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      Poitier and Bogdanovich: The Defiant Ones

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      Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich were geniuses of the Hollywood system who, with great success and frustration, worked to transform it in the same era.Last week, the movies lost two giants — Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich — who each made history in his own way. Our chief film critics discussed the men, their careers and their legacies.MANOHLA DARGIS When Poitier and Bogdanovich died last week, you and I talked about how each had helped shape the periods in which they emerged. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. We know their careers briefly overlapped: Bogdanovich directed Poitier in the 1996 TV movie “To Sir, With Love 2,” a sequel to the 1967 film. For the most part, though, they had separate trajectories partly shaped by race, personal choices and what was happening both in the country and the industry.It’s fascinating to trace the arcs of these separate paths. Poitier’s begins first, with his big big-studio break, the 1950 drama “No Way Out.” He was working in Jim Crow Hollywood that he would later help overturn, but it took so long. In some ways, the pressures and contradictions he faced came to a head at the end of the decade first with the release of “The Defiant Ones” in 1958, in which he has equal billing with Tony Curtis. A year later, though, Poitier is on his knees playing Porgy in “Porgy and Bess,” a role that he’d rejected but was effectively forced into taking.A.O. SCOTT Bogdanovich was fundamentally a historian. Poitier was a history maker. When we started talking about them side by side, it wasn’t to compare their achievements, but to look at how their very different careers illuminated the changes underway in American movies after the studio era.Poitier came up in that system and had no illusions about its interest in racial progress. “Hollywood never really had much of a conscience,” he told an interviewer. “The social conscience that you’re talking about” — the durable myth of liberal Hollywood — “was always only a handful of men,” among them Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who made “No Way Out” and Stanley Kramer, who directed “The Defiant Ones.” “This town never was infected by that kind of goodness,” Poitier said. He could never romanticize Old Hollywood the way Bogdanovich did.Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.” Poitier never romanticized Old Hollywood.United ArtistsDARGIS Absolutely — among other things, I doubt that Poitier would have had access to all those at-times forgotten Old Hollywood veterans like John Ford and Orson Welles. Bogdanovich championed them in his writing and advocacy, and he learned about moviemaking through their conversations and by watching them work. I was looking at Bogdanovich’s anthology “Who the Devil Made It” and he was 20 when he did his first interview, in 1960, with Sidney Lumet. At that point, Bogdanovich had been studying acting with Stella Adler — presumably one reason he was fantastic with actors — and had worked in some 40 professional stage productions, one he directed. What a wunderkind!That year, Poitier turned 33 and started shooting “Paris Blues,” a film that I love despite its flaws, including his marginalization. Still, the film has Poitier and Diahann Carroll playing lovers and they’re beautiful, and shown as desiring and desirable. Poitier was disappointed with how the film turned out and said the studio had “chickened out on us” — he was always being sold out, it seems by the white powers that be, however ostensibly well-intentioned those powers. In 1960, he also joined a campaign to raise defense funds for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It takes nothing away from Bogdanovich to say that Poitier lived in an entirely different reality.SCOTT With Bogdanovich, it could seem that reality was defined above all by movies and his love for them. His cinephilia marks him as a charter member, along with guys like George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, of what used to be called “the film school generation.” Not that Bogdanovich ever went to film school.“Generally I find film schools disappointing,” he told an audience at the American Film Institute. “They spend far too much time on production and not enough time showing the right films to students. Students need to see the classics.” Some of his best films — the modern-day screwball “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972); the black-and-white, Depression-set road movie “Paper Moon” (1973) — are full of that reverence for tradition.Bogdanovich with Barbra Streisand, who starred in his “What’s Up, Doc?”Warner Bros., via Getty ImagesTatum O’Neal in Bogdanovich’s road movie “Paper Moon.”Paramount PicturesSome of the less good ones, too. In “Nickelodeon” (1976), he tried to bring some of the charm of early cinema into the New Hollywood, casting Ryan O’Neal as an accidental picture-maker and Burt Reynolds as a rough-riding screen idol. They spend the early 1910s scraping together two-reelers and battling industry consolidation, and wind up at the 1915 premiere of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of A Nation,” showing under its original title, “The Clansman.” In keeping with the dominant Hollywood origin story of the time, that movie is hailed as an artistic and commercial breakthrough — goodbye nickelodeons, hello movie palaces! — while its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan is brushed aside.The story of the late ’60s, early ’70s renaissance in American movies is conventionally told as a tale of heroic, rebellious white men. But as with the silent era, the truth is more complicated and more interesting. The period was also when Poitier (along with other Black pioneers like Gordon Parks, Ossie Davis and Melvin Van Peebles) turned to directing. He started out with a western, “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), set in the post-Civil War landscape familiar from so many Ford pictures. He also starred in it, with Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee. Do you think the choice of genre — and his treatment of its tropes — says something about his own relationship to the Hollywood past?DARGIS No doubt, though that relationship to genre was very different from that of those white directors, Bogdanovich included, who revisited (or were swallowed by) classic film forms in the 1960s and ’70s. In Poitier’s memoir “The Measure of a Man,” he talks about seeing his first film as a kid. It was a western and he was so wowed that he told his sister, “I would like to go to Hollywood and become a cowboy.” He didn’t know what Hollywood was; he thought people raised cows there — a child’s misapprehension that’s all the more poignant given how historically unwelcoming the town was to Black talent.One reason Poitier appeared in the western “Duel at Diablo” (1966), he said, was that it gave him an opportunity to create a heroic image for Black children who love westerns. He was apparently disappointed by this movie, as well, and his love for westerns and the complex iconography of the American cowboy were not yet in sync. Imagine the representational weight that his version of “The Wild Bunch” or a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” might have carried in the late 1960s! Belafonte and Poitier had been interested in making a western but nothing came of this until they teamed up for “Buck and the Preacher,” which we both adore as much for its behind-the-scenes story as the one onscreen.Poitier got his start directing when he stepped in on “Buck and the Preacher.” Columbia Pictures, via Getty ImagesSCOTT That story is a sign of how things were changing. Belafonte and Poitier were the producers. They didn’t see eye to eye with the first director, Joseph Sargent, and asked Columbia Pictures to replace him. Shooting had already started in Mexico, and Poitier offered to take over temporarily so the production could keep going while the studio looked for someone else. “Finally they called and said, ‘Why don’t you just continue shooting?’” Poitier remembered years later. “That’s how I started directing. I was just thrown into it.”Poitier went on to become one of the most successful comic directors of the next decade, playing straight man to Bill Cosby in the crime-caper trilogy “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), “Let’s Do It Again” (1975) and “A Piece of the Action” (1977), and steering Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder through the incarceration farce “Stir Crazy” (1980).Those were also Bogdanovich’s best years. We don’t have room to revisit all the dramatic ups and downs of his career, but I think there’s some perspective on that much-mythologized era to be gained by comparing how he and Poitier navigated the changes in Hollywood. It’s instructive, for example, that both were involved in attempts by groups of artists to take advantage of the waning power of the studios and assert their own independence. Poitier was a founder of First Artists, which brought together movie stars (including Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand) seeking creative control. Inspired by that example, Bogdanovich, with Coppola and William Friedkin, organized the Directors Company. Both experiments ultimately failed, which may say as much about Hollywood as the fact that they were tried in the first place.DARGIS Part of the pathos of the 1970s is that for all the great films made that decade — including by Poitier and Bogdanovich — the era laid the ground for the conglomeration, blockbuster-fication and Disney-fication of the industry. The two men traveled different roads, created tremendous work, won the industry’s highest honors and made a lot of money for a lot of people. But by the end of the 1970s, each one’s glory years were over. They kept working, on and off, with success and not, until they were the kind of faded greats the culture is happy to forget until they’re old enough to nostalgically venerate. I’m glad that at least we can do that, and watch their movies, too. The work is all over the place but it’s also immortal. More

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      A Rising Designer Brings Hip-Hop to Homeware

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      Sean Brown is the creative force behind Curves, a home décor brand inspired by African American pop culture. “I always aim to celebrate Blackness,” he said.The Toronto-based designer Sean Brown made a splash in 2020 with rugs inspired by classic CDs that you might have come across while scrolling through Instagram. In just a few years, Curves, which started with an event at a Toronto gallery, has grown into a contemporary homeware brand that offers products inspired by hip-hop (a color-changing umbrella featuring lyrics from Mobb Deep and Missy Elliott; a grocery tote depicting music video stills), stocked by stores around the globe.But Brown, 35, did not have a typical designer’s childhood filled with trips to art galleries and museums. Growing up in a strict household in Toronto, he rebelled after his parents’ divorce, landing in a group home at 14 and then in a foster home until he was 19. (He’s since reconciled with his parents, he said.) As he bounced around high schools without graduating, he started designing T-shirts.He would eventually do a year at a design school, where his interest in fashion and hip-hop intensified. Diddy in particular had an outsized influence on him. “I studied every outfit, I studied every step, I studied every chain,” he said of the rap mogul. “Everything about him I studied. The cover art. The art direction. The jiggy, the shiny suits. He has so much to do with my outlook on aesthetics.”A view of some of Brown’s CD rugs, left, and his vintage magazine collection.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesIn 2013, he and a friend started a pop-up vintage store, then came NEEDS & WANTS, a men’s sportswear brand from Brown and his partners. (The label’s varsity jacket landed in GQ.) Brown began working with the Canadian R&B singer Daniel Caesar on wardrobe styling, photography, graphic design and directing. Thus began a career in the music industry, where he’d handle design in various capacities for artists like SZA and Baby Keem.Meanwhile, he released a number of design objects, including a throw blanket and a puzzle set. When the pandemic hit, “I was like, I don’t think it’s going to get normal anytime soon, so let me settle into this new apartment,” he said. “I need a rug, I need a coffee table. Then it just turned into home décor.” Curves recently issued the Archway Chair and Puddle Mirror.At an interview in Brooklyn, where he was shooting and interviewing subjects for a new biannual magazine, tentatively set to be released in early 2022, Brown spoke enthusiastically about making design accessible, the influence of the video director Hype Williams and Brown’s very short stint in Diddy’s universe. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How do you define the Curves brand?To encourage people to think about the space that they occupy or where they come from, how it looks, how it affects their quality of life. A contemporary take on everyday objects. The starting point usually has cultural nuances. I’m always injecting culture into it. Black culture, Black music, Black art — always celebrating that. The other part about Curves is making design accessible to the people who need to be introduced to design.So far, most people know you for those rugs that look like CDs. Any worry that they will overshadow your newer work?It’s important to always keep doing things that people care about and to keep creative and to keep curious. That’s why I was like, yo, let’s do mirrors, let’s do incense hands, let’s do shelving, let’s do chairs. It’s almost like a hit song. Once you get three hit songs, people know you’re here to stay.Two of Brown’s decorative floor mirrors.James LeeWhat is the process from idea to physical product?So it’s like, OK, I really want to do a puddle mirror and then Iva Golubovic [his manager and a co-owner and creative producer of Curves] will be like, ‘I feel you, slow down.’ Then she’ll go and find someone like a manufacturer who can do the thing and just work through it with them, the technical aspect, and then bring in an engineer.Now we linked up with these guys who are our mill workers and they’re just as passionate as we are. And now we’re going to go full blown into furniture at this point, like bed heads, tables.You collect vintage magazines like Vibe. Why do you like print so much?Starting to own media, by way of the internet, I didn’t have to go to a library and open up books anymore. But then once my brain felt like the information was too overloaded, that’s when I wanted to dial it back, start being like, remember all the magazines you used to collect? Remember all the tangible data where you could just flip through? I was a liner notes kid, you know what I mean? So I think that that’s getting lost right now, heavily. People’s reference points and their research is very shallow. I have the physical data of history to be able to go back to these magazines and be like, yo, there was a time Foxy Brown [was] in the Calvin Klein ad or Erykah Badu for Gap. I have all of it. The tangible, beyond Tumblr.Where else do you turn for inspiration?Old music, old movies, old commercials, old media, but only to reference and not copy. Like, how can I reimagine this thing? Still Tumblr, honestly. Tumblr is like my collection of media in digital form. It doesn’t come with the social aspect of social media. You can just be on there, in your own world, dictating your own tastes, whatever you want to see.You also seem to have a real affinity for the director Hype Williams, who made his name making music videos for artists like Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes and the Notorious B.I.G. in the 1990s.Him and [the artist and filmmaker] Kahlil Joseph, they can take something like the hood or like a housing project and make it look so beautiful. They make it look like high art. I was watching as a child without knowing the political side of it, like how the government takes these people who are disenfranchised and throws them in a housing project. But then out of it you get a genre like hip-hop. That’s why when I think through design, I always aim to celebrate Blackness because a lot of it is birthed out of disparity. We’re given these [expletive] circumstances and then we can make something so beautiful out of it.You can see the lineage from a Hype, who was so influenced by Stanley Kubrick. You can see connections if you watch [“2001: A Space Odyssey.”] You can see Missy Elliott and Busta videos in a lot of that, if you’re really paying attention. But obviously Stanley Kubrick wasn’t coming from a housing project in New York. And that is the missing link. There have to be people in history who can make connections. I’m always at the intersection of things.The Archway Chair is one of the latest products from Curves.James LeeYou contributed creative direction to Diddy’s Combs Enterprises for only eight months, before parting ways.I was 34. I wasn’t a kid who was looking for an opportunity; I wasn’t trying to be an intern. I knew who I was and I was there to tell the truth. And what I believe was the intent to protect his creative and to take his creative to another level. Once we realized that that wasn’t sustainable, I just couldn’t go along with the program of being a yes man, I just wasn’t going to do it. The truth is, for a person who wants things done a certain way and wants everyone to go along with the program, I’m a cancer to all that. I have to be honest. If that meant losing a gig with him, then so be it. The next day I went right back to wearing Sean John. [A spokeswoman for Combs Enterprises declined to comment.]You don’t seem bitter.No. Look where I’m coming from — I’m the little foster kid.How much do you think Instagram is shaping how we’re designing our homes, and is that good or bad?It’s why I love Tumblr, because it’s the media without the social, so you could pick apart inspiration, download it, be inspired by things, decorate your home off that and there’s no pressure of the social community. Instagram is like the same thing: You have access to information overload, seeing everyone decorate their homes, but now you’re under pressure because, like, who likes it? I just think the social part of things is bad, but I don’t think the sharing part is bad.I think it’s great that you could see into so many people’s homes. I think that’s fire.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesThat could be an added layer of pressure, because so much homeware is expensive. A millennial person could think, “I want to show off my house, but I can’t afford all that.” There’s a class boundary and a level of insecurity that comes up for some people.Start small. You ain’t got to have the large three way couch. Start with a shower curtain. The CD rugs.Is there a dollar amount that equals success for you?Not a dollar amount, but I would say enough, enough provision. So that I’m content in a sense where I’m not trying to be filthy rich. I don’t need to own a basketball team, but I like nice things. I want to be able to provide for my family. I want to be able to put money away. I want to be able to give things back. It has to do with the word completion, being complete, feeling complete, completing the mission, being your complete self. More

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      Max Julien, Star of a Cult Blaxploitation Film, Dies at 88

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      Black audiences flocked to see him in “The Mack,” and generations of cinephiles have paid homage to his star turn, his smooth delivery and his extraordinary costumes.Max Julien, the sultry, soft-voiced actor and screenwriter who rose to pop-culture prominence with his starring role in “The Mack,” a 1973 film about the rise and fall of a pimp, died on Jan. 1 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 88.His wife, Arabella Chavers Julien, said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.“The Mack” is the story of Goldie, a young man who is framed and sent to jail, and who upon his release aims to make his fortune and his name by becoming a pimp. (The word “mack” is an Americanization of “maquereau,” French street slang for pimp.) It’s a hero’s journey, played out on the mean streets of Oakland, Calif., a real-life war zone in the early 1970s presided over by Black crime lords and Black militants, who battled each other for turf.Mr. Julien’s Goldie had a gentle gravitas and a kinetic sidekick, portrayed by Richard Pryor. Mr. Julien said that he and Mr. Pryor, working off a story written in prison by an actual convict, wrote much of the screenplay, though they did not receive credit onscreen.In the decades since its release, “The Mack” has accrued legions of devotees who can recite its lines verbatim. Artists like Snoop Dogg, Too Short and others have sampled its dialogue in their work. Quentin Tarantino paid homage to it in his script for the 1993 film “True Romance.” In 2013, when the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art held a screening in honor of the film’s 40th anniversary, Mr. Tarantino lent his vintage 35-millimeter print.“The film is a blaxploitation classic,” Todd Boyd, chair for the study of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, said in an interview. Part of the film’s legend is that Oakland’s crime boss, Frank Ward, gave the filmmakers his protection so they could shoot there. (He has a cameo as himself, dispensing pimp wisdom in a barbershop scene as a barber tends to his kingly locks.) The movie’s vernacular and its rituals were authentic, and they still fascinate, as do the clothes.Goldie’s single-breasted white fur maxi-coat was a character in its own right. (Years later, Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, would offer Mr. Julien $10,000 for it, Mr. Julien told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. It now lives in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Mr. Julien had a hand in the film’s costumes and made sure they were crafted by local Black clothing designers, he said in a 2002 documentary about the film.The white fur maxi-coat worn by Mr. Julien’s character in “The Mack” is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureWhile the blaxploitation genre was problematic for some — Junius Griffin, then president of the Hollywood branch of the N.A.A.C.P., coined the term and described its themes as “just another form of cultural genocide” — urban Black audiences flocked to movies like “The Mack.” (The Los Angeles Times noted in 2013 that it was released in only 20-odd theaters in African American communities but quoted its director, Michael Campus, as saying it did better in those cities than “The Godfather” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”)Such movies “were critic-proof,” Dr. Boyd said. “People were not reading Pauline Kael reviews to determine if they should go see these films.”Melvin Van Peebles had set the tone with “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” his independently made 1971 box-office hit about a performer in a sex show turned revolutionary. Gordon Parks’s “Shaft,” less transgressive but still wildly popular, appeared the same year.By the late 1970s, the blaxploitation category had fizzled out. A decade later, young cinephiles and hip-hop artists would devour VHS tapes of “The Mack” and other gems from that era — a trove of movies with powerful Black imagery that also included “Super Fly” and “Black Caesar.”“Because of Hollywood’s racism,” Dr. Boyd said, “at the time there was just not that much else. And the tale of an underworld figure like Goldie, working outside the system, was enormously appealing to the young rising stars of a new musical genre, gangsta rap.”Mr. Julien worked as a screenwriter, too. “Cleopatra Jones” (1973), which he wrote, featured a different kind of hero, on the right side of the law. It starred the statuesque Tamara Dobson as a machine-gun-toting, martial-arts-swirling model and undercover agent on a mission to rid her community of drugs. (Shelley Winters played a drug lord named Mommy.)He also wrote “Thomasine & Bushrod,” a lightly feminist western, released in 1974, and starred in it with Vonetta McGee, his girlfriend at the time. The film brings to mind a sweeter and goofier version of the 1967 movie “Bonnie & Clyde.” Mr. Julien said he was inspired by the exploits of a great-grandfather, a bank robber named Bushrod, to turn his family history into a love story.Maxwell Julien Banks was born on July 12, 1933, in Washington. His father, Seldon Bushrod Banks, was an airline mechanic. His mother, Cora (Page) Banks, was a restaurant owner. She was murdered in her home in 1972, and Mr. Julien said that his grief over her death influenced his performance in “The Mack.”He won a basketball scholarship to Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., where he spent a year before transferring to Howard University. He joined the Air Force in 1955 and served as an air traffic controller before beginning his acting career. He took his middle name as his stage name because he felt it sounded more theatrical than Banks.Mr. Julien played a Black militant in “Getting Straight,” a much-panned 1970 drama about campus unrest starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, and appeared in “Uptight,” a 1968 update of the 1935 movie “The Informer” written by Ruby Dee and directed by Jules Dassin. He also acted on television. He and Ms. Chavers Julien married in 1991. She is his only immediate survivor.As much as Mr. Julien enjoyed the accolades from generations of “The Mack” fans — he appeared as a suave, pimplike elder in the 1997 comedy “How To Be a Player” — he told Dr. Boyd that he often felt his Goldie character overshadowed his own persona.Mr. Julien and Vonetta McGee in the 1974 film “Thomasine & Bushrod,” for which he wrote the screenplay. He said he was inspired by the exploits of a great-grandfather who was a bank robber to turn his family history into a love story. Columbia Pictures, via PhotofestEarly on, he also disliked the term “blaxploitation,” which he felt diminished his work.“The average white audience has had opportunities to explore every facet of their existence by now,” he told The Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1974, the year “Thomasine & Bushrod” was released. “No one ever talks about white exploitation films. If ‘The Sting’ had been done by Ron O’Neal” — the star of “Super Fly” — “and Max Julien, everyone would have called it Black exploitation. A 10-year-old kid came up to us in Baltimore and thanked us for making the picture. He said he’d read about Black cowboys all his life, but didn’t believe it until he saw it on the screen.”He added: “Blacks didn’t want to see ‘Sounder’” — the 1972 film taken from the book of the same name about a poor Black boy, his dog and the grim travails of his sharecropping family in the 1930s. “That’s not the image they want. They’ve seen that image all their life.” More

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      Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94

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      The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No cause was given.Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry.Matt Sayles/Associated PressMr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.Mr. Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws.Columbia Pictures“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. Mr. Poitier and Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which Mr. Poitier won an Oscar. United ArtistsIn 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes.When he was 12, Mr. Poitier quit school and became a water boy for a crew of pick-and-shovel laborers. He also began getting into mischief, and his parents, worried that he was becoming a juvenile delinquent, sent him to Miami when he was 14 to live with a married brother, Cyril.Mr. Poitier played a Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger played a bigoted Mississippi sheriff in “In the Heat of Night,” one of three hit films in which Mr. Poitier appeared in 1967.Mirisch/United Artists, The Kobal CollectionMr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg. He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.In late 1943 Mr. Poitier lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, becoming an orderly with the 1267th Medical Detachment at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors.His first audition was a flop. With only a few years of schooling, he read haltingly, in a heavy West Indian accent. Frederick O’Neal, a founder of the theater, showed him the door and advised him to get a job as a dishwasher.Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay.His lucky break came when another actor at the theater, Harry Belafonte, did not show up for a rehearsal attended by a Broadway producer. Mr. Poitier took the stage instead and was given a part in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata” in 1946. Although panned by the critics, it led to a job with the road production of “Anna Lucasta.”“No Way Out” was followed by a sprinkling of film and television roles, but Mr. Poitier still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.In 1951 he married Juanita Marie Hardy, a dancer and model, whom he divorced in 1965. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina. In 1976 he married Joanna Shimkus, his co-star in “The Lost Man” (1969), a film about a gang of Black militants plotting to rob a factory. They had two daughters, Anika and Sydney.Ms. Shimkus survives him. His daughter Gina Patrice Poitier Gouraige died in 2018. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), which established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.United ArtistsAfter breakout movies like “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Defiant Ones,” Mr. Poitier’s fate was tied to Hollywood, his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote.In “The Defiant Ones” and “In the Heat of the Night,” racial politics coincided with meaty roles. Just as often, however, Mr. Poitier found himself playing virtuous messengers of racial harmony in mawkish films like “A Patch of Blue” (1965) or taking race-neutral roles in less than memorable films, like a newspaper reporter in the Cold War naval drama “The Bedford Incident” (1965), Simon of Cyrene in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) or the former cavalry sergeant in “Duel at Diablo” (1966). “The Defiant Ones” remained one of Mr. Poitier’s favorite films, but to get the part he had to cross swords with Samuel Goldwyn, who was assembling a cast for “Porgy and Bess.” After Mr. Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy as demeaning, Mr. Goldwyn set his sights on Mr. Poitier, who also regarded the musical as an insult to Black people. As Mr. Poitier told it in his lively, unusually frank first memoir, “This Life” (1980), Mr. Goldwyn pulled strings to ensure that unless Mr. Poitier played Porgy, the director Stanley Kramer would not hire him for “The Defiant Ones.”Mr. Poitier, seething, bowed to the inevitable. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967.The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers.His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”Mr. Poitier with Claudia McNeil in the 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Reviewing his performance, Brooks Atkinson of The Times wrote, “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control.”Leo FriedmanIn 1959 Mr. Poitier made a triumphant return to Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” winning ecstatic reviews. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “Cast as the restless son, he vividly communicates the tumult of a high-strung young man. He is as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak. He can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance.” Mr. Poitier repeated the role in the 1961 film version of the play.With the rise of Black filmmakers like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Poitier, now in his 40s, turned to directing and producing. He had proposed the idea for the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy” (1968), in which he starred with Abbey Lincoln. After joining with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand in 1969 to form a production company called First Artists, he directed the western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which he acted opposite Mr. Belafonte, and a series of comedies, notably “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), in which Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby teamed up to play a pair of scheming ne’er-do-wells, and “Stir Crazy” (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.The critics thought little of Mr. Poitier’s directing talents, but enthusiastic audiences, Black and white, made all three films box-office hits. Neither audiences nor critics found much to like in subsequent directorial efforts, like the comedy “Hanky Panky” (1982), with Mr. Wilder and Gilda Radner, or “Ghost Dad” (1990), with Mr. Cosby as a dead father who refuses to leave his three children alone.President Barack Obama presented Mr. Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his later years, Mr. Poitier turned in solid performances in forgettable action films and thrillers like “Shoot to Kill” (1988), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “Sneakers” (1992). It was television that provided him with two of his grandest roles.In 1991 he appeared in the lead role in the ABC drama “Separate but Equal,” a dramatization of the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk.“Sidney Poitier and Nelson Mandela merge with astonishing ease, like a double-exposure photograph in which one image is laid over the other with perfect symmetry,” Caryn James wrote in a review in The New York Times.In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture. (At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”) He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mr. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.Mr. Poitier’s memoir “This Life” was followed by a second, “The Measure of a Man,” in 2000. Subtitled “A Spiritual Autobiography,” it included Mr. Poitier’s thoughts on life, love, acting and racial politics. It generated a sequel, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter” (2008).Despite his role in changing American perceptions of race and opening the door to a new generation of Black actors, Mr. Poitier remained modest about his career. “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.” Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Watch Sidney Poitier’s 1964 Oscar Speech for His Historic Best Actor Win

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      Sidney Poitier made history in 1964 as the first Black performer to win an Oscar in the best-actor category, for Ralph Nelson’s comedy-drama “Lilies of the Field,” in which Mr. Poitier played Homer Smith, an itinerant worker who helps a group of nuns build a chapel in rural Arizona.“Because it is a long journey to this moment, I am naturally indebted to countless numbers of people,” he said in his acceptance speech, in which he thanked the creative team behind the film, his agent, and the members of the Academy. “For all of them, all I can say is a very special thank you.”Anne Bancroft, who had won the best actress Oscar in 1963 for her role as Anne Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” presented Mr. Poitier with the award. He was competing against Albert Finney (“Tom Jones”), Richard Harris (“This Sporting Life”), Rex Harrison (“Cleopatra”) and Paul Newman (“Hud”).When Mr. Poitier accepted an honorary Academy Award in 2002, he took a similar tack, thanking the “handful of visionary American filmmakers, directors, writers and producers” he said made his career possible by going against the odds.“Without them, this most memorable moment would not have come to pass and the many excellent young actors who have followed in admirable fashion might not have come as they have to enrich the tradition of American filmmaking as they have,” Mr. Poitier said. More

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      in Music

      The Vitality of Black Criticism

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      Before his death, Greg Tate spoke with four other critics at the Pop Conference about the need for Black writers to face down racist institutions and take the lead in cultural conversations.Last month, popular music lost one of its greatest philosophers and storytellers: The critic, scholar, teacher, musician and New York City grass-roots cultural icon Greg Tate, a towering intellect and a modern-day griot, died at 64. His singular critical prose — in The Village Voice and Vibe, among other outlets, and collected in two anthologies — seamlessly fused dense, dazzling vernacular wisdom and street corner wit with equally intricate ivory tower analytic discourse.When I set out to organize the “dream team” lineup for a round-table session titled “Black Critics Matter” for the 2021 Pop Conference — an annual gathering of journalists, academics, musicians and other creatives — Tate was the first person I contacted. In his 40-year career as a working critic, he revolutionized the form and content of music journalism by centering Blackness as both the analytic framework to engage and experience popular music as well as the language to tell the story of the music itself in living color.Our April session included three other pioneering writers: the critic, poet, novelist, playwright, librettist and scholar Thulani Davis; the New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris; and the veteran music journalist Danyel Smith, the host of the “Black Girl Songbook” podcast and author of the forthcoming “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” Below are edited excerpts from the hour-plus panel. (The full conversation is available here.)The conversation was wide-roving: at turns, intimate and candid, funny and incisive, moving and brutally honest, and consistently reflective and mindful of the under-acknowledged import of Black critical voices and the role that they play in challenging the racism at the foundations of cultural institutions, and the taste-making power those institutions continue to wield.We started by affirming simple truths: that Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story,” as Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang wrote in 2019, across the centuries, from Frederick Douglass’s sharp observations about blackface minstrelsy to the barrier-breaking journalism of theater and music columnists like Pauline Hopkins, Sylvester Russell and Lester Walton in the late 19th and early 20th century. The long Harlem Renaissance gave us figures like Nora Holt, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. And Amiri Baraka and Phyl Garland wed Black nationalist desire with fierce, experimental music criticism in the Black Arts era.Their work helped lead an intellectual revolution in writing and thinking about the importance of Black sound, but also more broadly showcased the meaning of being an informed, opinionated and passionate listener dedicated to inviting readers into felt and meaningful conversations about the culture that matters to them. Greg Tate carried that tradition forward with a combination of potent love for Black peoples and a swagger fueled by that same deep and unbridled affection. In April, when the annual PopCon holds its 20th anniversary gathering in Brooklyn, it’ll be a second-line lovefest for one of its greatest voices.DAPHNE A. BROOKS Many of us have been thinking for some time about the absolutely crucial role that critics of color, that women critics, that L.G.B.T.Q. critics can and have played in shifting and opening up and challenging the kinds of conversations, the value systems, taste-making, and gatekeeping rituals and processes that have long dominated mainstream popular music criticism. If 2020 reminded us of anything, it’s that the struggle for African American autonomy in the American body politic is a multifaceted one tied to necessary and interlocking social, political as well as cultural revolutions in valuing Black life. Culture critics, we know, play a pivotal role in identifying and narrating the dimensions of that value. But in the history of popular music culture across the 20th and 21st centuries, how often have we extensively imagined Black folks as critics, as knowledge producers in relation to their own expressive cultures?GREG TATE I discovered that music critics existed because I was doing research for a comic book I wanted to write back in the early ’70s. I went to the library and got all the books about music that I could find, one of which was Amiri Baraka’s “Black Music.” And after that, I exchanged comic book superheroes for great Black music superheroes, because the way Baraka wrote about Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor elevated them to the level of superheroes to me.The way he was able to bring his poetics into writing about music and left these indelible lines — these things, they’ve formed my own critical perspective, my own critical understanding of the way in which the opportunity to talk about the music is of course the opportunity to bring our whole lives to who we are. And it’s also the reason that most of us who were writing in the ’80s and ’90s really became, or were, multidisciplinary artists. We never thought that criticism was the be all and end all of what we had to offer.Between I’d say 1977 and 2000, there was a community of Black writers in New York: The Voice first, but then The Source and then Vibe. So all of us come into the game thinking of Black criticism is something we do as a gang. And because you had the near instant gratification of response from the community, you knew what you were writing was having impact. With The Voice, if it came out on Wednesday, you knew by Saturday what people were thinking of it.WESLEY MORRIS At some point I figured out that there were definitely some gaps in terms of who was speaking and who was writing about what. I would spend hours on end watching BET, VH1 and MTV, and you start to see that there are people being put in boxes by these programmers. I mean Joan Armatrading? She was never on MTV. I could see that there were things that needed to be addressed, or redressed, in terms of who was being acknowledged, whose existences were being acknowledged. There are Black women who’ve made music that changed my life that have never received a review in any magazines. The thoroughest description I got was Vibe, when it showed up. Because I had been waiting for that. I had been waiting for people to acknowledge that there was some merit to this music.I’ve noticed in the last 10 years, say, but it’s probably even older than that, that there is a real reluctance to seriously engage with the work and the craft of the work and what pop music is doing, what it sounds like. I don’t know if that’s a fear of getting it wrong. I don’t know if that’s a fear of what Twitter might do to you if you do get it wrong. This is related to a question of ethics, which is what is falling in that lacuna between greatness and crap that only criticism can both explicate and reify in some way. To me, it feels like a crisis that nobody’s really acknowledging, but I think that’s because there still aren’t enough Black people to pick that work up and do something.DANYEL SMITH Listen, it’s the criticism that’s missing in action without question. I am consistently, constantly in a mild panic about the music that has been created over the last 15 to 20 years that has not been listened to like it’s real music. I am concerned about artists like Cardi B and Drake, who are literally the biggest stars in the entire world, and their music is not talked about with a lot of seriousness. Comparing it to what happened in the past, comparing it to what could happen in the future, the context of when it came out to when it didn’t. Again, as an editor, I say, what about the knowing, deeply reported stories and the profiles that are not being written? The columns?It has to do, I think with there being a generation of Black writers who have not really ever worked with Black editors. And I think, flawed as we were, at Vibe, XXL, The Source, Essence — there were hip-hop magazines all over — there has not been enough of “I’m a Black editor that knows a lot; and I’m a Black writer that wants to know more.” I don’t know where they’re happening. Not nearly enough, anyway.TATE Well, I’ll first say, and this is in response to Wesley: Internet killed the Black music journalist star or the Black music star publication. But that was a different world we existed in just in terms of the power that labels had, right? If you wanted your music, you had to get it in a CD form from a major label. So the work we did as independent writers, and as “Blacketty-Black” as we were in the writing, it was very much tied to the commercial life of those publications: the ads The Voice got, Vibe got, Source got from labels. So on just a base level, what we were doing was glorified consumer reporting. That’s why those voices mattered, but what also happened around 2000 and in the arts was that the published pool of writers on hip-hop shifted more from Black to white. Why? Most of our colleagues by that time had just moved out of doing music journalism at all. People grew up, they had marriages, they had kids, kids needed to be fed and properly clothed and sent to the right school. And hip-hop at that point blew up in the suburbs in a major way. But the thing was that notion of Black writing being essential to one’s understanding of the culture, where the culture was no longer the culture as we’d known it in ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.BROOKS: But let’s be real, right. We know historically that jazz and blues criticism has been the domain of white men.TATE Yeah and certainly, that’s the radical transformation that hip-hop criticism offers. It was the first time in the history of the music that Black writers were writing about it authoritatively as it was being created.THULANI DAVIS But I want to say there, you all are talking out of a wealth of information …. This is the moment to teach young people that they’re in a continuum, because I don’t know that they’re aware of that. The one thing about the ’60s and the ’70s was everybody got some education about what happened before them and what the continuum was like. This is a particularly good time to ask, “What is it that the critic needs to know?” Because any critic of anything needs to know something more than the last 25 years of their lives. They need to know everything you all have been talking about.I think also there’s this idea that everybody has a platform, everybody can be a platform …. I do think people have to think about working together, because one of the things about the culture right now, it’s one star at a time. The collective conversation would be useful. We need to keep asking how do we push awareness, taste, interesting writing styles? How do we push forward? I think it can’t be one at a time. I don’t think that’ll work in the way that information is disseminated now.TATE I just want to paraphrase Baldwin: “Ours is a story that must be told again and again and again, because the erasure goes on as the culture is emerging.” You can’t reboot the institutional access that we had in that particular moment because of how incendiary the culture was in that period. People were coming up with new paradigms for what hip-hop or rap was every week, it changed. There was just an understanding that there needed to be writers who were on the ground, who got it, who lived it, embodied it at a certain level.We haven’t even tracked the kind of self-making, cultural transformation of the landscape that got affected by all this writing, by these gangs of folks being at these institutions at that particular time. The conversation about hip-hop that is still sustained is the one that we created in the ’80s and ’90s. And it extended, of course, to what was happening in Black academia, what was happening in Black film.BROOKS So it means that at the point in which we’re writing about popular music, for instance, we’re asking questions that start with, “What are the conditions that created this music in the first place?” We need to start at that level. We need to start at 1619 before we can actually get to the place of critics being able to dissect and write really beautifully about the richness, the depth, the urgency and complexity of what our music is, why we made it, what it means to us. It’s a 400-year story. More

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      in Theater

      LaChanze on Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind”

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      Since October, the actress has been performing the lead role of Wiletta Mayer in the Broadway debut of Childress’s 1955 play.“I started to scream but no sound come out … just a screamin’ but no sound …”Alice Childress wrote those words in her 1955 play “Trouble in Mind,” which the Roundabout Theater Company produced on Broadway this fall, in a limited run that will end on Sunday. The backstage comedy-drama, about the rehearsal process for an anti-lynching play, tackles racism in the theater industry, and that quote sums up what Black Americans have historically experienced — a consistent outcry to be heard by the dominant society that refuses to listen.In “Trouble in Mind,” I play Wiletta Mayer, a middle-aged actress who dreams of doing something “real grand … in the theater.” This is Wiletta’s first time as the lead in a play, not a musical. Surprisingly, this role in a play is a first for me as well, even though I have been performing in Broadway musicals for over 30 years. And it’s the perfect role, because of many of my career experiences: as an actress onstage, my length of time in this business, not having the opportunity to be considered a serious dramatic actress. I draw on all of them to step into Wiletta’s shoes.Now I go to the American Airlines Theater six times a week to portray a character I first came to know in college. I get to feel her life experiences as my own. I get to convey the things so many Black actors have expressed, but, as Wiletta says, “You don’t want to hear.”I first read “Trouble in Mind” — along with a wide range of works by Black American playwrights — as a student at Morgan State University in Maryland, one of our nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. Writers who used their plays as art and activism — Childress, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks and so many others — inspired me to become a performing artist. Studying their works ignited my ambition to delve as deep as a person can into the values that make an artist and activist. I wanted to feel their kind of power, their eloquence, and their courage. This courage, this fire that led Childress to produce such timeless words. In fact her play is being performed word-for-word in its original form.Childress was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1916, and died in Queens in 1994. She wrote and produced plays for four decades. She put up “Trouble” Off Broadway in 1955, four years before Lorraine Hansberry made history by debuting “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway, and was the first playwright I ever read to show authentic conversations between Black Americans, things that are said about whites when whites aren’t around. She exposed a Black cultural way of speaking that we call code switching, which the Urban dictionary defines as customizing “style of speech to the audience or group being addressed.” Childress cleverly demonstrates this in “Trouble in Mind.” She gives the audience a peek into what we, as Black actors, must do to accommodate white audiences.In the beginning of the play, Wiletta tells John, a young actor, how to act around white people, explaining there are certain things you must do:WILETTA But don’t get too cocky. They don’t like that either. You have to cater to these fools too …JOHN I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.WILETTA Laugh! Laugh at everything they say, makes ’em feel superior.JOHN Why do they have to feel superior?WILETTA You gonna sit there and pretend you don’t know why?JOHN I … I’d feel silly laughing at everything.WILETTA You don’t. Sometimes they laugh, you’re supposed to look serious, other times they serious, you supposed to laugh.The stereotypes have changed over the years — now there’s the hyper-masculinity of Black men; the strong Black woman who doesn’t seem to have a need for vulnerability or tenderness; Black children whose innocence has been removed — but the same rules still apply.LaChanze with Brandon Micheal Hall (who plays the young actor John), Chuck Cooper and Danielle Campbell in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Trouble” was optioned for Broadway, but never opened there because Childress would not tone down the dialogue for the show’s white producers. The white director in the play, Al Manners, tells Wiletta, “The American public is not ready to see you the way you want to be seen because, one, they don’t believe it, two, they don’t want to believe it, and three, they’re convinced they’re superior.” I have also had white male directors debate with me about what a Black woman would say, feel, even how she would dress.Childress was unapologetic about her intentions, even if it meant her work wouldn’t make it to Broadway in her lifetime. I have debated this with other artists, wondering whether she was even more brave than brilliant. But we agree that she was a truth teller, a soothsayer.As a student and young actor, I was astonished that the canon of Black American writers and artists that so richly shaped my artistic life were mostly unknown and so poorly understood. The play’s director, Charles Randolph-Wright, the first Black director with whom I have worked as a leading actor on Broadway, shepherded this project for 15 years. He also read the play in college and fell in love with Childress’s unapologetic writing.He is the champion of “Trouble in Mind.” Charles, who studied at Duke University and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, and danced with Alvin Ailey in New York, was told many times that he could not make this happen. It is as if, with her words in the play, Childress wrote directly to Charles six decades ago, “I’m sick of people signifyin’ we got no sense.” Charles wants to give her the voice she should have had before he and I were born.In our many conversations, I am invigorated in speaking to him about Black representation in the entertainment industry. Working with a director who I feel lives in my head is thrilling. My private thoughts that I’m sometimes too shy to share, Charles boldly speaks them before I can even get them out. Much like Childress, Charles is committed to telling the truth in his work and in having multidimensional portrayals of Black people, not just the broad strokes we see. And quite frankly, we’re both tired of seeing these examples. In my own career, I’ve taken jobs I didn’t want to do, but I had to play these parts because I needed a job.I get to work with a dedicated, resilient Black director, and a fearless, committed cast. Childress wanted to speak for the have-nots, the invisibles, and to share her eloquence with the Broadway community and universities across the world. She used her play about Black actors to explore the values of America. But some people weren’t ready, and so many people never got to hear her words. Now I proudly stand on her shoulders, opening my soul to her and teaching my daughters and other lovers of truth about her brilliance.“Some live by what they call great truths,” Wiletta says in the play. “I’ve always wanted to do somethin’ real grand … in the theater … to stand forth at my best … to stand up here and do anything I want …”And that’s exactly what Alice Childress did.LaChanze won the Tony Award for best actress in a leading role in a musical in 2006 for “The Color Purple.” In 2019, LaChanze and her eldest daughter, Celia Rose Gooding, became one of the few pairs of mothers and daughters to perform on Broadway as leading actors in the same season. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Pariah’ at 10: When Black Lesbian Characters Had the Spotlight

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      The Dee Rees drama made waves but studios largely returned to business as usual. A new crop of filmmakers sees signs of hope.At the shimmering pink Catnip Lounge, a Brooklyn teenager, Alike, stands face to face with a dancer sliding head first down a pole. The pleasure manifesto “My Neck, My Back” from the rapper Khia booms from the speakers. Transfixed by the power of her desire, Alike discovers a physical place outside herself that can hold it. Finally.This is the bold opening of “Pariah,” the coming-of-age drama from the writer-director Dee Rees. Ten years ago it premiered to critical acclaim, first at the Sundance Film Festival, then in theaters with a limited release that December, a herculean effort for an independent film starring a then unknown Adepero Oduye as Alike (pronounced ah-LEE-kay) and made on a shoestring budget of less than $500,000.“Pariah” (available to stream on HBO Max) was the first movie about a Black queer woman to be released in theaters nationwide by a Hollywood studio. As Nelson George wrote in The Times in 2011, “No film made by a Black lesbian about being a Black lesbian has ever received the kind of attention showered on Ms. Rees’s film.” At the same time, George pointed out, “Pariah” was also part of a crop of films that pushed the boundaries of “what ‘Black film’ can be.” How Hollywood responded, then and now, has been telling.Rees tells Alike’s story with an uncompromising specificity that has etched its place in great American cinema. (This year the movie was added to the Criterion Collection.) This unflinching sensibility harks back to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. By opening with the unfettered eroticism of the lesbian club and showing us scenes — like Alike’s awkwardly endearing dildo try-on — without explanation or apology, Rees followed in the footsteps of a group of filmmakers who refused to sanitize images of queer life to appease straight audiences. Think Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first narrative feature film about an out Black lesbian protagonist made by an out Black lesbian. Cheryl Dunye directed herself and Guinevere Turner, left, in “The Watermelon Woman.”First Run Features“Pariah” began making waves in 2007 when Rees released the short that would become the basis for the 2011 feature. Kebo Drew of the San Francisco film training nonprofit Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project remembers the reaction in her community of friends and colleagues. “The Blackness was just saturated, coming from the roots,” Drew recalled.After hearing word-of-mouth about the short, a screening at Outfest in Los Angeles touched the filmmaker Angela Robinson. “I felt like it was kind of opening a door that I hoped would stay open,” said Robinson. “It was such a personal story and a singular vision.”The writer-director Numa Perrier credits Rees and “Pariah” as an inspiration for her 2019 film “Jezebel.” She remembered, “The softness of how vulnerable that coming-of-age story was, I hadn’t seen that before.”Yet this fresh perspective did not lead Hollywood to greenlight more films about Black lesbians. There have been supporting characters like the passionate teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) in “Precious” (2009) and the serene boxing coach Buddhakan (Sheila Atim) in Halle Berry’s directorial debut this year, “Bruised.” But over the last 10 years, not a single feature focused on Black lesbians has made it through mainstream pipelines.At the same time L.G.B.T. characters overall have become far more visible on the big and small screens. Yet according to a University of Southern California report looking at the top 100 films of 2019 (the most recent year for which figures were available), nearly 80 percent of all such characters were male-identified and 77 percent were white. The report doesn’t provide statistics on queer women of color, as a group distinct from the category “female-identified.”“It’s almost like the stars have to align before we get another Black lesbian movie,” Drew said. “But that’s a structural issue. So there has to be a more systematic approach for encouraging stories.”So “Pariah” was singular not just in its self-assurance, but in whose story it told, too: Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), two Black, gay and masculine-of-center best friends from working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn circa the early 2000s. Through the refuge of their friendship, they carve out space to be themselves.Sara Foster, left, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki and Jill Ritchie in “D.E.B.S.”Bruce Birmelin/Samuel Goldwyn FilmsAt a “Pariah” screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, Rees told the audience, “There shouldn’t be two or three or 10. To me there should be like 200.” She added, “There’s room for so many more stories.” (Rees declined a request to be interviewed for this article.)When Black lesbian stories, and the filmmakers with the lived experience to tell them, are shut out of the larger film world, the result is systemic erasure that is by definition hard to measure.About 100 feature films have been directed by Black women since 1922, almost a third of whom are lesbians, the researcher and filmmaker Yvonne Welbon wrote in the 2018 anthology “Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making.”But the work of Black lesbian filmmakers has almost exclusively been made outside the Hollywood system and often not seen outside the film festival circuit, academia or grassroots distribution networks. Rees’s predecessors — filmmakers like Dunye, Michelle Parkerson (“A Litany for Survival”) and others — didn’t have assurances that a larger audience would even see their work; they simply made films that mattered to them, stories they wanted to see that didn’t yet exist in a film world that barely acknowledged their existence.That “Pariah” earned distribution, made back its budget and even received a glowing shout-out from Meryl Streep during her acceptance speech for “The Iron Lady” at the 2012 Golden Globes, was all monumental, even if the film didn’t garner much attention inside Hollywood.This is something the filmmaker Tina Mabry well understands, having tried, and failed, to get a theatrical release for her critically acclaimed debut feature, “Mississippi Damned,” a few years before “Pariah” came out. After seeing the short version of “Pariah,” Mabry asked Rees for an introduction to the film’s then up-and-coming cinematographer Bradford Young and hired him to shoot “Mississippi Damned.”Tessa Thompson in “Mississippi Damned.” The director, Tina Mabry, turned to the cinematographer Bradford Young after seeing his work on the “Pariah” short.Array ReleasingA coming-of-age tale starring Tessa Thompson and based on Mabry’s experience growing up in a Black working-class family in Tupelo, Miss., the movie won awards on the festival circuit, and aired on cable. Mabry said that she was told repeatedly that the movie was too similar to “Precious” and that “the market can’t handle two Black dramas.” For some distributors that focus on L.G.B.T. audiences, the movie was also perceived as not being gay enough despite a Black lesbian main character.“The distribution model failed us. The people did not,” Mabry said. She also gives a nod to Ava DuVernay, who eventually got the film released on Netflix in 2015 through the film distribution arm she founded, Array. That year Mabry also got her first television directing job (“Queen Sugar,” another DuVernay assist) and Mabry — much like Rees after “Pariah” was released — has worked steadily in Hollywood ever since.Indeed, there are signs of potential change. Mabry said she currently has feature film projects in development at four Hollywood studios, some of which center on Black queer women protagonists, although none of them are a done deal yet.Back when Robinson made her first feature, “D.E.B.S.,” a 2004 lesbian teen spy movie that has since become a cult classic, “there was still the attitude in town that if you played a lesbian, it could ruin your career,” she remembered.After Nina Jacobson, then a Disney studio executive, saw “D.E.B.S.” at the Sundance Film Festival, she hired Robinson to direct “Herbie Reloaded,” starring Lindsay Lohan. With ticket sales of $144 million, Robinson became the first Black woman director to draw at least $100 million at the box office. But despite her gratitude to Jacobson and the crew, the experience left her feeling isolated.“It was me and 200 white men,” Robinson said.That was when she pivoted to cable, accepting an offer from the showrunner Ilene Chaiken to direct episodes of the third season of “The L Word,” the groundbreaking show about the lives of high-powered lesbians in Los Angeles. Robinson hasn’t made another studio-backed film since. (Her 2017 feature “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” was an indie.)But now, more than 15 years later, she has an all-female action movie in the works at Warner Bros., and her desire to cast women of color in the leads was met not with pushback, but enthusiasm, she said.“Warner Bros. called back and they were like, ‘Yes, we think you should make it more women of color and more queer,” Robinson said. “You have no idea how many years I have been waiting for somebody to say that.”And Robinson is more hopeful than ever. She has a lucrative television production deal with Warner Bros. and several other projects in the pipeline, including a DC Comics series, “Madame X,” and a film remake of “The Hunger.”“It’s always a tenuous time, but things have changed. I don’t feel like I have to Trojan-horse it anymore,” Robinson said, adding that it seems as if “I can just walk in the front door and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do it.” More