Well NNQ not that you don't already know this but as far our take in the big screen profession It should improve with "Black Panther" being the catalyst to spring us forward in a billion dollar industry. We've done it once and we can do it again. EVER FORWARD!!!!!!
The political, spiritual and progressive leaders of our race sometimes cuts our collective noses off to spite the "Other Mans" face. The NAACP did this with the "Amos & Andy" TV series thus rendering every Black actor in that series unemployed. I call this an act of the 4th sin: Pride. Irregardless of why the Hollywood moguls elected to give us Blacks in America some manner of pride and false hope for our future or maybe it was a nothing more then a conspiracy with the DOJ to placate us after the tumultuous 60's where we almost burned Amerikkka to the ground to demand a decent standard of living as we so rightfully deserved since we helped build this land for the most part free and eventually to this day for a mere pittance. Read "Animal Farm" It's all in there. The mindset of the pigs can be aptly applied to other ethnic cleansing edicts such as the Jewish and Polish Holocaust. I have no idea and don't care to know who but we as a marginalized race seeking emotional comfort carried the "Blaxploitation" banner as some macho badge of courage and fear which worked for a while only as an illusion while the Hollywood producers skimmed 99% of the up front profits from the signed contracts and 100% from the back end residuals. If a great many of our entertainment potentials would have followed the leads of Spike Lee and Tyler Perry who took great financial risk, especially Spike Lee staked every dime he had with the help of AMEX got his investment back in spades because he was a genius in his own right. Tyler Perry crafted a style that Flip Wilson was handed a few dollars and a pat on the head for. Flip Wilson like Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry had to degrade himself to pave the way for the next generation of Black entertainers to demean themselves much less in film or stage for far more pay. Mr. StepinFetchit named by Boss man as "The laziest man in the world" was the first ever Black comedian to gross one million dollars throughout his acting career. That was virtually unheard of for a Black actor in the 1900's. The "Other Man" tried his best to blast "Black Panthers" success but sometimes the firestorm of hate and jealousy blows back into the face of the arsonist and now they bleat that it's success was an anomaly. I'd be less then forthcoming if I said we have slid back into obscurity after the "Blaxploitation" era but we never had a foot up then but we can revel in "Black Panther" with the hopes that our well heeled Black entertainment and investment folk will seek to invest in more of what we need, quality entertainment that we finance, control and wholly profit from.
Laurence Fishburne was always one of my top 5 favorite actors. The first I was aware of his natural acting abilities was in Apocalypse Now. I think I posted a comment about him somewhere here. Gina Torres never struck me as much of a dynamic actress as her dedicated and loyal hubby Laurence. It's interesting when you mentioned their split, I heard rumors of their impending divorce and both their publicist stated that the Suits TV series was going to relocate to Canada to offset the cost of union support staff and that was going to strain their committed marriage since 2002. Come to find out in 2016 ole Gina has been in the arms, mind and quite sure the bed of Utah entrepreneur Kevin Wright for over a year before I guess Laurence just had enough of the public humiliation and was decent enough to allow her to break the sad news in 2017 of his divorcing her not because she was a cheater and fornicator but to say he was regrettably dissolving their long standing marriage due to irreconcilable differences. Unless there's something we all know nothing about, swirl or no swirl that was indecent of Gina.
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