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      in Theater

      Samm-Art Williams, Playwright, Producer and Actor, Dies at 78

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      He challenged racial barriers in Hollywood, was a producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and earned a Tony nomination for “Home,” a paean to his Southern roots.Samm-Art Williams, who made his mark in several fields — as an executive producer of the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” as an actor on both stage and screen and as a Tony-nominated playwright for “Home,” died on Monday in Burgaw, N.C. He was 78.His death was confirmed by his cousin Carol Brown. She did not cite a cause.An imposing 6-foot-8 (a lefty, he once served as a sparring partner to Muhammad Ali), Mr. Williams appeared in films including Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, “Dressed to Kill” (1980), and the Coen brothers’ neo-noir, “Blood Simple” (1984). He had a memorable turn as Jim in the 1986 adaptation of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” part of PBS’s “American Playhouse” series.Mr. Williams as Jim with Patrick Day in the 1986 television version of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”Everett CollectionCommitted to expanding the Black presence in Hollywood, he was both a writer and an executive producer on “Fresh Prince,” the hit 1990s NBC comedy starring Will Smith as a street-smart teenager from West Philadelphia who moves in with his aunt and uncle in the moneyed hills of Los Angeles.He also served as a writer and a producer on the television shows “Martin” and “Frank’s Place.” He was nominated for two Emmy Awards — for his work as a writer on “Motown Returns to the Apollo” in 1985 and a producer of “Frank’s Place” in 1988.Raised in Burgaw, a former railroad town north of Wilmington, N.C., he moved to New York in 1973 to pursue a career in acting. It was his wistfulness for his small Southern hometown that inspired “Home,” a production of the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company that opened at the St. Marks Playhouse in Manhattan six years later before moving to Broadway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing

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      Recent releases like “American Fiction” and “The American Society of Magical Negroes” have used absurdist humor to examine race. But they have also depicted narrow views of Blackness.In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies of the Trump Era. The next year, Boots Riley’s masterful “Sorry to Bother You” seemed to herald a new golden age for Black satire films. But as those movies stood out for using surreal plot twists to humorously — and horrifically — unpack complex ideas like racial appropriation and consumer culture, the crop that has followed hasn’t kept pace. The current moment is defined by a central question: What does the “Black” look like in Black satire films today? Too often lately it’s “not Black enough.”By that I mean to say a recent influx of films, including “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “American Fiction” and “The Blackening,” have failed to represent Blackness with all its due complexity — as sometimes messy, sometimes contradictory. Instead, they flatten and simplify Blackness to serve a more singular, and thus digestible, form of satirical storytelling.The foremost example is “American Fiction,” inspired by Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” which won this year’s Oscar for best screenplay. In the film, a Black author and professor named Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) finds literary success through “My Pafology,” a novel satirizing books that feed negative Black stereotypes. But Monk’s audience receives his book with earnest praise, forcing him to reconcile his newfound prosperity with his racial ethics.The surface layer of satire is obvious: The white audiences and publishing professionals who celebrate “My Pafology” do so not because of its merits but because the book allows them to fetishize another tragic Black story. It’s a performance of racial acceptance; these fans are literally buying into their own white guilt.Monk’s foil in the film is another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who publishes a popular book of sensationalist Black trauma about life in the ghetto. Profiting on her white audience’s racist assumptions about Blackness, Sintara is this satire’s race traitor — or so it initially seems. Because when, in one scene, Monk questions whether Sintara’s book is any different from “My Pafology,” which she dismisses as pandering, she counters that she is spotlighting an authentic Black experience. Sintara accuses Monk of snobbery, saying that his highfalutin notion of Blackness excludes other Black experiences because he is too ashamed to recognize them.But the fact that it is Sintara who voices the film’s criticism of Monk shows how loath “American Fiction” is to make a value statement on the characters’ actions within the context of their Blackness. Sintara, whom Monk catches reading “White Negroes,” a text about Black cultural appropriation, somehow isn’t winkingly framed as the hypocrite or the inauthentic one pointing out the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the hero.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Black Twitter’: Movements, Memes and Crying Jordan

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      This new Hulu docuseries explores how a social media subculture influenced American culture at large.When Prentice Penny first began work on the forthcoming docuseries “Black Twitter: A People’s History,” the last thing the director wanted to do was explain to anybody just what Black Twitter was. How could he?“Everybody has a different opinion what it is, and a different entry point and path to how they feel about it,” he said.“Black Twitter” is a kind of shorthand descriptor referring loosely to commentary, jokes and other kinds of cultural conversation and activism driven largely by Black users of the social media platform now named X. What Penny wanted to do was capture the pivotal moments that have come to define this organic online community, including the movements (Black Lives Matter; OscarsSoWhite) and defining hashtags (#uknowurblackwhen, #BlackGirlMagic) it has propelled and championed.And he wanted to do all of this while Black Twitter was still around.“So much of Black culture in this country isn’t documented,” Penny said. “When you see books about culture and race being banned, when you see narratives saying, oh, there were good sides to slavery, you realize that Black Twitter could be here today and gone tomorrow.”Prentice Penny, left, Joie Jacoby and Jason Parham at the film’s debut at the South by Southwest film festival in March.Andrew Walker/DisneyIndeed, since Penny started the project, Twitter itself has disappeared — or the name officially has, anyway. “I don’t trust anybody who stopped calling it Twitter,” said Jason Parham, a producer on the show whose 2021 Wired story “A People’s History of Black Twitter” inspired the series.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Barbara O. Jones, Actress Who Brought Black Cinema to Life, Dies at 82

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      Her arresting roles in movies like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped shape a generation of independent filmmakers.Barbara O. Jones, an actress whose captivating work in films like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped define the cerebral, experimental and highly influential Black cinema movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, died on April 8 at her home in Dayton, Ohio. She was 82.Her brother Marlon Minor confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.Starting in the early 1970s just a few miles from Hollywood, a generation of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, began making films that pushed hard against many of the tropes of commercial moviemaking.Budding filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Haile Gerima eschewed polished scripts and linear narratives in search of an authentic Black cinematic language. They relied on actors like Mrs. Jones, drawn from far outside the mainstream, to bring their work to life.Mrs. Jones was in some ways the typical Los Angeles transplant, having moved from the Midwest in search of a film career. She took acting classes, but, rather than gravitating toward Hollywood, she fell in with the politically charged, aesthetically adventurous scene around the U.C.L.A. film school, a movement that the film scholar Clyde Taylor called the L.A. Rebellion.She appeared in several short student films, including Mr. Gerima’s “Child of Resistance” (1973), in which she played an imprisoned activist loosely based on Angela Davis, and Ms. Dash’s “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a short story by Alice Walker.Mrs. Jones in Ms. Dash’s short film “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a story by Alice Walker.Julie DashWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Jordans’ Tackles Race at Work at the Public Theater

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      Alternating between funny and bleak, the Public Theater’s latest production tackles race and the modern workplace.The workplace in “Jordans,” an ambitious but unwieldy new play at the Public Theater, is so white that it’s a bit alarming. I don’t mean to say it’s full of white people (though it certainly is that, too), but rather that the aesthetic of the space itself catches your attention: minimalist, modern, white screens and walls. By the end of the play, however, those bright white spaces will be covered with blood.Jordan (Naomi Lorrain) is the only Black employee at Atlas Studios, a “full-service rental studio and production facility,” as she says to a potential client. She’s the one who answers the phones; she also gets the lunches, collects receipts and calls maintenance. When her boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), decides the company’s new path to revenue involves appealing to a more “diverse” demographic, she hires a director of culture: a young Black man also named Jordan (Toby Onwumere).Though their white colleagues somehow can’t seem to tell them apart, the two Jordans find themselves at odds: She knows how to “play the game,” even if that means compromising her integrity. He (dubbed “1. Jordan” in the script) imagines another path to success — a Jay-Z level of achievement that he will then put back into the neighborhood. But as Jordan sees an opportunity to advance, the team takes on a brand launch event for a rapper that transforms into a grisly horror-movie scenario.Written by the playwright Ife Olujobi (she/they) in their Off Broadway debut, and directed by Whitney White, “Jordans” feels a little “The Other Black Girl” and a little “American Psycho.” The play tries to make a satire about race in the workplace and then, within that, gender — the differences in how Black men and Black women might act and be treated in a predominantly white workplace. But it’s also largely a grim parable about the terrors of consumer culture, including the commodification and appropriation of Black people.Lorrain, far right, gives a sharp performance as Jordan, an employee so overworked she even does most of the show’s set and prop arrangements. The cast also features, from left, Matthew Russell, Brontë England-Nelson and Walsh.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMany of the targets of the satire feel too obvious: hip influencers, like a twerking white pop star and super-masc energy drink bros; the white boss fumbling through hollow corporate-speak about diversity; the white female colleagues bonding over how unfairly hard they work while their Black female colleague endlessly bustles around in the background.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

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      The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Bud Shaffner, a board member who had come under fire for introducing the motion at the April 15 meeting to cancel the speech, apologized for his comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle.” He later introduced the motion to reinstate the speech and voted for it.“I will accept the blame because of the insensitive word I spoke on April 15,” he said at the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting. “I fully understand the interpretation of my poor word choice.”Many community members who spoke during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      O.J. Simpson: Made in America, Made by TV

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      In O.J. Simpson’s life and trials, television was a spotlight, a microscope and a mirror.One of the strangest quotes I can remember associated with O.J. Simpson came from the broadcaster Al Michaels during the notorious freeway chase in 1994. Michaels, a sports commentator now covering the flight from the law of one of America’s biggest celebrities, said that he had spoken with his friend Simpson on the phone earlier. “Al,” Michaels recalled him saying, “I have got to get out of the media business.”For a man who was about to be arrested and charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, it was an odd statement. But it was accurate. Simpson, during and after his pro football career, was a creature of the media business. With the freeway chase, and the acrimonious trial on live TV, he would essentially become the media business. Simpson, who died Wednesday at age 76, was one of the most-seen Americans in history.What did people see when they looked at O.J. Simpson? A superstar, a killer, a hero, a liar, a victim, an abuser, an insider, a pariah — often many of these at once. In his fame and infamy, he was an example of what celebrity could make of a person and a symbol of what the media could make of a country.Simpson’s football career made him a TV star in itself, as he became the first N.F.L. running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, with the Buffalo Bills. But he found his way into mass-market stardom during the commercial breaks, doing endorsements for RC Cola, Chevrolet and, most famously, Hertz rental cars.Simpson was a star for the Buffalo Bills, but endorsements dramatically increased his fame.Getty ImagesAs the documentary “O.J.: Made in America” would later detail, race was a subtext of Simpson’s fame, even in his pitchman days. There was a sense of social relief in having white America, after the civil-rights battles of the 1960s, embrace a charismatic Black star. It felt good for the country to like O.J.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      A ‘Taxi Driver’ Remake: Why Arthur Jafa Recast the Scorsese Ending

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      The artist has gone back to his filmmaking roots, re-examining what he sees as racial undertones in Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie.Call it a return to his roots. The artist Arthur Jafa began his career as a cinematographer, working with his then-wife, Julie Dash, on the acclaimed “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) and with Spike Lee on “Crooklyn” (1994), before garnering art world fame, including a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for “Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” a snapshot of Black life in the United States created from collaged video footage. Jafa’s practice has embraced film and video, sculpture, installation, and even painting.His newest film, which goes on view Thursday at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, has a provocative conceit: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of a classic of American cinema — Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) — in which the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, storms into a seedy Times Square brothel and kills everyone in sight in order to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, then 12 years old.In the original movie — what Jafa calls the “redacted version” — these characters, including Iris’s pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), were white. That never felt right to Jafa. When he discovered that the film’s celebrated screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had intended Sport to be African American, he decided to “restore” the movie by introducing Black actors, except for De Niro and Foster. In the 73-minute-long film, titled “******” — or as the artist pronounces it, “Redacted” — we see this recut version of the bloody climax over and over, each time slightly but crucially different. The result is extraordinary — both technically and conceptually — and brings to the surface the racist animus long accepted as underpinning Bickle’s barely contained rage. (Quentin Tarantino also criticized the decision to change the character to white in his 2022 book, “Cinema Speculation.”)Arthur Jafa cast a replacement actor, right, as the pimp in “Taxi Driver,” originally played by Harvey Keitel, then skillfully wove in the new footage and rerecorded the voices. via Arthur Jafa and Gladstone GallerySchrader, who is still making movies at 77, said in a recent telephone conversation that the change to his original vision was the right call. “Someone at Columbia Pictures said to Marty, ‘we’re going to have a riot in the theater if we cast Sport as Black,’ and I realized they were completely right.”“I think it would have been a much more vile and revolting film if his hatred was directed completely at people of color,” he added. “You can’t make something that is so off the meter that it can’t be seen or that people simply can’t bear watching.” (Martin Scorsese did not return several calls seeking his comment.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More