Today is April 18th. On this day, back in 2019, I was contacted directly and hired to be a freelance scriptwriter for primetime hosts on cable's TCM (Turner Classic Movies). I grew up in Los Angeles where Hollywood movie production was a major industry like Lockheed used to be. My love for classic films started about the same time I was learning how to read in elementary school. I was blessed with having working class Black parents in South Central L.A. who loved classic and new movies. My favorite pastime was a Rivers Family night at the drive-in movies. I was thrilled to see people on the big screen who looked like me, my relatives and neighbors in films like A RAISIN IN THE SUN and PARIS BLUES, both starring Sidney Poitier. Other movies we went to see included SAYONARA, THE BIG COUNTRY, ELMER GANTRY, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, HUD, EL CID, foreign films like YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and even fun, fizzy entertainment such as BYE BYE BIRDIE and WHAT A WAY TO GO! To this day, Mom and Dad were the only people I knew who saw SPARTACUS and said that it was perfectly timed for the Civil Rights Movement era in that had overtones of America's history of slavery and discrimination.
In the late 1980s, when I got my own prime time celebrity talk show on VH1, Kirk Douglas was my first guest.
When they aired on TV, Mom introduced me to ON THE WATERFRONT, ALL ABOUT EVE, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, BORN YESTERDAY and just about any movies starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman and Simone Signoret. My first introduction to Shakespeare came thanks to my postal clerk dad who a multi-record set of scenes from HAMLET starring Laurence Olivier. Dad's favorite classic films were FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, KINGS ROW and SHANE.
I tell you that because, at the time, local L.A. television had no shortage of movie hosts and Hollywood news reporters. But none of them was Black. We were left out of the classic film TV hosts jobs and the general discussion of classic films. And we were not assigned a Hollywood/film beat either in TV or in local newspapers. There was no representation of people who looked like my parents, grandparents, neighbors and teachers. This was how the community I lived in and loved was portrayed in national news. Our family lived in the curfew area during the Watts Riots, as they were called. Click onto the link below:
I wanted to challenge that image in my TV career. I wanted to give some history and representation in my own way.
In scripts I wrote for TCM's Ben Mankiewicz, I added film-related history about trailblazing African American architect Paul Revere Williams who designed homes for Johnny Weissmuller, Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz. He was designing Hollywood homes when Black people were not permitted to buy homes in Hollywood. I wrote that tennis great, sports legend and jazz vocalist Althea Gibson had a role as a plantation maid in John Ford's THE HORSE SOLDIERS starring John Wayne and William Holden (1959). The film was shot on location in Louisiana. But Gibson, a Wimbledon and U.S. Nationals tennis champ, had to shoot her scenes in Hollywood because deluxe Louisiana hotels discriminated against Blacks. The Althea Gibson casting and significance is something I learned from Mom and Dad when I was a kid. I wrote that veteran Black actor Clarence Muse (Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, Lubitsch's HEAVEN CAN WAIT, the musical FLYING DOWN TO RIO and last seen in THE BLACK STALLION) got onscreen credit for co-writing the screenplay to a 1939 RKO period musical. He co-wrote it with famed Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. That was a major achievement for Black artists contributing to a major Hollywood studio release. The film is 1939's WAY DOWN SOUTH. Ben read those items from my scripts plus other info such as the Irving Berlin song "Easter Parade" was introduced in a Broadway musical by...Clifton Webb, star of the film noir murder mystery, LAURA, and that Carol Lynley absolutely loved working with a very professional Judy Garland for two weeks of rehearsals for the 1965 black and white biopic, HARLOW. Lynley was cast as Jean Harlow. Garland was in rehearsals to play Harlow's mother, but she was replaced by Ginger Rogers who had replaced Judy in the 1949 MGM musical, THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY, starring Fred Astaire.
I hope Ben likes my work. I think my parents would.
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