Salim Akil, creator of the CW series, "Black Lightning," says black superheroes are needed more than ever; after Uma Thurman accused Tarantino of abusing her and putting her at risk on a movie set, will his next film proceed as planned?; hardcore movie fans now have a fantasy league of their own.
Filmmakers in the news: Del Toro poised for an Oscar and Tarantino under fire
Movie directors made headlines this weekend, and they weren't all positive.
While Guillermo del Toro's big win at the Directors Guild of America Awards made him the frontrunner for the Oscars directing award, Quentin Tarantino had a less pleasant weekend.
In a long-awaited interview with the New York Times, Uma Thurman describes enduring multiple sexual assaults by Harvey Weinstein, and also details her long professional relationship with Tarantino.
She described the director’s insistence on the actress, not a stunt double, driving at high speeds for a scene in “Kill Bill,” despite knowing the car was faulty. The result was a terrifying accident that Thurman says left her with long-term injuries.
Miramax — which produced the film under Weinstein's leadership — and Tarantino initially refused to release the footage of the accident to Thurman unless she signed away her right to sue. Fifteen years later, they shared the video with Thurman, who made it public in the New York Times story.
One day after The New York Times story was published, Thurman published a post on Instagram saying though the "circumstances of the event were negligible to point of criminality ... I do not believe thought with malicious intent. Quentin Tarantino was deeply regretful and remains remorseful about this sorry event."
https://www.instagram.com/p/Be0x6OCFRwQ/
The Frame's John Horn spoke with Kyle Buchanan, senior editor at Vulture, to discuss Thurman's allegations and what this means for Tarantino’s next project:
This seems way beyond the pale. This is not a director creating a safe space for his actors. This is a director taking advantage of his ability to get away with anything and the power dynamic on set in a very bizarre, extremely concerning fashion. I think it's in keeping with everything we've been talking about when it comes to abuses of power.
Tarantino is right now casting a Charles Manson-related drama and I don't know how the actors — especially the actresses, including Margot Robbie who he's supposedly wooing to play Sharon Tate— are going to feel about signing on for a project like this. Or, for that matter, how Sony will feel about the fact that they're dumping $100 million into the budget for this movie. When these people embark on a publicity tour for the film, is there any way they won't be talking about this awful situation non-stop?
Fantasy movie leagues are a betting haven for film buffs
We’ve all heard about fantasy football and baseball leagues, but what about those of us who wouldn’t know a WAR rating from a concussion protocol, but can tell you why Paramount’s animation department is tragically underrated?
As it turns out, there’s a place for these people too. Fantasy movie leagues are for movie fans can try to prove their skill set in the world of cinema, and they’re about to get a lot bigger.
On a recent Sunday morning at a hillside bungalow in Silver Lake, 20 industry types — including one Skyping from London — are buried in their laptops and research papers as they shout out bids.
Welcome to the 2018 Movie League season auction. Think of it as fantasy football, but instead of drafting players, you’re buying major motion pictures.
Matthew Mizel has been league commissioner since 2006 and, by default, the auctioneer.
“Everyone thinks they know more than everybody else," Mizel says. "Everyone thinks their taste is the best, they know more than their friends. If they were running a studio they’d be incredibly successful and never lose their job.”
The rules are a little complicated, but it boils down to each team spending 270-million fake dollars to buy a slate of 18 real films being released over the next year. You can trade films or co-finance, but at the end of the day those movies rack up points, either for their box office or how well they do with critics.
Which means you can’t just spend your faux cash on block-busters like "Black Panther," because everyone’s going to grab one of those. Instead, you need to find sleeper films you can buy on the cheap that either kill it at the box office, or critics fall in love with. Your Rotten Tomatoes rating is a good chunk of your final score.
There’s a $500 per team entry fee, and the winners will walk away with a couple of thousand dollars – real money, not the faux stuff. But for writer/director Steven Hentges, it’s not about that:
“I don’t play sports, so fantasy football, baseball, don’t make sense to me. I understand [movies], so it’s the bragging rights. The money would be nice, after finishing fourth twice in a row — just out of the money — for me it’s the bragging rights.”
But it’s not just how your movies do, but also how other studios — the real studios — market their films. This was producer Alison Small’s first time in the league. She’s hoping that some bad buzz around one of their films will be offset by a lack of competition.
“Everyone’s talking s**t about 'Tomb Raider,'" she said. "But there’s nothing else opening that weekend, so we got a shot.”
With so many business insiders playing, it’s a little like trying to win MVP after you’ve made the all-star team. Manager Jake Friedman has been playing in various leagues for 20 years:
“Now that we’re in this business, it's something you think you know a little bit about — until you’re in this room, then the advantage goes right out the window.”
And it can also get pretty intense. Mizel says compared to his other gig, it’s not even close:
“In my spare time I teach creative writing to incarcerated teens. I find I’m handling more disputes in the movie league than in the juvenile detention facility.”
While film fantasy games are nowhere near as popular as baseball or football leagues, Mizel is working on a mobile app called Hollywoodinviteonly.com that will let wanna-be moguls find like-minded film geeks to compete against — no matter where they live, or what '80s sitcom reboot or giant fighting robot-vampire-from-the-future movie they’d bet the mortgage on.
“Movies, like sports, are something that people love and are excited about," Mizel said. "And this is a chance to prove to your friends that you’re right, and get a little comeuppance ... and discover that maybe we don’t all know quite as much as we think we do.”
'Black Lightning' creator Salim Akil on the masks black people often must wear
For years, there’s been a real scarcity of black superheroes in film and television. But you wouldn't know it if you were an alien sent to Earth in 2018.
On the Marvel side, there's the much-anticipated "Black Panther" film and the Netflix show, "Luke Cage." And now, DC Comics has spawned the new CW series, "Black Lightning."
By day, Black Lightning is Jefferson Pierce, a former Olympian, current high-school principal and divorced father. Pierce has given up crime-fighting for almost a decade when we meet him, but he reluctantly returns to his superhero ways to battle a violent gang that's taken over his city of Freeland.
Salim Akil is the showrunner of "Black Lightning," which airs Tuesday nights on The CW. He and his wife, Mara Brock Akil, executive produce the series, which grew out of an overall deal the two signed with Warner Bros.
Salim Akil spoke with The Frame host John Horn about "Black Lightning" and why it's important to him to incorporate tough, real-life issues — like gun violence and police brutality — into a show about a superhero.
Interview highlights:
On the idea that "with great power comes great responsibility," for superheroes and for show creators:
I feel that the first responsibility I have is to my vision. Because if I stay true to that, all of the other things I should feel responsible for, or I am responsible for, will follow naturally. So, yes, you have a superhero. Especially an African-American male. And he's got two daughters that are going to have super powers. And they're young black women. One is a lesbian. That's a lot of responsibility in that. But ultimately you feel a responsibility to the people that you're telling stories to. You want to respect and entertain them. You want them to see themselves.
On the inspiration behind a "driving while black" scene in the pilot episode:
Jefferson Pierce is a black man. And I don't care how educated you are, how much money you have, what your status, or who your friends are, when an officer decides to pull you over, you're just a n----- in a car, plain and simple. And you have a choice: You can put on the mask —black men and women have a mask that they have to put on in those situations. But particularly in that situation, you sit up a little straighter and you try to be as docile and as unthreatening as possible.
That particular scene came out of me being pulled over on Main Street in Santa Monica. I'd been pulled over several times. And one night I got pulled over and I couldn't manage to put on the mask. And me and the officers started getting into an argument. And I could tell that they didn't appreciate what I had to say. And I damn sure didn't appreciate what they had to say, so it got to a stalemate. And I had to close my eyes for a moment and just ask myself, Okay, is this worth dying for? Is this worth getting beat down for? So I closed my eyes and I came back. And I just managed to get myself out of that situation. And what's strange about those situations is that you never get a ticket. You never get anything that says it even happened. So either you're going to die, get arrested, or they're going to let you go. But, either way, it's their word against yours.
On balancing real issues with superhero fantasy:
It is a balance. As real as I want it to feel, I also want to entertain. I want you to have fun. So what I try to do is use humor and use music to indicate things. You know, using Billy Paul's "Am I Black Enough for You?" when he's fighting ... [also music by] Jack White, Nina Simone. I just try to entertain on all levels, and so there is humor in the show as well. I mean, it's a drama. But our humor, you know, is — I guess they call it dark, no pun intended. But yeah, It's a balance. You do it from show-to-show, you do it from script-to-script and story-to-story.
On the show's discussion of the differing views of blackness and inclusion of a character with albinism:
I know people who talk like [Tobias, the gang boss with albinism]. And I think it's important we know that those people are out there. You know, we're about one generation up out of Jim Crow, and there's a lot of self-hate as a result. There are certain things that we say in our communities to each other that are the result of years and years of psychological abuse. And I didn't want to ignore it. It just seemed very natural to have it in — especially with Tobias because he's an African American man who has albinism. And as we get to know him, he's always felt out of place. He's not black, he's not white. I wanted to create a character that had suffered from that so that we could examine it and look at it and be honest about it.