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Queen Latifah’s performance in the HBO film “Bessie,” is a role that was 22 years in the making.
Now the biopic about the blues great Bessie Smith is nominated for 12 Emmys, including one for Latifah for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie, and one for executive producer Lili Fini Zanuck for Outstanding Television Movie.
Way back in the early 1990s, Zanuck and her late husband, Richard, tried to turn this story into a feature film with Queen Latifah as the lead — but no studios were willing to make the movie.
Then, even as Latifah’s career took off, she continued to monitor the “Bessie” project, hoping that someday she’d get to play one of the most influential singers in American history. The project finally found a home at HBO under the direction of Dee Rees.
When Zanuck stopped by The Frame, we asked her how she knew that Queen Latifah was the right person to play Bessie Smith, even all those years ago:
I had seen Queen Latifah on MTV. She didn't have a show yet or anything, it was when she was brand new [and] rapping. I thought we should bring her out to test her because she was a young woman and she was carrying this Queen Latifah [name]. That takes a lot of persona for a young woman to pull that off. That's actually what attracted me to Bessie...that she was a victim of nothing. Everything she did, she did voluntarily. It was her decision. She was a drinker, she was a brawler, she was bisexual — that is who she was, there wasn't anybody who influenced her...Queen Latifah was about 19 or 20, and she tested for it. She sang and she acted and she was incredible. I felt that she was ready right then.
Why were you interested in the story about Bessie Smith and how do you take such an amazing life and put it into a two-hour film?
She was so colorful and it was by choice. She was living like a man, which was eye-opening that she could do that at that time and in that period. The second thing that I had never seen in a movie, that she could actually have an entire career that really didn't intersect with white people. The venues she chose to play, everything.
Usually a movie like this is about where somebody couldn't get a hotel room, go to the bathroom, eat or whatever — including the movie I made, "Driving Miss Daisy." In this movie, because of the venues that [Smith] played and her choices, not just in this movie, but in her life, we don't have that intersection [that] it was so hard on her to live in this white world. I had never seen that in a movie. I didn't even know anything like that existed.
Why did you keep persisting on this project and why did you feel "Bessie" was something you had to get made?
I credit Queen Latifah with that because after she came for the test at her young age, she would check in with us periodically to get an update. We always said that if we got it set up, we'd have it set up with her. About eight years ago she had some clout with HBO. You have one of those conversations after a success where someone says, What do you want to do next? She was very clear she wanted to do Bessie. When you're trying to do something like this, you're not devoting 24 hours a day to it. You're keeping it simmering, but you can make another dish.
Obviously this was set up at different studios, we had heard all the different arguments about how it wouldn't travel, it was only for the domestic market, young people aren't interested in the blues, young black people aren't interested in the blues — just any kind of argument you can have had [was] put to us.
When you won the Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy," you were only the second woman ever to get that honor. So much has not changed in terms of the opportunities that women get as producers and as directors. Do you think that was a turning point in Hollywood, or is it almost still as difficult for a woman to get projects and be taken seriously in the industry?
I think it might have been a little easier back then. Our business tends to be very liberal, and in the early '80s it was made so aware of the fact that women were such a disproportion of the workforce. There were more opportunities because there was an acknowledgment that we should have women. That's when you had Sherry Lansing as president of a studio and Dawn Steel, etc. These were big, big moments. I found as a producer at that point that I got a lot of support from men. And not just my husband. Now there's a number of professors who keep track of these numbers and they're awful.
Yeah and they're not moving...
They're not moving at all. This isn't going to be a very popular opinion, but my experience is that women don't help women...Sometimes women treat other women in this business as they did in the old days when they heard a woman pilot: Are you sure she can fly the plane? I also find it odd that as soon as a woman gets promoted, there's a man sitting at her [reception] desk. A lot of my friends who have been in that position and had a man at their desk — I mean, you should hire the best person — when I asked them why there isn't a woman at their desk, they say "Oh, because she's going to want to be me." Well, that's called mentoring. Of course you want somebody sitting at the desk that wants to be you. This isn't "All About Eve," but there's nothing wrong with that. I don't see where women who were in a power position helped other women.
So what you're saying is that some women are so focused about not looking like a woman on the job they start behaving like a man?
No, wrong. Because men were totally supportive. I wouldn't have had my career. I was working for the [Zanuck] Company when I found "Cocoon," and my husband and David Brown had never shared a producer credit. Even though I had found this project and produced it, they wanted to give me an associate producer credit. It was Alan Ladd Jr. who said, "You can't do that. She developed it, this is her project." He was my advocate. I can give you a million examples of that, but I can't tell you one time that a woman helped me in any way.