Entertainment

Best Picture Nod for ‘Selma’ Caps Big Year for Black Women

Published

10 years ago

February 16, 2015

Reporter II

Ava DuVernay, director of the film “Selma.” (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

Sandy Cohen, ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three black women released movies in 2014, more than ever before in a single year. And one of them is a contender for the motion picture academy’s top prize.

But that’s just three films in one year — out of the 373 that came out in theaters.

Black female filmmakers are one of Hollywood’s greatest rarities. In the past seven years, only three were connected to the top 700 movies, according to recent research by the University of Southern California’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative.

“The ecosystem of filmmaking is problematic for women and people of color,” said initiative director Stacy L. Smith. More than 95 percent of the directors of top-grossing films during the past decade have been men, she said. Looking at the top 700 films over a recent seven-year period, almost 90 percent of them were white.

So while there’s been a lot of talk about the lack of diversity among this year’s Oscar acting nominees, the larger issue may be the overwhelming lack of diversity among those telling the stories on the big screen.

“Selma” director Ava DuVernay, as a black woman, defied incredible odds with her film’s best-picture bid at next Sunday’s Academy Awards. But was it merely an exception?

“The push for me is that it doesn’t stay an anomaly,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, writer and director of “Beyond the Lights,” which earned an Oscar nod this year for its original song, “Grateful.”

“The Oscars are not the problem,” said Prince-Bythewood, whose credits include 2008’s “The Secret Life of Bees” and her 2000 breakthrough, “Love & Basketball.” ”It’s more so Hollywood and the films that are being greenlit.”

She finds the dearth of stories about women equally disheartening. “Belle” director Amma Asante agreed, noting that all of this year’s eight best-picture contenders are about men. And DuVernay is the only female director behind any best-picture nominee.

Asante, DuVernay and Prince-Bythewood credit coincidental timing and continued hard work for their accomplishments in 2014.

Asante suggests the success of “12 Years A Slave,” ”The Butler” and “Mandela” in 2013 may have contributed to their films being financed the same year.

“We were lucky that they all got greenlit at a time when the films that came before us were showing that these films were important and they were attracting audiences,” she said.

But there’s no momentum if the number of women and people of color behind the camera don’t continue to increase, DuVernay said.

“Three is not enough. While we celebrate the three, we’re talking three in the hundreds of films that came out last year between the U.K. and the United States,” she said. “Unless (our success) equals more women being able to do the same thing next year — which legacy says is probably not going to happen — then we’re still at the same place.”

So how can non-white, non-male voices speak more loudly in Hollywood?

Financing is often the first obstacle. Smith’s research finds a general perception in Hollywood that stories by or about women are more niche than mainstream, and therefore less profitable. Asante laughs at that.

“We’re half the population!” she said. Recent blockbusters like “Gone Girl” and “The Hunger Games” franchise show large audiences will come see female-led films.

The frustrating truth, DuVernay and the other directors said, is that the number of female filmmakers of any ethnicity working in Hollywood has remained essentially unchanged for the past two decades, hovering around five percent.

But they insist women have to keep making movies, despite the odds.

“Stop waiting for someone to say it’s OK to move forward,” DuVernay said. “You just have to find a way to make the work. … You have to make it with what you have and by any means necessary.”

Be sure to make them good movies, added Prince-Bythewood, since quality, heartfelt stories speak to everyone.

“People do not go to the theater out of guilt,” she said. “A film should not be medicine. … I want people to go to my films because they’re good.”

Even films with wide appeal across ethnicity and gender can be impeded by marginalized marketing based on the women-as-niche perspective, she said. “Beyond the Lights,” her contemporary story about a pop star who finds love outside the spotlight, was marketed almost exclusively to women, she lamented, even though early screenings were well received by both genders.

“Let’s not assume that an audience is not going to respond to a film,” she said. “Put it out there and make it enticing for men and women.”

It just makes good business sense, Asante and DuVernay said. Today’s broadening TV landscape — which has been quicker to embrace women and people of color — gives viewers hundreds of good reasons to skip the theater and stay home.

“When you allow a variety of people to look through their lens and tell a story through their lens,” Asante said, “what you get is a more interesting variety of films at your local cinema.”

Audiences want to see movies that reflect the world around them, DuVernay said.

“If you are a person … that has a human spirit looking to be enlarged, you cannot do that staying in the same room with the same people,” she said. “It’s not about diversity. It’s not about even inclusion or representation. It’s about reality.”

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen at http://www.twitter.com/APSandy.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

###

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Arts and Culture

In ‘Affrilachia: Testimonies,’ Puts Blacks in Appalacia on the Map

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Author Chris Aluka. Photo courtesy of Chris Aluka.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez

An average oak tree is bigger around than two people together can reach.

That mighty tree starts out with an acorn the size of a nickel, ultimately growing to some 80 feet tall, with a canopy of a hundred feet or more across.

And like the new book, “Affrilachia” by Chris Aluka Berry (with Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam), its roots spread wide and wider.

Affriclachia is a term a Kentucky poet coined in the 1990s referring to the Black communities in Appalachia who are similarly referred to as Affrilachians.

In 2016, “on a foggy Sunday morning in March,” Berry visited Affrilachia for the first time by going the Mount Zion AME Zion Church in Cullowhee, North Carolina. The congregation was tiny; just a handful of people were there that day, but a pair of siblings stood out to him.

According to Berry, Ann Rogers and Mae Louise Allen lived on opposite sides of town, and neither had a driver’s license. He surmised that church was the only time the elderly sisters were together then, but their devotion to one another was clear.

As the service ended, he asked Allen if he could visit her. Was she willing to talk about her life in the Appalachians, her parents, her town?

She was, and arrangements were made, but before Barry could get back to Cullowhee, he learned that Allen had died. Saddened, he wondered how many stories are lost each day in mountain communities where African Americans have lived for more than a century.

“I couldn’t make photographs of the past,” he says, “but I could document the people and places living now.”

In doing so he also offers photographs that he collected from people he met in ‘Affrilachia,’ in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, at a rustic “camp” that was likely created by enslaved people, at churches, and in modest houses along highways.

The people he interviewed recalled family tales and community stories of support, hardship, and home.

Says coauthor Navies, “These images shout without making a sound.”

If it’s true what they say about a picture being worth 1,000 words, then “Affrilachia,” as packed with photos as it is, is worth a million.

With that in mind, there’s not a lot of narrative inside this book, just a few poems, a small number of very brief interviews, a handful of memories passed down, and some background stories from author Berry and his co-authors. The tales are interesting but scant.

For most readers, though, that lack of narrative isn’t going to matter much. The photographs are the reason why you’d have this book.

Here are pictures of life as it was 50 years or a century ago: group photos, pictures taken of proud moments, worn pews, and happy children. Some of the modern pictures may make you wonder why they’re included, but they set a tone and tell a tale.

This is the kind of book you’ll take off the shelf, and notice something different every time you do. “Affrilachia” doesn’t contain a lot of words, but it’s a good choice when it’s time to branch out in your reading.

“Affrilachia: Testimonies,” by Chris Aluka Berry with Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam

c.2024, University of Kentucky Press, $50.00.

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Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024

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December 20, 2024

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Arts and Culture

Promise Marks Performs Songs of Etta James in One-Woman Show, “A Sunday Kind of Love” at the Black Repertory Theater in Berkeley

“The (show) is a fictional story about a character named Etta, aka Lady Peaches,” said Marks. “She falls in love with Johnny Rhythm, leader of the Rhythm Players Band and headliners of Madam G’s Glitta Lounge.” Marks channeled the essence of Etta James, singing favorites such as “Sugar on the Floor” and “At Last.”

Published

5 days ago

December 18, 2024

Oakland Post

Photo Courtesy Of Promise Marks.

Special to the Post

It was “A Sunday Kind of Love” at the Black Repertory Group Theater in Berkeley on Saturday night, Dec. 7. The one-woman musical based on the music of Etta James featured the multi-talented singer Promise Marks

Marks, who wrote and directed the musical, also owns PM Productions.

Marks channeled the essence of Etta James, singing favorites such as “Sugar on the Floor” and “At Last.”

In between her soulful songs, Marks narrated impactful moments of the love story and journey of blues and forgiveness.

Marks sultry voice carried the audience back to an era that echoed with the power of Black music and a time of great change.

Marks said James shared love for the Black community by singing at gatherings during the Civil Rights Movement uplifting the people.

“She spoke to the movement, spoke to the people, and let her music speak for itself,” Marks said.

Backing the musical’s monologues, images and videos of Etta James are projected for the audience to view. While the production is fictional, Marks infused script with the unfairness and heartbreak James experienced while performing.

Marks performed gospel artist Donnie McClurkin’s “We Fall Down” as she narrated acts of reconciliation and forgiveness among the characters at Johnny Rhythm’s deathbed.

Marks, who regularly sings for the Miss America Pageant, was asked to perform as Etta James last year. “(At the event) a lady yelled out to me: ‘You’re Etta James!’ And then the audience went crazy. I said to myself, ‘I may have something here,’” she said.

Within 12 months, Marks created the musical production, which featured a dozen songs honoring “the great legacy of Etta James,” she said.

Marks says she was saddened to see how Etta James was often judged by the struggles in her life and wanted to offer attendees a more layered view.

“Etta’s life was so big. I want people to know that she was more than her drug addiction,” said Marks. “We can’t make that her legacy. Her catalog is too amazing. You can’t just be that and have the catalog that she (created). I don’t want the addiction to be the focus: I want her music, her element, her sassiness, and what she brought to be the focus – her woman-ness, that she was strong, and I wanted to honor that.”

Set Designer Nora Burnette says she created the set segments to mirror James’ life story. A set designer for BRG since 2016, she explained that her process of researching the scenario and the character serve as her inspiration for her design.

“I try to design a set as close to real life as possible so that the actress can deliver the performance sincerely,” said Burnette. “By creating the right setting, it helps the actors release the true essence of a character.”

The set brought the story to life and absolutely floored Marks. “Once Promise (Marks) saw the actual set, she understood my vision: ‘Wow, you get me. You get it,'” Marks told the designer.

Born Jamesetta Hawkins, Etta James, began her career in 1954 and gained fame with hits such “At Last” and “I’d Rather Go Blind.” She faced a number of personal problems, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album “Seven Year Itch.”

Co-producer and BRG Development Director, Sean Vaughn Scott, works with Overseer Production. According to producer Pamela Spikes, “Marks talent truly does Etta’s life story justice.”

Pam Jacobs of Hercules, a friend of Marks’ mom, Jackie Smith, said, Marks “was fabulous and sang all of those songs flawlessly.”

“I’m so proud of my daughter,” said Smith.

Marks, who has served as an instructor for BRG, will return on Feb. 21- 23 for an encore run of the musical.

“It’s an honor to be a part of the BRG (Black Repertory Group) family and continue our executive director Dr. Mona Vaughn Scott’s vision for the Black Repertory Group theater,” said Marks.

The Black Repertory Group Theatre is located at 3201 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA 94703. For information, visit: BlackRepertoryGroup.com