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Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (Photo: Courtesy HBO)

Jamila Wignot was nervous. It was Friday night, May 17, 2024, at Crosstown Theater in Midtown Memphis, and she was about to premiere the first episode of her latest HBO documentary series Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. to a hometown crowd. The sold-out house was full of Memphis music royalty: David Porter, Al Bell, Deanie Parker, Eddie Floyd, the list goes on.

“It’s like somebody was just saying to me, ‘Didn’t Janis Joplin get booed in Memphis?’ And I was like, ‘Exactly!’ That’s why I was nervous,” Wignot says on a Zoom interview a few days later.

Turns out, she needn’t have worried. The crowd responded to “Chapter One: ’Cause I Love You” with a Cannes-level standing ovation. During the Q&A after the screening, Deanie Parker, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s first CEO, seemed taken aback. “This really has been an emotional experience for me,” she says. “I think it’s because, while we achieved a lot, we did it in about a decade — which is astounding! We made a mark globally.”

Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, David Porter, Al Jackson Jr., Bonnie Bramlett, Delaney Bramlett, Isaac Hayes, and Steve Cropper (Photo: Courtesy Don Nix 
Collection/OKPOP)

Wignot says her involvement with the Stax story started as she was finishing up her last documentary, a portrait of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey. “I’ve been working in documentary filmmaking, particularly historical documentary filmmaking, for a long time. But I came out of a kind of PBS model of documentaries that were narrated by a kind of ‘Voice of God’ narrator. They used archival [film and stills], but there were very specific ways that you had to use it at that time. With Ailey, I finally got to do the kind of documentary filmmaking that I like to do, which is first-person, kind of witness-driven documentary filmmaking. As a kid, I saw Eyes on the Prize and thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ When you are hearing from somebody who was there on the front lines, and then you’re seeing them in the archival footage, it all just feels very immersive and alive and urgent.

“On the heels of that, I was then approached first by Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow who made O.J.: Made in America. We’d all been friends for a very long time. Ezra said, ‘I’m working with this company, White Horse Pictures, and we’re looking for somebody who wants to direct a series on Stax Records, and do you think you’d be into it?’ And I was just immediately like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”

Bruce Talamon and Isaac Hayes at the 1972 Wattstax concert (Photo: Howard Bingham)

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. skillfully blends interviews with the surviving players and extensively researched archival footage from the label’s heyday. “I don’t bother to interview RZA, who’s a diehard fan of the label. There’s no Justin Timberlake, there’s no Elton John, there’s no Paul McCartney. I was not interested in having the kind of secondary fan in there, just appreciating it. I wanted to understand how the label came together, the experiences of the people on the ground, and then let the music do the work of generating enthusiasm.”

The story is one of triumphant highs, stunning reversals of fortune, and missed opportunities, such as the time The Beatles tried and failed to schedule a recording session at the Stax studio on McLemore Avenue. (“Had that happened, for sure Ringo and Paul would’ve been up in this documentary!” says Wignot.)

Wignot’s approach is immediate and visceral. In one priceless take, shot in Booker T. Jones’ Nevada home, the Stax organist and arranger walks us through the creation of the timeless instrumental “Green Onions,” explaining how the song works from a music theory standpoint. It’s a little like watching Albert Einstein sketch out the equations for general relativity on a cocktail napkin.

“The thing that’s so incredible about Booker T. Jones is, he’s quite a quiet guy. Put him in front of a crowd and he’s like, ‘I’m ready!’ But then put him in a more intimate setting, and that’s not his milieu, which I love about performers. So he walked in and he said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little bit nervous and shy.’ He looked amazing, that blue suit and the hat, everything styled to perfection. And he said, ‘I’m going to sit at the piano and just start playing. It helps me settle down.’ As we were finishing up our setup, Booker T. Jones — Booker T. Jones! — is giving us a private concert. You’re trying to act like it’s very normal and not to go full fan-girl on him, just like, ‘How is this happening?’ The cameraman is like, ‘The light’s going to go here?’ And we’re like, ‘The guy is doing his thing RIGHT NOW.’

“Finally, I said, ‘[‘Green Onions’], it’s such a classic, that song. Since the process of working in Stax was so spontaneous, it could feel like things just kind of emerged out of nothing, give it to me. What’s the thought process? How do you get to this song?’ He was already at the piano, and he just started explaining it. It’s hands down one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. … Once you understand how ‘Green Onions’ came about, do you really need a famous person to talk about how much they love that song?”

The fact that Stax soul was chronically underappreciated by both the music industry and music press is a recurring theme in the series. In the intro, Parker promises to tell uncomfortable truths about how the powers-that-be never really wanted the company to succeed. The racial discrimination of the Jim Crow-era South is never far from the surface of the story, such as the time the label’s first breakout star, Carla Thomas, had to ride the service elevator to get to a meeting with the head of Atlantic Records.

It wasn’t until the Stax/Volt Revue toured Europe in the spring of 1967 that the Black musicians realized what it was like to be respected for their music, and not judged for the color of their skin. The segment of “’Cause I Love You” documenting the tour is powerful, says David Porter. “You could see a little bit of it, as an artist looking at the film, but to be there and to see that energy and that spirit was all over that space. There were people who were enjoying that music just breaking down and crying, getting tremendously emotional when they looked at Otis Redding, or Sam & Dave, or Eddie Floyd. It was something to see.”

Sam Moore acts as an informal narrator for the story of the tour, as you see his younger version hyping up a crowd of Norwegian teens. “There’s so many different films that have been able to make use of this material,” says Wignot. “Thank God it exists, but I was thinking, how do you take something that’s been often seen and give it a new life, a new kind of vitality? … When Sam Moore started talking about his love of the church, I wanted to get that in there, but not the way it is often told, up front. That’s the story of how R&B came together, in a way. It’s so central to what moves him as an artist. We have him talking about the power of the preacher to communicate. I just love in documentaries when you see somebody thinking. Then he says, ‘I would do anything to get that crowd to do a show with me.’ And that is so powerful because he’s not just trying to ‘turn them on.’ Even there, there’s a collective exchange, ‘Come with me, let’s do this together. …’

“The challenge of scenes like that, is how do you do it so that the music gets to live, so that we experience it as viewers as if we were there in the concert? But you’re adding just enough commentary that you’re not speaking on top of the scene, and you’re communicating what was going on emotionally for the performer. So there’s a real balance of too much dialogue versus too little dialogue, and understanding that the material is incredible in and of itself.”

“Chapter One” ends on the high note of the tour, says Wignot. “Episode one builds the way that ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ builds as a song. It was informed by Jim Stewart saying he thinks that that’s the song that best sums up the kind of spirit of Stax. It’s collaboration. It starts with one thing and then another thing gets laid on top and another. It just kind of builds over time and then becomes this big, explosive powerhouse climax of a song.”

“As you go forward with each of these segments, you’re gonna find that it is gonna get heavy. It’s gonna get fun, it’s gonna get powerful because it is alive,” says Porter. “The camaraderie that was between us, enjoying it, was shown in this film. It was a different time, and not a sweet time. We applauded what Jim [Stewart] was doing, giving us the freedom to go into the studio and do that. Everybody worked together in such a cohesive way, and there was a love and magic that happened in a continual way from day to day, hour to hour, all the way to the midnight hour. All that we would do, we’d have fun doing it. Because music is never good unless you can feel the joy inside of doing it.”

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. is now streaming on Max.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Last of Us

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey make for uneasy post-apocalyptic companions as Joel and Ellie.

Post-apocalyptic stories hit different these days. It’s not that the Covid-19 pandemic was a civilization ender — the real-life virus’ current worldwide death toll is 6.7 million people, while, to pick one example from post-apocalyptic lit, the Captain Trips virus from Stephen King’s The Stand is 99 percent fatal. It’s that now, we have a much better appreciation of what kind of disruptions that even a “normal” pandemic can create. And, of course, the fear of infection inherent in the zombie genre is much more relatable.

The Last Of Us was released for Playstation 3 in June 2013, right at the height of the last zombie craze and three years into the run of The Walking Dead. It was an immediate hit and is now considered a classic for its cinematic, character-based storytelling, and a Psycho-like protagonist switcheroo, as the character you play initially, Sarah, dies on the first day of the zombie outbreak.

In the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us, Sarah is played by Nico Parker, who charms instantly. It’s her father Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) birthday, and she wants to do something nice for her hardworking single parent. But Sarah’s little jaunt into the city to get Joel’s watch repaired is cut short by a jittery shopkeeper who, it turns out, pays a lot more attention to the news than she does. Her bus ride home becomes a less comic version of Shaun of the Dead, where the background action belies the encroaching chaos, but not everyone understands what it means yet. By the time showrunner Craig Mazin stages his own version of the famous one-shot car escape from Children of Men, the problem is obvious: A mutated fungus that takes over the brains of humans and hijacks their bodies to spread via bite is spreading rapidly.

Then, the story jumps ahead 20 years. Joel is grimly holding on in a radically changed world. What’s left of Boston is a Quarantine Zone run by the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), which also seems to be all that’s left of the American government. The deeply traumatized population bristles after two decades of military rule, and a group calling itself the Fireflies wages a furtive rebellion to restore some semblance of democracy. Joel and his partner Tess (Anna Torv) are planning on busting out of the QZ to find his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) who might be in a Firefly settlement in Wyoming. But their plans are complicated by the arrival of Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager who wanders in from the contaminated wasteland with a big secret: She was bitten by an Infected, but resisted the fungus. The Fireflies want to get her to a group of surviving scientists, who they think can use her to create an antifungal vaccine.

Mazin, who won two Emmys for his excellent Chernobyl series, and Neil Druckmann, who wrote the source material, have an unerring eye, and often more importantly, an ear for the creepy. Pascal, freed from the helmet of The Mandalorian, is perfect as the taciturn Joel, while Ramsey, last seen as the fierce Lady Mormont on Game of Thrones, deftly hints at the depths behind Ellie’s eyes. The Last of Us is the rare video game adaptation that actually works on its own terms. Even if you’re as burned out on zombies as I am, it’s worth a look.

The Last of Us is streaming on HBO Max and Hulu.

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Film Features Film/TV

House of the Dragon

Paddy Considine stars as King Viserys I Targaryen in HBO’s House of the Dragon.

I will start this review of the pilot episode of HBO’s House of the Dragon, the official prequel (eye roll emoji) to the smash-hit fantasy series Game of Thrones, with what we Extremely Online folk call a “hot take”: The last season of Game of Thrones wasn’t that bad.

Story-wise, the endgame of the eight-season tale was pretty reasonable: Jon Snow, who belatedly discovered he had a claim to the coveted Iron Throne, murdered his fiancée Queen Daenerys Targaryen after she opted for mass slaughter by dragon during the final conquest of Westeros’ capital, King’s Landing. Snow was re-exiled to the Black Watch for his crime (which was probably just as well, as he didn’t really want to be king), and his half brother Bran Stark, a post-human, magical being who can see both past and future, is proclaimed king by what’s left of the noble houses.

Personally, I didn’t buy the “Daenerys has shown her true genocidal self and has to go for the good of the kingdom” argument. If it had been me in Jon Snow’s fur collar, I would have taken the dynastic marriage and used the raw power of my smoldering sexuality to positively influence the khaleesi. But what do I know? I’m a lover, not a fighter, and the great game for control of Westeros favors the bold and bloody.

The real problem with the final season of Game of Thrones was that it was rushed. Instead of the standard 10-episode season, show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss opted to produce only six installments, redirecting their extravagant budget into one blowout battle scene for “The Long Night.” But the night battle turned out to be a bust because (surprise!) it’s hard to see what’s happening in the dark, so instead of watching Jon Snow and Daenerys go from love to deadly suspicion over four hours, we didn’t get to see anything, really.

But that’s all 172 years in the future from House of the Dragon, which informs us in a lengthy preamble that we’re going to learn how the dragon-riding Targaryen dynasty all but exterminated itself. When we last left King’s Landing, it lay in ruins. We return in its heyday, as King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine) rules over the (reasonably) peaceful city. His queen Aemma Arryn (Sian Brooke) has been pregnant five times, but only one child survived. Unfortunately, Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock, for now) is female, and the Westerosi patriarchy frowns on the concept of queens ruling alone. Instead, the king’s brother, Prince Daemon Targaryen (former Doctor of Doctor Who Matt Smith) is the heir apparent — unless the queen’s current pregnancy ends with the birth of a son.

The king is so confident in his son-siring ability that he calls all the knights and noble houses in the Seven Kingdoms to a tournament, just as the queen is scheduled to deliver. If all goes well, the chieftains will be there to celebrate the beginning of another generation of political stability.

Reader, all does not go well. As the tournament devolves from chivalric jousting into a general brawl, Queen Aemma Arryn’s labor results in a breech baby and botched cesarean delivery. (Westerosi magic has many strengths, but obstetrics is not one of them.) Prince Daemon, having shown his brutal character as the castration-happy commander of the city watch, is still scheduled to take over the throne. Thanks to the machinations of the King’s Hand, Ser Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), Viserys decides to buck tradition and name his embittered daughter Rhaenyra as his heir. What could possibly go wrong?

The House of the Dragon pilot is carefully engineered by new showrunner Ryan Condal and author George R. R. Martin to be both just familiar enough not to turn off the fans while promising new adventures, this time with a whole bunch of dragons. Rhaenyra is basically Arya Stark with Daenerys’ hairdo. Considine gives the most compelling performance as the well-meaning king, traumatized by the sudden loss of his wife. Smith continues his post-Doctor run of ace villains. The joy of Game of Thrones has always been the sprawling cast of supporting characters, and we’re introduced to plenty with potential. But still, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire began as a response to the bloodless, unsexy high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. House of the Dragon’s got plenty of on-screen blood and sex, but the tone so far has a distinct Tolkienian stiffness. Here’s hoping Condal and his cast grow into the chain mail boots they need to fill.

House of the Dragon is streaming on HBO Max.

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Cover Feature News

Ben Cory Jones’ Trip from Memphis to Hit-Making Hollywood Writer

CREDIT: Christen Hill

“The great thing about what I do … I write Black stories,” says Ben Cory Jones, who started his professional life on Wall Street but found his true love in Hollywood. “Wall Street made me a smarter person, and it’s because I have a sophisticated worldview. I want to bring that to us.”

Jones, an original producer and writer for the HBO hit series Insecure, got his start telling stories in high school at The Commercial Appeal‘s teen newspaper, The Teen Appeal. “I am a product of Memphis journalism. I continue to read the Memphis Flyer in L.A.,” he says.

Jones began his journey at Memphis’ Central High school. It was there that he was convinced to pursue a career in writing. He knew he had a knack for it but it was his guidance counselor who pushed him to pursue writing as a career.

Christen Hill

Writer Ben Cory Jones wrote his way from the local The Teen Appeal to Underground and HBO’s Insecure — with a stop on Wall Street.

When Jones set out to find a college in 2001, his decision came down to either the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, or Morehouse College in Atlanta. Coming from a middle-class family in Whitehaven, UTK made more sense, financially. And Jones had already gotten accepted and knew he could afford it. But the guidance counselor who was impressed with Jones’ writing ability urged him to major in English at Morehouse. Fortuitously, he earned a full-ride scholarship to Morehouse and never looked back.

As an editor of the Morehouse College newspaper, The Maroon Tiger, Jones could never have imagined that he would one day be striking Hollywood deals and working backstage with film and television legends. But he wanted to go to work on Wall Street after college.

From Wall Street to Rodeo Drive

Jones was an English major and finance minor, and thought it would be best to go into a career where he knew he’d be financially stable. He began working as an investment banker in 2005, just after graduation. Engaging with the finances of some of America’s wealthiest families, he was privy to a life only a small portion of the nation gets to witness.

Then the 2008 recession hit, and the bank where he worked closed. Jones no longer wanted to stay in finance, so he went back to writing — this time as a blogger. It was after he started a movie review blog that he got the idea to become a professional writer for television.

He studied the television writing industry like a Wall Street commodity, calculating his next move.

“My job at the bank was ending because of the market crash of 2008, and I’m a calculated risk-taker.” Jones says. “I saw that there were all these different writing programs in L.A. that you could apply to.”

He was able to land several opportunities to participate in writing programs, including the ABC Production Associates Program. “As long as you can get your foot in somebody’s door …” he says. “Now you gotta learn how to work it. Now I gotta learn how to use my Southern-ness from Memphis, my Morehouse-ness, my gay-ness, my Black man-ness, my Wall Street-ness. I’m cobbling together everything about who I am in order to make an impact and be memorable to people.”

The opportunity to work on the hit HBO comedy-drama Insecure came from someone in his writing community, who happened to be an “awkward Black girl” — namely Insecure co-creator and star, Issa Rae.

“Issa has admitly said that I was one of the first calls she made [for the show] because we have known each other, socially, in the industry, trying to come up,” says Jones. “I think there was something about me being a Black dude from the South, who’s gay, who was also funny and interesting, weird and fly. Like, we just took to each other.”

The View from the Writer’s Room

Jones comes from a class of peers that includes Rae and Lena Waithe, known for shows such as The Chi and Master of None, as well as the movie Queen & Slim.

He and Waithe were in the car on the way to the 2018 GLAAD Awards when the idea of producing a BET spin-off of the ’90s movie Boomerang, which starred Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry, came up. Ironically, Berry was presenting Waithe with her award. Jones recalls: “She’s like, ‘Ben, I’m going to ask Halle if you and I do Boomerang, if she would executive produce it.’ After Halle presents her with her award, Lena goes back to the greenroom and says, ‘Hey, me and my friend Ben are going to do a reboot of Boomerang. Would you like to be an EP [executive producer]?’

“She said, ‘Yes.'”

Jones has produced movies such as Step Sisters, and was a writer for Underground, a thriller about the underground railroad in Antebellum Georgia starring Jurnee Smollett. It just so happened that Memphis was the show’s highest-viewing audience in the country.

“Underground changed my life as a writer,” says Jones. “I thought I was gonna be known as the Insecure type of writer. Then I do Underground, they’re like, ‘Oh you can write that shit? You can write an epic thriller, drama, an adventure?’ I wanted that, because a lot of times in this industry, just as in life, people try to view you as one thing. I don’t want to just get pegged as a comedy writer.”

Jones has crafted his career after writers like David E. Kelley, whose writer credits stretch back to the late ’80s, his most recent being the critically acclaimed Big Little Lies. (Just Google him.) Jones touts his own ability to produce a variety of genres. His goal is to create high-octane shows, much like Westworld.

“You have to ingratiate yourself to people in order to learn this business; Hollywood is an apprenticeship business,” says Jones. “All the greats in Hollywood, they can point to the person that they were [an] apprentice to.”

Now, having directed, produced, and been showrunner to a multitude of shows, Jones knows it all goes back to his foundation of writing. “I don’t get my rocks off by being in front of the camera — the writers’ room is heaven to me,” he says. “It is my favorite place on Earth because it’s so fun.”

The distinct voice of Insecure beckons back to the authenticity of Black sitcoms in the ’90s. Yet now, it’s doused with a fresh perspective that transcends race. “When we got Insecure, we said, ‘This show is for us! Y’all can watch it, but this show is for us,'” Jones says. “The greatest compliment that we get about Insecure is that ‘this show sounds like conversations my friends and I have.’ And that’s all we ever wanted.”

There’s a Millennial voice that has impacted Hollywood in some beautiful ways. That may be attributed to the fact that the creators of the show derived from social media.

Hutchinsphoto | Dreamstime.com

Issa Rae

“The great thing about Insecure is that Issa Rae had those numbers on YouTube to show them that a show about Black women’s lives is important,” says Jones. The show’s cult following might contend this series delves into the journey of two exes, Lawrence and Issa, however, Jones describes Insecure as a love story between Issa and her best friend, Molly.

The show is a raw, funny, and endearing peek into Black life that isn’t driven by continual trauma or violence. It’s simply a show about Black people, living their Black-ass lives.

The Future After Insecure

“People are always like, ‘We need Black stories, we need Black movies,’ but the only way we get them is by having Black storytellers who are trained to do it,” Jones says. “They’re not trying to make us better; we have to make ourselves better.”

Jones noticed that there were fewer writing programs for young Black writers, so he built his own: @Benthewritersroom, a virtual writers’ room for new Black voices.

“Giving back, creating this program, has been one of the highlights of my life and career,” Jones says. “I’m the product of a lot of writers’ programs. I realized that these programs are fading in the industry, and I wanted to create a program that’s specifically for Black writers, specifically for underrepresented writers.”

Writers meet weekly for four months to develop their ideas. It’s his version of a boot camp for people who haven’t had the privileges he’s had. “I want to teach Black writers how to write. I want our skill level to be a level of excellence,” says Jones. “When you leave my program, you leave with a finished script. I’m going to teach you to have a product that is ironclad and sufficient to get your career started.”

Jones says he has a unique and valuable worldview that he is eager to unleash on the next crop of television writers: “One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned in Hollywood is you don’t personalize things that happened to you, because if you do, then you will literally leave and pack your bags after a month. I don’t know a lot for sure, but I do know for sure that I have a God-given talent to write. And I have to protect it at all costs. I almost have to have an impenetrable barrier around me. My main concern is making sure that my writer brain stays intact no matter what experiences I have.

“The people who green-light shows in Hollywood are not Black,” Jones says, “so our job as storytellers is to make it appealing and give a view of why this would be important.”

Jones says he is a Memphian at his core. He bleeds Memphis and he wants nothing more than to make his home city better. He’s writing a show set in Memphis called Candy, built around a Black female mayor. “I want to bring the industry here to Memphis,” he says. “I can create a TV show that employs hundreds of people.

“Life is going to beat you up. This business is going to beat you up. But the thing that saves me is when I write. At the end of the day, no one can tell me anything when I’m writing.”

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Film/TV TV Features

Between the World and Me

Since Kenneth Arnold saw mysterious objects in the skies over Mt. Rainier Washington in 1947, people have been scanning the horizon for UFOs. The alien spaceships were there in the skies over America, we thought, for the better part of 60 years, but actual photographs of flying saucers were rare because not everybody was carrying a camera all the time.

Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, racism has diminished in America, we thought. Arbitrary police violence directed toward Black people was a thing of the past, we thought. It was something Bull Conner did in Jim Crow Alabama, not something that happened in 21st-century America. Sure, every now and then we’d hear about a Black guy getting shot by police, but they probably did something to deserve it. Besides, it’s not like we had videos of police brutality.

In Kamilah Forbes’ adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a host of actors, like Oprah Winfrey (above), bring the script to life.

The year before Barack Obama was elected, Apple introduced the iPhone. Since then, smartphone technology has exploded across the globe. More than 2.2 billion iPhones of increasing sophistication have been sold, joined by at least that many Android devices. The latest iPhone has a minimum of three cameras onboard, which means now practically everyone does have a camera in their pocket, capable of recording 4K video and streaming it to the internet in real time.

And what has this technological revolution revealed? Clear images of UFOs are still rare as hens’ teeth, but a new video of police killing and brutalizing Black people rockets across the internet every few weeks.

If the annus horribilis of 2020 has any value going forward, I hope it will be remembered as the year we shed our rose-colored glasses of American exceptionalism. The summer of Black Lives Matter was enabled by the imagination of the son of a Syrian immigrant, but it was the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates that gave the protest movement its intellectual underpinnings. Between the World and Me was written in 2015 as a letter to Coates’ son, Samori, who was named for an Algerian freedom fighter who dedicated his life to trying to throw off French colonial rule.

“I’m telling you this in your 15th year,” it begins. The book is a memoir in the form of the “talk” Black parents give their teenage sons to tell them that they must keep their noses clean and their conduct above reproach to try and avoid the worst abuses of racism — not that that is enough to guarantee their safety. “I did not tell you it would be okay, because I did not believe it would be okay,” writes Coates.

The 2015 National Book Award winner was first adapted for the stage at Harlem’s fabled Apollo Theater by Kamilah Forbes in 2018. Then, in August 2020, in the heat of BLM summer, she directed a film adaptation for HBO. Between the World and Me is in no way a conventional movie. It is a spoken-word piece with visual accompaniment; its closest antecedent is probably one of Agnès Varda’s essay films, like Faces Places. There are montages, archival footage, and animation, but the point of the thing is Coates’ prose, which carries the same KJV rhythms as the language of the Black church. Instead of just having Coates read to us, the words are brought to life by a host of actors, including Oprah Winfrey, Phylicia Rashad, Mahershala Ali, and Angela Bassett. The late Chadwick Boseman, who attended Howard University with the author and collaborated on a play with the director, is seen giving a commencement address to his alma mater in 2018.

Howard, which Coates calls “The Mecca,” plays a big part in the psychic universe of the film. Not only did Coates meet his son’s mother there when he passed her a blunt at a college party, but he attributes his spiritual and intellectual awakening to his time at the HBC. After growing up in the poor neighborhoods of West Baltimore, Coates says his experiences at the school proved to him that “the African diaspora is cosmopolitan.”

Howard also becomes the locus of Coates’ radicalization when one of his friends, Prince Carmen Jones, is shot and killed by police while driving to his fiancé’s house. Coates uses the incident to drive home the message to his son that “… there are awful men who have laid plans for you.”

The writer has James Baldwin’s gift for summing up complex social concepts with a memorable phrase. He explains the appeal of racism to white people with “A mountain is not a mountain without something below.” He implores his son to not measure himself by the standards of racist society, but to forge his own path and identity. But he also leans strongly on what he calls “the American expectation of fairness.” Far from what Coates’ critics would like you to believe, this is not a call for tribalism and cultural isolation, but instead a plea to rework the very foundations of the American identity. As you watch Oprah weep while she listens to an interview with Breonna Taylor’s mother, you’ll think, it’s about damn time.

Between the World and Me is showing on HBO.

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Film Features Film/TV

American Utopia

From the beginning, America has been a utopian project. The Founders had come of age in an era that highlighted the problems of monarchy and what we now call authoritarianism. They saw decades in England dominated by civil war, with only the cast of unyielding megalomaniacs changing from time to time. They threw off a haughty monarchy interested only in exploitation and indifferent to the needs of its subjects in far-flung colonies. They embraced the ideals of science and the Enlightenment to create a system of democratic self-rule in the hopes that these United States could be a better place than those that came before. In 1790, George Washington wrote to a supporter that, “The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.”

From the beginning, America did not live up to the ideals espoused by our founding documents. All men were created equal — except the Black slaves. People were endowed by their creators with the inalienable right to life — except the natives who had to be slaughtered so we could take their land. Everyone had a right to vote — except for women, who made up half the population. But the ideas unleashed by the American Revolution proved infectious and hard to kill, sparking a pandemic of democratic thought all over the world. Like science, there is no end state to democracy; it’s a process. America is a 244-year-old work in progress.

This must be the place — A-list director Spike Lee documents former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s (above, center) vision of his adopted home in American Utopia.

Embracing the will to change is a theme that runs throughout American Utopia. It might sound strange to claim that a concert film has a theme besides “get up and dance,” but this is no ordinary concert film. David Byrne, who gained fame as the frontman for the greatest of the 1970s art punk bands, Talking Heads, crafted a Broadway show out of the unique tour he designed for his 2018 album. When Byrne played at 2018’s Memphis in May, the contrast between his act and the dozens of other pop, rock, and hip-hop acts was striking. Instead of a stage full of musicians tethered to the instruments, Byrne and company started out with a blank stage surrounded on three sides by curtains of silver links. The musicians, carrying their instruments in harnesses like a marching band, moved freely about the stage, executing choreography that took from both the freedom of the New York modern dance scene and the rigid precision of color guards and drum corps. Once the show moved to the Great White Way, it was refined into a blockbuster, which was selling out the historic Hudson Theatre.

Talking Heads were the subject of what is, for my money, the greatest concert film ever made, 1983’s Stop Making Sense, directed by the late Jonathan Demme. To document American Utopia, Byrne reached out to fellow New Yorker Spike Lee. Filming a Broadway show might seem like a waste of talent for someone on the shortlist of America’s greatest living directors, but Stop Making Sense proved the concert film is a unique and subtle challenge for a filmmaker.

Fortunately for us, Lee said yes, and he was more than equal to the task. This is not a three-camera shoot feeding a Bonnaroo live-stream. Lee and cinematographer Ellen Kuras have an uncanny knack for putting their cameras in exactly the right place to capture the drama and spectacle of the choreography. We get views from the wings, close-ups of the dancers’ bare feet, and even a rotating overhead camera.

The film’s 20 songs span Byrne’s career, from the twitchy “Don’t Worry About the Government” from the Talking Heads’ debut in ’77, to “Everybody’s Coming to My House” from 2018. The nestled polyrhythms and Dada poetry of “I, Zimbra” sound made for the percussion-heavy band, led by frequent Byrne collaborator Mauro Refosco. Songs from American Utopia, which sounded a little half-baked on the record, come into their own before the packed theater.

Byrne begins the show holding a model of a human brain. As New Wave’s poster boy, he weaponized what he now describes as mild autism into a persona that fit the confrontational CBGB punk scene where the Heads first emerged. The arc of American Utopia echoes his experiences growing up in public as a perpetual outsider trying to relate to the neurotypical. In his opening description of the brain, he pays special attention to the corpus callosum, the groove that both separates the two hemispheres and carries messages back and forth.

Byrne wants to show that we are much more alike than we are different. He points out that most members of his band, including himself, are immigrants. The American experiment has produced horrors and violence, but our openness has also led to the greatest flowering of creativity the world has ever seen. In this time of darkness, Byrne and Lee say we can once again come together to pursue that elusive dream of utopia. With this singularly joyous film, they are leading by example.

American Utopia is airing on HBO, and streams on HBO Max.

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Film/TV TV Features

Racism is the Existential Horror in Lovecraft Country

One of the subtle jokes in HBO’s 2019 Watchmen series comes in the pilot episode. In an alternate version of 2019, Tulsa police chief Judd Crawford is called out of an all-Black production of Oklahoma! when one of his men is shot by a white supremacist terrorist.

Recasting the lily-white musical about love among the Sooners with African-American actors was a subtle dig at Hamilton — an alternate history commenting on the real world’s preferred revisionist history. The 2019 where Robert Redford is president for life was, on the surface, much more racially tolerant and liberal than the real 2019, but their biggest problems are still megalomaniacal rich people and racism.

Jonathan Majors (left) and Jurnee Smollett face racism and white supremacist institutions in Lovecraft Country.

With its masked police and white supremacist conspiracies — and a whopping 26 Emmy nominations — the sequel series to Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ landmark graphic novel is enjoying a second life during the pandemic. With no second season in sight (and frankly, none needed), HBO’s would-be Watchmen successor is Lovecraft Country. Loosely adapted from a short story collection by science-fiction writer Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country takes the revisionist scalpel to one of horror’s sacred cows.

H.P. Lovecraft’s stories from the 1920s are founding documents of modern horror. The villains of Lovecraft’s stories are epic monsters like Cthulhu, an “elder god” alien hibernating on the bottom of the ocean, waiting for the moment when the stars align to devour humanity. But the real horror in Lovecraft is our own cosmic insignificance. The return of Cthulhu or the mysterious meteorite that brings a contagious, reality-distorting prismatic phenomenon in “The Colour Out of Space” are simply “natural” forces bigger than us. In the age of climate change and pandemics, Lovecraft’s appeal is clear: Everything we have worked for and worried about in our pathetic little lives is subject to being swept away by unfeeling forces beyond our comprehension.

But while Lovecraft may have been a genius and his work remains relevant, he was also, in his personal life and letters, racist as hell. While it’s true most privileged white men of his time held racial attitudes that would not pass muster today, Lovecraft wrote a friend that Hitler was “a clown, but God, I like the boy!” Once again, we are faced with the question of the content of the art vs. the character of the artist.

Black sci-fi fan Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) will take the art. The bookish Chicagoan has just returned from serving in the Korean War to search for his disappeared father. But his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance), won’t let him forget the glaring flaws in Lovecraft’s character. George is the publisher of a guide for safe Negro travel through pre-civil rights era America. Even though Atticus celebrates leaving “Jim Crow Land” when he rides in the back of the bus from his Army base in Florida across the Illinois border, George knows there are still “sundown towns” all through the Midwest, where Black people are unwelcome, to say the least.

George agrees to take Atticus along on his latest travel writing trip to investigate a mysterious message his father left behind. He was obsessed with finding the secret of Atticus’ mother’s mysterious parentage. Before he disappeared, he traced the family tree to Ardham, Massachusetts, one letter away from Arkham, the base of Lovecraft’s mysterious Cthulhu cult. The third person along on their journey is Leti Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), a childhood friend who has fallen on hard times.

Lovecraft Country‘s pilot “Sundown” begins strongly enough. Atticus’ dreams about his battle experiences in Korea are interrupted by invaders from Mars. As H.G. Wells’ tripods spray heat rays across the battlefield, the red Martian princess Dejah Thoris descends from a flying saucer to save him.

The fantastic scene neatly sums up how Atticus finds solace in pulp fantasy. But even as he and his friends find Lovecraft’s fantastic creatures in the Massa woods, the real scary monsters are the white supremacist sheriffs who terrorize the Black travelers. The episode’s climax traps Atticus and company with their racist oppressors in a Night of the Living Dead-style siege in a cabin in the woods, but not even mutual supernatural threats can overcome their divisions.

“Sundown” is gorgeously shot, and showrunner Misha Green and director Yann Demange conjure some genuinely tense moments, such as a car chase with our heroes trying to beat both the law and the sunset. The series promises a Black, vintage version of The X-Files, with monsters of the week and an overarching Cthulhu cult conspiracy.

While it’s hard to judge a series by its pilot (with Watchmen‘s “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice” being the exception that proves the rule), Green and Demange muddy the waters by trying to bite off too many characters and plot threads at once. A pretty but meandering sequence involving Leti’s R&B singer sister feels glaringly out of place, for example. Lovecraft Country‘s revisionist horror has potential, if it can just learn to focus.

Lovecraft Country airs on HBO.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Try Not to Cringe

CREDIT: HBO

“Try not to cringe.”

We’ve all had those moments — times when we said or did something that causes us, perhaps even years later, to wince inwardly or take a sharp breath at the thought of it: An email sent to the wrong person. A not-so-white lie exposed. An embarrassing party video. A mistake so dumb, the memory of it still makes you … cringe.

Sometimes we cringe for other people, especially for someone who might be making a fool of themselves — usually because of their cluelessness — but is totally unaware of it. Bless their heart, you think. Better him than me.

HBO

Axios reporter Jonathan Swan

If you haven’t seen Axios reporter Jonathan Swan’s interview with President Trump on HBO, please check it out. I haven’t cringed so much in years, mostly in a kind of weirdly sympathetic way for Trump, who is clearly suffering from some sort of mental disability that renders him incapable of hearing a factual statement or question and responding to it in kind.

Swan points out the high death numbers from COVID-19 in the United States. Trump responds: “Our death rate is one of the lowest in the world!” and pulls out some simple-looking bar graphs to prove it. Swan looks at the graphs and says, in effect, “Oh, I see. You’re pointing out that the rate of death per case in the United States is fairly low. I’m talking about the fact that the United States has by far the highest number of deaths in the world per person.”

“No we don’t,” says Trump.

Swan points out that South Korea, with 51 million people, has 300 deaths.

“How do you know that?” says Trump.

By this point, Swan is trying to swim through the murk of Trump’s brain. “The United States is losing 1,000 people a day,” he points out. “The number of deaths per capita is the highest in the world, by far.”

“No. That number’s going way down,” says Trump.

“No, it’s not. It’s going up.”

“You’re wrong,” Trump says. “Look at the manuals. Look at the books.”

“What manuals? What books?”

At this point, Trump is in so far over his head, so cringey and dense, I could barely watch. I imagine, for a brief moment, being a member of his staff charged with showing him “proof” of his magical thinking. He doesn’t want facts. He wants “evidence,” no matter how absurd, that backs up his point of view.

It’s frightening that the president of the United States thinks this way — that facts and statistics and scientific research are all considered nothing but malleable fodder, subject to debate and ideological manipulation. “Don’t think, just listen to me” is Trump’s real message.

Trump says “open the schools,” and all across the country, cities and counties are striving to make that happen, despite the obvious dangers. But Trump’s child’s private school and his grandchildren’s private schools will be closed. Trump says we should have fewer COVID tests, yet he and his staff and everyone who comes near him is tested every day. Trump says voting by mail is corrupt, yet he and his family vote by mail. His echo chamber on Fox News says wearing masks is silly and we need to get back to normal, yet all of them are still broadcasting from their homes.

Don’t think, just listen to me. And millions do just that: The fools who gathered at a Missouri county fair by the hundreds this week to sing along to country music. The morons who hang out in clubs on Broadway in Nashville and on Beale Street in Memphis, partying like nothing has changed. The 77 seniors who posed close together and maskless for a class picture on the first day of school at Etowah High School in Georgia. Magical thinking. The disease only happens in cities or to old people. Masks are for scaredy-cats. The flu is worse.

Tell that to Herman Cain. Or John Prine. Or 160,000 other dead Americans, and counting.

The pandemic has made one thing quite clear: There is a lot of ignorance — proud and belligerent ignorance — in this country. And I’m afraid Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.

It’s enough to make you cringe.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

HBO’s Watchmen Series is Chillingly Relevant

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Dr. Manhattan in HBO’s Watchmen limited series.

Alan Moore named his 1986 comic Watchmen after a quote from the Roman poet Juvenal: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who watches the watchmen?”

When Moore and artist David Gibbons reworked some moribund characters from the defunct Charlton comics, the Reagan ’80s were in full swing in America, and Margaret Thatcher was imposing austerity in the artists’ native Britain. Three years earlier, when Moore was first pitching the story to DC, the NATO Able Archer 83 military exercise had almost led to a full-on nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The work, which would later be called “the moment comics grew up,” was suffused with apocalyptic fear and profound disillusionment. The institutions we had created to protect us were out of control and threatening to destroy human civilization. Moore’s thesis, that the comic book superheroes we loved were secretly fascist thugs, was echoed in the other big comic book hit of 1986, Frank Miller’s Batman reboot The Dark Knight Returns. But Miller celebrated violent vigilantism because it made for good comic images. Watchmen was Moore’s warning about a fascist future.

The Seventh Kavalry

When HBO tapped producer Damon Lindelof to create a sequel series to Watchmen, he cast around for a contemporary issue that would resonate as deeply as the reckless rush to nuclear war had in 1986. Moore was out of the picture — he has not endorsed any adaptation of his work since the disasters that were the The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen films. Besides, Watchmen was explicitly a comic about comics. Even though the 2009 Zack Snyder adaptation of Watchmen was successful when it strove to faithfully reproduce scenes from the comics (I cried when Dr. Manhattan went into exile on Mars), it was still blasphemy as far as Moore was concerned.

What Lindelof came up with was the persistence of racism as an organizing principle of American society. Now, nine months after its debut on HBO, Lindelof looks prescient. The Watchmen series is so much better than we ever could have hoped for. And now, for Juneteenth, HBO has made the series available for free outside their paywall.

Regina King as Sister Night

Like the original, this Watchmen features a sprawling cast of characters. The most vibrant and poignant of the bunch is Sister Night (Regina King), aka Angela Abar, a former officer in the Tulsa police department who now fights crime as a costumed vigilante. The Commissioner Gordon to her Batman is Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), the Tulsa chief of police whose suspicious suicide by hanging sets off an investigation that will expose both a deep-seated white supremacist movement in government and a plot to regain the power that created quantum superhero Dr. Manhattan (played in different stages of life by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Zak Rothera-Oxley, and Darrell Snedeger).

Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass and Regina King as Sister Night

What’s most eerie about watching Lindelof’s Watchmen in 2020 is the police department’s use of masks. After the events of Watchmen (the graphic novel and the film adaptation), the superheroes who had been outlaws were accepted as adjuncts of the police.
Universal masking was adapted after an incident in which the racist terrorists The Seventh Kavalry, inspired by the posthumous writings of the Watchman Rorschach, had murdered police officers in their homes. Now that masks are de rigueur in the real world, it connects the fiction to our own apocalyptic atmosphere.

But the series’ critique of race relations in America is what really resonates in the long, hot summer of 2020. Allies emerge in unexpected places, and the villains are hiding in plain sight. Opening the series with a recreation of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which white supremacist gangs destroyed an affluent black neighborhood, turned out to be a stroke of genius.

Since comic book superhero narratives have become the dominant onscreen form in the last decade, it’s a relief to see something as meaty and timely as this. I’ll fully admit that I was extremely skeptical of the endeavor — let’s just say I have not been a fan of Lindelof’s previous work — but this Watchmen is a most worthy successor to Moore’s masterpiece.

HBO’s Watchmen Series is Chillingly Relevant

Watchmen is being re-broadcast on HBO this weekend in its entirety. It is also available on HBO Max streaming service.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Flashbacks: Vinyl and 11.22.63

Two new TV series obsess over the details of a certain moment in time, but with vastly different approaches.

Bobby Cannavale as hard living record executive Ritchie Finestra in Vinyl

As Martin Scorsese’s new series for HBO, Vinyl is focused on 1973, a time which, in retrospect, was the height of the recording industry. Co-produced with Mick Jagger and much of the same production team behind Boardwalk Empire, including writer Terence Winter, Vinyl is a tale of out of control excess on all fronts. Bobby Cannavale, veteran of that show as well as Will And Grace, plays record executive Ritchie Finestra, head of the fictional American Century records. Ritchie is trying to turn his company’s fortunes around by signing Led Zeppelin and selling out the the German company Polygram, and turn his life around by getting clean and moving to Connecticut with his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde). But with cocaine bumping all through his hard partying social circle, it’s clear from the beginning that sobriety was going to be an uphill battle.

With his cronies Zak (Ray Romano) and P.J. (Scott Levitt) at his side, he uses his “golden ear” to find acts to create hits for the label, cringing when he finds out his A&R people had a turned down ABBA as uncommercial. Ritchie’s big breakthrough, which forms the frame of the pilot episode, is finding the New York Dolls and opening up the American glam rock scene. We also flash back to the 1960s, when Ritchie got his start in the business promoting soul singers. Ritchie is another totally unlikeable protagonist in the Scorsese mold of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. Record executives and Wall Street junk bond traders both live near the bottom of the list of careers that inspire sympathy, and Ritchie’s cavalier attitude towards paying his artists justifies reflexive hatred.

But drug-crazed macho preening is not Vinyl’s biggest problem. It’s characters seem to lack motivation (beyond “he’s drug crazed”) for almost anything they do, flying into fits of rage and falling in lust almost at random. And for a historical story made by people who were there, it plays fast and loose with anachronism. Punk and hip hop arrive three years too early, and the concert scenes, which should be the series strong suit, come off like Rock Band: The TV Show. There’s a long way yet to go in Vinyl’s first season, but Scorsese and company will be hard pressed to get themselves out of the corner that the pilot’s frankly ridiculous ending painted them into.

James Franco gets anachronistic in 11.22.63

Better with the historical details is Hulu’s 11.22.63. With 50 years of conspiracy theorists picking over the Warren Report and Zapruder film, few historical events have been obsessed over as thoroughly as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stephen King, who wrote the short novel that the series uses as a jumping off point, created the story out of seemingly the same impulse that drove Oliver Stone to make JFK: to wallow in the details and try to emerge with a coherent narrative. But there’s no Stone-esque psychedelia here. Director Kevin MacDonald’s pilot is a workmanlike table setting exercise, spelling out the rules of the time travel scenario that sees New England writing teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) going back to 11:58 AM on October 21, 1960 by merely stepping into the closet in the back of the neighborhood diner run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) Jake is convinced by Al to use the portal to try and stop the Kennedy assassination, and thus Vietnam and a host of other bad things from happening. He’s got a carefully researched dossier accumulated from his own time travel adventures, and advice like “If you do something that really fucks with the past, the past fucks with you.”

King has had a spotty record with adaptations of his work, but this 11.22.63 does a good job of capturing him at a moment of storytelling tightness. Franco is an appealing presence, and his experience in genre work, which often requires actors to convey information about plot and emotional states very quickly, shines through. The first of eight planned episodes finds Jake experimenting with all of the information advantages being a time traveller 50 years in the past brings, which, when done intelligently and with a sense of play, is the fun part about time travel stories. The trademark King supernatural creepiness comes into play in the person of the Yellow Card Man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who periodically appears to Franco to point out that he doesn’t belong in the past. With the expositional formalities out of the way, 11.22.63 looks ready to take off.