oneself and still make money. To non whites plus women, Wenner hurt himself or showed less sharp intellect by not admitting the simple truth. non whites plus women entertainers communicate more guarded plus are less trusting to open their true thoughts in the mediasphere. why? both are more afraid to lose their revenue streams or opportunity. Sequentially, he does feel a greater kinship to white male artists who through a combination of individual character plus environmental allowance, are more than likely speak their mind or not give a fuck. To the 1960's multiracial youth movement in the USA. They did fail their goal which was a united human race on earth with the smallest amount of biases. But why is their saving grace? THey failed because they didn't have support outside the usa. while the youth movements in the usa were rallying most youth in humanity were being indoctrinated in systems that are heavily negatively biased. Everyone is racial,the word is biased. They failed because the unity they seek is a very hard thing to create. Many humans are individuals, but most humans like community. They bend to community and all communities have an unwanted other. 

Writeup as I listened

12:10 
Secrets to writing great horror

12:12
He wrote the Kundalini equation < https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-kundalini-equation-1 >

originally wrote to have a best seller and increase his career. A white guy was put on a peers cover. The firms back in the day to the original publication was not willing to look at their own responsibility. 
True, the white audience in modernity is used to 

17:36 
STeven sees the potential to do something unique to him. He will rewrite a former novel and turn it into something it should had been, and he will collaborate with Tananarive in the script form. He wants to use Tananarive practical historical smoothing.

18:46 
People suggest Tananarive Due is one of the greatest horror writers alive. 

20:10 
what makes a great horror story?

22:06
What is the greatest extent, what is the most extreme moment?
There is a point where it is too much or that is not enough. A symphony of different emotions to feel the experience. Using vision boards matters.  You can feel your way before you write it. 

23:50 
Now that a cardboard treatment, and now a written treatment and ask what is the experience of this movie be.
What is the difference between action or horror movies?
In action movies, people are getting hurt in a sequence, like in horror. 
For Tananarive, the difference is the depth of characters.
For example, a horror movie about a bunch of college students on a ski trip. She can relate to college students through friends who like skiing.
Then a mercenary on a mission is on a ski lift. She can't relate to a mercenary or being on a ski lift. 

26:31 
Horror needs a relatable character who is experiencing fear, a haunted house is not enough. You need a customer who has never been in that haunted house and something goes wrong. A couple for example trying to work out their stuff and it makes the external side internal.

27:41 
Tananarive has a template. 
If she has to write a horror story and has three weeks.
->What scares you?
She uses survivor horror as that is scary to her and she has been camping, rafting. 
->How do you make the story yours? 
So more than bears, it becomes about a cult. Stephen King was a teacher growing up
->Believe in the characters
Suffered a trauma, and committed a transgression is common among writers of horror. Grief is common , the one horror no one overcomes. 

31:29 
All horror is about surviving what you are in.
Imagine Get Out if Chris wasn't in grief over the lost of his mother.
Steven makes a point, deer antlers were used as a symbol to defend himself, which is like the deer he hit in the beginning of the film.

32:37 
Tananarive, she weaponized his Grief, and by the end, he has weaponized his own grief. To make it his strength and overcome. 

34:09 
Tananative You can make "Get Out" a drama. Is Chris in love with the secret psycho white woman? 
Peele discussed Guess who is coming to dinner in the early screenplay version of "Get Out" 
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpGmCLcqgAw >
< https://www.shadowandact.com/what-is-black-horror-the-sunken-place-professor-tananarive-due-explains > 

36:27
Peele started with social anxiety. It wasn't about phenotypical frictions, merely the frictions of the stranger among a group of friends and amplify it. 
Turn it up to 11. 
Tananarive isn't into human horror. She is triggered by Human horror and make it a journey. It is a journey of self revelation. 

37:39
Liam Neeson, eyes in the grey.
She loves that film, for not about the wolf winning but standing up. Even though many call the end a downer. The film is about who the character becomes. 

38:44 
Tananarive considers gaslighting her least favorite horror. PArents or spouses gaslighting children or spouses in her opinion is poor storytelling. Is it going to kill your character to cut on a flashlight in the dark room? She feels it is overdone. She calls it an artificial conceit. She loves Miles in the good house. Miles doesn't believe but stands by the female character. 
< https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-good-house-2 > 

40:47
You want psychological realism, nothing breaks more than when people act away from common responses. If you do not pick up a weapon going to a dark place you are an idiot.

41:36
STeven Barnes, asks is that why meetings are the best part in horror to Tananarive. 
Tananarive loves the meeting in horror.  

42:40 
Steven talks of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, people of normal intelligence with no idea what is about to happen. In alien, normal people of normal intelligence. Whereas in prometheus, they were scientist and should had known better. 

43:57
Steven, Difference between action in horror, something killing you in the dark is horror, in the light as a tiger is action. 
Horror is unknown, playing on the minds ways to whatever the truth is in the darkness. Action is more strategic, allows for knowable assessment. 
 
45:20 
Tananarive, the feeling of fear is different in action. 
Steven, it will be interesting to take a liam neeson skill set taken man into a situation where he finds himself in a situation beyond his comprehension that he realizes. 

46:42
Tananarive, war time horror is like that. ala Predator. 

47:25 
Steven, talks of Prey, the predator underestimates the human female lead. 

48:25 
Elegance usually takes years. Steven says, the best pieces of horror were not primordial, they evolved. 

49:33 
Tananarive, Think about the antagonists too. Make sure their is logic to Zombies. What is different in the way you write zombies?
< https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/devil-s-wake > 

Put your own unique spin. For example, the reason for haunting of ghost matters. 
The interaction between characters side antagonist matters. 
Steven, your god of the universe in your story
Alot of readers like the antagonist more than anybody else in the story, make it pop ,and don't repeat things. 

52:55 
September 23rd 5-8 on the east coast , 
3 hour workshop. It is 197 dollars. If you can't afford it. You can email us and ask for a lower price.
how to format screenplay, all the hacks. 
www. hollywoodloophole.com
< https://store.payloadz.com/details/2686637-other-files-arts-and-crafts-10-secrets-of-hollywood-writers-live-zoom-workshop.html > 

They want engaged people. 

Sammy Davis Interview

TRANSCRIPT

0:00
4 scene 22 take 33 psalm 22.
0:13
damn
0:16
[Music]
0:28
went into the army
0:31
you know that that horrible
0:34
that was my first taste really of racism
0:37
you know ever because I never been
0:40
exposed to it being in Show Business you
0:41
know
0:42
you know you'd run into the average bit
0:44
of it but not them not enough to to
0:45
upset you or anything you know or not
0:48
even to be aware because I'm in show
0:49
business so I wasn't aware of it and as
0:51
a kid being in Show Business you I
0:53
didn't learn until later the about why
0:55
we slept in bus stations and why we had
0:57
to go to the police and say where's
0:58
there
0:59
a colored family that you can stay with
1:01
because you couldn't get in the hotels
1:02
and things like that you couldn't eat in
1:04
this restaurant
1:05
but there was a very close fraternity
1:08
between most of the black and white
1:11
performers at that time
1:13
uh that doesn't exist today what were
1:17
some specific examples when you started
1:20
first getting the message
1:21
well I think the the first real thing
1:23
that I got was in the Army when I you
1:25
know and I was in basic training and I
1:28
hadn't even gone to basic training I
1:29
went in San Francisco we went to the
1:31
Presidio Monterey and the third day I
1:33
was standing in line and this is before
1:36
um desegregation came in the Army you
1:38
know uh and I'm standing in line and at
1:42
the at this place where there was black
1:43
and white soldiers and the cat said you
1:46
know
1:47
where I come from [ __ ] you know
1:48
staring in the back or they they ain't
1:50
here I forget the exact line now and I
1:53
had my my duffel bag and I'm a duffel
1:56
bag but you know the thing like use the
1:57
carry of Shaving equipment in and I just
1:59
sundied him you know
2:01
and knocked him down and had cut his lip
2:04
and he's bleeding from the lid and he
2:06
said
2:08
okay you knock me down but you still a
2:09
[ __ ]
2:12
and that laid with me you know because
2:14
that that's that's so
2:17
so venomous it really is you know that
2:20
that's the kind of cat that you ain't
2:22
gonna never reach
2:23
were there some points at which you
2:26
during that time when you had a lot of
2:29
pressures on you almost lost confidence
2:31
in yourself
2:33
oh well I that happened to me but not
2:35
until I made it really because you know
2:37
when you when you're hungry and you're
2:39
trying to get there that's one thing
2:41
because you've got that ambition that
2:43
feeds on and you keep crawling on your
2:46
ambition to get there I got there until
2:48
I lost control of everything
2:51
sense of values uh
2:53
now I've got the doll so wound up
2:56
there was no relaxing there was there
2:58
was no being aware of anything first of
3:00
all there was not much to be aware of
3:01
anyway in those days
3:04
but I mean the nominal awareness that
3:06
wasn't there I was just wrapped up in me
3:09
then then I got scared because I started
3:12
to lose what I thought was the basic
3:14
human instinct that I had had
3:17
and I got too phony I did oh I did it
3:19
all man I invented some
3:21
the ones that in the book I invented
3:23
some other problems you know but
3:26
I you know again to relate to what you
3:29
are I said today and I look back 25
3:32
years ago and I say wow I don't think I
3:35
my head would be where it is now if I
3:38
had not gone through that
3:40
25 years ago all the mistakes being on
3:43
all the time
3:45
emulating in truth emulating the white
3:48
stars not trying to get my own identity
3:52
but because that that was the kick then
3:54
you know that's what you had to do so I
3:58
decided if you got to do it then I'd do
3:59
it better than anybody else had ever
4:00
done it
4:01
you know in other words when I started
4:03
to do Impressions and all of that kind
4:04
of stuff relating to a theatrical thing
4:06
being on Broadway and Mr Wonderful you
4:09
know I wanted to do all that because I
4:11
figured if Donald O'Connor can do it man
4:13
I'm gonna do it
4:14
so in other words I was becoming a black
4:17
Donald O'Connor a black Mickey Rooney
4:19
instead of becoming a black Sammy Davis
4:21
what about the Rat Pack era you and
4:25
Sinatra and let me light a cigarette and
4:27
I'll tell you okay
4:32
I keep thinking uh just a few days
4:36
[Music]
4:38
no longer will it be anything happening
4:40
like it should be the one traffic ticket
4:42
that's the first step to maybe in 20
4:44
years is not to legalize it right now
4:46
when they legalized marijuana
4:50
but I'm just comedically I'm thinking
4:52
when they legalize it they will be back
4:55
to commercials again
4:59
[Music]
5:13
[Music]
5:18
[Music]
5:30
and plus but the most important thing is
5:32
you'd never be able to run through the
5:34
forest
5:41
thank you
5:43
what about the Rat Pack era
5:49
was that a part of your mistakes
5:51
well let me tell you about let me tell
5:53
you about the Sinatra thing
5:56
uh
5:57
if it hadn't been for Frank Sinatra
6:00
I don't I would have never been in films
6:02
really
6:03
because he gave me uh
6:07
he gave me a an opportunity
6:09
in three pictures
6:13
based upon the fact that there was
6:14
nothing to do really except the fact
6:16
that it we got the job because we were
6:17
all friends and buddies and it was based
6:19
upon a camaraderie that we had as a
6:22
bunch of guys as performers that Frank
6:24
said why don't we do all do a picture
6:26
together
6:27
but he so he helped my career
6:29
tremendously again my own personal
6:32
involvement being such that I became so
6:35
involved with that lifestyle
6:38
that again I found myself submerging
6:41
into a lifestyle that I could not equate
6:43
with after you'd leave the party you
6:45
come home and you're going to
6:47
and you say wow man it sure was nice to
6:49
be in the company of all them big names
6:50
and the movie star
6:52
but there was no
6:54
on one hand I I loved being with my
6:57
friends
6:58
but it was submerging me as a human
7:00
being I think as I analyze it now
7:03
and there were Beautiful Moments during
7:05
that period of the 60s the early 60s and
7:08
there was some frightening moments I
7:09
remember walking on the stage at the
7:11
Democratic Convention and being booed by
7:13
the southern contingent you know
7:16
because they had no business the only
7:17
reason they booed me was because I was
7:19
married to a white woman you know to put
7:21
it right where it's at that's why they
7:22
boom boom hits how dare you be married
7:25
to a white woman you know
7:27
but it was
7:28
a part of conversation privately and
7:31
publicly is that uh you were married to
7:33
a white woman how do you feel about that
7:36
how would you advise a young black
7:38
person your son about marrying a white
7:41
woman
7:42
I think a person should marry who they
7:43
want to marry man
7:45
I think that you can be committed to
7:47
your people to the cause whatever you
7:49
whatever the terminology you want to use
7:51
doesn't matter matter who you're married
7:53
to if you fall in love you fall in love
7:55
if you're if you're getting I don't
7:57
think anyone gets married has children
7:59
and the rest
8:00
to do a three cheating job you know
8:03
and uh
8:05
to me
8:07
I feel no thing about it I really don't
8:11
I really don't feel anything about that
8:13
because I think that's so damn private
8:16
man
8:16
that has to do with what I want a cat to
8:19
do if it's a brother on the corner
8:20
whatever it is look at me and say what
8:23
did you do today to help
8:24
don't talk about my private life
8:27
that's mine that if you know if I want
8:30
to marry a dog that's my life
8:33
this is the point whatever I had I paid
8:35
my dues to get it
8:38
and I mean pay them
8:40
in every way you want to talk about but
8:43
what I'm but that's professionally
8:45
that's as a human being on a
8:47
professional level but as a human being
8:48
period I tell my kids Harry who you want
8:52
to marry
8:53
now I know this sure as I'm sitting on
8:55
this floor man whole bunch of brothers
8:58
and sisters don't like me there's a
9:00
whole bunch of white people that don't
9:01
like me why do you feel there's a group
9:03
of brothers and sisters who don't like
9:05
you because there was a whole bunch of
9:07
brothers and sisters that didn't like
9:08
Jesus Christ that's why
9:11
and ain't nobody ever been put on this
9:12
Earth that everybody liked
9:14
they don't kill Martin Luther King the
9:16
only thing he kept singing was we shall
9:17
overcome and love and peace killed him
9:19
wiped him out killed Malcolm
9:23
wiped out everybody man don't you
9:25
understand and some cat hired three
9:29
black cats to wipe out the man who was
9:31
the mother of our time and when they
9:33
killed him he had a half a church full
9:35
of people it wasn't like it was packed
9:37
and jammed because already he was losing
9:42
and he says it himself if you read his
9:44
works that there's a whole bunch of
9:46
[ __ ] that don't like me black folks
9:48
like me but not the [ __ ]
9:51
which is true and three black cat three
9:55
[ __ ] knocked him off
9:57
paid by white establishment that's my
9:59
feeling and I will feel this as long as
10:01
I live
10:02
and it was afterwards at the the
10:04
Resurgence of this man and suddenly we
10:07
became aware of all the things that he
10:08
was saying because as long as doesn't it
10:12
strike you funny that as long as
10:16
Malcolm was preaching separatism
10:20
as long as he was preaching such
10:23
vehemence he never got hurt at all it
10:26
was when he came back from Mecca and he
10:28
said we must all live together we must
10:29
we must ask black people do our thing
10:31
but we must all live on this Earth as
10:34
one blah blah that's when he started
10:36
getting his house bombed
10:38
he got wiped out months later
10:40
same thing with King as long as King was
10:42
hitting the March as they put him in
10:44
jail that was it as soon as he started
10:45
talking about Vietnam
10:47
and the workers and this that and the
10:49
other getting out of his field of
10:52
reference
10:53
really
10:55
heavy too heavy for somebody wipe him
10:57
out
10:59
you know and it's frightening to me so
11:01
that's why I say a lot of people will
11:03
not like any performer and you try to
11:06
relate
11:07
as far I'm not talking about relating in
11:09
terms of oh hi bra and do the Fist and
11:12
whatever it is and hey man right on I'm
11:14
not talking about the words I'm talking
11:15
about in your heart relating to what the
11:17
problems are
11:18
but the society in which we live in
11:19
today it has gotten to a point where you
11:21
cannot do that anymore based upon the
11:24
fact that I must do what I feel
11:26
if I feel that I I want to help in this
11:29
area I try to do it and I try to do it
11:31
Sans publicity not based upon the fear
11:34
that I have for my job
11:36
but I think that sometimes if I want to
11:38
help some brothers who are in trouble my
11:40
lending my name to it defeats the very
11:44
purpose that they're trying to achieve
11:48
but money is money
11:50
heart is heart you should lend your
11:52
heart and your money you ain't got the
11:54
money
11:56
then lend this lend your body man to it
11:59
you know but I'm talking about I think
12:01
that if the performer can be used
12:05
than he should be used
12:08
to put my obligation into black positive
12:11
things I'm not talking about National
12:12
organizations it can be something that's
12:14
happening on the corner a project that
12:16
because I found out and Walter Mason can
12:19
tell you we found out that you go into a
12:22
town
12:23
and sometimes it's as little as a
12:25
hundred dollars because you go to an
12:28
area where this where where some
12:30
projects are and they got a recreation
12:31
center ain't got no pool table ain't got
12:33
no records to play so the kids don't go
12:35
there they hang on the car right
12:37
Jesus you walk in and you look around
12:40
and you say hey well I know I get a pool
12:42
table and I know I can get the record
12:44
player and I'll get reprise at that time
12:47
or my own company to send records you're
12:50
in a privileged situation first of all
12:52
uh I can't help but make an analogy
12:54
between yourself and lean a horn
12:55
I mean the two of you are for lack of a
12:58
better phrase are superstars are using
13:00
to some extent your sense of commitment
13:04
you uh you're evolving a new sense of
13:06
self and most importantly like you're
13:09
going in front of the nation and you're
13:11
saying I'm Black and I'm Proud and I'm
13:13
relating to my people
13:15
I'm not going to use anybody's name but
13:17
I'm sure you won't but where are the
13:19
heads of a lot of the black Superstars
13:21
we don't see them like we see you in
13:23
Philadelphia with the street gangs we
13:25
don't see them saying what Lena said in
13:28
terms of what's happened to her well I I
13:30
think
13:32
I think the phonies
13:34
that's what I think and the bitter irony
13:37
of it all is
13:39
that
13:40
again I have to sit by man and watch
13:44
these people be lauded by our brothers
13:46
and sisters in the streets
13:49
and they and the brothers and sisters
13:50
must be aware
13:52
that they ain't doing nothing
13:54
but it took me a long time to get there
13:55
maybe they maybe my brother brothers and
13:57
sisters who are superstars need that
13:58
kind of time and there are many who say
14:00
I don't want to get involved in it
14:02
but I don't know how you cannot get
14:04
involved in it because they are first of
14:06
all black and they are committed
14:08
whether they want to be committed or not
14:10
the very nature of the skin commits you
14:12
I don't read a script that I don't weigh
14:15
and say I wonder what the brother and
14:17
the con is going to think about this
14:20
how can I change it if it's wrong
14:23
because the black performer again has
14:25
that obligation
14:27
that we are black performers
14:30
and so therefore I'm not talking about
14:32
you gonna come out every time man and do
14:35
a number because like on Laugh-In
14:38
you know I do jokes but somewhere along
14:41
the line I've got to relate to what's
14:43
really happening
14:44
somewhere so that the brother who's
14:47
watching me who may not necessarily buy
14:49
my records
14:50
may not go to my movies may not come to
14:53
the Copa the Sands Hotel lassimi will
14:56
say yeah
14:58
in a bar or in his house yeah
15:01
that's all that's my thanks but the
15:04
black audience
15:06
owes that black performer an obligation
15:08
of watching and supporting him unless he
15:10
turns out to be really the rat of all
15:13
time
15:15
but I mean when I say rap I mean he's
15:17
not doing anything he's doing things
15:19
that embarrass the the black population
15:23
now I know a lot of people don't like
15:24
flips doing the the Deacon I've heard a
15:27
lot of talk about it Geraldine Geraldine
15:29
they don't like uh I now my personal
15:32
things I think geraldine's funny I feel
15:34
a little funny about the deacon
15:36
because I think that's going back to
15:37
something that's so deeply rooted in
15:39
black people
15:40
religiously you know that I think that
15:43
that does this to me but I think it's
15:45
still funny because I'm looking at it
15:46
again through one eye that looks
15:49
in two directions first as a performer
15:52
is it funny is it clever secondly as a
15:55
man we're trying to relate to the cat on
15:57
the corner again you understand what I
15:58
mean because first and foremost I'm a
16:01
performer that's all I've ever done all
16:02
my life
16:03
so I know he's got to weigh it but what
16:06
do you do
16:07
you've got to have the support of your
16:09
people
16:10
but geez I just love saying that number
16:13
one variety show in the country now and
16:16
start in by a black man who is very very
16:20
funny but Amos and Andy was funny don't
16:24
do that to me don't do that
16:27
and Geraldine is funny and uh the Deacon
16:31
is funny but can you move forward you
16:33
know at at the level of the struggle we
16:36
are for Liberation yeah you know came
16:38
before to continually uh entertain white
16:41
people with shows produced by white men
16:44
with a frame of reference of what we are
16:46
I mean that's not defining ourselves and
16:49
the role of the Entertainer
16:51
to some extent has to accommodate that
16:54
relevant I think that the Amos Amanda
16:56
was funny I was embarrassed by it I
16:58
signed the letters too you know but I I
17:00
say that I think at this point now we've
17:02
got more stars than we've ever had
17:04
before that I can afford the luxury
17:07
because in place of Geraldine and then
17:10
place a Flip Wilson I have Don Knotts
17:14
since you both guess no baby I was out
17:17
of town you know I haven't had a chance
17:19
to live a boat here okay so what you
17:21
think of the terrible cat dead man
17:27
we are like
17:29
in one sense limited because we will
17:33
never have the audience of a commercial
17:36
Channel but do you want that audience
17:38
I'd like to have that audience on the
17:40
other hand if getting that audience
17:43
necessitated compromising our principles
17:46
I know they have ten Brothers
17:48
out of the 200 million people in this
17:51
country watch this show yeah then they
17:53
have the 200 million people in this
17:55
country watch the show even because I
17:57
think being irrelevant is
17:58
counterproductive you know and and that
18:00
brings me to the next point
18:02
uh you have a show
18:05
that
18:06
folded
18:09
and that's when I think like what you
18:13
said you were in another era
18:15
you're being very kind yeah
18:18
I was a stone rock and you could be for
18:21
free yeah what would you do I mean I
18:24
don't know but I would I tell you what I
18:26
wouldn't do or maybe by that you can get
18:28
a clue I certainly wouldn't do nothing
18:29
more than I'm doing as an entertainer
18:31
today in other words I ain't gonna let
18:33
them change me last time out I let him
18:35
put me in suits I couldn't smoke I
18:37
couldn't say what I wanted to say and
18:39
though I put a lot of people to work and
18:40
I did a lot of things and all of that
18:42
and I changed a lot of policies at NBC
18:44
you know when they catch and went yeah
18:47
because you know I walked into the
18:48
publicity office one day I didn't see no
18:49
black people I said I don't understand
18:50
this it looks like the Lilies of the
18:52
white Fields you know and that was it
18:54
and the guy went oh he's very bitter and
18:56
I went well the hell with it I am very
18:58
bitter if I got it I gotta surround
18:59
myself with people that I know of and
19:01
we've got capable brothers and sisters
19:02
to do it now you go up there and be
19:04
seeing it's packed and jammed and the
19:05
executives are there you know but the
19:07
only thing that they are
19:11
you know
19:15
the most relevant thing I think I was
19:18
able to do was near the end of the
19:20
series I did a sketch
19:21
with nipsy Russell
19:24
about how brothers treat Brothers
19:27
and I did a very Bourgeois cat going in
19:29
to apply for a job right
19:31
and very Bourgeois with the three button
19:33
code as soon as he found out it was a
19:35
brother
19:36
he took his head on each other
19:39
right and the cat's baggies to send him
19:41
in and the cat walked in he said damn
19:43
hey babe that ain't the way he walked in
19:46
the White Secretary was there seeing he
19:47
said I'm I'm here for the job and I like
19:50
to apply I've been okayed and I went
19:51
through the IBM machines blah blah blah
19:54
talked very problem as soon as he went
19:55
in there instead of identifying and
19:57
saying Hey I want a groove it is to see
19:59
you in this position he didn't do that
20:00
he just put his feet up on the desert
20:02
dead go ahead and sign that
20:05
you know I'm straight
20:08
you know and suddenly here's the brother
20:10
sitting there trying to do something and
20:12
he is not protected and it was a funny
20:13
sketch and we loved doing it I got such
20:16
complaints from NBC you would not
20:18
believe and we never were to do another
20:19
one because I think we went through a
20:21
period where we were just pleased to see
20:23
a black guy there
20:25
yeah
20:26
there we are
20:28
there we are we in there because we
20:30
needed that at that period now we've got
20:32
to go on
20:33
further
20:35
you know what I mean and it's not just
20:37
seeing the black cat there anymore
20:39
you know it's like the guys I will
20:42
believe till I die that when the
20:44
pressure came on the Madison Avenue and
20:46
they said you got to put black people
20:47
into commercials they said we'll show
20:50
them black people in a commercial so
20:51
they put them in the commercials where
20:53
black people look ludicrous in
20:56
you know because everybody has a white
20:58
neighbor
20:59
you very rarely see two black women
21:02
talking
21:03
and if they're black women talking
21:05
they're not the sisters
21:08
it's Bourgeois middle class you know
21:11
straight hair no dues never a dude ever
21:14
never do you know can't look like Gloria
21:16
Foster no chance you know you must look
21:19
like you know the old days of of tan
21:22
confessions you know and that's it
21:24
and I look and I say it on the stage
21:26
sometimes I say it's ridiculous because
21:29
it doesn't relate to anything
21:35
you wearing a free Angela button have
21:37
you had any reaction from other people
21:39
as a result of wearing that button well
21:41
that was a fan of mine
21:43
in the restaurant and uh
21:46
was at the risk around the airport and
21:48
the guy walked up and asked my autograph
21:50
and he was white and he said Jay the
21:53
wife gets a big kick out of here when is
21:55
he on the laughing and all that sign us
21:59
for the kitties you know and I signed it
22:01
and he said I was wondering if and he
22:03
started staring at the button and I was
22:04
wearing you know this but and he was
22:06
going like this and he kept saying I was
22:08
I was and he was trying to focus on it
22:10
because I I was blowing his bubble
22:13
because they have
22:15
an image of me I guess of another kind
22:18
my involvement with Angela is again the
22:22
Injustice of it all
22:24
uh her political beliefs you know are
22:26
her own
22:28
I don't share her political beliefs I
22:30
share her blackness
22:32
and I share the Injustice to any black
22:35
person and there's no way that she's
22:36
going to get the right kind of trial we
22:38
know that
22:39
it's stacked against it
22:41
uh they made her the Most Wanted woman
22:44
since uh Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde and
22:49
I think that if a guy like myself wears
22:51
a button
22:52
that's letting somebody in that crowd
22:54
that I go around with know where my
22:55
head's at
22:57
you're now married to a sister
22:59
is she I didn't I didn't know that
23:04
[Music]
23:09
[Applause]
23:13
[Music]
23:18
and it's so groovy and so nice I've been
23:21
in the hospital five times
23:22
[Music]
23:24
[Applause]
23:30
I think he's trying to tell me so
23:34
I'm absolutely
23:36
you know flabbergasted by the by the
23:39
fact that we as a people almost without
23:42
the underground which they keep saying
23:44
we've got and everything else around the
23:46
ground as a soul underground you know
23:48
don't take no trains or nothing this
23:51
something happens it's it's the same
23:53
thing compared to
23:54
as soon as downtown gets the dance we've
23:57
gone on to another one and nobody ever
24:00
told us that they got it and we didn't
24:03
care about it but when they get funky
24:04
chicken we're into something else
24:06
uh there's something else you know it's
24:08
the thing that we have that ain't no
24:09
other people got in the world
24:12
it's that immediate eye to eye contact
24:15
that says
24:17
jamf
24:19
horse that says
24:21
yeah
24:23
that's that same thing again that one
24:25
word yeah
24:27
and you know and it's not followed by
24:29
he's down right on but really just yeah
24:33
you feel that we can solve our problem
24:34
by having some type of army or some type
24:38
of violent confrontation with whites
24:41
no
24:43
you know ain't no way you can put poor
24:45
Cadillacs against the tank
24:48
two Rusty raises
24:50
you know against an M1
24:52
and the flame throw against a bottle of
24:55
Coca-Cola with a rag in it ain't no way
24:57
you can do that
25:01
how is it that you're free enough uh to
25:04
talk the way you're talking and be an
25:06
Entertainer
25:07
because you know
25:09
the rationale is that if I'm black and
25:11
an Entertainer I can't be too involved
25:13
with black causes and survive in an
25:16
industry controlled basically by white
25:18
people how are you free enough let's say
25:20
to come on black journal and relate to
25:22
the brothers and sisters the Way You Are
25:24
but I I think
25:27
that it's called
25:29
a respect for one's opinion
25:31
because I've had too many white people
25:33
talk to me and say I
25:35
I don't like what you said on the David
25:36
Frost show about something such a thing
25:39
well you but you shared a lot of guts to
25:41
say it
25:44
and the other point is which is very
25:46
very good man
25:48
I really don't care I don't give it
25:52
when I say this is a racist society in
25:55
which we live in everybody knows it is
25:58
that ain't no that ain't no big big
26:00
statement to make it maybe it's shocking
26:03
to hear it from someone that you just
26:04
watched the night before on laughing uh
26:07
but it is man I can't say well how can
26:10
you say that white and black say this to
26:11
me how can you say that man you got it
26:13
made I said I Got It Made because I had
26:15
to fight all of that but I then owe an
26:17
obligation to my brothers and my sisters
26:19
to let them know
26:21
that it existed then it still exists now
26:24
and I've been here for 40 years you know
26:27
I've got the house I've got a wife I've
26:29
got children I've got success
26:32
and now it is time for me to try in
26:36
every way feasible
26:38
to help
26:39
the plight of my people
26:41
and to gain our freedom because I'm see
26:45
the fallacy is man and let's let me say
26:47
this and and I really mean it from the
26:49
bottom of my heart
26:50
money don't make you free
26:52
popularity don't make you free
26:55
don't you know that
26:58
you know sure I live in Beverly Hills
27:00
but I'm Shackled by the same things that
27:01
happen to the brother and Watts
27:06
I've had my bosses say to me
27:09
cats that I work for
27:11
who you know really basically give me a
27:15
Jack Entrada will say to me Sam geez
27:17
that was a little heavy statement you
27:19
said on that I said but it's true ain't
27:20
it Jack he said yeah I know it's true
27:22
but I said Butcher and that's the end of
27:24
that
27:25
I mean that man and my cousin did I say
27:29
it like it is man I've been the last
27:31
five years
27:33
go away
27:39
thank you
27:40
because he's got to respect me it's like
27:42
when a brother comes to me and says but
27:43
man you're a Jew
27:45
you know I look at him and say what's
27:46
your religion and he says I'm a Baptist
27:49
or I don't have one or I'm a Muslim I
27:51
said well our religion is blackness
27:55
because if we ever get to the point
27:57
where we started talking about he's a
27:58
black Jew he's a black Catholic he's a
28:00
black Baptist he's a black Muslim really
28:03
saved for the titles that the papers put
28:04
on people then we're in trouble our real
28:07
religion and the thing that connects us
28:08
all is our blackness
28:10
the religion of Blackness that's it
28:13
God
28:15
[Music]
28:17
[Applause]
28:18
[Music]
28:19
[Applause]
28:22
[Music]
28:23
[Applause]
 

My thoughts to the article below

I quote < “The other show is kind of mean and too grown up for me.”
 > 
her son said a show is to grown up for him:)  How does a child know what  defines grown up when many grown up don't. Know if he would had said what his mother will not like,that shows honesty.

I quote < what does it say that it is so much easier for my son to find wonderfully crafted television shows and films featuring talking animals than it is to find shows about kids who look like him? >
It says that Black people with money aren't willing to spend their money to make cartoons for black people. It says that Black people had less money in the past and white people financed cartoons to be made for white people, which is perfectly acceptable. It says that Black parents need to focus on books with rearing their  kids as a ton of content has existed that has human black characters. It says white people around the world who may be asian or muslim or latino is a larger market and satisfactory. It says Black people need to tell their children they are willing to suck a white persons penis or lick a white persons vagina for opportunities but opportunities are not meant to be shared or made universal. It says that Black people from black countries like Uganda didn't use their control to make media in Uganda or other black countries that black people globally need. 

I quote < “But where are the cartoons, Mom?” he asked. “And why does the story have to be so sad with people dying?” > 
What the author of the article the black mom was unwilling to simply say is white people wrote most of the films, live action or television, that she cites and sequentially, their themes. But, again, a Black one percent exist, they are billionaires or millionaires. She needs to tell her son, rich black people aren't spending their money on financing black cartoons. That is why ? and asking non blacks to make media for black people is unwarranted, and non blacks don't have to care about blacks. 

I quote < Where are the happy carefree storylines for young Black kids that white kids get? Where is the diversity of storyline and personality and genre representation that white kids get? > 
Pick up a book, they are out there.  And again where are the black rich. Where is Oprah's money? where is Tyler Perry's studios? 

I quote < I find it very telling that the first animated Disney movie featuring a Black woman main character and the first animated Disney movie to feature a Black man character as leads are written in such a way that both of these main characters spend a large part of their respective films in bodies that are neither Black nor even human. > 
Yes, White people finance media for white people. As DW Griffith said, when the NAACP boycotted Birth of a nation, anyone can make whatever film they want. The NAACP wouldn't spend money on making a film as a rebuttal as if teh white jews who financed the organization would do that. But, Oscar Mischeux made films in reply. So where are the Oscar Micheaux Black directors. Comprehend, Spike Lee tells similar stories of Blac plight than disney so...

I quote < What does it say to Black kids watching when the world’s biggest children’s entertainment company cannot give them even one animated film that features a Black person that stays a Black person throughout? What does this say about Blackness to kids who are not Black? About whose life is being portrayed as mattering? And whose does not? > 
It says to Black kids their Black parents are stupid telling them white people will change by black merit. It says to Black kids  their Black parents don't have the power, money isn't always power, to provide them with what they need. It tells non Black kids how impotent the black community is wherever they live, which is the truth. It tells non black kids to make sure they emphasize their non black community so that it isn't like the impotent black community. It says to Black kids their black parents are lying when they talk about a human family. All humans are human but that does mean all humans are family and that is ok. 

I quote  < When will Disney make a film with Black characters played by Black characters? Why is this so damn hard? > 
Maybe never and that is ok. Disney was started by a white artists as an independent company. So when will Black artists who are fortunate enough to get financing for films do likewise. Black people did create BET which was a black owned media outlet but sold it to whites. So, why complain about Disney? when Oscar Micheaux proved independent movies can be made. B.E.T. proves Black people with money undercut their own community. Disney is not obliged to give concern to black people. Why are Black people with money financing what the Black community need so damn hard? It isn't like Black people with money only send people to traditional black colleges so...

I quote < Or does Disney’s refusal to create an animated movie with Black characters who stay Black characters go beyond these three films that traffic in stereotypes and erasure and speak to larger institutional issues regarding perceptions of Blackness that behoove attention? > 
Institutional issues? no. Disney is a white owned firm that is free to sell to all phenotypes. If non whites absorb or dream of disney , they are the fools. Don't blame disney for black people pushing disney on black children or not rearing black children better, better meaning to media that has black created content, which has always existed.

I quote < It matters, where imagination begins in the mind. It matters whether that mind can imagine full Black personhood, or if that imagination is still constrained by unconscious bias and internalized stereotypes.> 
Yes this is true, but film is a collective project which starts with the financier and white people have more money or power than blacks and are not beholden to satisfy black needs. Black people can take care of ourselves and if our leaders: black people with money or influence, are unwilling to lead positively or lead negatively, well such is life.

I quote< There are a few future things in the works that I am hopeful about. Disney is set to premiere Ironheart on Disney+ in the near future, and is creating a TV show featuring Princess Tiana in 2023 with (hopefully) an eye to a less stereotypical portrayal than the earlier film. The Disney partnership with South African film company Kugali to produce Iwaju in 2022 looks promising as long as it doesn’t turn into a repeat of the single representation story, and diasporic wars where African, Afro European, and Black American creatives are pitted against each other.  > 
Well to be fair to Black people. White tribes have wars with each other. Black tribes have wars with each other as well. And to be blunt, because Black communities the world over usually lack power, and have to beg from whites, we tend to have bitter fights cause all the communities are based on begging.

I quote < In the meantime, my son has stopped asking to watch television. He told me the other day that he understands why I have always avoided TV and read to him instead. It is not just the wonder of imagination and language that books rather than TV provide. It is not just the vibrant storylines that inspire his own creations. As my Black son looks at his bookshelves he can see row after row of books whose covers shine with characters who look like him, whose pages are full of joyful stories about characters who look like him living their lives in full Black joy instead of the shapeshifting and death embedded into so much of mainstream American television entertainment engaging with Blackness for kids.

My son knows now, like many Black kids in America do, that if you try to look for yourself onscreen all you will see is erasure, sometimes stereotype. He knows to look for himself on the page instead. You can find some beautiful things there, if you try. > 
In my view, this passage should had been the whole article. All this about what white man isn't doing for Black people is for me worthless. Yes, Whites don't like Blacks. Blacks don't like Whites. And just because the financially wealthiest Black people are reared to cater to whites doesn't mean the financially poorest Black people want to. 
 

Disney's Disembodied Black Characters

March 23, 2021   •   By Hope Wabuke

ONCE A YEAR, from the first year of middle school until I graduated from high school, my orchestra would board the yellow school district buses along with our instruments and drive the 45-minute winding route through the San Gabriel mountains from Arcadia to Anaheim, California, to perform at Disneyland. After 30 minutes of rehearsal and another 30-minute performance, we were given free rein to wander the park until closing, when the busses would drive us home.

I knew even then that what we had was not usual; it was a privilege to experience what we experienced growing up in that tiny southern California town, miles and years away from the tiny black and white missionary TV screen in Uganda where my parents had first spied the Disney movies that had made them imagine America a wonderful, magical place. 

What we had in Arcadia, home to one of the top public school districts in the state, were the perks that went along with that education. But what we also had to go along with it — being one of the first Black families to move to that city, and usually the only Black student in my class — was the racism: being followed in stores, ordered to pay before dining in restaurants, being told we were the color of “poop” by teachers, and never seeing anyone who looked like us in the books we read in school. This is the Black experience in America when your hardworking Black parents are determined to get you the best education they can. It’s an abundance of opportunity, but only if you learn to survive within the boundaries of acceptable racism.

¤

My wealthy non-Black classmates loved wandering around the grounds of Disneyland, a place they were familiar with from regular family visits throughout the year. I was not. With the price tag at $100 per person, my family of eight people had been to Disneyland only once — with family friends from out of town when they came to visit. To prepare for the $1,000 excursion, my father had put our family on a budget for half a year, and we had packed backpacks full of lunch and dinner. We were warned there would be no souvenirs so we shouldn’t even try it.

As someone unaccustomed to its scope, Disneyland was big and overwhelming for me. But as performers in the student orchestra — both guests and employees, to some extent — we were privy to the back lots and back entrances of the park that regular visitors didn’t see — the backstage bones of the glossy stages and rides, the stacked up piles of recycled parts of shuttered amusements and worn-out characters. We were forbidden to take pictures here — it was not public Disney; it did not hold the myth of Disney perfection and magic. But I liked thinking that we alone had this secret knowledge of a place that was familiar to so many. We were part of the select few who saw what was denied public view.

Once, I was told this same story about the man himself, Walt Disney: the reason that most of  the candid photos of Walt Disney throughout the park showed his fingers shaped in a V was because he smoked cigarettes and didn’t want to be seen doing so. But this private truth did not align with his desired public image; the cigarettes had to be airbrushed out.

¤

In the middle of last summer, trying to understand the new balance of homeschooling and remote working in the pandemic, I gave in to my seven-year-old’s requests and let him have half an hour of screen time in the evenings. But being a Black parent who was once a Black girl and well aware of the horrific absence and equally horrific stereotypical and token representations of Blackness on television that I have seen, I told him that he could only watch a TV show if it had a main character who looked like him. Within that guideline, he could choose whatever age-appropriate show he wanted. He wanted cartoons, and so he began his search with those constraints. But within five minutes, he came to me in tears. We had subscriptions to am*zon Prime and Netflix, and he had searched both for Black characters in kids shows. He had found nothing.

I sat down, pulled him onto my lap and cuddled him until his tears eased. When he was soothed enough, I picked the remote up from the floor and typed in “Black kids cartoons” on Netflix. The only thing that came up was Motown Magic, which he had already seen. I tried “African American kids cartoons.” Nothing else. “Black kids shows,” “African American kids shows” had nothing else in his age range, but a couple of live action shows aimed at the tween and teenage crowd.  I tried am*zon Prime, which was even more of a desert. Searches there brought up Orphan Black and Black Mirror instead.

My son was growing impatient. “Mommy, isn’t there anything?” he called, tears eased and now bouncing on his trampoline. “Not yet,” I called back, scrolling through endless titles of movies without any Black characters in them. And then I recalled a passing conversation about the launch of Disney Plus with a fellow mom friend.

“Doc McStuffins!” I exclaimed loudly, remembering the patron saint of Black parents everywhere, as I ordered Disney Plus. Among the little Black girl doctor and her talking toys, my son was happy for most of the year. I thanked God for Chris Nee, McStuffins’s wonderful creator, every day of 2020. And then, just in time for winter break, he asked for something else.

“Did you finish Doc McStuffins?” I asked.

“No, I just want to watch something else for a while,” he said. But we couldn’t find any other cartoon show on Disney Plus that featured Black kids as main characters. So we watched an episode of Vampirina, another of Nee’s creations, this one about a vampire family living amongst human neighbors in contemporary Philadelphia. But I was uneasy at the danger made cute, uneasy with Nee’s portrayal of the mythical bloodsucking vampire-as-monster-as-outsider equated to the outsiderness of the Black girl as outsider.

Networks are so proud of each of their few Black kids shows, it seems, that they forget two things:

That kids will watch the show and then want to watch something else.

That Black kids have a diversity of tastes, and, beyond that, they grow up. One show can’t appeal to all Black kids from age three to 16. And why should we expect it to, even if it could?

Searching further on Disney, we found Moana, which my son watched because Moana was brownish like him he said, and Elena of Avalor because she was also kind of brownish and went to school with a brownish kid who looked kind of like him.  

But nothing else.

“What about these ones? I said, selecting the 2009 animated feature The Princess and The Frog and The Proud Family.

“I already looked, Mom. The girl isn’t really there; she’s a green frog most of the time,” he sighed. “The other show is kind of mean and too grown up for me.”

I searched and searched the network. Nothing. Finally, I had an idea.

“Animals!” I exclaimed. “You can watch a show if there are animals.”

My son’s face brightened. He returned to Netflix and selected Octonauts, a delightful show about animals from diverse regions of the world who work together to help other animals, teaching science along the way. Then there were Puffin Rock and Peppa Pig. And, of course, the entire Disney collection of talking animal content. The animal cartoons were fascinating and endless in their diversity and skillful edutainment. My son has yet to run out of new animal show options on the streaming services we have.

But I wonder: what does it say that it is so much easier for my son to find wonderfully crafted television shows and films featuring talking animals than it is to find shows about kids who look like him?

¤

Last fall, when the studios and networks rolled out their kids holiday fare, it was more of the same: the absence of Blackness. The most promising of the offerings was Netflix’s Jingle Jangle, which is quite lovely and which my son enjoyed. He appreciated the live action musical magic in the tradition of Disney’s own Mary Poppins.

“But where are the cartoons, Mom?” he asked. “And why does the story have to be so sad with people dying?”

I thought about my son’s questions. I had no answers, only the same questions about entertainment for Black adults, and the saturation of images of Black pain rather than Black joy. The heaviness I feel in my soul when yet another studio markets its slave film (or other narrative of historical Black oppression) as the “Black movie” release of the year is the same heaviness in my son’s soul at these kid’s movies that traffic in Black sadness and Black death.

True, films like Netflix’s Jingle Jangle and Disney’s The Lion King and the Princess and the Frog are in line with the loss-of-parent narrative that’s part of the blueprint for this kind of children’s storytelling, harkening all the way back to Disney’s Golden Age. But the impact of that loss-of-parent narrative resonates much more loudly when looking at animated Disney films with Black content because of the very small number of animated films and television that feature Black protagonists at all.

You see, all animated Disney films featuring Black protagonists have either a dead parent or the death of the protagonist as a plot point; however, there are many animated Disney films with non-Black characters where parents and protagonists escape this deathly trope simply because of the sheer numbers of Disney films made with non-Black protagonists. This lack of representation creates a single story of Blackness, predicated on death and sadness.

And, because of history, because of the way race and power work in a society where we are already saturated with images of Black death and anti-Black violence — consider how many times the deaths of unarmed Black children like Tamir Rice and unarmed Black men like Eric Garner and George Floyd were replayed across media channels versus the genteel blurring out of the death of Ashli Babbitt, the white woman insurrectionist who died while storming the Capitol in January 2021 — the death of Black parents in Disney films operates in a much different way than the death of non-Black parents in Disney films. Simply put: for every death of non-Black parents depicted in Disney films like Frozen, there are many, many other Disney films with non-Black protagonists in which the parents do not die, in which death is not a major plot point; in which the non-Black characters are allowed happiness and joy. And when that death does occur, it is not amplified in the real world by the media’s disregard for the sanctity of Black life.

Where are the happy carefree storylines for young Black kids that white kids get? Where is the diversity of storyline and personality and genre representation that white kids get? Whiteness gets multiplicity — of storyline, genre, medium, a multiplicity of films and television shows that speak to a multiplicity of age ranges and interests — all represented by white characters. Snow White. Cinderella. Beauty and the Beast. 101 Dalmatians. The Flight of the Navigator. E.T.. How to Tame Your Dragon. My Little Pony: Equestria Girls. The Incredibles. Kim Possible. WildKrats. Toy Story. Frozen. Frozen II. Inside Out. Tangled. Brave. Sarah and Duck. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Peter Pan. Pete’s Dragon. Alice in Wonderland. Sleeping Beauty. The Little Mermaid. The Sword in the Stone. Robin Hood. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Pete’s Dragon. James and the Giant Peach. Hercules. Doug’s First Movie. Recess: School’s Out. Return to Neverland. Treasure Planet. Meet the Robinsons. Enchanted. Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue. The Cat in the Hat. Sofia the First. Boss Baby. Masha and the Bear. Johnny Test. The Lorax. Dennis the Menace. Ben and Charlie’s Little Kingdom. The Magic School Bus. And on and on.

Blackness gets Doc McStuffins.

¤

My freshman year of high school, our annual performance at Disneyland coincided with a live recording session of a Disney film soundtrack. Because we were members of one of the best high school orchestras in the state, the staff said, we were to be given a special treat: a walk-through of the recording soundstages. Quiet, in the audience, we stood and watched the musicians’ bows rising and falling across their strings in unison. Onscreen, the young lion I would come to know as Simba was roaring his pain at the death of his father. I would, of course, also come to know the film as The Lion King, Disney’s first modern foray — however anthropomorphized — into engaging with Black culture on the big screen. The Disney orchestra soared. So did I.

The story, of course, since it engages with Blackness in some way, was about family disintegration and death. But still, I remember the crackling energy pervading my childhood home in the days preceding the film’s release, the excitement of going to see it in the theatre with my whole family, so starved for representations of Blackness, let alone Africa in film. I remember my African parents’ happiness and pride in seeing something like home shining across the screen.

The hunger for representations of Blackness in Disney films was not just felt in my family, but in families across the world. To date, The Lion King is the highest grossing traditionally animated Disney movie of all time. But back in 1994, Disney couldn’t imagine that this success could be repeated by making more Black stories, perhaps even with people, rather than animals. Instead, the studio just made more Lion King. We have seen The Lion King as Broadway musical, as a touring production, as a television show, as a live action remake starring the voices — but never the Black bodies of course — of the nation’s most iconic and brilliant Black performers.

Indeed, it would be another 15 years before Disney made another feature based on Black culture — and the first Disney film ostensibly to revolve around actual Black characters. But Tiana, Disney’s first Black animated protagonist, would be onscreen for just about 40 minutes. More shockingly, she would be drawn as a Black woman for just 17 of those minutes. Most of the time, as you probably know, Tiana is a frog.

¤

Some of us, like I am, are old enough to remember the public call for a Black Disney princess throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s that pushed a reluctant Disney into making The Princess and The Frog in the first place. However, the representations of Blackness in Princess Tiana’s world were problematic from the beginning. Set in the 1920s South — the height of the Jazz Age, but also Jim Crow — Princess Tiana, accounts of that time report, was originally conceived as a servant character with strong echoes of slavery in characterization and naming. Indeed, her original name “Maddy” sounded very close to the Mammy slave stereotype applied to Black women.

Although Tiana’s character was rewritten as a waitress rather than a servant, this original vision is still evident in the opening scenes of the film, when Tiana’s mother pays little attention to her daughter and focuses all her attention and dialogue in caring for Tiana’s white girl friend. Here, too, in this opening, Tiana’s white girl friend is introduced before Tiana and dominates the first scenes of the film with verbosity and energy. Tiana is silent and ignored in the background.

The dynamic is clear: here is the centering of the white character and the depiction of Tiana’s mother acting as a mammy character to the white child, while ignoring her own — a stereotype of Black motherhood that was set during Jim Crow but has roots embedded in American slavery.

But it is not just the opening racial dynamics and cinematic choices of the film that sets Tiana’s portrayal differently than any of Disney’s other non-Black princesses, or even main characters. Nor, again, is it just the fact that the Black body of Princess Tiana appears so little in her film: 17 minutes out of the film’s 98 minute runtime.

It is that so much of Tiana’s film is created through a white gaze that looks to diminish, rather than celebrate the beauty of Black womanhood, or even Blackness in general. Instead of the expected cute and cuddly Disney animal character that always accompanies a Disney hero, there is only the worst of the buck-toothed minstrel stereotypes in the firefly that adopts Tiana; instead of a magical and charming fairy godmother there is only the worst stereotypes of the bugaboo African witch doctor; and everywhere, everywhere is the ridiculing of the Black body with the obsessive attention to all the characters’ overexaggerated buttocks, a stereotype used to portray Blackness since Saartje Bartmaan was kidnapped from South Africa and exhibited onstage in European zoos in order for white audiences to gawk at her physiology. It’s not just a question, in other words, of Tiana’s relative visibility as a Black princess; it’s about the whole swamp she’s got to wade through in order to be seen at all.

¤

Soul, Disney’s ethnic animated kid’s film for this winter season, is unique among animated Disney movies in that the central characters are adults rather than children, with children sprinkled sparingly throughout the film. Also of note is the much more adult subject matter of the film: the inciting incident of the narrative is that the main character dies. Soul follows what happens after that death. More typical is the message of the film: the classic cinematic stereotype of the Black male character desperately trying to save the life of a white woman, the character 22 played by Tina Fey, to the point that the Black man sacrifices his “life” doing so. And the other message of Soul? Accept that you are going to die and don’t try to fight your fate. Yet neither of these themes seem particularly uplifting to children in the style of the Disney brand that exists when dealing with non-Black characters.

Like The Princess and The Frog, Soul begins as a promising premise showcasing some brilliant Black actors. However, like Princess Tiana, Soul’s Joe Gardner is immediately characterized by a burning desire to work. Even the character’s last name is a type of job. Tiana and Joe, unlike other non-Black Disney characters who are given other motivations — falling in love, self-discovery, or saving the world — are only represented by the labor their Black bodies can provide, another stereotype of Blackness.

But the most damaging representation is this: like The Princess and The Frog’s Black protagonist, Soul’s Black lead spends a good deal of the movie not in a Black body, but represented as a blue ghost object without the Black ethnic facial features that characterize the him when in his physical form. And then, Joe Gardner’s Black body is inhabited by 22, the spirit of the character voiced by white actress Tina Fey. Joe, on the other hand, is put in the body of a cat. In other words, the Black body is colonized by whiteness while the Black character’s “soul” is put into the body of an animal — because it’s Disney and Black people are only equal to animals — before eventually choosing to sacrifice his life for 22, the white woman.

I find it very telling that the first animated Disney movie featuring a Black woman main character and the first animated Disney movie to feature a Black man character as leads are written in such a way that both of these main characters spend a large part of their respective films in bodies that are neither Black nor even human.

Green, blue — Disney has no problem with characters that are different colors, it seems, as long as that color is not brown.

¤

What does it say to Black kids watching when the world’s biggest children’s entertainment company cannot give them even one animated film that features a Black person that stays a Black person throughout? What does this say about Blackness to kids who are not Black? About whose life is being portrayed as mattering? And whose does not?

This is how bias and harmful stereotypes are created and perpetuated in society. This is how whiteness protects whiteness and thus a system of white supremacy through media representation: by normalizing itself as human and othering Blackness through erasure and dehumanization. Whether conscious or unconscious, this bias and adherence to white supremacy and Black erasure and dehumanization is real and damaging.

And no matter how much I try, I still cannot understand why Disney — a groundbreaking company predicated on reveling in the imagination, a company whose creative products are so well-known for their tremendous ability to invest animals with human characteristics and deep wells of pathos in order to center intimate storytelling against epic themes — does nothing but relegate Black characters to animals and objects, mining stories of Black suffering and death when Black kids deal with enough violence, often based on race, in the real world.

When will Disney make a film with Black characters played by Black characters? Why is this so damn hard?

¤

In 1937, Walt Disney Animation Studios released its first full-length animated film: Snow White. As the film’s cost grew to $1.5 million over its three-year production period, Walt Disney mortgaged his house to put up the remaining financing. His financial gamble worked: Snow White was an artistic and commercial success. Disney’s groundbreaking form of storytelling captured the hearts and imagination of children and adults alike and grossed $8 million in revenue at the box office, the most money ever made by a film up to that time. Snow White was quickly followed by Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi, the films now known as Disney’s Golden Age.

One of the cornerstones of the Disney entertainment phenomenon is the understanding of how an irrepressible visual imagination and sonic landscape are vital in creating lush children’s entertainment that draws viewers in and has them humming songs from the films afterwards. By the mid 1940s, the Walt Disney team had perfected this structure, setting a bar that has led the industry for decades.

Simply put, Disney stories and Disney songs are iconic in our culture.

So as we think about questions of representation, this includes looking not just at how few films with Black characters are made by Disney, but also looking behind the camera at the creative team. Who are the creatives involved in these projects? The writers and composers trusted to create for the Disney brand?

For Soul, the sonic landscape of the film was created by the wonderfully talented Trent Reznor, best known for his band Nine Inch Nails, who, along with Atticus Ross, composed the score. Black American musician Jon Batiste was brought on to provide the singing “voice” of Joe Gardner’s piano, the same way the luminous Anika Noni Rose was the “voice” of Princess Tiana. This was considered progress from The Lion King’s casting of white American actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas to play the young version of the Simba, the African hero, and white American actor Mathew Broderick to play the adult version. White American actress Moira Kelly was the voice of Nala, the female African lion who is Simba’s love interest.

As with Soul, for The Princess and The Frog, Disney again tapped another white male composer to head the team in Randy Newman. And for The Lion King, we remember Elton John’s and Hans Zimmer’s glorious soundtrack, an art object in its own right.

These artists are brilliant. That is unquestionable.

The question is this: Despite the stunning reputations and work of these white composers, with all the Black jazz and soul musicians out there; with the invention of rock, country and jazz music by Black artists, the erasure of Blackness and co-option by whites of the first two art forms; with the financial imbalance in which white artists and labels took advantage of Black artists, whether predatory contracts in the 1960s and 1970s or Black soul musician Lady A getting her name stolen by the band formerly known as Lady Antebellum this past year; with this history of marginalization of Black creatives and in this political climate, doesn’t this sonic whitewashing just seem like there is so much potential for diverse representation, wasted?

Or does Disney’s refusal to create an animated movie with Black characters who stay Black characters go beyond these three films that traffic in stereotypes and erasure and speak to larger institutional issues regarding perceptions of Blackness that behoove attention?

One wonders: if the very accomplished white writing team of John Musker and Ron Clements, who after criticism about their treatment of race in the film, brought on the gifted Black writer Rob Edwards to help pen The Princess and The Frog, had also included a Black woman on the script about the first Black woman Disney protagonist, or an eye that valued Black woman the same way white women are valued in our society, would we perhaps have seen a less stereotypical representation of the first Black Disney princess that was more in line with the value and care shown to the other lighter-skinned Disney princesses in the Disney story canon, for example? Or, if the creators had thought as intentionally about Blackness before creating this story as they did with the creation of Moana’s Oceanic Story Trust, could there have been a different result as well? Or if a Black creator had been allowed to imagine Tiana and her world from the ground up, rather than slapping a Black perspective on the film as a hasty afterthought — a quick fix band-aid to solve the racist undertones of the film when the problems were not just skin deep?

And if Soul, too, had also begun with a Black writer creating a storyline rather than white screenwriters Pete Doctor and Mike Jones again bringing on a Black American writer (this time Kemp Powers) two years into the project to add authenticity and perspective of character to a fundamentally problematic idea, could Soul have been a more positive representation of Blackness without unconscious bias and stereotypes?

It matters, where imagination begins in the mind. It matters whether that mind can imagine full Black personhood, or if that imagination is still constrained by unconscious bias and internalized stereotypes.

“We quickly came across this idea of a story about a soul who doesn’t want to die meeting a soul that doesn’t want to live,” said Mike Jones in an interview with Awards Daily from February 2021. “I think the very first version, he was an actor, and he had gotten his big break on Broadway. He was going to play Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, and we thought that was just so clever but we just didn’t feel it. As soon as we came up with the idea that he should be a jazz musician, the idea of wrapping jazz and the improvisational nature of jazz was just so electric that we decided to make him a jazz musician. And let’s make him a middle school band teacher who aspires to something greater. That naturally led to the idea that he should be a middle-aged Black man, and that’s when we brought Kemp Powers in.”

Because of the complexity of the Black experience in America, stories that may read as neutral with a white main character can become, like Soul, problematic when the race of that character is changed from white to Black and the narrative is not rethought accordingly. For example, take Soul’s idea of putting a white character into the body of a Black man. Or Soul’s idea of a Black man’s soul being put into an animal. Where whiteness in America does not have a tradition of being violently colonized and enslaved, Blackness does. Where whiteness in America doesn’t have a racially loaded history of being compared to animals in a dehumanizing way, Blackness does. And suddenly, a plot point that seemed innocuous when envisioning the character as white, becomes part of a larger tradition of whiteness violating and dehumanizing the Black body, begun with American slavery.

It is not just enough to change a character’s race; when changing race, the narrative has to be re-envisioned accordingly in line with a character’s positioning in society. For Black folks in America, race informs so much of our experiences in life; to ignore this when creating a narrative of Black life is to practice a white-centered misconception of “colorblindness” that denies the full humanity of our personhood.

And nothing makes this misrepresentation clearer than Soul’s animation, which erases Joe Gardner’s Black ethnic features in the afterlife, effectively saying that the default representation of human, of a soul, is whiteness.

¤ 

There are a few future things in the works that I am hopeful about. Disney is set to premiere Ironheart on Disney+ in the near future, and is creating a TV show featuring Princess Tiana in 2023 with (hopefully) an eye to a less stereotypical portrayal than the earlier film. The Disney partnership with South African film company Kugali to produce Iwaju in 2022 looks promising as long as it doesn’t turn into a repeat of the single representation story, and diasporic wars where African, Afro European, and Black American creatives are pitted against each other. Mama K’s Team 4, a Zimbabwean cartoon, is set to premier on Netflix in 2022. And our most promising discovery: the Kweli TV app, which curates Black content from around the world with shows like Bino & Fino, a cartoon featuring two kids from Nigeria who, my son says, look exactly like him.

In the meantime, my son has stopped asking to watch television. He told me the other day that he understands why I have always avoided TV and read to him instead. It is not just the wonder of imagination and language that books rather than TV provide. It is not just the vibrant storylines that inspire his own creations. As my Black son looks at his bookshelves he can see row after row of books whose covers shine with characters who look like him, whose pages are full of joyful stories about characters who look like him living their lives in full Black joy instead of the shapeshifting and death embedded into so much of mainstream American television entertainment engaging with Blackness for kids.

My son knows now, like many Black kids in America do, that if you try to look for yourself onscreen all you will see is erasure, sometimes stereotype. He knows to look for himself on the page instead. You can find some beautiful things there, if you try.

My son’s basket of to-read books contain his current four favorites: Dragons in a Bag, Hi-Lo, Obi & Titi, and The Adventures of Mia Mayhem. In these books, like the others on his bookshelf, Black joy and Black life are embraced. And any of these would make amazing television or cinematic content.

Take Dragons in a Bag, the first book in a series about Black kids and dragons in Brooklyn written by the wonderful Zetta Elliot. Or Hi-Lo, Judd Winick’s alien robot who saves the world with his best friends — a Black girl with magical powers and an Asian boy who breaks gender stereotypes to spread love rather than violence. Or Obi & Titi, O.T. Begho’s tales of a Black boy and girl racing through magical adventures in Nigeria. Or the Mia Mayhem series, Kara West’s thrilling adventures of a Black girl superhero in a long lineage of superheroes. These books are amazing, well written stories with nuanced representations of character. And guess what?

No one Black dies in these books. And no one Black turns into a frog, a ghostly blue object, or anything else that is not Black for some corporation’s bizarre mindset that still believes that seeing Black faces onscreen for 120 minutes is too much.

They stay Black kids the whole time.

URL

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/disneys-disembodied-black-characters/

  Quote

But how are they ALL...as a community...treated why White New Yorkers?

We acknowledge differences among ourselves, but do Whites acknowledge our differences as far as their treatment of us?

The quick one word answer is no. But that isn't a sufficient answer. In NYC, Whites acknowledge differences among themselves. One of the problems when black people talk about how the white community treats the black is the idea that the white community is unified against us, while unified in itself. 

What is my point? 

Before that, I have seen a muslim woman with a hijab holding hands lovingly with a jewish man with the jewish cap on very happy, so.. you see instance of everything in new york, i am speaking of majority here. Plus, I will use the phenotypical adjective for religious races, though I comprehend italin or irish are not phenotypical but geographic heritage labels.

Now, what is my point. 

In NYC at the least, and I think all over, The italian doesn't like the white jew, the white jew doesn't like the irish , the irish don't like the dutch. They all are whites who treat blacks as the enemy historically in a communal sense. But they are not united, they are against each other. The proof. I don't know if you know NYC history but their is blood on the streets in NYC from all the bloodshed these communities have spilled against each other.  My point? Black groups in NYC, like White groups oppose each other, all the time. I argue, Black groups oppose each other less than white groups. The variance. White groups tend to treat all black groups the same while black groups don't tend to treat all white groups the same. But, this goes into the difference between the black community side white community in the usa. Never forget pioneer. The white community in the usa for most of its history or the european colonies that preceded actually had complete power. The black community has never in the european colonies or today, had complete power over itself, and never another community. So... the black community in the usa does have a different heritage from the white community and just because I think it is warranted to say, the native american community also had a unique heritage. Said three people's are not in the same in their heritage concerning the usa in large ways. It can't be reduced to, all humans are human, that isn't sufficient. the native american is not the whites, the whites are not the blacks, the blacks are not the native americans. yes, hybrid examples or situations occur but the majorities are not the same in key ways. 

The question is why can't a majority of black leadership in the usa, implement a cognition of said variance in their ideas or policies. I actually have an unproven thought on that. A majority of black leaders in the usa have a position of human equality, individualism as a unifier that blocks said cognition. If you are frederick douglass or martin luther king jr or barack obama and one of your principles in your mind is a human unity a human equality that is pure or at the root how can you accept or implement ideas or policies that at their core accept human disunity or human inequality? 

Now you said the following with more

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One of the reasons for this is, unlike most White people who CLAIM to be different politically and religiously....Black people actually ARE different and are SINCERE about their differences.

White people may CLAIM to be Jewish or Christian but at the end of the day they both share the same values and ethics.
A few ritualistic differences but they pretty much dress and talk the same.

Well, concerning whites if what you said is true, then the commonly called Civil War, World War I , World II, Balkans war, the troubles < which is really another round of the irish-english wars> , the current ukrainian/russian war, the january 6th incident <which can be argued is an incident in the long line of post civil war incidents between whites in the usa> where many white people have killed or harmed or threaten to harm other white people more than any other with pride or happiness are merely hoaxes or deceptions. If you do, that is fine, I don't want you to change your mind, but I oppose that view. 

Concerning Blacks, I don't think internal black friction is any different in emotion than in any human group. In india, muslims ad being burned alive by hindus. In former yugolslavis as we speak, croats and slaves are battling each other, no differently than the factions of sudan.  But I will say this, Black internal communal friction in the USA, the usa and to some extent the entire american continent, is mostly nonviolent. To me, white internal communal friction in the usa is historically quite violent, while said black friction is not. But again, that goes back to the people's heritage being different. 

Now is white internal communal unity in the USA unlike other white people? yes. Brexit didn't happen because whites of england hated black people. BRexit happened because white of england didn't want whites of eastern europe populating rural england anymore. In Italy or Spain you see many incidents of friction between catalonians and basque or sicilians and neapolitians. But in the usa, after the commonly called civil war and the end of the commonly called world war II , the white community in the usa has a greater sense of white unity. But as january 6th proved, it isn't that strong. 

I end with, you and many black people before have claimed that whites are one big happy family who unite against all others, ala the hellenistic example, while all others lack the same. but I oppose that view. I think many black people and to be blunt, black leaders like to suggest black people are more caught up in our variances than whites. but the million man march, the black community in NYC proves that assertion false for me. I think the problem is the black community in the usa has a problem getting results, and in frustration blames itself because blaming itself is easier than blaming itself aside its environment equally.  

The problem with the film industry in the USA and Kemet

OPENING THOUGHTS

Historical fact versus Film industry goals. 

A film, with chadwick boseman before the black panther called, Gods of egypt , had only one Black god of egypt. Thoth. But, all the gods of Kemet, which the hellens< the romans called the hellens greeks, the greeks called kemet egypt> took over through the macedonian rule of hellens, are Black, all of them. So all the gods of egypt should had been Black. 

In parallel, Cleopatra is white. I didn't say she wasn't Egyptian. She spoke the native tongue. In the same way the Mamluks , who are from eastern europe, are not native to Kemet but lived most of their lives in Kemet, they called egypt, while being muslim. So, the problem is the film industry in the USA has a goal with many projects. The goal is simple. Unbind all characters from racial definition, a key to araciality. The problem is, history isn't a false thing, history is fact. Cleopatra was not black, just like the Mamluks. But this doesn't mean most people in Kemet or Egypt are white. 

But i wanted to do research and find out, who is the lawyer that filed the complaint because as always, the internet story linked to me has no citation. 

I found the following and I will end with lcosing thoughts

ARTICLES

TITLE
Egyptians complain over Netflix depiction of Cleopatra as black

CONTENT
by David Gritten
BBC News
A Netflix docudrama series that depicts Queen Cleopatra VII as a black African has sparked controversy in Egypt.

A lawyer has filed a complaint that accuses African Queens: Queen Cleopatra of violating media laws and aiming to "erase the Egyptian identity".

A top archaeologist insisted Cleopatra was "light-skinned, not black".

But the producer said "her heritage is highly debated" and the actress playing her told critics: "If you don't like the casting, don't watch the show."

Adele James made the comment in a Twitter post featuring screengrabs of abusive comments that included racist slurs.

Cleopatra was born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 69 BC and became the last queen of a Greek-speaking dynasty founded by Alexander the Great's Macedonian general Ptolemy.

She succeeded her father Ptolemy XII in 51 BC and ruled until her death in 30 BC. Afterwards, Egypt fell under Roman domination.

The identity of Cleopatra's mother is not known, and historians say it is possible that she, or any other female ancestor, was an indigenous Egyptian or from elsewhere in Africa.

Netflix's companion website Tudum reported in February that the choice to cast Adele James, a British actress who is of mixed race, as Cleopatra in its new documentary series was "a nod to the centuries-long conversation about the ruler's race".

Jada Pinkett Smith, the American actress who was executive producer and narrator, was meanwhile quoted as saying: "We don't often get to see or hear stories about black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them!"

But when the trailer was released last week many Egyptians condemned the depiction of Cleopatra.

Zahi Hawass, a prominent Egyptologist and former antiquities minister, told the al-Masry al-Youm newspaper: "This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black."

Mr Hawass said the only rulers of Egypt known to have been black were the Kushite kings of the 25th Dynasty (747-656 BC).

"Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilisation is black," he added and called on Egyptians to take a stand against the streaming giant.

On Sunday, lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary filed a complaint with the public prosecutor demanding that he take "the necessary legal measures" and block access to Netflix's services in Egypt.

He alleged that the series included visual material and content that violated Egypt's media laws and accused Netflix of trying to "promote the Afrocentric thinking... which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity".

Three years ago, plans for a movie about Cleopatra starring the Israeli actress Gal Gadot triggered a heated debate on social media, with some people insisting that the role should instead go to an Arab or African actress.

Gadot subsequently defended the casting decision, saying: "We were looking for a Macedonian actress that could fit Cleopatra. She wasn't there, and I was very passionate about Cleopatra."
 

URL

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65322821

<Rough translation of the arabic to english from google translate>
TITLE
"Falsification of facts and Cleopatra was not black." Zahi Hawass comments on Netflix's latest movie

CONTENT
Zahi Hawass, former Minister of Antiquities and archaeologist, commented on the film "Cleopatra", which was revealed by Netflix yesterday, and drew criticism from public opinion in Egypt for portraying the "black" Ptolemaic queen, considering it a falsification of history.
Hawass commented in an exclusive statement to «Al-Masry Al-Youm» on the film, saying: «That is a falsification completely, Cleopatra was Greek, in the sense that she was blonde and not black», and considered that the film «falsification of facts and an attempt to attract illustrious historical names such as Queen Cleopatra, with the aim of promoting that the Egyptian civilization is black».
Hawass pointed out that there is a trend in the world in recent years led by American blacks and blacks in South America, to claim that the Egyptian civilization is originally black, stressing that «this talk has no basis at all».

The archaeologist pointed out that the black civilization has no connection with the Egyptian civilization, pointing out that the black civilization did not rule Egypt except in the twenty-fifth dynasty during the era of the Kingdom of Kush, that is, at the end of civilization. (The number of families of the Egyptian civilization is 30 families).

Hawass proved that the Egyptian civilization is different from other African civilizations, pointing out that the Egyptian temples have drawings of Egyptian kings, and the Egyptian king is depicted beating his enemies, explaining that the temples depict his enemies either «African, Nubian, Libyan or Asian, and all of them have a different shape».

Hawass continued that «Netflix is trying to create confusion to spread false and false information that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is black», and called on Hawass to take a stand against the Netflix platform.

Netflix launched a promotional advertisement for a documentary about Queen Cleopatra, directed by Jada Ninket Smith, wife of the famous American star Will Smith, and will be shown on the platform on May 10, and actress Adele James was chosen to play the role of the Ptolemaic queen.
Queen Cleopatra, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, was born in 69 BC and died in 30 BC in Alexandria.
 

URL

https://www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/2864818

<Rough translation of the arabic to english from google translate>
TITLE
After the crisis of the movie Cleopater the brunette. Public prosecutor's complaint against Netflix demanding that the platform be banned

CONTENT
Lawyer Mahmoud Al-Samri submitted a report to the Public Prosecutor to close the Netflix platform, after the announcement of the documentary film Cleopater Al-Samra, and to take all legal measures against those in charge of this work, and against the management of the platform for its participation in this crime, and to investigate them and block its broadcast in Egypt and address all concerned authorities, especially the National Media Authority, to achieve this.
The complaint filed against Netflix stated: It was recently noted that the Netflix platform broadcasts some visual materials and content that violate the controls of media content, which we are accustomed to in Arab and Eastern societies in all countries of the Arab and Islamic region, as most of what is presented by this platform contradicts Islamic and societal values and principles, especially Egyptian.
As stated in the communication after the crisis of Cleopater's black film: The platform's management reached them to display advertising and attractive ads seen by millions in the world, and spread on their official pages documented via Facebook, recently, an invitation to watch a documentary film about Queen Cleopatra, who was of Greek origin that she is black and all the pharaohs at the time have black skin, unlike Egyptian history and civilization, to promote the thought of Afrocentric spread widely on social media, which have slogans and writings aimed at distorting and obliterating the Egyptian identity In a crude and worrying way for us as Egyptians we have a historical civilization that nations talk about over time and the issue of these owners of this thought is largely supported by large external parties to falsify the facts of the Egyptians.

The communication against Netflix continued on the Black Cleopatra Declaration: From the standpoint of preserving the Egyptian national and cultural identity among Egyptians all over the world and taking pride in it, and consolidating the spirit of belonging to the homeland, and accordingly, we ask and request you to take the necessary legal measures against this platform, and to stop displaying every work whose purpose is to obliterate and distort the Egyptian identity, by playing in the minds with attractive advertisements and films aimed at falsifying and distorting history in Egypt, and also accusing those in charge of forgery of this work jointly And assistance from the management of the platform.

At the end of his communication, Al-Samri called for taking all legal measures against those responsible for this work and against the platform's management for its participation in this crime.

URL

https://www.cairo24.com/1783644

CLOSING THOUGHTS

My first thought in closing is a question. Did Zahi Hawass or  Mohamed-El-Sayed-El-Semary file a lawsuit against gods of Egypt. Because don't tell me that the gods of Egypt were nordic ? How is that not a falsification? 

And even though, and I quote

... the world of Gods of Egypt never really existed. It is inspired by Egyptian mythology, but it makes no attempt at historical accuracy because that would be pointless — none of the events in the movie ever really happened. It is about as reality-based as Star Wars — which is not real at all ... Maybe one day if I get to make further chapters I will reveal the context of the when and where of the story. But one thing is for sure — it is not set in Ancient Egypt at all.

—Director Alex Proyas, December 2015

if Gods of Egypt can be forgiven for that then the African Queens series by Jada Pinkett Smith can be forgiven. These films are meant to make Black women of African descent feel good about themselves. These films are not meant to be documentaries. 

Now Adele James who portrays Cleopatra said, if you don't like the casting don't watch the show.  And to be fair, the lawsuit, though gaining global attention isn't for a global ban, it is for a ban in Kemet itself. Which is not unusual in film. Many governments ban films involving the history. China banned Seven Years In Tibet. This is not uncommon. 

But Hawass and James and Jada Pinkett for me, offer an interesting question about the series and casting and identity. 

The first thing I thought was, why didn't they chose Nefertiti ? 

They could had chosen Hatshepsut but she is to dominant. Hatshepsut goes into other arguments about women's role in general and Jada Pinkett probably wanted to step away from that. But Nefertiti is legendary and she has a bust that is preserved. I want you to take a look at the show poster and then Nefertiti bust.

Adele James as Cleopatra

The bust of Neferitti

Doesn't ADele James look like Nefertiti? 

Why not Nefertiti?  Why did Jada Pinkett SMith have to use Cleopatra, whom I have said countless times in AALBC is a white woman. I didn't say she wasn't egyptian and I didn't say she didn't have black blood. 

Take a look at the following image of an actor named Ty Burrell. A white man.

Said actor, Ty Burrell has an ancestor, as Black as the night. And, in his own words <you search the "finding your roots" episode, he admitted that people in his community growing up stated that in whispers about his clan>

So Cleopatra being white doesn't mean she doesn't have Black ancestors. It doesn't mean she can't claim Kemet. Charlize Theron says she is south african. She isn't XHosa or Zulu. 

The point is Cleopatra is a white woman. But being in the phenotypical ranges commonly labeled white or black doesn't define one's background or how one defines themselves. Look at the following of Fredi Washington, who played the first Peola in the first film version of Imitation of Life 

She look more like Betty Davis than Lena Horne and Lena Horne is extremely Yella. And Fredi Washington never called herself anything but Black. Hawass would call Fredi Washington light skinned. 

So I see three points, in any order. 

Phenotype in modern USA based media, film in particular but even outside ala Hamilton the play with all the white or blanco historical figures being played by negros/mullatoes/mestizoes, likes to suggest an araciality to historical figures. Anyone can play anybody is the message, in my mind at least. So, The Dagda of the Tuatha de danaan  can be played by a male or female person, kid or elder, with blue black skin and a large black afro. While... Ogun of the Yoruba Orishas can be played by a male or female person, kid or elder, with long blonde hair and snow white skin. Now the question is why? well, the USA has a problem. It's population is the most multiracial or multicultural or multiheritaged in modern humanity and is only growing more multi every day. But, alot of negativity or hatred or dislike is between the parts of the people. The USA populace doesn't have enough love  in its populace to become a family, a set of loving ones. But maybe it can be engineered to be a clan <ala the country of immigrants claim which is false to the native american or partial to enslaved black people as they were unwilling>, perhaps even better a creed<ala the shared belief in individual rights, government of elected officilals through voting, a set of laws that need to be abided and respected absent the use of arms>. Various individuals or groups of people in the USA across all racial spectrums are trying to make the USA into a clan or creed and in the arts, this has led to hamilton or this film of Cleopatra. I see two goals, the first is to deracialize historical figures to support the idea that one can be a racial stranger in a community, the usa, and be part of it instantaneously if they abide by the rules of the clan or creed. The second is to support the idea that one can idolize, be proud of, adopt someone who isn't of their race as part of their essence.   Do I artistically like this? no. I prefer historical truth. But that is only a matter of taste, it doesn't warrant a large multilog for me. Any artist knows, no work makes everybody happy, and it shouldn't. 

Phenotype outside the USA, race, is simpler but when applied to the USA media's portrayals of race, become very complicated. I have been to africa. I can tell you, many women <not most> of North Africa, today, are white women. Now, they are african. They are muslim. And they are not nordic in appearance. Many Northern African women do share the mediterranean look with Southern European women, ala why in Europe, many northern europeans would call southern europeans dark. But they are white women. But they don't see themselves as Europeans. and this is the problem with race outside the usa in comparison to in the USA. In the USA race in general is usually reduced, made simpler, rightly or wrongly. But in BRasil you have Pardo, you have the brown skinned. In African there is no one drop rule, being black doesn't equate to african in africa.  In India, people who look like my mother's father, will argue they are not black because in asia, black equates to african. In asia, the word dark is used for people who in the usa will be deemed black. So outside the USA phenotype, appearance, has other rules and when you apply the goals , the phenotypical goals,  in USA media to places outside the USA it is dysfunctional. But, part of the dysfunction doesn't merely stem from the combination of two unequals or the attempting to find a multiracial center in the USA end, but also the old rigidities of race in many places outside the USA. I live in New York City and anyone who knows latin americans knows that in their homes, the dark or black or negra members of the familia are not treated like in the disney film encanto. Rosie Perez said it best herself, that in the latin community a colorism exist deeply. So when latin americans talk about latin unity, I scoff at that because I know fully well that in their homes, in their community that unity dissolves into a rulership by whites or light skins or alveno's or blancos over everybody else, negra, zambo, indios, et cetera. And it is the same in an India or in Egypt or other North African governments. The communities under said governments have rigid inequal racial categories that are accepted as part of their essential identity. Thus El Semary talks about national Identity even though most people in Egypt if they were in Mississippi in the 1960s would be called nigger on a daily basis. while most of the wealthy in Egypt if in the same Mississippi would be deemed the White elite. Which in Egypt is how the whites treat the blacks, as an elite. 

The importance of media. Hawass is correct. Video media in modernity are the books of yore. The video is how many or most learn, rightly or wrongly. Sequentially, any historical lies in video will be treated as truth or history by many. The question is, it is dangerous. I argue it isn't. But I will explain why. Growing up as a kid my parents provided me with nonfiction or fiction by black people that allowed my perceptions of black people to exist without need of white people. I didn't need public school. I didn't need colleges or universities. I didn't need the television or some video media. Sadly , many people in modernity need an external because their parents are ignorant, they don't know. In the black community in the USA, many black people like to say that the black community doesn't know enough about itself, but the truth is, that is all communities in humanity. The reason why is simple, most communities in humanity are recovering from being completely dominated by another community in humanity and that recovery tends to be a crude or complicated thing. Rarely as smooth as in the fiction books, Sequentially, media serves a huge role, like the images on the early european christian church walls to the illiterate in europe. It doesn't convey the truth, but it conveys a message easier. 

Preproduction in the arts, is an underrated thing. What I know on the outer rim boundaries of the entertainment industry in the usa is how often arts are produced absent a lot of quality preproduction. I am not suggesting a system exist to evade negative criticism. But, I wonder about Jada Pinkett's series. Why go from Nzinga to Cleopatra. In my mind, Jada Pinkett wanted to show being African is not equal to being african. While that is the truth I would had advised her to use another.  I can see why Nefertiti was not used based on the phenotypical range. Nefertiti is black, looks black, regardless to people like Hawass saying otherwise. But, I think the one of the Kandake's, like Shanakdakhete or Amanirenas<one of my personal favorites>, or other queens of Nubia or Kush and its descendants to Sudan or Aksum, like Gudit<who I learned of doing research for this post>,  and its descendants to modern ethiopia. Hawass is correct. Cleopatra is not black. But he is incorrect in one key way. The problem with Kemet and Egypt is that the Upper Nile, the south of the land because in the nilotic world the north is where the Nile flows from which is south if you base north on the pole nearest Europe which is what most in modern humanity do, has always been in a cohabitation with the peoples south of it, whether Nubia or Kush or Aksum. In the same token, the Lower Nile, which is the one that border the modern day mediterranean, has always been in connection to Hellens/the larger Europe or Asia. So, when Hawass talks about the non Blackness of Egypt I argue the Kandake's are to the upper nile what cleopatra is to the lower nile. Female rulers representing the external communities to either half of kemet. And that kind of interpretation is needed in preproduction. It doesn't mean it will happen. But in preproduction it is rarer than people think. 

The power of negative media. The first season involved Nzinga of congo and the second involved Cleopatra. Now considering the slap from her husband to chris rock happened nearly a month after the first season with Nzinga started, it proves the power of negative media. The show from Jada Pinkett wasn't mentioned alongside the slap. The slap was mentioned as the central issue of Jada Pinkett, Will Smith, plus Chris Rock. Her series was barely mentioned if at all. The movie, Emancipation, starring Will SMith was prejudged through people's view to the actor, and Chris Rock's standup was expected and eventually did rotate around this issue, one negative moment dominated all three of their recent time. 

I conclude with a simple point. All EL Semary wants is the show banned in egypt itself. Not an issue. And neither is the depiction of Cleopatra. I already spoke of Hamilton. None of the key points advertised in the media are important.

The location of Mohamed El Sayed El Semary 

https://yellowpages.com.eg/en/profile/Mohamed-El-Sayed-El-Semary/315467

IN AMENDMENT

I finally found evidence to answer my question about gods of egypt in the post above, I didn't find a page and quit on it as I have other things to do but after @Troy asked the same question. I tried again, and read the following

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3847128833/weekend/

Mar 2-6    -    $39,360    -    1    -    $39,360    $39,360    1
Mar 9-13    -    $14,958    -62%    1    -    $14,958    $60,950    2
Mar 16-20    -    $13,675    -8.6%    1    -    $13,675    $77,216    3

So, Gods of Egypt wasn't banned, wasn't called to be banned in Egypt. People saw it in egypt. So, this invalidates the desire of the few in Egypt to pan the cleopatra film by Jada Pinkett Smith. And what does it prove. It proves that, the issue here isn't  that the Cleopatra film in question isn't phenotypically or other racially correct, it is that, it is produced by Jada Pinkett SMith, a Black woman of the USA in the NEtflix zone, which is going to be mostly seen online in streaming. This is the true issue. Black produced and mostly on streaming not in theaters. Hawass and  EL Semary realize that most of the young in egypt, like most poor people in the usa , get film through streaming, not theaters, they are afraid of said Cleopatra's visions being displayed amongst the youth, which will get some youth to question the Europhilic-whitephilic aspects of egyptian culture that have been peddled or enforced by those in power in egypt.

REFERRING COMMENT

https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10236-the-problem-with-the-film-industry-in-the-usa-and-kemet/?do=findComment&comment=60302

It's called war sweetie:) well said. People forget the USA was made from war. The native american was slaughtered by the colonial settlers who then made the usa's first thirteen states. But while the history books don't suggest war, that was war. I think the woman king handled slavery well. But I will explain, they showed that the institution of slavery was bigger than the Agoji warriors. Glory doesn't deal with the civil war any better than The Woman King dealt with the Slave Trade. 
hahaha chicken, can't crawl for your country:) 
Exactly, well, the question isn't will all humans regardless of phenotype go to see movies with all black people. Most films , including all white ones, lose money. Do the white producers, who produce most films connected to the usa, want to lost money on the all black films that do not become Black PAnther or The Woman King. 
Great mentioning the credits content.

The Woman King Search
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=the woman king&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=relevancy
 

The director Ryan Coogler on the set of “Wakanda Forever.” Does he want to direct more “Black Panther” movies? “I’ll do it as long as folks will have me.”Credit...Annette Brown/Marvel

The ‘Black Panther’ Sequel That Never Was

Writer-director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole reveal the original plot for “Wakanda Forever” and discuss working in the Marvel universe.

By Reggie Ugwu

The “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole are just coming up for air. A month after release, the much anticipated follow-up to the original “Black Panther” (2018) is well situated, still screening at more than 3,000 theaters heading into the holiday weekend. The film has received mostly positive reviews from critics and holds the year’s second-highest performance at the box office, after “Top Gun: Maverick.” To date, it has grossed more than $420 million domestically and nearly $800 million overall.

Things could have gone much differently.

“This film was difficult in ways that only the people who made it would know,” Coogler said in a recent interview. “There are things we put in there that felt revolutionary, that challenged the definition of having ‘a good time’ in a movie like this.”

The death of Chadwick Boseman, who played the title role in the original film — a noble but untested leader of the fictional African promised land Wakanda — forced a radical reimagining of the franchise. Coogler and Cole had recently sent Boseman a completed first draft of the script when the actor succumbed to a secret bout with colon cancer.

Their eventual rewrite opened with the death of Boseman’s character, T’Challa, turning the $250 million superhero film that followed into what can be fairly described as an extended meditation on grief and recovery.

In a recent joint conversation over video, the screenwriters discussed their original vision for a “Black Panther” sequel, how they addressed the loss of Boseman, and balancing the demands of their story with those of the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe.

These are edited — and spoiler-filled — excerpts from the conversation.

What was it like collaborating this time?

RYAN COOGLER Last time we went back and forth. Joe had already started when I came on. I think I tried to go for a draft, but I was taking too long and so he jumped in. Then we would get notes from the studio, and we would just kind of divide and conquer. On the second one, we were doing it over the pandemic, so we couldn’t meet up. But Final Draft [the screenwriting software] came out with this update where we could both work in the script at the same time. It was an amazing feature. Very productive, very fun.

JOE ROBERT COLE It allowed us to bridge that feeling of being in a room and just spitballing ideas.

COOGLER Then we took that hit, bro, when Chad passed. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I didn’t know how we were going to pull ourselves up and figure it out. Thank God for Joe and the collaborative process, man. It would’ve been impossible for me to write this thing on my own.

In the initial draft of the script, before Chadwick’s death, how were you looking at the story? What were the challenges?

COOGLER It was, “What are we going to do about the Blip?” [In Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” T’Challa is one of billions of people who suddenly vanish, only to be brought back by the Avengers five years later.] That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made. It was going to be a father-son story from the perspective of a father, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the perspective of the sons.

In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia [T’Challa’s love interest, played by Lupita Nyong’o] talking to Toussaint [the couple’s child, introduced in “Wakanda Forever” in a post-credits sequence]. She says, “Tell me what you know about your father.” You realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude. Then, we cut to reality and it’s the night that everybody comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meet the kid for the first time.

Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. Our code name for the movie was “Summer Break,” and the movie was about a summer that the kid spends with his dad. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual where they go out into the bush and have to live off the land. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie.

Was Namor, the leader of the undersea nation Talokan in “Wakanda Forever,” still the villain?

COOGLER Yeah. But it was a combination. Val [the C.I.A. director, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] was much more active. It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the U.S. and Talokan. But it was all mostly from the child’s perspective.

In the new version, the opening scene is T’Challa’s death. Why did you decide to start there?

COLE Just practically, everyone was going to be waiting to see how we dealt with it, so doing it right up front made sense. In terms of the characters, we needed to introduce a different version of Shuri [T’Challa’s sister, played by Letitia Wright]. We’re showing the moment that she becomes a different person than the person we met. She’s the smartest person in the world, but she can’t save her brother. What does that do to you?

COOGLER We wanted to have an emotionally intelligent conversation. It’s about the transformative quality of grief and trauma. There’s this expectation with emotional trauma that you just need time. “Oh, give them a couple weeks off; they’ll come back to work and get back to it.” But that person is completely different in some ways. You just don’t see it because the change isn’t visible.

T’Challa’s death is attributed to an illness, but it seems sudden and inexplicable, which profoundly unsettles Shuri. Why did you make that choice?

COOGLER We wanted to keep it simple. At the end of the day, what mattered is that she had a self-expectation of being able to be solve it and she failed. And we didn’t want her to have anywhere to displace her anger. If somebody else would’ve taken T’Challa out, Shuri would’ve looked for that person. We wanted it to be a situation where the only place to go was internal.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character has appeared in other Marvel properties and is being set up as a major antagonist in the studio’s future projects, including the “Thunderbolts” movie due in 2024. Is it challenging to incorporate characters or story lines from the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe?

COLE Ryan will have a different perspective as the director, but I’ve never had a conversation where I was asked to incorporate something that didn’t feel organic. The dynamic of the U.S. being an instigator and Western powers being an instigator, that always existed. It wasn’t, “Oh, we need to find a reason to make this character exist.” It was, “Oh, this is already in here and there’s this wonderful actress available.” It always starts from the story and the ideas.

COOGLER Yeah, nobody was shoehorned in or asked to be put into the movie or anything like that. Actually, in this version, [Louis-Dreyfus’s role] was pared back in order to make space for dealing with T’Challa’s death. And we had Val in there before she even appeared in any of the other movies, before “Black Widow” and [the series] “Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” People assume that we were told to put her in, but she was there from the beginning.

Ryan, what’s your appetite to tell more stories in the world of Wakanda?

COOGLER I feel blessed that I have the opportunity to work on these movies, bro. When I got asked to do the first one, it was like a moving train. I thank God every day that I was able to jump on it and meet these people, these actors, and to meet Chadwick during some of the last years of his life. I’ll do it as long as folks will have me. But I think it’s bigger than just me or Joe. Between the first and second movie, we made $2 billion at the box office, which is what matters the most to corporations. So I hope that it continues, man. I hope people are still making movies about Wakanda long after we’re gone.

Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture reporter covering a range of subjects, including film, television, music and internet culture. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was a reporter for BuzzFeed News and Billboard magazine. @uugwuu

URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/arts/ryan-coogler-black-panther-wakanda-forever.html

Jacobs-Jenkins, far left, on the “Kindred” set during filming. “In honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about,” he said.Credit...Tina Rowden/FX

‘Kindred’ Creator Wants Viewers to ‘Question Their Assumptions’

In his TV adaptation of the Octavia Butler novel, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins changed parts of the story but kept the author’s focus on “making the familial political.”

By Salamishah Tillet

Dec. 26, 2022

“If a ‘Kindred’ movie is ever made, I wouldn’t be involved,” Octavia Butler wrote in a letter in 2000. “It won’t be my movie, and I suspect it won’t look much like my book.”

It was yet another Butler prediction that was mostly on target, though she was wrong about the format. Adapted by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for FX on Hulu, “Kindred” is neither a film nor a completely faithful interpretation of the novel. But it comes at a time when there is more interest in Butler’s body of work than ever before, and in how her prolific writing, mainly science fiction novels, continues to resonate with our world more than 15 years after her death.

“Kindred” is Butler’s most well-known and often-taught novel. Published in 1979, it tells the story of Dana Franklin, a 26-year-old African American writer who repeatedly and unexpectedly travels from 1976 to a mid-19th-century plantation in Maryland. Each time Dana arrives in the past, she finds herself saving the life of Rufus Weylin, her white slaveholding ancestor; she returns to the present only when her own life is at risk.

In a 1988 interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery, Butler said that “Kindred,” with its blend of genres, periods and antebellum histories, was informed by ideological debates she had during college in the 1960s, about the extent to which slaves should have rebelled against their masters.

Knowing this, Jacobs-Jenkins sought to capture those tensions while updating the story to convey the complexity of our post-Obama racial reality. A lifelong Butler fan, he wanted to turn “Kindred” into a television series as far back as 2010, when he debuted his first full-length play, “Neighbors,” at the Public Theater.

The drama was well regarded, but it was Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 Obie-award-winning play, “An Octoroon,” that established him as one of America’s most exciting young playwrights. A satirical adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Octoroon,” a 19th-century melodrama about the tragic love story between a European-educated white plantation owner and the play’s titular character, an enslaved woman, the play inspired critical raves and hot ticket sales. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that its success “seemed to confirm the reputation of its author as one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers about race.”

Even then, Jacobs-Jenkins remained committed to “Kindred.” In 2015, he persuaded Courtney Lee-Mitchell, the rights holder of the novel, that it should be a television series and not a movie as previously imagined by other potential producers and even by Butler herself. The decision to stretch the story over multiple seasons has drawn some criticism. (All eight episodes of Season 1 are available on Hulu, but the series has not yet been renewed.)

Nevertheless, Jacobs-Jenkins hopes that his expansion of the novel’s universe encourages more people to discover Butler’s writing for themselves.

“After watching this, I want people to question their assumptions about what they think they know about history, about themselves,” he said. “I want them to read Octavia’s work.”

In a video interview earlier this month, Jacobs-Jenkins talked about his introduction to Butler’s writing, the motivations behind some of his changes to her story and why he thinks television and theaters need even more stories about slavery. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

When did you first come in contact with “Kindred”?

My relationship with Butler preceded my engagement with “Kindred.” I was one of those kids reading Stephen King on the playground for no good reason, and Ray Bradbury’s novels were important transitional objects for me too. I was like 12 or 13 when I had a babysitter who went to Howard, who was a Black nerd, too. She told me, “You should read Octavia Butler.” So I started with her Patternist series. And when I got to college, I read her on an African American studies syllabus and remember thinking, Oh, this person I read for fun is important academically. That is also when I learned of “Kindred,” which was oddly one of my later introductions to her work.

Before, when I was reading her, it felt very much still like a secret; it felt good to be a part of that weird underground. And now, she’s been mainstreamed in this gigantic way.

How did this adaptation come about?

Slavery is the material of my creative life. I remember becoming obsessed with the visual work of Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall and wondered why they were so ahead of theater. So back then, I said, I’m going to deep-dive these people, and I’m going to write a play based on my deep dive. I just inhaled whatever their discourse was and tried to translate it into a theater space. And the truth is, my creative life is also ultimately guided by fandom on some level, and I remember rereading “Kindred” in 2010 and thinking, This is a TV show. It was a eureka moment.

I immediately started figuring out how to get the rights. It had been under option since 1979 because people kept trying to make a movie out of it. And I was like, It’s not a movie. Because the whole book is about the experience of time’s passage and watching people transform, witnessing their development, growth, decay and shift of their allegiances. It took six years for me to get the rights, and then my task became trying to translate it and ultimately peel back the layers for people.

Speaking of time passages, her novel was set in 1976 to coincide with the bicentennial year of the Declaration of Independence. Why did you set the series in 2016?

Along the way, I became very friendly with Merrilee Heifetz, Butler’s literary executor and her lifelong agent. One of the things she said to me was, “Octavia would’ve wanted you to make this for now.” So I took that to heart. I think 2016 was that last gasp of naïveté about how we had processed the legacies of this racial regime that the country’s founded on. Do you remember the day after Obama was elected, suddenly, there was a discussion of a phrase called post-race? I remember asking, “What is that?” I also think because people did not see the results of the 2016 [presidential] election coming, we suddenly felt like we were backsliding as a country. “Kindred” was the ultimate metaphor for that, too.

Another surprising change was your inclusion of her mother as a major character. What inspired that story line?

Merrilee also told me that Octavia referred to this book as one she never quite cracked. That interested me because this is her most widely read and known book, and that also sent me to her archives, which had just been cataloged at the Huntington Library.

I read every draft of “Kindred,” and there are ones in which she experimented with this mother figure. In her canon, she’s obsessed with mothers. I don’t want to be psychoanalyzing another artist, but her relationship with her mother was very complicated. Merrilee told me once that she would say, “Octavia, I want you to write a memoir.” And she would say, “I’ve already written a memoir; it’s called ‘Kindred.’”

Unlike many other contemporary representations of enslaved people in television and film, Dana is not by herself. She has a community in each of her periods to help her. Why was this important to portray?

I think Octavia was obsessed with family. I mean, it’s called “Kindred,” and it is about making the familial political. My approach was to always think of what she was doing and try to echo or expand on that universe — I took all my cues from her, except for setting it in 2016. At the same time, she was always trying to understand why tribalism exists, why genes are so varied as a concept, how they’re weaponized to oppress people and what oppression ultimately is rooted in.

Dana has to make some hard choices for herself and often risks the lives of other enslaved African Americans to ensure that she continues to exist in the present. How did you approach bringing her moral ambiguity to the screen?

That’s an essential part of the book, and I think that’s what makes Dana interesting. Most folks are not participating in active insurrection but are fighting in small ways to maintain their agency. This is driven home in Dana, who says to herself: “Wait a minute, to ensure my existence, I have become someone who might destroy or erase the existences of countless people. I want to be perceived as good, and I want to think that my goodness will rub off on Rufus too.” But playing both sides isn’t how justice happens. You wind up being morally compromised in all your actions if you are still thinking about yourself. That’s the interesting challenge she has to negotiate.

Why did you think a multi-season arc was best for this story versus adapting it as a single-season limited series?

I just didn’t think you could do this book in eight hours. It’s about being with people over time and really feeling these tectonic shifts in their personhood. I thought the idea of squeezing in six different actors for Rufus would have felt like a party trick. I’m sure that someone out there could have made that thing, but I just really wanted to give us the fullest canvas I could to tell the story.

Do you ever worry that audiences will grow weary of stories on slavery?

There is this interesting quota that we all want to put on stories about slavery, and I think that question is often asked only of Black creatives. There are a thousand shows on the air about rich white families doing evil sympathetically, and no one puts a quota on that. I think it’s interesting that there’s this desire to police any storytelling about a creative’s history. I mean, this is my history and my family history.

I also think people are worried, afraid of, or sick of the tropes and stereotypes that come with this work and are waiting for the familiar scene in which some female enslaved person is raped or someone is tied to a pole or a tree and whipped. But in honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about. We should never stop telling these stories, especially when people try to erase them from history books.

Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The Times and a professor at Rutgers University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2022, for columns examining race and Black perspectives as the arts and entertainment world responded to the Black Lives Matter moment with new works. @salamishah

URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/arts/television/kindred-branden-jacobs-jenkins-octavia-butler.html

OMELETO

My thoughts
I watched this... this is lovely this is lovely ... I will be blunt, the black community globally has a problem. It has been oppressed for hundreds of years and has gained a majority 
URL
https://youtu.be/ab8IUtHG1iA

Marvin Gaye 1983 Interview

paraphrases

One can't have hits if one isn't commercial

I won't have any credibility unless I am on top

People don't comprehend record artist like painters 

I am awfully afraid of getting there, looks like only one way from there

So if I have to do sex so they can listen to social topics 

Worst rock bottom moment in the last seven years when i tried to commit suicide by an overdose of cocaine

I was in love with my wife at my time, and I couldn't handle the rejection... I thought I was king of the world now I am prince

I never played with the other kids when I was little.

One can never be a fine artist if one hasn't lived and experienced life's negatives. 

I look upon the motown days as times I wouldn't pay a million dollars for but I also would pay a million dollars to have the experience again.

I would like to start with motown again but i would like to write the script different to be a little happier.

I hate those human feelings, I like the feelings of an artist

The last time Lou Rawls won one he gave me a smile, it gave me chills , I told my wife i would tackle him and grab the award

In music, disk jockeys, feel free to edit and tamper... in fact its the reason why I left motown and asked berry gordy to release me. my last album was tampered with horribly and .. is hwy i asked to be released. 

I'd rather never have a hit than for my music to be touched

It's taken about a few years, about 400 or so , for white america to come to the point where they feel rhythm and blues... or rhythm and pop , these categories kill me too, is acceptable

There was a time you couldn't bring a soul record into the home in white america

It all started in the rock and roll era when elvis and everybody was taken after chuck berry it slowly started to change

Basically it is a white artist doing the same thing a black artist is doing but it is acceptable when a white artist, with black artist it is raw

let's take reggae for instance, bob marley is very interesting, he has taken his roots music, but bob marley is intelligent enough, or was , god bless him and i love him, he took the roots music and was smart enough to incorporate some of the western music. 

And he took the rawness from it so it can be accepted by other nationalities.

After a while there will be no categories, music will be music

There are those who want to hold on to the last vestiges of their prejudices, meaning , a little thing, like winning an american music award and winning in all categories and then you watch the television the next day and who won the pop category dah dha dha dah and they will not show who won the soul category. we will not admit that. I am a rhythm and blues artist and soul artist and black singer, it doesn't take anything from my humanity

Marvin gaye won in the soul category, other artist take my work and can be announced as winners in their categories , why can't I be announced. That's not very nice

I want to say the ted turner news agency out of atlanta showed the r and b winners.I just thought i wanted to share that, good man.

Maybe a far right station in ohio. 
URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L63XR2hFgpg

IN AMENDMENT

Marvin Gaye stated his success with sexual healing was a sort of revenge. And it made me think about so many different types of artists who have said similar in my memory. Artists who came back to the top always speak of the people, whose names can't be mentioned or will not be mentioned, that basically knocked down or didn't support when they were down, and I wonder how to end that aspect of entertainment culture.
I am not ignorant, I comprehend the commonality, but I also realize, something in the USA keeps it alive. Is it the fiscal capitalism? the greed of people is so pure when one stops making money they are treated as if they never did. IS it the yes culture to success? People who can't  stand you are trained in USA culture to act like loving friends till they can finally kick you without penalty. I wonder.

IN AMENDMENT PART 2

In some ways he is right. Pop music, which is short for popular music, which at its roots means, music of the people, is the last label, cause modern music labeled pop contains hybrids of many musical styles, so that day is coming where the way in which music is advertised or approached will require a major linguistical shift.

IN AMENDMENT PART 3

Marvin Gaye said reaching the top only has one destination from there, going down, his transcendence is the only out. I wish it would had not been forced.

Octavia Tried To Tell Us XXIV: KINDRED Goes Hollywood

Some thoughts on making black male characters impotent in film and the use of black literature in film as an adaptation

In the discussion between Tananarive Due side Monica Coleman many excellent points were made but two I want to focus on.

First, I thought of Denzel Washington's career and the only three earliest films I can think where he wasn't married already or physically unable to fornicate <the bone collector> was the mighty quinn , mo better blues, plus devil in a blue dress. 
In devil in a blue dress he has various interest from various females, so the only normal for a male lead of a certain age. 
In mighty quinn, he desires a single mom whom he knew before the baby. 
And in Mo Better Blues he ignores the woman he has known for a while for a stylized woman but when he falls, he goes to the women waiting for him:) I know poor lauren bacall in Bright Leaf. Few women in my view matched patricia neal's "villainous" in this film
So I concur it is rare for black males in hollywood <white financed film> historically

Second, I thought on Tananarive Due's thoughts on adaptations. 
From Oscar Michaeux to Ousmane Sembene to Julie Dash many Black filmmakers are used to writing their own work to be filmed. and white filmmakers created a heritage of using white literature to make films that have black characters, ala Uncle Remus or Porgy and Bess. 
It is rarest for films to be adapted from black literature absent the black writer being the black director. 
Sequentially, a the goal by denzel to adapt all of august wilson's works into films, while a start, needs a greatr follow up of adaptions by black literary work from the 1800s.                                               

URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=178amUHLmRA&feature=emb_imp_woyt
IN AMENDMENT 
A great scene in 12 years a slave is when the white wife of fastbender the slaveowner demands lupita nyongo's slave be sold and fastbender says with a reality that the two panelist support as real, that patsy is his best earner, she can't go, but fastbender in his expression also shows, how his slave master would love to put his white wife out in the field after her demand, displaying from his vantage point she is merely one step from the enslaved.

prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2182&type=status

A bust of Nefertiti on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin in December 2012, during an exhibition marking the 100-year anniversary of the item’s discovery.Credit...Michael Sohn/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty Images

King Tut Died Long Ago, but the Debate About His Tomb Rages On

By Franz Lidz
Published Oct. 30, 2022
Updated Oct. 31, 2022

More than three millenniums after Tutankhamun was buried in southern Egypt, and a century after his tomb was discovered, Egyptologists are still squabbling over whom the chamber was built for and what, if anything, lies beyond its walls. The debate has become a global pastime.

At the center of the rumpus is the confrontational enthusiast Nicholas Reeves, 66, who shares a home near Oxford, England, with a nameless house cat. In July 2015, Dr. Reeves, a former curator at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, posited the tantalizing theory that there were rooms hidden behind the northern and western walls in the treasure-packed burial vault of Tutankhamun, otherwise known as King Tut.

It was long presumed that the small burial chamber, constructed 3,300 years ago and known to specialists as KV62, was originally intended as a private tomb for Tutankhamun’s successor, Ay, until Tutankhamun died prematurely at 19. Dr. Reeves proposed that the tomb was, in fact, merely an antechamber to a grander sepulcher for Tutankhamun’s stepmother and predecessor, Nefertiti. What’s more, Dr. Reeves argued, behind the north wall was a corridor that might well lead to Nefertiti’s unexplored funerary apartments, and perhaps to Nefertiti herself.

The Egyptian government authorized radar surveys using ground-penetrating radar that could detect and scan cavities underground. At a news conference in Cairo in March 2016, Mamdouh Eldamaty, then Egypt’s antiquities minister, showed the preliminary results of radar scans that revealed anomalies beyond the decorated north and west walls of the tomb, suggesting the presence of two empty spaces and organic or metal objects.

To much fanfare, he announced that there was an “approximately 90 percent” chance that something — “another chamber, another tomb” — was waiting beyond KV62. (Dr. Reeves said: “There was constant pressure from the press for odds. My own response was 50-50 — radar will either reveal there’s more to Tutankhamun’s tomb than we currently see, or it won’t.”)

Yet, two years and two separate radar surveys later, a new antiquities minister declared that there were neither blocked doorways nor hidden rooms inside the tomb. Detailed results of the final scan were not released for independent scrutiny. Nonetheless, the announcement prompted National Geographic magazine to withdraw funding for Dr. Reeves’s project and a prominent Egyptologist to say, “We should not pursue hallucinations.”

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s onetime chief antiquities official and author of “King Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb,” said: “I completely disagree with this theory. There is no way in ancient Egypt that any king would block the tomb of someone else. This would be completely against all their beliefs. It is impossible!” (Dr. Reeves countered by pointing out that every successor king was responsible for closing the tomb of his predecessor, as the mythical Horus buried his father, Osiris. “This is even demonstrated in what we currently see on the burial chamber’s north wall — as labeled, Ay burying Tutankhamun,” Dr. Reeves said.)

Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted the fraught scholarly terrain. “Nick’s work is evidence-based and carefully researched,” she said. “But few Egyptologists will say it on record because they are all afraid of losing their access to tombs and excavation concessions. Or they are just plain jerks.”

Despite the setback, Dr. Reeves soldiered on. In “The Complete Tutankhamun: 100 Years of Discovery,” a freshly revised edition of his 1990 book to be published in January, he draws on data provided by thermal imaging, laser-scanning, mold-growth mapping and inscriptional analysis to support his fiercely debated scholarship. The provocative new evidence has bolstered his belief that Tutankhamun was given a hasty burial in the front hallway of the tomb of Nefertiti.

“Much of what Tutankhamun took to the grave had nothing to do with him,” said Dr. Reeves, who spoke by video from his home office. He maintained that King Tut had inherited a suite of lavish burial equipment that had then been repurposed to accompany him into the afterlife, including his famous gold death mask.

The father of Tutankhamun was Akhenaten, the so-called heretic king whose reign was characterized by social, political and religious upheaval. The 18th-dynasty pharaoh rejected Amun, Osiris and Egypt’s traditional gods in favor of a single disembodied creator-essence, Aten, or the sun disk. In the space of a generation, Akhenaten had created a city from scratch at el-Amarna for his new god, and prepared royal tombs for himself, his children and his wives, including Nefertiti.

After Akhenaten came an obscure pharaoh named Smenkhkare, whom Tutankhamun succeeded directly. Dr. Reeves has long held that Smenkhkare and Nefertiti were the same person, and that Akhenaten’s queen simply changed her name, first to Neferneferuaten, during a period of co-rule with her husband, and then to Smenkhkare following his death, navigating a period of sole, independent rule. To the boy-king would fall the burial of this rare woman pharaoh.

During King Tut’s decade-long reign, he appeared to have been largely occupied with rectifying the chaos bequeathed to him by his old man. But it would not be enough: Shortly after his death in 1,323 B.C., a new dynasty chiseled his tarnished name into dust.

Pyramid scheme
Dr. Reeves has conducted research directly in the tomb on several occasions over the years. He came to his theory about Tutankhamun in 2014 after examining high-resolution color photographs of the tomb, which were published online by Factum Arte, a company based in Madrid and Bologna, Italy, that specializes in art recording and replication. The images showed lines beneath the plastered surfaces of painted walls, suggesting uncharted doorways. He speculated that one doorway — in the west — opened into a Tutankhamun-era storeroom, and that another, which aligns with both sides of the entrance chamber, opened to a hallway continuing along the same axis in form and orientation reminiscent of a more extensive queen’s corridor tomb.

“I saw early on, from the face of the north wall subject, that the larger tomb could only belong to Nefertiti,” Dr. Reeves said. “I also suggested, based on evidence from elsewhere, that the perceived storage chamber to the west of the burial chamber might have been adapted into a funerary suite for other missing members of the Amarna royal family.”

To support his radical reassessment, Dr. Reeves pointed to a pair of cartouches — ovals or oblongs enclosing a group of hieroglyphs — and a curious misspelling painted on the tomb’s north wall. The figure beneath the first cartouche is named as Tutankhamun’s Pharaonic successor, Ay, and is shown officiating at the young king’s burial carrying out the “opening the mouth” ceremony, a funerary ritual to restore the deceased’s senses — the ability to speak, touch, see, smell and hear. The key, Dr. Reeves said, is that both of the Ay cartouches show clear evidence of having been changed from their originals — the birth and throne names of Tutankhamun.

Dr. Reeves suggested that the cartouches had originally showed Tut burying his predecessor, and that the cartouches — and hence the tomb — were put to new use. “If you inspect the birth-name cartouche closely, you see clear, underlying traces of a reed leaf,” he said in an email. “Not by chance, this hieroglyph is the first character of the divine component of Tutankhamun’s name, ‘-amun,’ in all standard writings.”

Beneath Ay’s throne name may be discerned a rare, variant writing of Tutankhamun’s throne name, “Nebkheperure,” employing three scarab beetles. This is a variant whose lazy adaptation provides the only feasible explanation for the strangely misspelled three-scarab version of the Ay throne name “Kheperkheperure” that now stands there, Dr. Reeves said.

He deduced that the scene had originally depicted not Ay presiding over the interment of Tutankhamun, but Tutankhamun presiding over the burial of Nefertiti. There are two visual clinchers, he said. The first is the “rounded, childlike, double underchin” of the Ay figure, a feature not present in any image currently recognizable as him, implying that the original painting of the king must have been of the chubby, young Tutankhamun. The second is the facial contours of the mummified recipient — until now presumed to be Tutankhamun — whose lips, narrow neck and distinctive nasal bridge are a “perfect match” for the profile of the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti on display in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

“There would have been no reason to include a depiction of this predecessor’s burial in Tutankhamun’s own tomb,” Dr. Reeves said. “In fact, the presence of this scene identifies Tutankhamun’s tomb as the burial place of that predecessor, and that it was within her outer chambers that the young king had, in extremis, been buried.”

Rita Lucarelli, an Egyptologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said she had been following Dr. Reeves’s old and new claims with interest. “If he is right, it would be an amazing discovery because the tomb of Nefertiti would be intact, too,” she said. “But maybe even if there is a tomb there, it’s not that of Nefertiti, rather of another individual related to Tut. We simply cannot know it unless we dig through the bedrock.”

The problem, Dr. Lucarelli said, is finding a way to drill through the decorated north wall without destroying it. “This is also why other archaeologists do not sympathize with this theory,” she said.

Dr. Reeves’s unsympathetic colleagues are legion.

“Nick is flogging a dead horse in his theories,” Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, said. “He has provided no clear proof that the cartouches have been altered, and his iconographic arguments as to the faces on the wall have been rejected by pretty well every other Egyptologist I know of who is qualified to take a view.”

The politics of heritage
Dr. Cooney, whose book “When Women Ruled The World” argues that Nefertiti may have been Tut’s grandmother, is one of Dr. Reeves’s few champions. “I am not one of the many scholars laughing behind their hands,” she said. “Nick’s theory is brilliant but easily discounted in a very political and nationalistic Egypt that has refused to give permits to Western scholars who disagree with the party line. Maybe there’s nothing beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Maybe it’s Al Capone’s safe. But if there is something there, this could potentially be the discovery of the millennium.”

At least part of the backlash against Dr. Reeves’s ideas can be traced to the politics of heritage. The narrative that Tutankhamun’s tomb was unearthed by the heroic English archaeologist Howard Carter has long been openly challenged by Egyptians, who took the discovery as a rallying cry to end 1920s British rule and establish a modern Egyptian identity. Among Egyptologists today, the hot topics include the decolonization of the field and more inclusive and equitable accounts of Egyptian team members involved in archaeological excavations.

“Sure, some in Egypt take a different view from me, which is easy enough to understand,” Dr. Reeves said. A weary expression spread over his face. “Archaeologists in the U.K. would, I am sure, look askance at some foreigner sounding off on who might be buried in Westminster Abbey. But my sole interest as an academic Egyptologist, my intellectual responsibility, is to seek out the evidence and report honestly and as objectively as possible on what I find.”

Nefertiti’s burial is what the raft of new facts points toward when considered altogether, he said, and inevitably Nefertiti plus Tutankhamun is a big ask. “I can understand the skepticism with which my proposals have been greeted in some quarters,” he said. “And I initially shared it; I would spend a year testing and retesting my conclusions before feeling comfortable enough to publish.”

That was back in 2015, and Dr. Reeves believes the evidence now is stronger than ever. “Indeed, with the discovery that both cartouches of Ay overlie original cartouches of Tutankhamun, we have the veritable smoking gun,” he said. “To simply deny the evidence is not going to make it go away.”

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/science/tutankhamen-nefertiti-archaeology.html

MY THOUGHTS

I am a Nefertiti fan. Considering Akenaton is known as a radical leader of the nile, in that he went against the heritage and formed a new culture, i imagine his wife is radical in thinking as well. I can see her preparing for her son's time. The white man miscomprehends. He doesn't realize that the damage of his community, that being white scientist in africa is so vast that he is not trusted he is not wanted. He wants to be viewed as content of character but that is something anyone native in egypt must have a hard time doing based on an extensive negative past. It is that simple, the individualism some in the scholarly community want demands ignoring human history or specifically, interracial history, which is mostly or overwhelmingly negative in humanity.
 

Quoted from the author Milton j Davis @Milton  not me

My novel Woman of the Woods was inspired by my research on the Mino of Dahomey, the same source of inspiration of The Woman King.  It tells the story of Sadatina, a girl on the brink of becoming a woman living with her family in Adamusola, the land beyond the Old Men Mountains. But tragic events transpire that change her life forever, revealing a hidden past that leads her into the midst of a war between her people and those that would see them destroyed, the Mosele. Armed with a spiritual weapon and her feline 'sisters,' Sadatina becomes a Shosa, a warrior trained to fight the terrible nyokas, demon-like creatures that aid the Mosele in their war against her people.

https://www.mvmediaatl.com/product-page/woman-of-the-woods

AMERICAN BLACK FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2022 TALKS, PANELS AND TOP LINE TALENT FOR 26TH ABFF JUNE 15-19, 2022

Following is the schedule of 2022 ABFF talk series events to date.

Live Events
Thursday, June 16, 2022
The NFT Masterclass for Creative
NFTs have risen as one of the hottest topics in the entertainment industry. Understanding the intellectual property issues in NFTs is essential to our protection and advancement. This session will address the ABCs of NFTs, including copyright, trademark, publicity issues and tax matters surrounding NFTs. Instructed by Kimra Major-Morris, attorney at law.

Leading From Within 
Presented by Prime Video

From the suffrage movement to the civil rights movement, history has shown us we all win when Black women lead. Join three Black women executives from Prime Video for an intimate discussion on how they are leading the charge to create content across series and features that all audiences will love.

Moderators: Latasha Gillespie (head of diversity, equity and inclusion, Prime Video)

Panelists: Amber Rasberry (senior executive development, Movies – am*zon Studios),

Lauren Anderson (co-head Content and Programming, am*zon Freevee) and Larissa Bell (development executive, am*zon St.)

The Black Beauty Effect Panel 
Presented by Black Experience on Xfinity

An intimate discussion on the global impact of Black Beauty in the upcoming docuseries, The Black Beauty Effect. This discussion will highlight black women and their overall impact in the beauty industry, despite its historical exclusion and oppression of black women.

Panelists: Andrea Lewis, series creator, Kahlana Barfield Brown, beauty expert, Whitney White, natural hair entrepreneur, CJ Faison, executive producer

Funding Your Story: The Nuts and Bolts of Film Finance
Presented by the Motion Picture Association

You can be a great storyteller and writer of words that captivate the masses. However, you can’t share that story with the world without having a financing plan in place to get the story made! In this panel, representatives from major studios and a lead film finance company will provide an overview of the variety of ways content creators can finance their production. As each panelist has a unique background in the film finance world, this panel will provide filmmakers with a basic understanding of what to expect when putting together a financing package.

Moderator: John Gibson, vice president, External and Multicultural Affairs, Motion Picture Association

Panelists: Donyelle Marshall, LATAM business and tax analyst, Florida Office of Film and Entertainment; Chiquita Banks, Esq., senior vice president, TPC; Graham Lee, Esq., vice president, Tax Counsel-Production, Paramount; Brian O’Leary, Esq., senior vice president Tax, NBCUniversal (Invited)

Bel-Air: Clips and Conversations  
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversal

Peacock presents an intimate conversation with the cast members from Bel-Air about celebrating Black on-screen characters and discussing story themes such as love, family and relationships.

Moderator: Scott Evans

Panelists: Rasheed Newson, Adrian Holmes, Cassandra Freeman, Coco Jones, Akira Akbar, Jimmy Akingbola and Jordan Jones

Bust Down in Laughter with NBCU’s Comedy Crew
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversal

Join talent from NBCU’s hit comedies for a lively conversation about celebrating and shaping Black culture through stories of family, friendships, love and joy on TV.

Moderator: Danielle Young, journalist and host of Real Quick

Panelists:  Nicole Byer, Phil Augusta Jackson and Carl Tart from NBCU’s “Grand Crew” and Sam Jay, Langston Kerman, Jak Knight and Chris Redd from Peacock’s “Bust Down”

Shoot Your Shot
Presented by ALLBLK

ALLBLK, the first and largest streaming service for Black TV and film from AMC Networks, is partnering with the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) to kick off a nationwide casting call for the co-star of its latest original production, “Judge Me Not.” A new hour-long psychological/legal drama created by TV icon, Judge Lynn Toler.

“Judge Me Not” focuses on a millennial Black female attorney navigating mental health issues, a rocky romantic relationship and a volatile family, who shocks everyone when she wins a judicial seat at 31. Once there, she fights her demons while managing the chaos of a busy court.

25th Annual HBO Short Film Award Showcase
Presented by Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO

Five finalists will compete in ABFF’s HBOÒ Short Film Award. The prestigious showcase will celebrate 25 years of HBO’s commitment to recognizing the next generation of diverse, artistic and creative talent at ABFF.  This year’s groudbreaking directors with diverse style of filmmaking are: Sherif Alabede (Another Country), Elisee Junior St. Preux (Aurinko in Adagio), Gia-Rayne Harris (Pens & Pencils), Destiny J. Macon (Talk Black) and Rebecca Usoro (The Family Meeting)

Friday, June 17, 2022
Masterclass: Legal Aspects of Indie Filmmaking
Presented by Arrington and Phillips

This seminar will introduce filmmakers to the legal and business aspects of independent filmmaking. From conception to distribution, attendees will learn all the basics needed to make, produce and distribute their own independent film. Instructed by Marvin Arrington and Vince Phillips.

Johnson: Clips and Conversations
Presented by Bounce TV

Join the cast and producer of Johnson for a conversation around the anticipated return of season two. Johnson focuses on life-long best friends and their sometimes-complicated journey of love, friendship, heartbreak and personal growth as told from the Black male perspective.  The show is executive produced by Eric C. Rhone and Cedric The Entertainer’s A Bird and A Bear Entertainment.

Moderator: David J. Hudson, head of Original Programming for Scripps Networks

Panelists:  Deji LaRay (series creator and show runner); Thomas Q. Jones (show runner, “P- Valley,” “Luke Cage”); Philip Smithey (“Switched at Birth,” “The Rookie”); and Derrex Brady (“NCIS,” “First”) with Earthquake (“The Neighborhood,” “Chappelle’s Home Team – Earthquake: Legendary”) and Eric C. Rhone (executive producer)

Finding Happy: Clips and Conversations
Presented by Bounce TV

Meet the cast of Bounce’s newest series, Finding Happy, a show created about, for and by Black women. The dramedy follows Yaz Carter as she navigates her loving-but-complicated family, her stagnant career and a merry-go-round of unrequited love as she looks to find her happy. The show is executive produced by Eric C. Rhone and Cedric The Entertainer’s A Bird and A Bear Entertainment.

Moderator: Keisha Taylor Starr, chief marketing officer for Scripps Networks

Panelists: B. Simone (MTV’s “Wild ‘n Out”); Kim Coles (“Living Single”); Marketta Patrice (“Black Jesus”); Angela Gibbs (“Hacks,” “The Fosters”); and Kendra Jo (series creator and show runner)

A Champion of Independent Black Film: Celebrating the Legacy of Michelle Materre
Presented by Meta

Michelle Materre, prolific film distributor, professor, curator and fervent supporter of women and BIPOC filmmakers, passed away in March. To honor her decades as a champion of independent film and her mission to lift the voices of underrepresented people in cinema, ABFF and Daughters of Eve Media will present a roundtable discussion featuring trailblazing and renowned women filmmakers.

Moderators: Terri Bowles and Dr. Michele Prettyman

Panelist: Ayoka Chenzira

Fierce Female Filmmakers of TriStar Pictures
Presented by Sony Pictures Entertainment

Join three trailblazing fierce, female, filmmakers — Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), and Nicole Brown (TriStar Pictures President) for an intimate sit-down conversation as they open up about their highly anticipated Sony Pictures releases: The Woman King starring Viola Davis, and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody starring Naomi Ackie. This conversation will dive into the importance, power and future of Black film while providing a sneak peek of what audiences can expect in their upcoming releases via exclusive content.

Moderator: Brett King, vice president, Creative Programming, Diversity and Inclusion for Sony Pictures Entertainment

Panelists: Nicole Brown, president of TriStar Pictures; Kasi Lemmons, director, I Wanna Dance with Somebody; Gina Prince-Bythewood, Director, The Woman King

Flipping the Script: Defining your own Path to Success presented by Warner Bros. Discovery Equity and Inclusion
Presented by Warner Bros. Discovery

Over the last few decades, the road to stardom and success in Hollywood has changed significantly. With the emergence of the digital age, social media and waves of new talent, many are finding success, their own way and on their own terms. This engaging and motivating panel discusses the impact of breaking into the entertainment industry both traditionally and non-traditionally; and ways to stay relevant in an ever-changing production landscape that is no longer one size fits all.

Moderator: Karen Horne, senior vice president, Warner Bros. Discovery, Equity and Inclusion

Panelists: Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Winning Time and The Gilded Age, HBO), Carlos King (Love & Marriage Franchise, OWN), Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins (Trials to Triumphs Podcast, OWN), Bashir Salahuddin (South Side, HBO Max), Diallo Riddle (South Side, HBO Max). Networking Reception to follow. RSVP and COVID vaccination required.

“This Is Us”: From Script to Screen
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversal

Go behind the scenes of NBC’s beloved drama “This Is Us” with actress and writer Susan Kelechi Watson, writer and producer Eboni Freeman and producer Christiana Hooks. Delve into a poignant conversation about the final season and the episode “Our Little Island Girl: Part Two” that is centered on Beth Pearson and was co-written by Susan and Eboni. Learn about the show’s unique approach to bringing multidimensional narratives to life by reflecting on the past, inspiring the future, and creating beautiful stories that transcend generations.

Moderator: Danielle Young, journalist and host of Real Quick

Panelists: Susan Kelechi Watson, actress and writer; Eboni Freeman, writer and producer; Christiana Hooks, producer

Life Of A Showrunner 
Presented by UPS

This panel examines the road to becoming a television showrunner, the duties and demands it entails, career strategies to be considered, the parameters of creative control as well as the freedom it affords and what running a writers room looks like.

Panelists: Robin Thede (A Black Lady Sketch Show), Rikki Hughes (The Hype), Randy Huggins (BMF)

ABFF Comedy Wings Showcase
Presented by Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO

A night of laugher hosted by Aida Rodriquez and introducing: Marshall Brandon, Cherie Danielle, Shanna Christmas, Rob Gordon and Alan Massenburg

Saturday, June 18, 2022
Academy 365
Presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a 95-year-old organization that has long been known for the Oscars, often called “Hollywood’s biggest night.” But what goes on the other 364 days of the year? In this panel, key leadership shares how the Academy engages their membership of over 10,000 members on a year-round basis and leads industry initiatives that celebrate the history of film, amplifies its global community of artists and advocates for increased representation across the industry.

Moderator: Scott Evans, Access Hollywood

Panelists: DeVon Franklin, governor-at-large; Christine Simmons, chief operating officder, Academy; Shawn Finnie, executive vice president, Member Relations and Awards, Academy; Meryl Johnson, vice president, Digital Marketing, Academy

Best of ABFF Awards Presentation 
Hosted by Dondré Whitfield

Join us for the announcement of the festival winner of this year’s competitions including: Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, John Singleton Award for Best First Feature, Best Documentary, Best Web Series and HBO Short Film Award. This event will be live-streamed on ABFF PLAY.

Cocktails, Conversations, and Financial Facts with LisaRaye McCoy
Presented by Prudential Financial

Actress and Entrepreneur LisaRaye McCoy will share her journey with money, finances, and setting financial goals from her life on the South Side of Chicago to her life in the film industry. Prudential financial professionals will be available to answer financial questions.

Moderator: Delvin Joyce (Prudential Financial Planner & Founder of Prosperity Wealth Group)

The Leading Man
Presented by Cadillac

A panel of esteemed male actors examine the images of Black men in film and television, share stories about their journeys to success and discuss the messages they wish to convey to boys and young men in the community.

Moderator: Malinda Williams

Panelists: Trevante Rhodes, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Michael Ealy

Critter Fixers: Clips and Conversation
Presented by Disney+

Join veterinarians Dr. Terrence Ferguson and Dr. Vernard Hodges as they discuss some of their most unique animal cases and provide great tips and techniques to help care for your pets.

Moderator: Jill Tracey, Morning Show co-host on WHQT Hot 105 Miami

Panelists: Dr. Terrence Ferguson, Dr. Vernard Hodges

Closing Night Screening   
Rap Sh!t

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max

Rap Sh!t follows two estranged high school friends from Miami, Shawna and Mia, who reunite to form a rap group.
Cast: Aida Osman (Shawna), KaMillion (Mia), Jonica Booth (Chastity), Devon Terrell (Cliff,) RJ Cyler (Lamont), Executive Producer and Writer: Issa Rae (for HOORAE); Executive Producer and Showrunner: Syreeta Singleton; Executive Producer: Montrel McKay (for HOORAE); Executive Producers: Dave Becky and Jonathan Berry (for 3 Arts Entertainment); Executive Producer: Deniese Davis

Hip hop duo Yung Miami and JT of City Girls serve as co-executive producers, along with Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas for Quality Control Films and Sara Rastogi for HOORAE. Sadé Clacken Joseph directed the pilot. Rae’s audio content company Raedio will handle music supervision for the series.

Sunday, June 18, 2022
ABFF Community Day
Sponsored by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB)

The festival, in partnership with the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, presents a day of entertainment curated for family audiences.

Virtual Events available on ABFF PLAY https://abffplay.com/

Life As Entrepreneurs
Presented by Morgan Stanley

A discussion exploring what it takes to build a family brand, the importance of being financially literate, and the value of building generational wealth.

Panelists:  Husband and wife team DJ Envy and Gia Casey

Mathis Family Matters
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversal

E! Entertainment presents an intimate conversation with the cast of E!’s new docuseries, “Mathis Family Matters” about representation, the black family on television today, their personal experiences and perspectives around diversity both in front of and behind the camera. To further the dialogue regarding unscripted television, they will exchange thoughts on the importance of Black producers ensuring that our stories aren’t overlooked and we are represented equally in today’s diverse culture.

Moderators: Ebony Magazine  

Panelists: Judge Greg Mathis, Linda Mathis, Jade Mathis, Camara Mathis, Greg Mathis Jr., Amir Mathis

Universal GTDI’s Five Years of Creative Impact 
Presented by Comcast NBCUniversal

In celebration of Universal’s Global Talent Development & Inclusion (GTDI) five-year anniversary, this panel spotlights friend-of-GTDI director Jude Weng, accompanied by four incredible alumni who have participated in GTDI’s flagship programs. Moderated by Rotten Tomatoes Awards Editor Jacqueline Coley, this panel aims to highlight the participants’ journeys towards establishing a career in the industry, as well as provide their perspective on how they view representation and access in the industry.

Moderators: Jacqueline Coley

Panelists: Jermaine Stegall, Juel Taylor, Jude Weng, Marielle Woods

Gate-Opening: Black Exec Round Table
Presented by Lionsgate and Starz

A candid conversation with Black development executives at Lionsgate and Starz demystifying the studio system, providing helpful guidance and insight into the initial development stages to support rising Black filmmakers.

Moderator: Kamala Avila-Salmon — head of Inclusive Content at Lionsgate

Panelists: Kathryn Tyus-Adair, senior vice president of Original Programming at Starz, Jade-Addon Hall, vice president of Current Series at Lionsgate TV, Aaron Edmonds, vice president of Production and Development at Lionsgate

ABFF 2022 sponsors and partners to date include Warner Bros. Discovery & HBOÒ (Founding); Cadillac, City of Miami Beach, Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Prime Video (Presenting); American Airlines, Comcast NBCUniversal, Meta, Bounce TV, Black Experience on Xfinity, UPS, IMDb (Premier); ALLBLK, Prudential Financial, Variety, TV One, Netflix, Starz, Disney+, Onyx Collective (Official); Accenture, Motion Pictures Association (MPA), A&E, The SpringHill Company, The Boston Globe, Color Of Change, Confluential Films, Arrington & Phillips, Fulton Films, BET Her, Morgan Stanley, Miami Beach VCA, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Supporting); Endeavor Content and DC Office of Television (Industry).

https://www.blackenterprise.com/american-black-film-festival-announces-2022-talks-panels-and-top-line-talent-for-26th-abff-june-15-19-2022/

MOVIES THAT MOVE WE with Nike Ma and Nicole Decandas , discuss Alien vs Predaotr

My thoughts with time indexes as I listened

circa 3:47
Its funny, Black people in terms of film have an interesting relationship with the room in the house of fantasy called science fiction.
When I think of Body and Soul, Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, black people are more interested in dream fiction, which is in fantasy, more than science fiction.

circa 4:06
As I ponder Nichelle Nichols I realize in cheap retrospect what many Black people see, what MArtin Luther King jr. saw, and what I don't like. 
Nichelle Nichols in star trek, the original series, is interesting cause she is so lauded by Black people, including me, yet the production is in many ways something between anti-black or not pro black.
To be blunt, Black people in the USA love Nichelle Nichols as Uhura because as a thespian or the character itself, she represents what they want. The Black Individual in the USA doesn't need or exclusively want a star ship designed by black people, populaced by black officers, in Black interstellar law enforcement agency or governmental union. 
The Black people in the USA are content with Black people living happy, or respected aside non Blacks in a ship not designed by blacks, in a ship mostly populated by non blacks, in a non black interstellar organization or law enforcment organization. 
It is not that Black people in the USA do not want the black designed ship, with the black crew , with the black interstellar organization, but they are content to live as individuals without it, hoping or knowing it will happen one day. 
I don't like that, but that is the potency of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura

circa 4:32
The terms science fiction or fantasy have commonly accepted definitions but are in no way bounded to the common definitions. 
I define for this section fantasy as any film that involves the unreal, so aliens/monsters/psycopaths any unreal character, including faux biographcal characters is fantasy. 
Musicals I define as films where exhibitions of songs are inacted by thespians in the film on more than one occasion, thus seven brides for seven brothers <which I never saw, but I recall the title>, Purple Rain, west side story are musicals. The fifth element, footloose, the color purple, ray are not musicals based on my definition.
I will not speak for Nike, but when I say major production in USA cinema, I refer to volume of money spent on the film. Blackwood, Black financed cinema in the usa, is historically in comparison to Hollywood,white financed cinema in the USA, lower budget. But I do not concur with comparing Black cinema to white cinema financially in the usa. The distinction of Black cinema in the usa is it is historically with the leanest finances, thus expensive fantastic productions are not possible. Thus why Dream Fiction is so popular in Black Cinema: Body and Soul, Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, Ceddo , Emitai
In the USA no high budget Hollywood film involving what is commonly called science fiction had a black female lead before sanaa lathan. Dionna Ross was in a high budget film , but the WIZ is commonly considered a musical or fantasy film, not science fiction, in the USA.
Oddly enough, the journey of Dorothy is a dream journey which is historically interesting with the prevalence of dream fiction in Black cinema.

circa 5:38 
Nicole asked a historical question. She asked, I paraphrase her, Black people are usually cast in Hollywood, note I define hollywood as white financed cinema in the USA, in dramatic or comedy roles but to what extent are Black thespians comfortable or the Black audience comfortable with Science fiction? 
I recall Eddie Murphy saying he turned down who framed roger rabbit based on the screenplay he received or pitch he got, and he didn't buy it. The white actor, bob hoskins, who played the role Murphy let go ,oddly enough to my themes, was in a movie in 1986 called Mona Lisa, which is a dream fiction film. 
So Eddie Murphy's admitted career choices show Black thespians have doubts. I add, Denzel Washington turned down Seven, which Morgan Freeman did. Sequentially, "the nutty professor" or "doctor dolittle" from Murphy or "the little things" from Washington. 
In defense to Murphy or Denzel, I read screenplays. And if you ever read the original screenplay of 1986 legend, by Hjortsberg  ,  you will realize how what thespians are originally pitched can be far away from what is finally produced. 
Now, why does that matter? To Nicole's point, Black Thespians based on the two examples I gave maintain the Black labor mentality in the USA. The Black labor mentality is based on the fact that Black people rarely are the owners, thus our employment is never secure and must be merited. Sequentially, as a thespian, mistakes are costly in a career. Sequentially, Black Thespians don't take the risks that early scripts present themselves to be.
As for the Black audience, the Black audience was always ready, but only recently had the money.

circa 6:51
Nike spoke on Black Panther and how a question existed in media. The question was: if people, I will define people as ticket buyers to films, was ready for an all black cast superhero film, I define ready as willing to buy tickets? 
The reality is , consumers are always artistically ready, but not always financially able. I restate, Black people always wanted to see Black people in everything. But Black people didn't have the money, nor did the non black ticket buyers show the willingness to buy a ticket for an all black high budget film in the past. 
But past the year 2020 when Blacks in: Africa,Europe, the Americas, Asia are all financially potent, let alone capable, they have the money to buy the tickets. 
And, non Black ticket buyers past the year 2020 are willing to buy an all Black cast. 

Circa 7:52
Nike states Hollywood, I defined it earlier, does not feel non blacks are willing to pay a ticket to see Black leads today. I concur. But I will say in the fantasy film realm, especially, that some Black creators haven't helped. 
From Poitier in the film "The Longships" <oh the Black Moor:) forgive me> to  Sayles, a white director, "Brother from another planet" starring Jellyroll Morton to Wesley SNipes as Blade, Black thespians have taken fantasy roles seriously.
But from "Cleopatra Jones" to "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" to "Fat Albert" to "MEtero Man" Black creators or thespians have played fantasy roles in a comedic way that hurts the role. 
To be blunt, fantasy can easily become comedy, as it is easy to laugh at the unreal. To many examples of Black thespians making a fantasy role comedic exists. 
And that is why Sanaa LAthan's heroine in Alien vs PRedator is a great role. She is Black, she is a woman, the film is a hollywood high budget, but she isn't comedic. While she still offers the full range of emotions through the character's scenes, from funny, to sexy, to brave, to afraid, to legendary.

circa 8:42 
Nicole makes the point, I restate her, Black money has finally reached a point where it can influence larger fields in the film universe.
The 1970s Hollywood films involving or starring Black thespians, commonly called Blaxploitation, was reflected on greater Black revenue in theaters as well as white ticket buyers willingness to buy said hollywood films with black thespians. How many white women know the Shaft song? 

circa 10:39
They , Nike side Nicole, speak on Sanaa Lathan's preparation, and how they felt she forced some of her lines. Sanaa was inexperienced in the genre. When you look at Sigourney Weaver in Aliens as compared to Alien you see what having one of these in the belt means. But they do make a great comparison between LAthan in "Alien vs PRedator" in comparison to Angela Bassett in "What's love got to do with it". 
My only issue is I would had compared Sanaa LAthan in "Alien Vs PRedator" to Angela BAssett in "Strange Days" . Yes, Ralph Fiennes was the lead thespian but Angela Bassett was totally convincing as the single mom black security driver who has a unrequited love to a man who earned her respect and is going through his own internal chaos while los angeles is going through a potential phenotypical war, and the man in question happens to be white.
I argue it will be nice to see if Angela BAssett was called for Alien vs PRedator and did any casting tests.

circa 12:10 
Nicole side Nike go over Sanaa Lathan in films like "Disappearing Acts" or "Brown Sugar"

circa 12:25
Everyone wish Nicole Decandis a happy BESOONED BIRTHDAY!!! seven days from the time of this post

circa 13:31 
They talked about the Alien or PRedator franchise and whether the story for Alien vs PRedator helped Sanna LAthan. 
I saw all the Predator films or the ALien films 1 to 3 before this film. 
It is a standalone, it refers to either film franchises but doesn't own either. It is standalone and even alludes, in location,  to the legendary story "who goes there" more commonly known in the film world as the "the thing from another world" or "the thing"

circa 15:52
I want to merely repeat what Nike stated about a film I will not type out in name, but say it is the supposed sequel to Alien vs PRedator. 
It didn't need to happen. 
Those who know about an annihilation, that is a clue , know what I am talking about. How can all that is good be killed in a sequel?  It makes wrath of khan look magical.

circa 16:04
I don't rate or star films, enjoy Nike or Nicole's rating.
My review is, if you are looking for a fun action film ride, Alien vs Predator is a fun ride. If you are a hardcore

Alien or PRedator fan that wants the details followed, this movie isn't for you. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EZcgCyq8B0

MOVIES THAT MOVE WE- aalbc search
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=%22movies%20that%20move%20we%22&quick=1&search_and_or=or&sortby=relevancy
 

The history of films converted from books , proves everything in the article linked after the following prose is correct  
1. Millions of scripts or books have been created. As the article suggest most people in film production read screenplays/scripts , not books, for potential projects. Sequentially, screenplays are vetted more harshly. But, moreover, most successful movies are based on media to be read<books/short stories/comic books[reading images]> not viewed in motion<screenplays/scripts>. Gone with the wind/arthur conan doyle works/harry potter/hammet's detectives/stephen king works/edgar allen poe works/all religious characters/ the twilight series/the marvel or dc universes/chitty chitty bang bang <I just wanted to type that> / or et cetera dominate the list of most potent finacial films. Most of the financially potent movies come from media that does not have a moving image outside the mind of the reader. 
Yes, Star Wars, John Wick, Seven Samurai or its versions, titanic , or et cetera all prove standalone screenplays can make tons of money. But, overall I think the global film industry shows books are toe to toe with screenplays in profitable films, and thus with the larger perentage of potentials as screenplays, it is an advantage to books in rate. 
But, so many books exists, being the book chosen has its own set of rules that make it more of a challenge to be chosen , even if once chosen you have a better chance of selection.
2. Premise does matter, I said it a trillion times. A film is not as long as a written work. Even a short story at times can be in the mind quite long. SEquentially, while Ulysses, about the domestic life in Dublin, can work as a book, as a film, its premise is a challenge and converting the linguitiscal freedom of book world into film is always a challenge once film became governed with codes. Thus, few adaptions of this historically well regarded book have been made while others were chosen.
I can add Aucassin and Nicolette, of the troubadour era in mediterranean europe. It was transcribed to text as it was originally sung. It moves faster than the average film at times, but the erratic premise of it at times, think a romance between royals turns into something wilder than a screwball comedy while raunchier than hardcore bondage porn then back nto a royal romance, make it very difficult to turn into a film . And make something like Beowulf, an epic poem not as fast or raunchy or romantic but more simple while straightforward chosen over it. Beowulf is one of many "rise and fall of a king" tales. 
3. Book sales don't matter- yes, "the ninth gate" comes from a book called "el club dumas" which is originally in spanish from reverte. Shrek or Pitch perfect were once books. So, a book doesn't need to be a financialy juggernaut or a financial juggernaut in the anglophone book world like Harry potter to be selected for modulation into film. 
4. Characters are critical- when you look at the two film adaptions of the short story, Farewell to the master, you see this point proven well alongside the power of character over special effects. In the first adaption the attache/servant to the master is skeptical to humanity and ends the story, unassured  but with a slight hope. While the master is unknown in its truest power and offers a threat in frightful ignorance to humanity. While in the second adaption, the attache/servant to the master is a common laborer unconcerned to humanity and ends the story a hero who believes in humanity with the smallest of convincing to human merit. While the master performs the most grandiose feats but is thwarted in a way unbefitting the master , unknowingly.  The original short story allowed for the film adaptions to have space to be, but the choice of characterizations is exhibit A. 
5. Author involvement and loyalty to book form- Ende extremely disliked the film adaption of Die unendliche Geschichte <the reason being that book wasn't created as a children's book as the film adaption suggests>. Stepehn King extremely disliked the film adaption of the shining from kubrick <King opposed that Kubrick made the characterizations or settings are other enough to not be considered the same or similar to the book> . And I can see the point from Ende or King. The adults are making the nothing, and the lone child to save all fantasy is being influenced by adults/his father to not believe. The evil , unimaginative evil ,in adults is missing in the film. The fear induced by the grandeur of imagination, ala the details of the ivory tower or the decaying emptiness of the land of the southern oracle's fading voice is absent in the film. The journey of an alcoholic /depressed/not successful author by truly magical or negative forces in this isolated place with a strong wife or gifted child doesn't exist in the film. 
And yet, who can forget the wonder of the dreamlike depictions of the ivory tower or the southern oracle. Yes, it wasn't as frightful. It was depicted more safely , more gentle, as a Grimm fairy tale depicting the older unfiltered christian fables. But children loved it and the former children still do. 
Who can forget the psychological unwrapping of jack nicholson's jack torrance. Who boldly stated he was empowered going into this isolated empty hotel with his squeeky voiced unoffensive tall wife or disquieted introverted child. The fear the audience felt watching ths little family degrade into thier pure selves in a large prison: an angry violent uncaring man, a frightened unfriended woman, a child deep in his own mind, frightened and still frightens viewers.
6. The relationship between producer or author is key-  A bronx tale was started as a one man play, the thespian in it was offered by many producers to turn it into a film. He rejected them cause he wanted to play a specific role in any film adaption. Robet DeNiro accepted his condition and the film became highly successful. The two worked together , with deniro a producer or actor while palminteri was a screenwriter or actor. Both men are italian americans, new yorkers. But DeNiro knew what it took to make a film and that led the project. But he knew to delete what worked from the one man play was dysfunctional and needed palminteri.
In parallel, the movie international velvet. a screenplay sequel to a film, national velvet,  originally based on a one and done book. Was written and directed by one person. But the original author of the book, bagnold, elizabeth taylor who played the lead character, bagnold's daughter who illustrated the original book, the first films: direcotr/producer/screenplay writer were all alive in 1978. The writer + director of international velvet didn't include any of them in the production. My proof is Taylor didn't reprise her role from the original blockbuster film. her third film role and first starring role. 
I end with the relation between producer or prior creators is key. They are not dumb, they may be able to provide insight to the project you may miss. On the other hand, the producer needs to know the now. The fact that international velvet came out during star wars and after american graffiti proves the producer was not in touch with the trends.
7. Socal media in film production- to make greater connections authors can be known online not just intimately in private and that can aid in comprehending their stories plus the audience about their stories. When you look at how disney handled the star wars universe, it is clear, disney never intended the last trilogy to gain new audience members, the last trilogy was meant for the hardcore star wars fans, while the standalone films and streaming shows, like Rogue 1 or the Mandolorian were meant to get new fans and sate the encyclopedic hardcore fans. 

Article
https://www.janefriedman.com/what-kind-of-book-translates-well-to-screen/

MEDIA THAT MOVES WE- TRAINING DAY 2001
One seasoned crooked narcotics cop. One eager to please rookie. What do you get when you drop this combo in the middle of LA? One helluva day! That’s what! Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke are polar opposites that hold a tight balance from start to finish in this film and make Training Day a fantastic ride. Join the discussion and share your thoughts!

MY THOUGHTS

Ethan HAwke seemed like the same character in The Lord Of War
Caricature cop is more how I look at Denzel in Training Day

I checked 
1993 Schindlers list won best picture the year after Malcolm X in the 66th academy awards, unforgiven won best picture, which is the end of a western film era.  Al PAcino won for scent of a woman. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65th_Academy_Awards
1985 - Out Of Africa won the Oscars during the year of The Color Purple, interestingly, Whoopie goldberg nor meryl streep won the best actress award
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/58th_Academy_Awards
 
Interestingly, when I looked at who was against denzel washington in 2002, it wasn't al pacino or clint eastwood, it was russell crow<who won in 2001> side sean penn side side tom wilkinson <whO i think is a great thespian but is more of a stage man>  side will smith playing ali:) oddly enough, showing nothing had changed in terms of playing biopic characters... at least till ray right. 
While Halle berry beat out  nicole kidman who won the next year <her first of two with the Hours, oddly enough another more negative character than her character in moulin rouge, so...> Judie Dench, who like williamson is british, is old, I don't think is favored, sissy spacek who had already won it through a biopic oddly enough, and zellwinger who will get hers eventually
My point being, the year they both won it, was interesting. in their competitors . 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/74th_Academy_Awards

Good point Nicole, white owned media, created a false narrative around Malcolm X , that the general white community grasped while also many black people who didn't like islam/his background/his positions acted as if Malcolm was being spoken of honestly by that depiction.

For me the film is a 0 from 1 to 5.. the plot is so silly. A lieutenant like him would not have some silly rookie in his car. 

So Nicole + Nike , is the Equalizer the hidden child between Malcolm and the Training cop? 
Or  is his Troy the hidden black man in all three characters: malcolm/training cop/equalizer superhero

Good point, on Black actors career choices. The lesson is, be very careful. I want to ask either of you, is it the black female community that leads to this viewpoint toward male black actors who play such visibly criminal agents towards black women. It is common knowledge that black women in the usa are financially worth more than black men , so with black women being more revenue, is the reception in media of some characters reflecting that?
Well, when parents let children watch the lion king and that romantic scene with the female lion on her back, you never know. 

To be fair, he never hurt a black woman as a fictional character. Malcolm reached out to a black woman and delroy lindo stopped him. Mighty Quin or Mo better blues he stands in the rain. Training Day he had a mestizo woman and he didn't even hit her. 

Nike, your facial expression when you refer to DEnzel as Don Pedro. I can tell you like Don Pedro quite a bit. I will not ask if you wrote about a similar character even though I just did

Nicole, most black women, including Nike, forgave Denzel cause of his looks. I saw Denzel in Fences on stage, the reaction by black women I will never forget when he came on stage, and I said specifically Black Women.

Nike, I think phyliccia rashad is unwilling to play that far from Claire Huxtable

The worst he is done, Virtuosity , I didn't like but I think I can recover, I wonder what you guys think about rewriting the script of a financially poor movie like that.
 

MAry j blige plays dinah washington,Blige is a little more chunkier but great vocal choice since they are singing all the songs. Marlon wayans may finally play another role his sister or I can watch with him. ... I think one of the most amazing things about the otis redding song is how, aretha franklin did something many black musicians did through the years, still continue to do, ala every breath you take being turned into  a mortuary song. But she did it the best. She proves with her rendition of respect how underrated the way one produces an artwork gives them ownership. A person has to compose a song/write lyrics, but she proves with respect that the singing of a song is unique enough to warrant ownership. A point I think is underrated. And i know it is not legal cannon, but I think it is true musically. What would the usa anthem be without black singers? ... to the time period, ray charles/johnny cash/aretha franklin/i am forgetting the white female musican's name, the coal miners daughter, but they all came up at a time where the music industry was starting to lose its financial form from the 1800s. The days of ma rainey's black bottom where all musicians received nothing for their work was ending. 
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-08-06/jennifer-hudson-aretha-franklin-respect

How Jennifer Hudson found new ‘Respect’ for Aretha Franklin in the role of a lifetime

BY LORRAINE ALITELEVISION CRITIC 
AUG. 6, 2021 9 AM PT
Jennifer Hudson knew she had her work cut out for her when she agreed to play the Queen of Soul. “You just can’t wake up one morning and decide ‘I’m gonna be Aretha Franklin,’” said Hudson. “I mean, her voice. Her legacy. The songs. Who she is to all of us. It was daunting. There were times when I was like, ‘Jennifer, what have you done?’”

The answer is “Respect,” the highly anticipated biopic sanctioned by Franklin, who handpicked Hudson for the role before her death in 2018. The film chronicles the late singer’s rise from her father’s church choir to international stardom, shining a light on the talent and the stories behind the songs.

“‘Respect’ is the song and the hit we all love from the gifted Aretha Franklin,” says Hudson. “But when you add her life narrative around it, it’s that much more powerful. Understanding the era she grew up in and the courage that she had and her activism. Her relationship with Dr. King and Angela Davis. It’s like, wow, you see all sides of the human and the way she used her art to reflect herself and support others and be an advocate. So now it’s more than just the song. It’s more than just the artist. Knowing her history helped me understand her legacy and understand why her impact has been so great.”

The film, which hits theaters Aug. 13 after decades of planning and a year of COVID-related release delays, moves from Franklin’s religious upbringing with the charismatic but controlling Reverend C.L. Franklin to her hard-won stardom of the 1960s to a spiritual return to gospel music with her highest-selling album ever, 1972’s “Amazing Grace.”

Rather than lip sync to pre-recorded tracks, Hudson belted out The Queen’s material live on set during filming (“Aint No Way,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think”) as did the rest of the cast — which includes Tony award winner Audra McDonald portraying young Aretha’s mother and Broadway talents Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh playing her sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin (the women’s harmonizing alone is worth the price of admission).

But Hudson is a singular force. The former “American Idol” contestant, who like Franklin grew up singing in church, emotes with the same passion that won her an Oscar for 2006’s “Dreamgirls,” using her powerhouse vocals to re-create iconic moments in music history including the birth of Aretha’s own sound in Muscle Shoals’ Fame studio and a knock-‘em-dead performance of the film’s namesake at Madison Square Garden. With Hudson and other music-minded folks on board, “Respect” is the rare biopic where the celebrated artist’s compositions also land a starring role.

“I wanted to make a movie where music was front and center,” said director Liesl Tommy. Known for her work on Broadway, including her Tony-nominated direction of the play “Eclipsed,” “Respect” marks Tommy’s first time directing a feature film. “Aretha was capable of so much power when she sings and so much delicacy and nuance. I wanted the way that we feel listening to her music to be the way that we felt watching the film. Another thing that guided me is that she has so much emotion in her singing. I felt that the film should be emotional too because that’s who she was. And even though she was very protective of her private life, her private life is all over her music.”

Written by Tracey Scott Wilson (a playwright who has also written for TV series including “The Americans” and “Fosse/Verdon”), “Respect” stars Forest Whitaker as Franklin’s father, Marlon Wayans as her husband and manager, Ted White, and Tituss Burgess as the gentle Reverend Dr. James Cleveland. Mary J. Blige plays diva Dinah Washington and Marc Maron is pushy Atlantic Records exec, Jerry Wexler.

“Respect” follows in the footsteps of other biopics, such as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” that dared to tackle the legacies of treasured singers. And as American icons go, Aretha is right at the top. .

The pressure of portraying her was not lost on Hudson. “I was calm on set. The freakout came later,” said Hudson recently while in Los Angeles to promote the film. She arrived to the interview wearing a necklace that spelled out “R.E.S.P.E.C.T” in gold letters. She had it made as a memento of the film because “it’s not every day you get to be the Queen of Soul,” she said, slipping on pink, fuzzy slippers after shedding a pair of deadly high stilettos she donned for a photo shoot.

Hudson worked with acting and dialect coaches for the role, and she turned to the legendary Patti LaBelle for insight into the experience of Black female artists in the 1960s. “They had a lot less freedom and women took up less space” says Hudson. “Ms. Franklin spoke up with her music.”

Hudson took her job seriously, learning to play piano for the role: “I’m really still trying to get’ Dr. Feelgood.’ I got the piano part, but now I’ve got to figure out how to sing it while playing it. It’s a process.” Slipping into fabulous reproductions of Aretha’s wardrobe was easier, though Hudson counted 83 costume changes and 11 different wigs (the beehive was her favorite). “And I loved her clothes in the birthday scene. She’s wearing a gold dress and a big fur. I couldn’t help but feel royal.”

Hudson grew up in 1980s Chicago worshipping Whitney Houston, but by the time she auditioned for “American Idol,” her song of choice was Franklin’s version of “Share Your Love With Me.” Even the jaded Simon Cowell was impressed (still, she lost the competition in 2004 when she came in seventh). But Hudson’s personal associations with The Queen’s catalogue had its disadvantages when she was prepping for the film.

“Playing her is a completely different thing from being a singer and fan who sings her songs,” said Hudson. “I mean, thank God I already knew the majority of her material. That was one less thing I had to worry about. But I remember saying on the set, ‘She doesn’t know this song yet.’ Jennifer Hudson knows the song. We all know the song. We know what it became. But in Aretha’s life, in that moment, she doesn’t. She’s learning it. It hasn’t manifested yet. We can’t overshoot the story and speak of her as who she became because we’re in the beginning phases of the making of Aretha.”

Tommy said she too had to break from her own personal associations with Franklin’s work in order to approach the story with a fresh perspective. “When you listen to music and there’s a song that you love, you’re bringing yourself to that,” said Tommy. “It’s like it becomes your personal soundtrack and it’s about your life. So there’s a detaching from how I felt when I was 8 years old that I first heard ‘Natural Woman.’ It’s not about me sitting in a window looking at the rain. It’s something else. You just have to give over to her and her story and her history and that was the great joy of this — discovering the music in a brand new way.”

Tommy and Wilson did extensive research into Franklin’s life to ensure the film was as accurate as possible, from her pregnancy at age 12 to her plight in the studio as the only female musician to her friendship with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. For the religious and gospel references, it helped that Wilson’s father and grandfather were Baptist ministers.

Franklin herself had also reportedly been involved in the planning of her biopic up until a week before her death, and more recently, her family and estate made themselves available to the filmmakers. The scenario was quite different for another recent television biopic, National Geographic’s four-part limited series “Genius: Aretha,” which earned an Emmy nomination for star Cynthia Erivo but was blasted by Franklin’s family for its apparent inaccuracies.

“[Franklin’s family] really trusted us, which is a great gift,” said Tommy. “I will never stop being grateful to them for how they sensed our care and sensed that we were two Black women who would die before we let anything not be right in this film. ... In the past, these stories about Black people were pretty often written and directed by white men. Aretha was so real. She was so authentic. I wanted this film to feel like it was undeniably her world and it wasn’t from some kind of voyeur’s perspective. It was from a lived-in perspective. It was really important that her realness be present inside of the film.”

Hudson met Franklin when both women were doing what they loved best: performing on stage. “I got to open up for her in Merrillville , Ind. in 2003 at one of her concerts,” says Hudson. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I get to sing at Aretha Franklin’s show. She allowed me to do this!’ That was a moment in itself. And then after I won the Oscar for ‘Dreamgirls’ [in 2007] we had a meeting about the possibility of me [portraying] her. ... Years later she called me when I was doing [the Broadway revival of] ‘The Color Purple’ and she said, ‘I’ve made my decision on who I want to play me. It is you. Don’t say anything to a soul.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, ma’am. I won’t.’ Now here we are. It was like holding my breath for 15 years.”

During that time, Hudson has released three albums, appeared in countless TV series and films (“Sex and the City,” “Empire,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” “Cats”), did Broadway and had a son with professional wrestler David Daniel Otunga. She also overcame the 2008 murder of her mother, brother and nephew by her sister’s estranged husband. Hudson has said she made it through the tragedy thanks to her faith.

The church is embedded in Hudson’s soul. And apparently, so is Franklin’s influence. “I didn’t realize until researching and even shooting ‘Respect’ that ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Precious Little Words,’ songs from her ‘Amazing Grace’ album, they were the same versions I grew up singing in church. I was brought up in a church too. We sang ‘Amazing Grace’ every Sunday. But to learn it was her renditions, it’s like wow. So she’s always been there.”

Hudson sang “Amazing Grace” at Franklin’s funeral, 50 years after Franklin sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at King’s memorial. “She was courageous enough to take a stand,” says Hudson of Franklin’s involvement in the civil rights movement. “She used her platform to respond to the times. She fought so hard to get there, and that could have taken her down, but she did it. She left us an example — for us to keep pushing. That’s what got me through this whole thing — her saying, ‘Jennifer, go on.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I’m as courageous as you, but if you think I can, I’m going to give it a try.’”
 

“I Probably Modeled Him on Something I’d Heard on The Wire”
The audiobook industry is collectively squirming through the cultural debate on representation and casting.
BY LAURA MILLER
Twenty years ago, Grover Gardner began narrating a series of comic mysteries whose title character is a white lawyer named Andy Carpenter. In the series—written by David Rosenfelt—Carpenter also has a partner, Willie Miller, who’s a Black ex-con, which means Gardner had to voice Miller too. Back then, he hardly gave any thought to the fact that he was a white narrator voicing a Black man. “I probably modeled him on something I’d heard on television, on Hill Street Blues, or The Wire,” Gardner said. Today, 14 books later, he’s still voicing Willie—but he’s changed his approach. “I’d think very hard about doing that kind of accent now,” he said.
In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of representation and misrepresentation, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a white actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show. But audiobooks play by different rules. It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender, race, and sometimes sexual orientation of a novel’s author or main character. Yet most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own.
When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s, the field was overwhelmingly white. Gardner, who has been an audiobook narrator for four decades and also works as a producer, recalls that, for the first couple of decades of his career, “the whole industry was geared toward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. There were hardly any narrators of color, and few female narrators back then, Gardner said. “I recorded Scott Turow’s [1990 novel] Burden of Proof. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer,” he told me. “I did it. We did whatever they sent us back then. But I wouldn’t do that book today. You would find a Latino narrator to do it.”
Apart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents Ronan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 exposé Catch and Kill, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of the sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries, like magazine publishing and television. This is partly because it’s a low-profile, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press. But many who work in the industry still feel the tensions around casting acutely. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color, nonwhite narrators are being offered more work than they once were. Meanwhile, like most narrators, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. January LaVoy, a biracial narrator who identifies as Black, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is freighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. “For many white narrators, it’s difficult because of fear [of backlash]. For many narrators of color, it’s difficult because of the weight of responsibility.” The industry is grappling with these issues daily. “It’s difficult for everyone,” LaVoy said.
Although some publishers have audiobook divisions, they usually function separately from the print division, and the audio rights for many titles get sold to separate companies such as Brilliance or Blackstone. The producer of an audiobook, who is employed by the publisher, acquires the rights and oversees casting and other big-picture decisions, such as opting for multiple narrators on a novel that often switches points of view.
Michele Cobb, a producer and the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, told me that she and her colleagues have tried to figure out how they can sensitively ask narrators to provide producers with information about their backgrounds—such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability—that can be helpful when casting. Cobb explained that it’s an ongoing challenge to cast appropriate narrators for books by authors of color, while avoiding typecasting. In her own company, which publishes romance audiobooks, “I’ve definitely had authors come back and say, ‘Well, this character is white so I wouldn’t go with a Black narrator,’ ” a choice she feels obliged to respect.
Traditionally, both a director and an engineer, usually both freelancers, work on the recording with the narrator. Director Simone Barros outlined an exhausting list of tasks to me, from making sure the narrator doesn’t skip or add words to researching accurate regional pronunciations and maintaining continuity. “You can get to the last page of the book, and it will mention that a character had a German accent the whole time,” said Barros, speaks with the mile-a-minute lucidness of a person whose job is anticipating every contingency. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.*
In the case of some first-person narrators, such as the one in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, an audiobook Barros directed, the book is “written so much within the perspective of the first person that the ethnicity of other characters are specifically heard from the narrator’s perspective of them. More specifically in Antkind, the author’s very point is this shifting, mutable and even unreliable perspective, to shine a light on how too often minority characters go unseen, or only seen or heard through a bias cipher.” But with a book written in the third person, she and her narrator will work up a full voice profile—a cache of recorded dialogue and biographical information—for each speaking character. That way, if, say, a villain appears in a novel’s first few pages only to disappear for several chapters, the narrator and director can remind themselves of what he sounds like. Such profiles are particularly helpful with recurring characters in sequels and series, which may be recorded years later.
In the past, it was largely left up to the professionals behind the scenes to anticipate and head off any problems. Ten years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a book’s author—the person most intimately acquainted with a title—to have no input at all in the audiobook production. But as audiobooks became a more mainstream and high-profile format, authors began seeking more oversight. Today, writers often get the final say on casting, and are often invited to choose a narrator from a selection of sample recordings and encouraged to provide crucial information about how characters ought to sound. Nathan Harris, a Black writer whose debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, is set at the end of the Civil War, knew the accents of his multiracial cast of characters, who include freed slaves, would be a challenge. “You can go down a very precarious road with how they sound,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it myself.” His publisher presented him with an audition recording by William DeMeritt. “They told me they could go in all sorts of different directions if that’s what I wanted,” Harris said. “But he just nailed it.”
Over the past few years, the crew of professionals who work on a given book has increasingly been whittled down to a bare minimum, putting greater pressure on narrators’ judgment—even though a narrator, who is in most cases a freelance contractor, doesn’t have much time to carefully screen a book for potential stumbling blocks before agreeing to the job. The exploding demand for audiobooks with the advent of digital downloads and, most recently, an increasing number of home studios built during the pandemic also means that more narrators have ended up doing most of the production work and key decision-making on their own.
Some narrators say they now turn down jobs when they feel unsure about voicing major characters. Cassandra Campbell—narrator of, among other things, Delia Owens’ bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel featuring several Black supporting characters—recalled narrating the first two in a series of books, which made her the automatic choice for the third. But when she discovered that the third book was told from the point of view of a young Burmese boy, Campbell, who is white, bowed out. “I just didn’t feel comfortable with it,” she said.
A multitude of minor characters can turn an audio book into a minefield for its narrator. Edoardo Ballerini, who was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last year as “a go-to voice for intelligent, subtle but gripping narrations of books,” says he’s now most often asked to narrate books requiring European accents. (His father is an Italian poet, and he was raised in New York.) Still, challenges do arise. “Take a James Patterson book,” he explained. “Let’s say it’s set in New York City and the detective is hard-boiled, an Italian-American. I can do that. His partner is a feisty woman and I think I can handle that.” But then the minor characters start showing up, sometimes slotted into uncomfortably stereotypical roles: “They get in a cab and there’s the cabbie, or they run into a perp who happens to be Black, or whatever it is. You have to voice them as well. And there’s really no way for anyone to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do this book because there are a handful of lines by an Indian cabbie.’ ”
Meanwhile, many narrators of color—extra-conscious of the weight of representation—find themselves engaging in a lot of extra, unpaid work researching characters and voices that they may ultimately decide they can’t do justice to. Recently, LaVoy bowed out on a title in a children’s series she narrates about a group of middle school students who travel the world with their eccentric professor, encountering mythical creatures from the cultures they visit. “When we did one that took place in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “we got a Native American linguist from the Muckleshoot tribe to work with me. I felt really comfortable,” she said. “But this one particular book took place in Cuba, and it was very heavily written in Spanish,” a language LaVoy doesn’t speak fluently. When she got to a part where the whole group begins singing the Cuban national anthem, she decided to pass. “They needed someone with a different mouth,” she concluded.
A character’s accent can be an evocation of her origins and identity, but it can also be—as was the case with Apu, the Indian-born convenience-store clerk on The Simpsons, voiced by white actor Hank Azaria—a mocking caricature. (Azaria recently announced that he would no longer voice Apu and expressed a desire to “go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”) “Actors love to do accents!” Campbell told me. “It’s fun to do vocal gymnastics, but we have had a moment of recognizing that there are certain accents where you’re appropriating someone’s culture.”
The one motto that nearly every audiobook professional I interviewed repeated to me when I asked about their strategies for dealing with accents is “less is more.” Kevin R. Free—a Black theater actor who began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago and has become the voice of both a soap opera–addicted cyborg in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series and of Eric Carle’s iconic picture books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.)—laughingly recalled reporting for his very first recording session armed with a set of theatrically bold character voices, only to be told by his director: “I don’t want you to think of doing this book as doing a solo show. … There’s no reason for you to go all the way there.”* That holds especially true for cross-cultural accents. If Ballerini feels that “maybe I’m not the right person to give a voice to this particular character, let me just do it as plainly and as simply as I can. I think that’s a general trend that’s happening in the industry.”
Campbell explained that when voicing characters of color, she uses an acting technique that focuses on the character’s intentions rather than on more superficial markers of identity like accent. “What does the character want from the other person in the scene? What is the conflict of the scene? Play that fully without relying on cultural stereotypes.” In Campbell’s recording of Where the Crawdads Sing, she audibly dials the rural North Carolina accents of the Black characters further down than the accents of the white characters they interact with.
Sometimes, however, an accent shouldn’t be underplayed, because it serves a crucial role in the story. That can create conflict with the production or postproduction staff, if they’re not familiar with or sensitive to the cultural context of a book. Barros directed the audiobook of Simon Han’s 2020 novel Nights When Nothing Happened, about a family of Chinese immigrants living in Texas. The wife in the book becomes annoyed when her husband leaves an outgoing message on their answering machine pronouncing the family’s surname as “Chang,” as the Texans around them say it, rather than using the Mandarin pronunciation, which is closer to “Cheng.” When narrator James Chen’s recording went through a postproduction process called quality control, or QC, Barros and Chen received orders for “pickups” (short rerecordings edited into the final audiobook to correct errors) on every instance of the family’s name, instructing them to pronounce it the Anglicized way—as the Texans do. This was, as Barros put it, “not only totally wrong,” but a literal replication of the assimilation that so bothers the main character’s wife. In that instance, the producer backed Barros and her narrator, but that’s not always the case; January LaVoy wincingly recalled the time that, at a director’s insistence, she recorded pickups replacing her correct pronunciation of Latinx with latinks.
Deciding whether to use the Anglicized or loanword pronunciations can be fraught for bilingual performers. Emily Woo Zeller, a Chinese American narrator, has sometimes clashed with directors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages, such as tofu or kung fu. She is also one of the few narrators I spoke with who took the step of contacting the author of a book that she found objectionable. “I won’t name names,” she told me, “but it was a white author,” and the scene involved what Zeller called “misplaced comedy,” in which the author “mixed up Chinese and Japanese culture, and the comedy was about the way characters looked and the fact that wanted to do kung fu and they were Communists.” Deciding “this can’t come out of my mouth,” Zeller brought her concerns to the author, who, she said, was “very apologetic and willing to change it.”
 Hers was an unusual move. Audiobook narrators tend to see their role as strictly interpretative. Their job is to convey the book from the author to the reader in a way that remains true to the author’s intent. This includes texts like classics, books whose authors can’t be appealed to for changes, and books that contain words, passages, and characters that are now deemed offensive. There also remain plenty of contemporary authors who, as Cobb tactfully put it, “haven’t caught up yet,” and narrators will continue to have to figure out how to perform those books.
For Grover Gardner, four decades in the audiobook industry have taught him that “where there’s ignorance, you fall back on the only things that you’ve seen or heard, and chances are very good that, if you’re an older person, you’re drawing on a stereotype.” He’s had to work to transform some of his ongoing roles from vocal clichés into full characters. In the case of the former convict Willie in the Andy Carpenter mysteries, for instance, he has consciously tried to lean less on an exaggerated accent as an actorly crutch. “I’ve tried to focus more on attitude,” Gardner said, “on the real person.”

Correction, June 23, 2021: This article originally misstated that Simone Barros is Black. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.
Update, June 23, 2021: This article has been updated to add additional comments by Barros about the narration and perspective in Antkind.
Correction, June 22, 2021: This article originally misstated that Kevin R. Free began narrating audiobooks five years ago. Free began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago.

ARTICLE
https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/audiobook-narration-race-accents-casting-racism-representation.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2022%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list

How Stories Change When They Move From Page to Voice
Laura Lindstedt on the Different Ways We Read a Book
By Laura Lindstedt, translated by David Hackston
June 14, 2021

To all intents and purposes, a psychoanalyst’s couch is in fact a bed—after all, it lacks a back and armrests. And yet, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody would offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst’s bed unless, that is, they were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst.

In October 2019, I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios, headphones over my ears, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia, which had been published in Finland six months earlier.

“‘Natalia’ was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting,” I read and continued: “When I showed her round my office, which I had rented in an apartment next to my house, I told her about the couch.”
These two consecutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading these sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain.

When one reads a book aloud as an audiobook, the visual aspects of the text all disappear. Of course, one could read the word couch, which appears in italics, in a slightly different way, perhaps by holding a short, artistic pause before the word. But this is not the same thing. Italics are not the same as a short pause.

The therapist, the book’s narrator, gives the patient the code-name “Natalia.” Under the cover of this anonymity, the therapist then proceeds to divulge intimate details of Natalia’s life to the reader, then at one point removes the inverted commas from Natalia’s name “as I might remove the safety catch from a gun”. When read aloud, this sentence is absurd: the listener cannot hear the inverted commas around Natalia’s name.

*

Let’s be clear: I am very skeptical about the practice of turning works of literature into audio recordings.

If audiobooks become the primary way in which we interact with books, it would be strange if at some point this did not have a direct impact on how people write literary works.
Will writers—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud? The succinct speech between Me (the writer) and You (the reader) works well when spoken aloud, so the current appetite for autofiction is unlikely to dwindle any time soon. A linear narrative, in which we already know (or think we know) something about the end point, is also easy to listen to. For this reason, celebrity autobiographies and so-called true stories make for successful audiobooks.
However, complex narrative structures, shifting perspectives, narrative polyphony, long, meandering sentences and the visual aspects of a text find themselves increasingly under threat from a medium that relies solely on hearing. If linear narrative becomes the only acceptable form of complex literary expression, our thoughts will be the poorer for it. Imaginary worlds and possibilities will shrink because such worlds and possibilities are not “content” that can be detached from “form,” they are not statements, suggestions or questions isolated from their rhetorical devices.

*

That being said, I’m not a militant opponent of audiobooks. To my mind, it is simply important to recognize that there is a significant difference between the printed book and the audiobook. Written material turns into vibration, letters become sound waves. They always come from a concrete source that guides our interpretation, a source that is completely different from the reading process heard through our “inner voice.”

A new element appears between the book and its recipient: a voice that shapes how we receive the text. It is a sound born of a human body in a unique way and that is (generally) readily identifiable as the voice of a man or a woman.

In the audiobook of My Friend Natalia, this unavoidable fact becomes a poetic problem in its own right. Throughout the text, I have scattered conflicting clues as to the sex of the therapist, the novel’s first-person narrator, but I was careful never to define the therapist as either a man or a woman. With certain exceptions, in many languages a writer and a translator can easily disguise or at least avoid the matter of the narrator’s sex. A writer can also play with this ambiguity, as is the case in my novel My Friend Natalia.
Some readers have been convinced that the narrator is a man, others have considered the therapist a woman. Several readers have told me that their perception of the matter changed as they were reading. Readers always read a text through the prism of their own experiences, preconceptions and cultural stereotypes.
For this reason, I wanted to read the Finnish audiobook of My Friend Natalia myself. I am a woman, but because I am the book’s author my voice is above all an authorial voice, and in this way I feel I managed to resolve the dilemma described above.

But my relief was somewhat premature. I was once again forced to confront this matter in early 2021 when Penguin Random House Audio began to produce the English-language audiobook of David Hackston’s translation of My Friend Natalia (W.W. Norton/Liveright).

PHR Audio’s producer kindly sent me a number of audio samples to listen to. All these samples were very professional and of the highest quality, but still they were unsuitable for my novel’s narrator. I started to lose hope. Was it at all possible to find an actor whose voice was neither that of a man nor a woman, a voice that wasn’t too young as it should be a voice that conveys the therapist’s wealth of professional experience? The voice also needed dash of pompous embitterment, stemming from the fact that nobody seems to value the therapist’s subtle genius.

But we were lucky, and eventually we found an excellent voice, that of the actor TL Thompson, who identifies as non-binary and whom I chose as the English-language reader for My Friend Natalia.

Thompson’s voice is characterful, mesmerizing and unforced. To my own ear, Thompson’s voice sounds more masculine than feminine, or perhaps it’s the whisky baritone of an elderly lady. However, the voice is not remotely “gender-neutral,” a voice-type that we tried to look for at first and whose very existence I have seriously begun to doubt. Thompson’s voice made every sentence oscillate between the two. I have not written such oscillation into my novel, let alone a gender-neutral narrator’s voice: the question of the therapist’s identity opens up—if, indeed, it opens up at all—when readers find themselves indulging in assumptions that the text does not affirm.

I can say quite whole-heartedly that I love Thompson’s reading. Yet in the same breath, I must reiterate what I have already said: an audiobook is a different entity from a printed book.

*

For me, the act of interpretation is specifically that of thinking with the book. It requires stops, pauses, flicking through the pages, making notes in the margins. The book takes on markings, layers that are missing from digital products, which are perpetually new.
We can browse with our eyes but not with our ears, as my partner, who works with sound, would put it. The ear is more sensitive to chaos and clamor than the eye. Sound operates like a one-directional timeline, a surge that is hard to control. A detailed auditive perception of a large space is simply impossible.

It is to these very layers that I return when trying to form an understanding of the kind of book I am reading. I can easily locate markings I have made by flicking through a book, even if it is a book I read 20 years ago.

The various temporal strata of my home library provide a shadow story of what has touched me and who I have been throughout my reading life. Last summer I awoke to the immeasurable value of these little scribblings when going through my grandmother’s estate after she died at the age of 100. From the collection of religious books, treatises and notebooks, I saved those in which my grandmother had left some kind of mark—and exclamation mark, a line under a section of text, or a Biblical verse in the margin. These markings reveal not only what touched her and who she was; they also say a lot about where I have come from, what kind of supra-generational reality I carry with me.

ARTICLE
https://lithub.com/how-stories-change-when-they-move-from-page-to-voice/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2014%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list

New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives will finally be published, starting next year.

By Dan Sheehan
June 23, 2021, 11:21am

The publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and vital literature in American history.”

As reported by Publishers Weekly earlier today<  read below  > , the mega-deal gives HarperCollins world rights “to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.”

Given the significance of the books in question, it seems strange that a deal like this one wasn’t made sooner, but this is welcome news nonetheless.

More welcome still is HC’s assertion that it will hire a dedicated archivist to oversee the project, and “engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.”

Way back in 1958, HC’s predecessor company Harper & Brothers published Dr. King’s very first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, which detailed the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and described the conditions of African Americans living in Alabama during the era.

The first MLK titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

ARTICLE
https://lithub.com/new-works-from-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-archives-will-finally-be-published-starting-next-year/

HC Inks Deal with MLK Jr. Archives
By Rachel Deahl | Jun 23, 2021

In an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., HarperCollins has acquired world publishing rights to the archives of the civil rights leader. The publisher said the collection features some of the "most historically important and vital literature in American history."

Judith Curr, president and publisher of HarperOne Group, negotiated the deal with Amy Berkower, president, Writers House and agent for the King estate; and Eric D. Tidwell of Intellectual Properties Management, manager of the King estate. The deal gives HC world rights to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.
HC said it plans to hire an archivist who will oversee the material in the archive and make it "available to all HarperCollins editors globally." HC added that it intends to "engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life."

HC also has history with King. A predecessor company to HC, Harper & Brothers, published King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, in 1958.

All current his King titles, including those published by Beacon Press, will continue to be publishing by their current rights holders.

“We are thrilled to be the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives,” said Curr in a statement. “We view this as a unique global publishing program."

The first King titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

ARTICLE
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/86731-hc-inks-deal-with-mlk-jr-archives.html
 

SOURCE ARTICLE
Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, Books for Palestine, and an Intro to Booktok: This Week in Book News
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/06/25/kobo-emerging-writer-prize-books-for-palestine-and-an-intro-to-booktok-this-week-in-book-news/
 

Superman will be Black
VIDEO

MY REPLY
He makes a few points. 
1st- news to me, I didn't know superman is going to be negro. I concur, old characters develop followings over time. King Arthur is not gay. If someone tried to make it where he was sleeping with lancelot it will be rejected. 
2nd- he is correct that initially black comic book characters have made money. But he misses DC/Warner bros problem. 
Take away Milestone, take away Marvel characters like Blade or the XMen or Spider man that now all are under Disney's roof. Name the top 5 DC black characters? 
Warner bros. see's money in courting the non white male. But DC Comics don't have a black panther/blade/storm/Luke Cage/Moonstone/Psylocke. so... 
3rd Both DC or MArvel are guilty of trying to court non white audiences by forcing a race change on a character. Look at what marvel did with captain marvel, a character that has a long complicated history of changes, and made a muslim girl captain marvel while captain marvel is still the blond haired woman flying in the stars...
4th- As Anthony McKay said, I am paraphrasing, I Am not playing Falcon, Falcon is being played by me. I think sometimes you get a personality like Momoa playing a lower character like Aquaman. You see the same thing with Deadpool/Doctor Strange/Black Widow/Nick Fury... as the actors who played them dominate their perception but that is cause none of them were well known outside comic circles beforehand, and the actors who portray them have a large media profile or following before them. That is why Downey Jr was able to dominate Iron man in a way he wasn't sherlock holmes. I never forget people saying with the first film, what is this martial arts? I have to admit the street fighting took me by surprise. I never forget how some fans ecried when Jackman was in his last wolverine depiction. Wolverine is not dead, but the audience is influenced.
5th- I end with , the video creator is correct, the goal is not to make money. The goal is to supercede the money made and that is where the problem resides. If Warner Bros/DC focused on a Black Lightnin project, as he is their first black titular character. It will make money but it will not make superman money and that is what the studios fail to realize is their problem. 
Going forward, an issue about new characters. I argue that DC spent too much time rebooting batman/superman and gave to little time to bringing in new characters. why is it: martian manhunter/green arrow/hawk woman or hawkman/black canary/mister terrific not have a film yet? These characters are as old and still remembered, I argue DC or MArvel is missing a trick by focusing on a narrow set of characters. TO be blunt, huntress/black canary warrant a standalone movie, that birds of prey was premature.  Marvel's problem is simple, can they move on from iron man/captain america. Can Marvel let characters die and stay dead, that is the question. The avengers don't need captain america or iron man or vision or black widow to come back. I think they should all stay dead. The black widow movie is a temporal prequel. I think they need to respect the world they created and make Shuri black panther. It makes sense. Tchalla died by some rare space disease or whatever. Make sHuri the black panther. harry potter fans still complain about gambon as dumbledore