2010 CALL FOR FILMS – QBC International Film Festival (NYC) (via )

Released: 5/02/10 Contact: http://www.queerblackcinema.org info@queerblackcinema.org SKYPE: QueerBlackCinema 2010 QUEER BLACK CINEMA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES CALL FOR ENTRIES NOW AVAILABLE New York, NY– (May 2010) The 2010 Queer Black Cinema International Film Festival announces the call for entries for dramatic a … Read More

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Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92

Article By ALJEAN HARMETZ

Published: May 9, 2010

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not do her own singing. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work

Although absent from the screen, she found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also, she said, “the only man I ever loved,” but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc (the war had scaled Mr. Young’s ambitions down to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor). He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated that contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Credit: New York Times

GONE TOO SOON: Black Photographers Photo Exhibit Tribute to Michael Jackson

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 2009
For more information about the exhibit please contact:
Angel L. Brown, Curator
info@ospfilms.com

NEW YORK, NY – On Sunday, August 30, 2009 Our Stories Productions in association with Billie’s Black celebrates the opening reception of Gone Too Soon: Black Photographers Tribute to Michael Jackson Photo Exhibit curated by Angel L. Brown from 4 PM to 8 PM. Billie’s Black is located at 271 West 119th Street New York, NY between St. Nicholas Ave. & Frederick Douglass Blvd. All are welcomed to attend the reception and may RSVP by emailing info@ospfilms.com

During the exhibition planning process, Angel L. Brown founder of Our Stories Productions and curator of the photo exhibition as well as one of the photographers reached out to over sixteen Black photographers for this unique exhibition.  Angel was one of many fans who went to the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, NY to celebrate the life of Michael Jackson after hearing of his untimely death a few hours earlier. “If you were in New York at the time the death of Michael Jackson was announced, The Apollo Theater was one of the majors places to be among other fans.  After a while of feeling sad and depress, a since of joy and happiness came over my body so I started taking pictures with my digital camera. I then notice it was nothing but media outlets, networks and mainly non-people of color professional photographers capturing the moment.   I then turned the camera on to every Black photographer taking photos. It was my way of archiving the moment in it’s truth. “  The project took on a life of it’s own and is now a traveling exhibit and ongoing series archiving a series of events the day of and weeks after Michael Jackson death with a focus on his fans.  “I want to show his family how much we loved and appreciate his talents” states Angel L. Brown.
The opening exhibition will showcase photography by Kwane Brathwaite, Angel L. Brown, Ricky Day, Lisa DuBois, Gloria “Aziza” Lawyer, Joy Malone and Freddy Rumeci.  In addition, there will be mixed media pieces by Angel L. Brown screened throughout the night.

The opening reception is $3 suggested donation and open to the public. All of the photographers are expected at the opening reception.  R&B recording artist Tyran Gem will perform Gone Too Soon with a photo-montage of the fans at the Apollo Theater the day Michael Jackson died. For more information, please contact curator, Angel L. Brown at (646) 209 -6497or visit http://www.GoneTooSoonMJPhotoExhibit.com

About Angel L . Brown

Angel L. Brown is the founder/CEO of Our Stories Productions, a multi-media company that produces progressive socially conscious work that continues to explore, expose, enlighten, and in search of truth, spirituality and healing through various forms of storytelling with a focus in film, television, music and exhibition about but not limiting to the African Diaspora experience. Some work includes The Black season: Shifting focus to women of color on the L word, a showcase of women shorts, musical acts and career highlights of the L word cast. OSP Black Filmmakers Showcase screening award winning films: Allergic To Nuts featuring Vanessa Williams and Yolanda Ross produced by Red Wall productions, Silence: In Search of Black Female Sexuality featuring Little X, Nzingha Stewart, Tricia Rose, Punany Poets and Dr. Rev. Jeremiah Wright produced by Mya B/ Shoot Films Not People Productions; Cinematographer for cross over music video, Rumors for hip-hop artist Maino featuring Lil Kim and Babs directed by Zaire Baptise and QBC International Film & Music Festival 2009 happening at The National Black Theater. Angel has premiered in several printed magazines including Time Out magazine and participated on various panels, guest curated and was a consultant for several film festivals most recently served on the Executive Committee for Jubilation, a New York Black Pride event heading the film showcase; Punkmouse & Princess Warriors Queer Media Conference: Women Submit 2008 with Rose Troche (Showtime L word writer/director); Women of Color Film Festival – Santa Cruz chaired by Angela Y Davis (associated with the Black Panthers, Activist, Professor& Author); ImageNation Film Festival guest curator including QBC College Tour at various Universities and production work in East Africa, South Africa.and.the.United.Kingdom.

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Queer Black Cinema reppin’ at Chillfest in Jersey City!

Chillfest.org the first and only LGBT film series in Jersey City!

Angel L. Brown, Director/programmer of Queer Black Cinema will be in Jersey City at Chillfest this Saturday representing the organization. Come out and show your love. Tickets are cheap and if you are a student with an valid ID, it’s even cheaper!

Angel will be participating in a Q&A with Vanessa Domico from OutCast films distribution company following the screening of She’s A Boy I Knew! Afterward, stick around and see how you can purchase the film and mingle with Vanessa, Angel and audience members. The event takes place at a bar/lounge so hang out for a while and have fun. Below are details information about the event.

Chillfest, Jersey City screening info:
SHE’S A BOY I KNEW, Directed by Gwen Hayworth. Q&A with Outcast Film’s Vanessa Domico and Queer Black Cinema’s Angel Brown.

This award winning film chronicles the director’s own male-to-female transformation partially through the voices of her family, friend, and wife. This compellingly intimate journey into the nature of love and identity while navigating interpersonal relationships is funny, touching and uplifting.

“Witty, brave and vulnerable.
…The most affecting and memorable documentary of the year.”
– Vancouver Magazine

Sat, Jan 10, 2:30PM (doors open at 2:00PM). At LITM, 140 Newark Avenue (a half block from Grove Street PATH in Downtown Jersey City). Cash bar and drink specials available.

Tickets: $8 at the door, $3 with student ID

Now in its 4th season, Chillfest is Jersey City’s first and only film series dedicated to the exhibition of LGBT stories and images in film and video.

WANT MORE ?
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http://www.qbcfestival.wordpress.com

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