FROM ARETHA TO TUPAC: A NON-FICTION JOURNEY
With Christmas coming I have lot of films available to purchase or watch
My journey into documentary film began while I was still a music journalist. After being interviewed a bunch for TV and music docs, I was asked to write the text for a PBS project on Aretha Franklin called ‘Queen of Soul.’ The producers gave me interview binders and told me to find the best quotes. Then I sat down with an editor who, thankfully, guided me through the process of translating what I’d selected into the doc format. You can find the resulting piece up here on YouTube.
Aretha had a lot of life after 1986, but the film is still a nice survey piece of her career during the classic Atlantic years and her Arista Records comeback. I definitely understood I had a lot to learn, though my focus at this point was on writing screenplays and not non-fiction. A year later I worked with Warrington Hudlin on an EPK on the making of Spike Lee’s ‘School Daze,’ a short behind the scenes piece that has been so lost to time, you can’t even find it on YouTube. What I appreciated about that experience was Warrington, and his brother Reggie, both a year away from making a big splash with ‘House Party,’ sitting me down at an editing board and showing me the science of doc storytelling, a lesson I still draw from today.
By 2004, I’d worked on several films as a screenwriter and producer, but was still unsure about whether I wanted to pursue directing. I’d published a book titled, Post-Soul Nation, which was a look back at the '1980s. To promote it I organized panels in New York and Los Angeles with writers, musicians and filmmakers to look back at that expansive era in black popular culture. Greg Tate, Lynell George, Barry Michael Cooper, Kool Moe Dee, Russell Simmons, Reggie and Warrington Hudlin, Michelle Wallace, Marcus Miller and Trey Ellis — really smart folks — took the time to tell remarkable and funny stories about their coming of age decade. Using my two consumer video cameras, I recorded both panels. At the LA event I positioned a camera on the podium, so I was moderating and shooting at the same time. The resulting 30 minute film was only shown at a few festivals. I actually have about 100 dvds collecting dust in my storage locker. (A trailer is in the link above.)
The mostly unseen ‘Smart Black People’ is one of the reasons I launched THE NELSON GEORGE MIXTAPE as a site on Vimeo. I have SBM up there for rent or sale to give it new life. As a direct result if making that short film, I later would make ‘Brooklyn Boheme,’ a doc I directed with Diane Paragas, that would play on SHOWTIME and Revolt. It covers the ‘80s into the '1990s in the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn that was a center of black artists working in film, music, literature, visual art, and spoken word. Rosie Perez, Chris Rock, Vernon Reid, Talib Kweli, Carl Hancock Rux, Toure, Lorna Simpson, Branford Marsalis, and “da Mayor” Spike Lee relate the story of an area that nurtured them and me.
So I up loaded a copy of Brooklyn Boheme on Vimeo, along with four outtakes from the film that will enrich the viewing experience. (The trailer is below.) You can rent or buy the film there.
The last few years I’ve felt much more confident as a documentary filmmaker and that’s resulted in more ambitious, high profile work. If you’d told me back in 1986 that I’d direct profiles of the most famous black ballerina of all-time, the greatest baseball player of all-time, and document the biggest selling LP of all time, I would not have believed you. It’s been an unexpected journey that’s taken me away from writing full-time, though the skills I learned as an journalist and author have proven essential in this new phrase.
Since I’m recounting my adventures in non-fiction storytelling, I can’t leave out the most ambitious project I’ve participated in — serving as an executive producer on ‘Dear Mama,’ the five part series directed by my old friend Allen Hughes. I met Allen and his brother Albert before they made ‘Menace II Society’ and have remained close to him ever since. But ‘Dear Mama’ was the first time we worked together. I did most of the pre-interviews for the series and assisted in some of the on camera interviewing, much of which was conducted at the height of the 2020 pandemic. Allen, and his editor/co-writer Lasse Jarvi, used an impressionist brush to paint the tale of rap star Tupac Shakur and his radical mother Afeni. So far the film as won an Independent Documentary Award and is up for an Emmy and Grammy.
That I was working on ‘Say Hey’ and ‘Thriller 40,’ while aiding in ‘Dear Mama’s completion, is part of a remarkable time in my life, full of travel, Zoom meetings and watching numerous edits. Much of 2023 has been about recovering from that fruitful, hectic time.
The documentary marketplace has shrunk in the last few years with streamers dominant and the grosses of theatrical releases in free fall. I’m working on two long term projects now with uncertain distribution futures. But I’ve experienced businesses either disappear (alternative weeklies) and careers become irrelevant (music criticism) before, so I’m gonna keep my head down and continue working. No one knows what the future holds in terms of media, but being prepared to reinvent yourself is the lesson I take from all this: If you have good tools, you can always build something new.