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Showing posts with the label Jean Luc Godard

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Midweek Morning Mixer - 1.8.14 ("It's-hard-for-black-actors-but-things-change" edition)

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Sometimes it's easy to forget how far we've come because we still have so far to go. Although public outcries forced SNL to hire a black female as a featured player on the show after so many years, opportunities are plentiful for actors of color compared to what it was like in the past.  And the roles are waaaaaaay more dignified.  So as a reminder of how hard it was for black actors who had to accept roles that were beneath them, let's offer a special HBD tip of the hat to... Butterfly McQueen . "She was born on January 8, 1911 in Tampa, Florida, to a stevedore and domestic maid, Thelma McQueen would go on to make cinematic history as one of the few African-American character actors in classic Hollywood. In 1916, her father abandoned the family, leaving her mother and her to travel the East Coast in search of work. She eventually landed in Long Island where she completed her education and learned to dance. She made her stage debut as a part of the Butterfly ...

PRODUCTION JOURNAL: Monday Morning Mixer - 10.21.13

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October 21, 1984 - François Truffaut dies One of the central figures of the French New Wave, François Truffaut, died October 21, 1984. Born in Paris in 1932, living an itinerant childhood with his single (later remarried) mother and several relatives, Truffaut became a child of the cinema early in life. He would steal away from school and sneak into matinees — childhood experiences that would form the basis for his first feature, The 400 Blows . He won the Cannes Best Director Award in 1959 for the picture, in which the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud played his alter ego, Antoine Doinel, enacted the tale of a neglected child poised between a life of petty crime and something greater. Before The 400 Blows , Truffaut had made several shorts but was mostly known as a tough-minded film critic at Cahiers du cinéma who often savaged conventional French cinema and endorsed instead the journeyman Hollywood directors celebrated by “auteur theory,” the critical school he helped found. Thr...