THE POSTER FOR THE MARSHALL MOVIE REVEALED!
Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, arrives at the Supreme Court in Washington, August 22, 1958. Marshall will file appeal in the integration case of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. (AP Photo) ASSOCIATED PRESS
This week marked the 109th birthday of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to be appointed to the highest court in America.
Later this year Marshall, the motion picture focused on the early days of Marshall’s legal career, will be released nationwide. Starring Chadwick Boseman as Marshall, the movie centers around the case against a black chauffeur who is accused of sexually assaulting his white female employer. The movie provides a rare glimpse into Marshall beyond his historic victory of Brown v. Board of Education and his appointment to the Supreme Court.
For those who knew him or have studied him, the film sheds a light on a Marshall they were familiar with.
Nicole Austin-Hillery, director and counsel at The Brennan Center for Justice in Washington, D.C. told NBC News that Marshall’s legal career prior to his appointment was itself a movement.
“There is no one who can speak in the same manner that Marshall did – on behalf of the disenfranchised; on behalf of the vulnerable and the misunderstood.”
“As Marshall was taking on these cases of Black men falsely accused of crimes in the South, he was trying to do more than prove their innocence,” she said. “He was trying to change the law so that precedence would be put into play. It was a long term game plan focused on changing the legal system of the future.”
Charles Hamilton Houston, Dean of the Law School at Howard University and Marshall’s mentor, passed Marshall’s legal strategy to him. One cannot understand Marshall without understanding Houston, said Austin-Hillery.
“He taught Marshall to strategically think about law. He pressed the importance of choosing cases very carefully,” she said. ”And how you build a lineage of case law on a series of cases, not just one case at a time. That’s what people don’t know and are missing about Marshall.”
They were strategies, Austin-Hillery points out, that are still alive today.
“When you look at various cases from voting rights to education to the death penalty to gender discrimination — The strategy is to change the legal framework for how these cases are adjudicated; long term legal precedence.”
John A. Powell agrees. Marshall, he said, had a radical vision of integration and of the law.
“He had this vision for transforming society, which I think will be around for a long time,” he said. “There wouldn’t be gay rights, there wouldn’t be the Loving case without Marshall.”
Powell, who is Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California-Berkley, had the pleasure of meeting Marshall once. He describes Marshall as the bone of the civil rights aspiration of an inclusive society – an aspiration that Powell believes we are still struggling with today.
“Marshall was future-focused. He thought the best way of achieving an inclusive society was through integration and presented himself as being part of the system or within the system while at the same time transforming the system.”
John Powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Credit Rasheed Shabazz
In the spring of 1978, Marshall who had been on the Supreme Court for just 11 years gave the commencement address to the graduating class of the University of Virginia. It was a major moment in his career, records historians, because he wasn’t a fan of giving such addresses.
Yet, his advice to the graduates exemplifies his commitment to justice and fairness. He told the class, “Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.”
It is that commitment, that voice that is missing in the legal system and on the court today, as far as Austin-Hillery is concerned.
“By no longer having Marshall, we are missing that moral authority; that voice of moral authority. And let me say this, we are missing the diverse voice of moral authority. Yes, we have that voice in Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” she said. “But there is no one who can speak in the same manner that Marshall did — on behalf of the disenfranchised; on behalf of the vulnerable and the misunderstood. That is what he gave us when he was on the bench.”
The experiences of his clients in his early days of his career, even his own experiences, influenced his time on the court. And it is that sensitivity — not to take anything away from Justices Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor because they are marvelous in Austin-Hillery’s own words — that is missing from the court.
From Left to Right: Josh Gad, Chadwick Boseman and Sterling K. Brown in Marshall film. Barry Wetcher / Open Road Films
But, the presence of Marshall, his early career, and his time on the court have left us with lessons for us to use as reference points — especially in the wake of the current political and legal climate.
“Marshall’s lineage teaches us that we cannot be distracted, dissuaded or disparaged by what is happening in the moment,” Austin-Hillery said. “Imagine if Marshall was distracted, dissuaded or disparaged by things happening in the moment. None of the cases he fought, none of the cases he took to the Supreme Court, none of those cases would have occurred. Again, he wasn’t just working on case law for the moment but that he was formulating a strategy that would have long term impact.”
We have to understand, she said, that what is happening in politics and the legal system today isn’t just about responding to executive orders being signed by the 45th President of the United States, like the travel ban, or even the firing of the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey. But, the focus needs to be on putting mechanisms in place that will have an impact beyond this moment, the current President, even the current Congress.
When you consider what was going on in the country early in Marshall’s career, what he did was major.
“It is hard, but people are responding and working to ensure our democracy is protecting the people it needs to protect and we are still respecting the rule of law.”
“The country was going through some pretty explicit racism,” Powell added. “He argued cases throughout the south and had to stay in people’s home because staying in a hotel was too dangerous. He had this vision of transforming society. We are not there by a long shot.”
Which is why Powell is concerned about the language of withdrawing that is so prevalent in the airwaves today — from Brexit to “Make America Great Again.”
“The wounded tend to retreat when they are wounded and that is what we are seeing. But withdrawing is a very dangerous space — a space that created two World Wars within 50 years,” he said. “You cannot hold this society together when you withdraw into tribalism. We are moving in the opposite direction at lightning speed.”
Austin-Hillery is optimistic.
“I think the progressive community has really stepped up to the plate,” she said. “I think that a large swath of the community are doing a really good job at responding with an eye towards ensuring that we have a foundation in place for how we have to behave and how we have to respond. I am not saying it is easy. It is hard, but people are responding and working to ensure our democracy is protecting the people it needs to protect and we are still respecting the rule of law.”
Comment + PermalinkBy Tanisha C. Ford
It is a Friday night on the set of 1992’s romantic comedy Boomerang. In between shooting takes for the now classic Thanksgiving-dinner scene, Eddie Murphy and cast trade jokes about what would happen if Mr. and Mrs. Jackson (John Witherspoon and BeBe Drake) had sex in the bathroom of his character Marcus’s luxurious New York City condo.
Director Reginald Hudlin wraps shooting for the week, but he cannot shake the thought: “What would happen if the Jacksons had sex in the bathroom?” He imagines all the ways it could be shot, how to make the joke land without being crass, how to use the moment to poke fun at respectability politics and buppydom. He rushes to set the following Monday to find that Murphy has been having the same thoughts. They improv the scene on camera dozens of times, each time funnier than the one before. It’s this black creative synergy that makes Boomerang the FUBU of romantic comedies.
This summer, Boomerang turns 25. To celebrate, The Root spoke with Hudlin about the film that made every black person in America dream of moving to New York City to work for an all-black company.
“That period in which Boomerang was made was a period of unapologetic blackness,” Hudlin told The Root. “A black upscale romantic comedy was something that audiences really wanted to see, that they needed to see.”
Boomerang centers on Marcus Graham, an ad executive at Lady Eloise, an all-black cosmetics company. The self-proclaimed “Eleganza mack daddy of the month” has a thing for beautiful women with pretty feet—and for mock turtlenecks (I counted 10). Marcus’ life is upended when his new boss, the suave Jacqueline (Robin Givens), flips the supposed gender script and beats the player at his own game. The wounded lothario finds comfort in the arms of Angela (Halle Berry), the pretty, boho-lite art director with a not-so-secret crush on Marcus. After a dramatic breakup—à la “love shoulda brought your ass home last night”—Marcus and Angela reconcile and stroll off together into the Lower East Side sunset.
The love triangle involving Jacqueline, Marcus and Angela is actually the least interesting aspect of the movie.
Viewers are seduced by the sumptuously black world of the Lady Eloise company and its employees. In their world, life moves to the rhythm of a banging R&B soundtrack. Everyone is fresh dipped in cashmere overcoats, silk blouses and haute couture tuxes as they partake of martini lunches and attend black-tie launch parties. Sexual romps are as commonplace as first-class business trips to New Orleans and the Caribbean. And didn’t we all want to have an uppity auntie who lived on an estate named Lavender Hill?
White critics panned Boomerang, saying that it was unrealistic in its portrayal of black life on celluloid. Some went so far as calling the film “racist” and a “fantasy,” saying that companies like Lady Eloise didn’t exist. In other words, how dare Hudlin and Murphy create a film where everyone from the mailroom workers to the CEO was black and about that corporate life?
Hudlin knew that black audiences of various socioeconomic statuses would relate to the film.
“[Boomerang is] a film that rings true to people,” Hudlin says. “Anyone who knows Johnson Publishing or Burrell advertising or Motown Records or BET or Radio One—there’s any number of black media businesses where black folks work and live our lives.”
He was right.
Every black person who had been raised on a steady diet of Ebony magazine went to the theater opening weekend to consume all of the film’s brown-sugary deliciousness. We made Boomerang a box-office smash. It grossed $70 million domestically and $131 million worldwide.
Murphy made a string of films in the late 1980s and early ’90s that, like Boomerang, presented fully imagined black universes. We wanted to visit Coming to America’s (1988) pastel-painted land of Zamunda. Fans have re-created Zamunda in music videos, step shows and birthday bashes. Harlem Nights (1989) made us nostalgic for the 1930s, when black hustlers wore suits “tailor-made to fit” and ran the dopest night spots in all of New York City. These films share a theme: black people in control of our own communities. We triumph over the insidiousness of white supremacy, and black love—romantic and familial—wins.
We needed to see that then. We still do.
This is why we keep rewatching Boomerang—reciting the lines verbatim—every time it airs on BET, and why it remains one of the top-grossing black romantic comedies of all time.
Reflecting on Boomerang’s legacy, Hudlin, whose political thriller Marshall hits theaters this October, says: “I remember talking with Eddie Murphy about [Boomerang] years later. And he said, ‘Reggie, I’ve gotten compliments from Lena Horne and Ice Cube about it.’ That’s all of black America right there—from Lena Horne to Ice Cube.”
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The internet is a powerful tool. Last week I wrote about one of my favorite films, Boomerang. With the 25th anniversary of the film approaching, I thought it would be cool to focus on the work that went into getting the film made, and shed light on the early 90’s black excellence that prevailed despite some hurdles set in place. The piece reached a few people I wouldn’t have imagined it reaching. Amongst them was Reginald Hudlin, director of Boomerang. After noticing that he shared the write up on his website, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to reach out, so here we are. I got the chance to chat with Hudlin about Boomerang, his upcoming movie Marshall, which is a film about the first African-American Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, how he feels about the upcoming Black Panther movie, and much more.
Your directorial debut was House Party. Is it true that it was originally a short film? What inspired you to turn it into a full-length feature?
RH: House Party was originally my senior thesis film as an undergrad. I had been writing another script all summer while working to save up money to shoot it. The night I was packing, Luther Vandross’ Bad Boy/Having A Party” came on the radio, and as a mental exercise I imagined what a music video for it might be. I realized there was a bigger idea there and wrote it almost overnight. There’s something about ideas that hit you like lightning bolts, fully formed, and that was one of them. I later started developing a feature-length version of the story because I knew I could afford to make the movie cheaply if I had to finance it myself. Plus I knew I had a good ending, with the kid getting caught by his dad after sneaking out of the house, and having a good ending is a big deal.
You followed that up with Boomerang, of course, which Eddie Murphy sought after you to helm. How difficult was it to seek a supporting cast that wouldn’t be overshadowed by him?
RH: I think Eddie Murphy is so funny there wasn’t really an effort to surround him with an all star team of comedic actors. I always thought that was unfair to him. There was some pushback on some of the cast because Martin Lawrence, David Alan Grier and Chris Rock weren’t as well known as they are now. But Eddie knew who they were and as long as I had his support I got what I needed. Heck, he made sure I had what I didn’t need. I remember talking with him about the arrival of Strangé. I was describing her entering on a chariot and he said “wait, I thought you said she arrives on a helicopter.” I told him the helicopter got cut for budget concerns but it was okay because I had a new idea….he didn’t let me finish. He immediately got on the phone, made a call, and said “okay, start from the helicopter landing.”
You took a chance with the film because at the time, there wasn’t anything like it; an all-black cast in a movie not focused on its cast being black. Do you think it’s still difficult to get movies like these green lit 25 years later?
RH: Well, it’s a tough time for romantic comedies right now, regardless of race. We are in a time of social and cultural crisis so movies that look to the past with history-based films to explain what’s going on today are very hot with studios and audiences. By the way, those movies were impossible to get made back when romantic comedies were hot. But to your general point, movies about middle class black life, the cinematic equivalent of R&B music, are the hardest to get made. But you can be black and middle class in a thriller.
Robin Givens’ portrayal as Jacqueline Broyer is one of my all-time favorites. How hard was it to find an actress that could capture the energy you were going for, with her character?
RH: A lot of talented actresses auditioned, but she owned the role. At the time, Robin was a very controversial character because of her history with Mike Tyson. There was a lot of rumors back and forth about who she was as a person.
Finally I called Bill Duke, who had just worked with her on A Rage In Harlem. He told me he was initially torn about casting her as well, but she blew everyone away in every audition, and was great on the set. So we pushed past the studios concerns, again with Eddie’s support, and she was incredible in the role. It was a pleasure working with her.
After the film’s release, Eddie was really vocal about the unfair criticism it received. He called it another attempt from critics to simplify and demean the achievement of black people. How did you feel at that time? Did you discuss with him how important this film’s success could be?
RH: There was one infamous review of the film that summed up the ignorance of many critics. The movie was called a science fiction film, because those writers didn’t know about any successful black companies. They didn’t know about Johnson Products, or Johnson Publishing, or Burrell Advertising, or UniWorld Advertising, or any black law firms or…..you get the idea. They were just ignorant, which they tried to pass off as wit. It was also frustrating for him because he was stretching out, expanding the range of movies he was doing, but instead of applauding him for doing something different, they sneered.
So many people love the film, from Lena Horne to Ice Cube. There are people who watch it with their family every Thanksgiving. But there was this crazy generation gap between the white people who ran Hollywood at the time the film was made, and the white people who grew up on hip hop who are players in Hollywood today. There’s a much higher percentage of white executives who at least have a basic knowledge of black pop culture today, thank goodness. That’s why you can’t sweat the controversy of the moment. Over time, the true value of a movie is revealed. Which is why it’s so nice Boomerang has generations of fans.
Just weeks after Boomerang‘s box office debut, the animated classic Bébé’s Kids which you handled the screenplay for, was also released. Portrayed by an all black cast, did you receive any pushback in its development?
RH: It was pretty amazing to have two films released the same summer. I really have to thank the late great Brandon Tartikoff for that. He became the chairman of Paramount shortly after I came on board Boomerang. I had put Bebe’s Kids in development as an animated series at NBC. He was running the network then, and I was determined to keep the memory of Robin Harris alive after he passed away shortly after House Party’s release. When Brandon went to the network we pitched the idea of doing it as a movie at Paramount, which he agreed was a good idea.
Doing Bebe’s Kids and Boomerang at the same time was tough. I had never done animation before, and the production company I was working with disagreed with the basic tone of the film. I said it was a family film with edge, like the Simpsons. They dismissed the Simpsons as a fluke, and kept wanting to make it more kiddie-ish. Because I was in New York shooting, I couldn’t supervise production of the other movie as closely as I wanted to. I also didn’t have kids, which I think is crucial when you make a family film. I would do a much better job of it today. But even with all its flaws, I meet so many people who grew up on the movie…like watched it every day before they went to school.
Static Shock is still one of my favorite animated shows. There was talk of it being rebooted as a live-action series, with your involvement. Any developments on this?
RH: I am working with the original founders of Milestone Media, the company that created Static Shock, to revive the whole company.
We’ll be publishing comics with the classic characters like Static and Icon and new characters as well. We’ll also be developing those properties for film, television, video games, toys and t-shirts.
Marvel’s Black Panther is finally hitting the big screen, and you not only wrote for the comics, you also wrote and produced the animated series for BET. What direction are you hoping they take the character for his big screen debut?
RH: The comic had a huge impact on me as a kid. I didn’t know if there would ever be a Black Panther movie. Back then the rights were with another studio and the scripts they were developing really violated the spirit of the character.
So when I wrote the comic and wrote and produced the animated series, I just wanted to tell the story right. I know Ryan and Chadwick feel the same way so I’m sure the movie is going to be great!
Speaking of the Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman will portray the first African American justice of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, in your film adaptation, Marshall. What are your thoughts on the criticism the casting choice is receiving so far?
RH: Everyone who’s actually seen the film thinks Chadwick is brilliant and says this is his best performance yet, which is saying a lot based on his previous work. There are some people who are concerned he’s too dark for the role.
Thank goodness the internet wasn’t around when brown skinned Denzel Washington played high yellow Malcolm X. We all talked about this, and decided since this is not a cradle to grave biopic, but one specific case in a long career, it didn’t matter in the story we were telling.
Are there any other historical figures you’d like to bring to the big screen?
RH: Sure, but I don’t want to reveal them yet!
Reginald Hudlin’s Marshall hits theaters October 13, 2017.