June 24, 2016
AMHERST, N.Y. – Filming in the Buffalo Niagara region for “Marshall,” a legal thriller starring Chadwick Boseman as a young Thurgood Marshall, a future Supreme Court justice, was recently on location at Daemen College’s presidential residence, where scenes were shot for the new movie.
“We are thrilled and honored to have Daemen House selected as a location for a major motion picture that will bring national attention to the Western New York region,” said President Gary A. Olson. “To be a part of a production of this magnitude was a unique opportunity to showcase the college.”
Cast and crew members from “Marshall” were at Daemen House in Amherst in June to film scenes for the residence of wealthy socialite Eleanor Strubing, being played by star Kate Hudson. Furniture and other early 1940s era modifications were temporarily made to the first and second floors for interior scenes filmed with Hudson and Sterling K. Brown, who recently starred in the series “The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.”
The movie was inspired by a notorious trial early in the career of Thurgood Marshall. As a brilliant young attorney for the NAACP, Marshall traveled across the nation defending black men unjustly accused of crimes. In 1940 on the eve of World War II, Marshall partnered with Sam Friedman, a Jewish lawyer from Bridgeport, Conn., to defend Joseph Spell, a black chauffeur accused of sexually assaulting his employer, socialite Eleanor Strubing. Marshall later became the first African American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Daemen House was chosen as the Strubing residence for its historical look and feel that reflects the film’s period, explained Tim Clark, film commissioner of the Buffalo Niagara Film Commission.
“The beautiful architecture and other details in Daemen House bring a historical authenticity to the scenes that were filmed there,” said Clark. “When production designer Richard Hoover first saw the residence, he was very impressed with it and knew the location would fit perfectly with the period continuity needed in the movie.”
While most filming was done inside the residence, the home’s exterior was also captured in an important scene of the film. Crews are expected to be in the Buffalo area through July.
“Vintage elements are critical to a period movie like this so having access to Daemen House was helpful to enhancing the film’s historical setting,” said Clark.
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on July 1, 2016 – 12:01 AM
I was in a movie!
Of course, so were at least 100 other people who were hired as extras or background actors in the filming of “Marshall.” The film is being shot here in Western New York this summer and tells of the trial that launched the career of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Like the other background actors, I submitted my headshot and bio to the film company and three days later I got a call to report for a wardrobe fitting.
Over the years, I have been involved as an actor in community theater and have been involved in broadcasting, but making a movie – this was something new and exciting.
At the wardrobe fitting, I met some delightful people who took their time finding just the right costumes for the two scenes I was to be in. They took pictures of me in costume to use as a reference on the day of the actual shoot.
About a week later, I received a call to report to the set at 9 a.m. When I arrived, I was met by a crew member who made sure that I had the necessary paperwork filled out.
This film is a period piece and takes place in the early ’40s. We were taken to the makeup and hair styling studios, where I was given a haircut reminiscent of that era. When they finished, I was awestruck. The actors, both male and female, around me looked as if they had just stepped out of some time machine. We were from the ’40s.
Background actors are an integral part of making any film. They are the canvas on which the primary actors work their magic. The background actors’ job is to react to what is playing out in front of them without being obvious.
We were escorted to the set and given our instructions by the associate director. A movie set is sometimes organized chaos as all of the elements of making the film must come together precisely.
After a few run-throughs using doubles (the second team), the principal actors (the first team) came on the set and did their thing. A scene that will last about two minutes on the screen takes hours to film. The action is recorded using different camera angles and can take hours to get just right.
We all were part of this major film. The associate director silenced the set as he shouted, “Rolling … camera … action!” Wow, we’re making a movie and I’m really in it.
I thought that perhaps we background actors would be treated as peons during the filming because we were not professional movie actors. I couldn’t be more wrong. The film crew treated us all with great respect. We were made to feel special.
A school friend from years ago wrote to me to say that she had taught ninth-grade English to Josh Gad, one of the stars of the movie, and she asked if I could say hello for her. He was delighted and asked if I would pose for a picture with him to send to his former teacher. Gad is a very down-to-earth guy.
I came away from my days making a movie with a tremendous amount of respect for the men and women of the film industry who work very hard to bring their collective efforts to the screen.
So, as I say farewell to my two days in the movie biz, I say thanks, and I’ll see you in the movies!
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By Nick Canedo | [email protected] on July 05, 2016 at 11:19 AM
(Screengrab from WGRZ)
The July 4 weekend marked the end of filming for the movie “Marshall” in the Buffalo and Western New York area.
The movie is a biopic of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice. The cast features Chadwick Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in “42.”
Filming began May 23 in Western New York at the LaSalle Branch of the Niagara Falls Public Library on Buffalo Avenue. The last day of filming was Friday, July 1. The cast and crew came together to share their experiences in Western New York and discussed some of their favorite things about the area.
Buffalo wings
While the cast and crew enjoyed many of the area’s restaurants, actor Josh Gad, known for voicing Olaf in “Frozen,” particularly loved the buffalo wings. “The movie takes place over about five days,” Gad said. “And because of your chicken wings, my character puts on an average of five pounds a day.”
Niagara Falls
Oscar nominated-actress Kate Hudson traveled to Niagara Falls in June, making the most of her visit by riding the Maid of the Mist and visiting the Cave of the Winds.
Canalside
Hudson said she enjoyed bike riding on Canalside during her day off.
The architecture
Why did the filmmakers chose Buffalo as their filming location? According to Hudlin, it was the architecture and the city’s commitment to preserving historic buildings.
The lack of traffic
“The no-traffic thing is amazing,” Kate Hudson said.
The 4 a.m. closing time
People also spotted some of the cast at bars on Allen street, WIVB reports. Actor Sterling K. Brown said that he’s not used to restaurants and bars being open until 4 a.m. “You kick it real hard,” Brown said of Buffalo locals. It probably helped that Buffalo is home to one of the top 10 cocktail bars in America.
The people
Director Reginald Hudlin called Buffalo an amazing place full of wonderful people, nothing “the incredible, friendly, open-armed spirit of every single person we’ve met here in Buffalo.”
“Everybody loves Buffalolove,” Hudson said.
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By Craigh Barboza July 2
Cuba Gooding, Jr. in “Boyz N the Hood.” (©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Director John Singleton was a brash young film student at the University of Southern California in the late 1980s when he saw an advance screening of “Colors,” a drama that purported to give viewers a real glimpse of street life in his native South Central Los Angeles. At the post-screening Q&A with a producer, Singleton gave the film’s producer a piece of his mind.
“You advertise this movie like it’s about my community, and it’s really about two white cops,” he recalled saying. “It’s not about what’s really going on there.”
Singleton added that it was obvious that no black people had worked on the movie. When the producer countered with, “Well, Ice-T wrote the music,” he shot back: “Ice-T didn’t write the [expletive] script!”
Singleton eventually made his own movie, “Boyz N the Hood,” a searing coming-of-age story set in a neighborhood overrun with gangs, drugs and automatic weapons. Originally released 25 years ago, on July 12, 1991, “Boyz N the Hood” received a 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and eventually yielded $58 million at the box office. In addition to making Singleton, who earned a pair of Oscar nominations, one of the hottest writer-directors in Hollywood, it also helped usher in the black film renaissance that flourished in Hollywood during the 1990s.
Filmmaker John Singleton in Los Angeles in July 1991. (Bob Galbraith/AP Photo)
In 1991, at least 17 black-helmed films opened in theaters, more than in the entire previous decade. Many introduced new black directors, such as Mario Van Peebles (“New Jack City”), Wendell B. Harris Jr. (“Chameleon Street”) and Matty Rich (“Straight Out of Brooklyn”). Granted creative control, these directors made personal movies that invigorated the black audience, who accounted for 25 percent of all ticket sales at the time but were famished for stories with multidimensional characters. They made stars out of Wesley Snipes, Halle Berry, Ice Cube, Angela Bassett and Chris Rock. And their films exploded stereotypes and explored vexing topics such as black-on-black violence, economic exploitation and the crack epidemic.
Even today, the renaissance directors continue to be a reference point. Singleton’s success helped forge the way for F. Gary Gray to make last year’s “Straight Outta Compton,” now the highest-grossing music biopic in history. And the lyrics and imagery of Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” evoke “Daughters of the Dust,” Julie Dash’s mesmerizing 1991 portrait of Gullah women on the Georgia Sea Islands that will be re-released this fall.
Going to the movies in the ’70s was an empowering feeling for black audiences, who finally got to see themselves as the hero-slash-heroine of their own story. But in the ’90s it was more of an enlightening experience — with better production value. Instead of “Coffy,” “Black Caesar” and other sexy action yarns in which blacks stuck it to the Man, the renaissance films offered a realistic, inside view of contemporary black life.
The seeds of the renaissance were planted in 1986, with Spike Lee’s first major feature, “She’s Gotta Have It.” Producer Stephanie Allain, one of the few black studio executives in the ’90s, said Lee’s guerilla filmmaking and outspokenness on social issues was a major influence, when the only other blacks who seemed to be making movies were Eddie Murphy and Prince. “Back then, the notion of a black artist who’s not afraid to speak his mind or put his feelings and point of view into his art was new,” Allain said. “For our generation, that was, like, wow.”
Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin in “House Party 2” from 1991. (©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Reginald Hudlin’s “House Party” also helped change perceptions of black directors. The 1990 black teen comedy was made for $2.5 million and took in more than 10 times that amount. “Often, when we talk about revolutionary cinema, we think about something like ‘Battle of Algiers,’ movies that make explicit political statements,” said Hudlin, whose next project was “Boomerang,” an upscale rom-com starring Murphy. “But what I learned with ‘House Party,’ and even more with ‘Boomerang,’ was that showing normal black life on screen is the most revolutionary thing of all.”
TV shows such as “21 Jump Street” and “New York Undercover” had “exposed the larger population to black culture,” Snipes said. At the same time, studios had begun to recognize the value of aiming films at black audiences. Directors tapped into the renewed black pride, with young men and women sporting leather medallions cut in the shape of Africa and T-shirts emblazoned with pro-black slogans (some of which, no doubt, were purchased at Spike’s Joint, the filmmaker’s hip retail shop in downtown Brooklyn). They also drew on the growing rage over the rising number of racial attacks and the Rodney King beating in March 1991.
“Our style was to have images that immersed the audience in the story by conveying the emotional or psychological states of the characters and the feeling of the environments,” said Ernest Dickerson, the cinematographer on several of Lee’s early movies, including 1991’s “Jungle Fever,” about a doomed interracial romance, starring Snipes and Annabella Sciorra. They often experimented with color, to denote different phases of the narrative, and storytelling techniques, like having the characters address the camera directly.
Wesley Snipes, left, Veronica Webb, Spike Lee and Annabella Sciorra in ”Jungle Fever.” (©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection)
For Burnett’s poetic debut film, “Killer of Sheep,” which opened in 1991 (more than a decade after it was shot), he cast neighborhood friends and kids, who also did lights and sound. With the film, about a Watts man who works in the slaughterhouse, he wanted to create a more nuanced perception of the black community. “Hollywood perpetuates so many wrong ideas about [us],” he said.
That’s in part because black directors had a hard time breaking in. When Harris couldn’t get past the assistant’s assistant in Hollywood, he decided to raise the money for his debut feature from private investors. It took him four years. “Chameleon Street” is a darkly comic biopic about Douglas Street Jr., a con man who assumed the identities of a reporter, attorney and surgeon (he performed dozens of successful hysterectomies) before getting caught. Harris said Street, whom he’d first read about in the Detroit News, was rebelling against societal constraints. “You are told from cradle to grave in this country exactly who you are, what you are and where the ceiling is on your expectations,” he said.
After winning the Sundance Film Festival’s top prize, Harris was a hotly sought-after talent, but Hollywood rejected every one of his original movie ideas. Instead, one studio offered him “a movie about a guy with an arm coming out of his stomach.” He is still working on a follow-up film.
Bill Duke couldn’t get hired in film after graduating from AFI Conservatory in 1978, so he turned to television, where he worked his way up to directing episodes of “Dallas.” “I remember the times when — it was whispered, but — I was called a n—–,” said Duke, who broke into features in 1991 with “A Rage in Harlem,” a stylish adaptation of the Chester Himes crime novel starring Robin Givens, Forest Whitaker and Gregory Hines. “No one was used to being told what to do by a black man.”
Badja Djola, left, Robin Givens, John Toles-Bey and Ron Taylor in “A Rage in Harlem.” (Richard Blanshard/Getty Images)
If finding work was tough for the men, it was like winning the lottery for black women. “Of course it bothered me,” said “Daughters of the Dust” director Dash. “I knew many female filmmakers, but at the time the language being spoken in Hollywood was hip-hop, urban [male]. Women did not fit into their myopic view” of black life.
Many directors made the savvy move of casting rappers such as Ice-T in major roles and featuring them on the soundtracks.
“Even ‘New Jack City,’ quiet as it’s kept, was designed as a platform for the music,” said a half-joking Snipes, who modeled his ruthless crack kingpin character after a Fortune 500 CEO.
The movie’s director was Mario Van Peebles, who said he tried to make it like “a brother in the basement making hard-core rap records.” He fought the studio to shoot on location, picking an area of Harlem controlled by drug dealers. He also refused to rely on stock footage for the famous opening scene, with its booming hip-hop track and helicopter shots of Manhattan that push in on Snipes dangling a man over the Queensboro Bridge.
Judd Nelson, left, and Ice-T in “New Jack City/” (©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection/©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“When they saw that first shot, people in theaters went crazy,” Van Peebles said. The black gangster picture grossed an impressive $48 million. Like father Melvin’s 1971 film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” — credited with starting the Blaxploitation genre — “New Jack City” turned out to be a watershed in black cinema, with a hit soundtrack. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but, boy, does it rhyme,” Van Peebles added.
In the early days of the movement, Singleton, Dickerson and others would gather at the L.A. homes of Van Peebles and Hudlin for Thai food and to swap stories, rap about technique, toss around ideas until 5 a.m. and commiserate about the business.
“A lot of times people presume we are the movies we make,” Hudlin said. “Very often that’s true. But sometimes the movies we make are the movies we can get made.”
Allen Payne, left, Christopher Williams and Wesley Snipes in “New Jack City.” (©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection)
The sets were social, too. “It didn’t feel like work,” says Ruth E. Carter, who designed costumes for three black directors in 1991. “It was like we were going to hang out with friends who happen to be directors, actors, ADs, PAs.”
When Carter, now a two-time Oscar nominee, broke into the business in the late ’80s, movie crews had about as much diversity as a NASCAR pit crew. So she said Lee’s company, 40 Acres and a Mule, launched an internship program to train techies and craftspeople. Others followed his lead, and the crew for “Boyz N the Hood” was 90 percent black.
Once Hollywood realized it could make big profits on black films, there was a frenzy for material, leading to such films as “Juice,” “Malcolm X” and “Passenger 57.”
Today, despite the absence of black acting Oscar nominees in the past two years, more blacks are getting a seat at the Hollywood table. Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” is already generating Oscar buzz, as is “Fences” with director-star Denzel Washington. Ryan Coogler (“Black Panther”) and F. Gary Gray (“Fast 8”) are helming big-budget movies, and Ava DuVernay is adapting “A Wrinkle in Time” for Disney.
Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” coming out later this year. (Fox Searchlight Pictures/Fox Searchlight Pictures)
“The things we’ve been shouting into the wind for 40, 60 years are finally being acknowledged, like: ‘Oh! If a movie is multi-ethnic, it appeals to more people and makes more money. And having directors with different points of view can mean something to the audience,’ ” said Hudlin, who is working on a movie starring Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood Marshall.
But Singleton is nervous about the way black directors are treating the issue of race. “A lot of them want to assimilate into the so-called mainstream and make the black version of this or that movie,” said Singleton, who is developing two TV shows. “They don’t understand that, by being Afrocentric and African American, we were trendsetters.”
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