Inside Gary Sheffield

The reactions to recent remarks by baseball player Gary Sheffield and film maker Spike Lee are reminders that outspoken Black men will frequently trigger unreasonable and hysterical responses to their comments from people who often haven’t even completely read them or tried to understand what was said. Both Sheffield and Lee are being called among other things racist and unpatriotic for their statements regarding Major League Baseball and American foreign policy.

Patrick Milligan’s Book on Film maker Oscar Micheaux

Patrick Milligan’s exceptional new book Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only, The Life of America’s First Great Black Filmmaker (HC) should be mandatory reading for everyone remotely concerned with African-American culture and history, as well as that of American film. Despite growing up and spending his entire life in an era where state-sanctioned racism was at its height, Micheaux still produced and directed 27 silent films and 16 sound productions. He wrote, produced and directed a film before Charlie Chaplin did, and he often took his films from place to place physically. Micheaux refused to acknowledge defeat, and wouldn’t accept the images he saw on screen of docile, ignorant and lazy Black people as the only ones that society at large would know.

Being Beyonce

I was all set to write about Beyonce Knowles for the Scene this week only to have the assignment snatched from under me. Well, that gives me room to expand my thoughts.

Beyonce’s handlers are master star makers. It appears her father’s influence seems to have waned in recent years, so I don’t know who is to blame, whether producer David Foster or an army of highly paid Hollywood automatrons. Still, they’ve managed to turn a moderately talented R&B singer into an all-entertainment diva of Diana Ross proportions. She’s got this schizophrenic mega personality going, hip-hop hag, polished Hollywood star, and staid, virtuous role model all at once.

Nobody Wins With Isaiah Washington Gone

There are three big losers in the Grey’s Anatomy fiasco. The first is Isaiah Washington, whose constant appearances and interviews continually erode his credibility because each time something new and different seems to emerge. While he’s consistent with the insistence that he’s the victim of a double standard (a reasonably fair proposition given the long list of on the set misbehavior from all types of male and female actors over the decades) he keeps making changes to the story behind his dismissal. On Larry King Live there was suddenly the entrance of a lengthy tale involving Patrick Dempsey that talked about perennial tardiness, an incident of disrespect involving a Teamsters member during a trip, and Washington’s own perception that he’d failed as a leader. None of this surfaced in the extensive interview that Washington gave to Newsweek’s Alison Samuels featured in an exclusive online piece.

NBA Draft: a look at the top ten

I’m not a big an NBA fan as my blog bud Ron is. I haven’t paid too much attention to the NBA since the Johnson/Worthy days of the Lakers, and after that, only a passing interest in the finals. I’m a Tar Heel alum, and even I tired of Jordan’s dominance. However, I love watching college hoops (ACC games especially, of course). So I do get interested in the draft and seeing where the players I’ve watched closely over the season end up as professionals, how they may contribute to their team, and if they’re underclassmen, whether or not they should have waited.

With that, let’s take a look at this year’s draft.

The Death of Pro-hoops in the ATL

It’s been 40 years since the Hawks moved from St. Louis to Atlanta, and during their time there they’ve mostly been dismal. It’s been eight years since they even made the playoffs, and lately such topflight players as Jason Terry have opted to take less money and go elsewhere rather than earn max dollars playing for a team universally deemed as a failure. You have to be at least 40 and maybe older than that to remember when the Hawks were a championship contender. Sadly race played a factor in the breakup during the early ‘70s of a potentially great club. “Pistol” Pete Maravich was drafted, which was a great move. What wasn’t so great was subsequently letting Joe Caldwell go to the ABA and losing Bill Bridges for simply being cheap. Of course during those years the Hawks always ran into either the Lakers or the Knicks (yes, there was a time when the Knicks were a great team) and got bounced out of the playoffs.

The second contending edition had Hall-of-Famer Dominique Wilkins, Doc Rivers and Tree Rollins among others, but could never get past the Celtics. The last decent Hawks team with Dikembe Mutumbo and Mookie Blaylock actually had the Chicago Bulls down by two games in a playoff series, but then Michael Jordan took over and quickly erased any chance of a Hawks victory. But those days are long gone, and the Hawks have been little more than a joke throughout much of the last two decades.

Perhaps the most amazing sports paradox of the moment is the fact that pro basketball, a sport dominated by African-Americans, has so little traction in heavily black cities like Atlanta and Memphis. The Grizzlies once seemed on their way to becoming a popular attraction, but last year’s 22-60 nightmare took all the wind out of those sails. Their best player Pau Gasol wants out of town, they now have a rookie coach and new general manager, and things just look bleak.

Meanwhile everyone wants to live in Atlanta, but no one wants to play there. If the Hawks make more idiotic draft moves despite having both the number 3 and number 11 choices, they’ll lose even more of the few fans they still have left. It’s hard to implore anyone to come out and watch a hideously coached, ineptly run franchise, and it doesn’t matter what color the people running it are if the product stinks.
Ron Wynn

Movie Review: 1408

1408John Cusak
Samuel L Jackson
Dir: Mikael Håfström

It sounds like a horror film written by Jerry Seinfeld. “Hey, you know those hotel rooms? Man, what’s up with those hotel rooms?” That, and a maudlin sub-plot involving a child who’s passed into the beyond, are about all there is to the new Stephen King adaptation 1408. Then there’s John Cusak, the eternal young rebel kicking and screaming into middle aged responsibility. As a one note joke, King’s oft repeated treatise on the fear of commonplace inanimate objects being given a malevolent soul, the film could have been a dreadful bore. However, Cusak’s presence morphs the drudgery into an interesting look at a man forced to modify his outlook on life.

Free Speech: The Zero Sum Game

The battle lines have been drawn among African-Americans regarding language and content, and it’s quite clear that things aren’t going to be simple (if indeed they ever were). The latest target is comedian D. L. Hughley, whose comments on a recent Tonight Show regarding the Rutgers women’s basketball team didn’t exactly go over well with many people. These included such insightful remarks as “these were some of the ugliest, nappy head women” he had ever seen. The furor over that hasn’t settled down yet, and on June 16 Hughley found himself the target of protesters during a concert at Bass Hall in Fort Worth. Pastor Kyev Tatus of Servant House Baptist Church said that “It’s not only that comment, he has a history of demeaning our community in such a way that it’s not funny anymore,:

Hughley responded by saying “I believe that freedom of speech is a zero-sum proposition. Too many times I have watched clowns like these pretend to speak for the masses. I can only speak for me. Isn’t there a child you can help teach to read, a war to help stop, an unjustly accused man you can help get out of jail? I will not apologize for telling a joke about the world as I see it.”

WEHT: Dramatic African American TV series?

Cultural Reflections (6/18/07)

With the fall season lineups now in place and an array of mindless reality shows set to flood the networks for the summer, it’s time to ask a familiar question regarding upcoming programs for the 2007-2008 television year. Where are the African-American dramas? There’s never been a surplus of Black drama on the network airwaves, and since the failure of Under One Roof and City of Angels no one among the alphabet soup of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox or the CW seems remotely interested in doing anything with Black actors beyond comedies and putting African-American faces in supporting roles on some highly visible properties.

In fairness, Grey’s Anatomy could be stretched to fit under the thematic boundary of a drama, although in truth it is really a daytime soap opera with nighttime production values. But at least it does have Black actors in featured and key roles, and doesn’t (or at least in the past) restrict opportunities for these characters to have complete and meaningful interaction across the board. It will be quite interesting to see what the fallout from the Isaiah Washington fallout will be to the show’s direction in the fall, and also what happens on the planned spin-off.

Still, it seems hard to believe there’s no audience out there after all these decades for a dramatic show with Black lead actors. Showtime had Soul Food for five years and the ABC Family channel will be bringing back Lincoln Heights in the fall for a second year. HBO’s The Wire takes place in Baltimore and essentially operates like an urban drama. But not even Spike Lee can convince the major networks they can launch and sustain a dramatic program with either a mainly Black cast or one spotlighting primary Black faces in an ongoing series of thematic situations special to the African-American experience.

But one also wonders why BET hasn’t begun its own array of dramas. They clearly have the largest Black audience among either broadcast or cable entities, and as a Viacom subsidiary could definitely set an example by showcasing one or two possible Black dramatic productions a year. This would not only seemingly fit their mandate of being first and foremost an “entertainment” entity (something they always trot out to deflect criticism about a lack of public affairs shows), but would also put them in the forefront and provide more opportunities for African-American writers, directors and producers, all of whom are sorely underserved in the current Hollywood climate.

Talented people like Kevin Hooks, Thomas Carter, Paris Barclay and many, many others who are now serving as executive producers on shows like Prison Break would probably enjoy the opportunity to spearhead their own creations on an African-American outlet (even if it’s not black owned anymore). Whatever else anyone says about BET, no one can deny it enjoys vast audience loyalty and a reach far beyond that of its primary rival TV One, which sadly still can’t get satellite companies like Dish Network to add it to their lineup.

A few years ago this was a hot topic in television circles, but now it seems almost everyone in the Black entertainment world has consigned themselves to an absence of dramatic properties and become, if not content, resigned to a steady diet of comedies and reality shows. While commending Tyler Perry for the clout he enjoys in getting a 100-episode commitment from TBS for his new sitcom, when will (if ever) his counterpart in dramatic circles emerge?

Freestyle Monday

Ron hosts a radio show on 88.1 FM WFSK Nashville called Freestyle, if you didn’t already know. This week, topics include Isiah Washington’s dimissal from Grey’s Anatomy, the upcoming Conscious Music conference in Nashville, and should standards be lowered so more students from poor families can get scholarships from the Tennessee state lottery. I’ll be able to sit in this week and join Ron and Regina V. Clark and Diallo. Stop on by at 6:00PM.