Here is the trailer for a documentary on the impact of Bruce Lee on the world.   I did an interview for it, and based on the Wall Street Journal review (which is on the Hudlin Entertainment Forum) sounds like they used some good stuff from me.  It opens in theatres for special screenings on February 9th and 11th.

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We're tired of "entertainment" that ignores us, that talks down to us, that panders us, that trivializes us. We're White, Black, Asian, Latin, and some other categories besides those…and sometimes we're a mix of all the above. We're male, we're female, we're straight, we're gay. We are comfortable in our own skin.

We're on our laptops, we're on our phones, we're in theatres, we're at the concert, we're at the protest, we're one on one in person.

Some of us don't even have a TV. We want it smart, we want it funny, we want it deep, we want it hot, we want it sexy, we want it inspiring, we want it all.

We like funny sketches, we like outrageous reality shows, we like crazy animation. We like action, we like science fiction, we like horror. But we like it when it's good.

We're not scared to be stupider than stupid. We're not scared to express our opinion. We're not scared to change our mind. We're not scared…period.

info@newnationnetworks.com

Two super talented friends, writer Selwyn Hines and artist Denys Cowan, are collaborating on a new book from DC/Vertigo called VOODOO.

"It's kind of like 'The Fugitive' meets 'True Blood,'" writer Selwyn Seyfu Hinds said, describing his new creator-owned Vertigo series "Dominque Laveau, Voodoo Child." Explaining that the series takes place in New Orleans, Hinds continued, "'Voodoo Child' is about a young woman who is a student...who wakes up one day and discovers that there's an entire supernatural side to the city that she never suspected. On top of that, every being in that world seems to be out to kill her."

"Voodoo Child" is drawn by Milestone Comics co-founder Denys Cowan, whom Hinds knew from their previous television work together through BET as well as mutual friend and director, Reggie Hudlin.

"[Denys is] a living legend, so it's great to do my first creator owned series with that kind of firepower talent," said Hinds...."

Talk about it on HEF - the Hudlin Entertainment Forum

Talk about it on HEF - the Hudlin Entertainment Forum

There’s been a series of tragic deaths lately: Steve Jobs, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth…and Professor Derrick Bell. Here’s his New York Times obit:

Derrick Bell, Law Professor and Rights Advocate, Dies at 80

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN

Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who worked to expose the persistence of racism in America through his books and articles and his provocative career moves — he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s hiring practices — died on Wednesday in New York. He was 80.

Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that is not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.

In his 20s, while working at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, he was told to give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P., which his superiors believed posed a conflict of interest. Instead, he quit the Justice Department, ignoring the advice of friends to try to change things from within.

Thirty years later, when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar advice. At the time, he said, his wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, asked him, “Why does it always have to be you?”

In “Ethical Ambition,” a memoir published in 2002, Mr. Bell wrote that his wife’s question trailed him afterward, as did another posed by his colleagues: “Who do you think you are?”

Addressing law students grappling with career decisions, he extolled what he called “a life of meaning and worth,” even though, he wrote, he sometimes alienated associates who saw his actions as “futile and foolish.”

Mr. Bell, soft-spoken and erudite, wrote that he was “not confrontational by nature.” But he attacked both conservative and liberal beliefs. In 1992, he told The New York Times that black Americans were worse off and more subjugated than at any time since slavery. And he wrote that in light of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, things might have worked out better if the court had instead ordered governments to provide both races with truly equivalent schools.

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even those intended to lessen the effects of past injustice. Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join the Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday.

At a rally while a student at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama compared Professor Bell to the civil rights hero Rosa Parks.

Mr. Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest. Asked how the status of blacks could be improved, Mr. Bell said he generally supported civil rights litigation, but cautioned that even favorable rulings were likely to yield disappointing results and that it was best to be prepared for that.

Much of Mr. Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of allegorical stories. In books and law review articles, he presented parables about race relations, then debated their meaning with a fictional alter ego, a black professor named Geneva Crenshaw, who forced him to confront the truth about the persistence of racism in America.

One his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Mr. Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves” in exchange for one thing: its black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin. (In 1994, “The Space Traders” was made into a TV movie titled “Cosmic Slop.”)

When I first read FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL, the book that contained the SPACE TRADERS story, I woke up the next day wanting to do a multi-ethnic version of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. HBO bought it under the name SOCIAL FRICTION FABLES and I attached well-known black extraterrestrial George Clinton as host.

Novelist and good friend Trey Ellis wrote a brilliant adaptation of Bell’s original story; Robert Guillaume starred in the lead role of Gleason Golightly, the black advisor of the Republican president.

The other two segments of the trilogy included an adaption of a Chester Himes story written by Kyle Baker and directed by Kevin Sullivan, starring Chi McBride and Paula Jai Parker; and a Santeria based mystery written and directed by my brother Warrington and starring Nicholas Turturro.

When the finished show was shown internally among executives at HBO, there a lot of drama that we eventually caught wind of. Apparently the black executives at HBO thought the show was “dangerous” because seeing the Space Trader segment would “give white people ideas”, as if they didn’t come up with the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, Jewish Concentration Camps and the massacre of Native Americans already.

The pedigree of legendary Harvard Law professor working with a Stanford-trained novelist and the Harvard -trained director of HOUSE PARTY and BOOMERANG, all black, wasn’t enough for them to consider the idea that we might know more than them. I’m sure their heart was in the right place, but their political sophistication was primitive, as is often the cast with Plantation Negroes, as blogger Denmark Vesey calls them. This lack of game is ironically exactly what the story is about.

The black executives lobbied hard to get HBO to dump the show altogether. They failed at that but they did get the marketing budget severely cut.

The show didn’t get a big push, but we got decent numbers and ended up winning two Cable Ace Awards for best special and best actress for Paula Jai Parker, who beat out an amazing list of major white actresses.

It’s such a drag to win an award that doesn’t exist any more. It was a big deal at the time!

I constantly get correspondence from professors who use the film in their college courses. When I first met Quentin Tarantino, the conversation began with him chastising me for only doing a short film when it deserved the big screen treatment.

The film was released on VHS and Laserdisc, but it’s still not on DVD. I didn’t upload those segments on YouTube, but in honor of Dr. Bell’s passing, I wanted to post the show on the site.

In his honor, read his books so we may elevate our game from checkers to chess.

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I’ve been working as a producer on Quentin Tarantino’s new feature film DJANGO UNCHAINED for several months now, and every day is a fantastic experience. I’ve been reluctant to show any pictures but here are a few images from the road.

On the veranda of a slave plantation. I grew up hearing stories passed down from one generation to the next, and read many a great book in college, but seeing it is a whole other thing.

This picture was NOT taken down south. This was taken a few hours outside of Los Angeles.

But it was worth the trip to find a place a beautiful as this.

Nice to be with people who recognize the art of Jim Steranko!

Chains buried in the red clay of Louisiana.
Coming Christmas 2012. It’s going to be epic.

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Let me just start with a simple declaration – Sade in her early 50’s is shitting on all these bitches out here. And that’s not me talking…that’s what my wife thinks!
Sade has always been one of the most beautiful women in the world. I’ve never even seen most of her videos because I couldn’t stand looking at her and not having her. The music was enough for me.

When you compare Sade to other musical artists her age…well, she’s crushing them with her beauty, her elegance, her classy sexual intrigue. Her look and music evokes moody black and white film noir classics like DOUBLE INDEMINITY and IN A LONELY PLACE.

We got to attend the concert because friends of ours decided to make us godparents to their newborn. Niiiiice. So there we are, sitting in a box at the Staples Center grooving to opening act John Legend, who sounded great.

Sade appears to the martial grooves of SOLDIER OF LOVE. She moved through her hits, but supporting her year old latest album with a surprising number of slots. I would have traded out a couple of those tracks for TURN MY BACK ON YOU and personal favorite MAUREEN. The video footage greatly enhanced the pace of the show, which is tricky to maintain with only ballads and mid-tempos.

She did four outfit changes, each raising the game. By the time she came out, hair down, barefoot in a plunging gown, I was done.

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This mural really evokes the great Overton Loyd to me, who deserves a show of his own.

Love how they recreated the density and intensity of New York City.

I was in New York during the golden age of graffiti…it was a sad day when they figured out how to keep the trains clean.

One of my favorite parts of the exhibition was the work art of the late great Ram El Zee, who coined great phrases like Ikonokastic Panzerism.

The west coast was represented too. I could fill this page with pictures, but here’s two more:

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While I’m in pre-production on a new project, my family went to Montana to visit one of my mother’s best friends who has lived most of her adult life in Montana.

While I’m working on a western, they were living it, visiting Native American Pow Wows, panning for gold, riding horses and climbing on tractors.

I was so happy to see my kids play in that much wide open flat space. I have mad yard envy now.

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I wasn’t planning on going but my man Javon Frasier, head of marketing for Marvel Games, insisted on it. He took care of me when we released the BLACK PANTHER DVD. He was there with his wonderful mom and his lovely expectant wife. A great family!

Sure, I could have taken a picture of the red and white carpet and all that, but this picture of someone’s girlfriend posing with a Hollywood Blvd. Spider Man impersonator was the funniest image of the night for me.

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