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WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the films, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Detective Pikachu, and The Sun Is Also a Star. Although Loving v. Virginia officially abolished all remaining anti-miscegenation laws in the United States in 1967, it really hasn’t been until recently where the portrayals of mixed race characters and interracial couples on the […]
Ava DuVernay didn’t want her new Netflix miniseries When They See Us titled “Central Park Five” because she felt it didn’t do justice to the young men wrongly convicted in the case.
“Obviously there’s a name recognition in Central Park Five, but Ava correctly pointed out that this didn’t do justice to these men’s stories. She wanted to reclaim a name for them,” said Netflix VP of Original Content, Cindy Holland on a panel discussion with DuVernay at the Producer’s Guild (PGA) Produced By conference.
DuVernay
The Central Park Five was the name referred to in news headlines about the five teenage boys (four African-American, one Latino-American) convicted of raping a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989. They served between six and 13 years behind bars before a prison inmate confessed to the murders and his DNA was a match.
Although exonerated right away at that point, it took lawsuits and years before the now-men received two settlements from the City of New York, totaling over 44 million dollars.
Instead of retelling just the court case, DuVernay wanted to concentrate on the familial side of the story and get away from the “true crime” genre.
“We came into something that just felt very intimate. We felt at the core of what we wanted to do with this was to really see these men and reclaim their humanity,” she said. “They are not the Central Park Five. They are not a faceless group of thugs. They are Kory, Antron, Raymond, Yusef, and Kevin, and they have memories and families and bleeding hearts and have communities. We wanted to recognize that.”
How it all came together started in 2015 with a tweet and then a cocktail party in New York.
“I received a tweet from Raymond Santana,” DuVernay said. “He asked me what I was going to make after Selma. ‘Could it be CPFive #fingerscrossed?’ So I flew into his DMs [direct messages]. I said, ‘Does no one have your story?’ I thought it would be fascinating to say I met one of the Central Park Five.
“I really didn’t think I’d be here four years later,” she continued. “When I sat in front of them and listened to his story and looked into his eyes and he introduced me to each of the men — over a series of days — I left that meeting saying I had to tell their story.”
After chatting with friend and producer Jonathan King (Roma) at a cocktail party, DuVernay and King asked for and secured the rights to take it to Jane Rosenthal, founder and CEO of Tribeca Enterprises to produce, and then eventually to Netflix to buy. DuVernay and all involved brainstormed on the title.
What started out as a possible feature film blossomed into four-episode series in which each episode deals with a different side of the case. Each episode unpacks a different part of the criminal justice system, according to DuVernay.
“The first episode will be about this case, but it also is showing how it feels to be arrested as a young Black boy, precinct behavior, the kinds of behavior we’re hearing that is happening in precincts around the country as it relates to Black and brown people.
“In the second episode, we gonna talk about bail, the fact that we have a debtor’s prison in this country — the fact that there are people in prison who are poor and innocent and people who are not in prison who are rich and guilty. We’ll talk about judges and jurys, and district attorneys and prosecutors.
“In the third episode, we’ll talk about how we’re locking up children in this country and putting them with adults and walking away. We’ll talk about post-incarceration — how we treat formerly incarcerated citizens in this country. If you’ve done a crime or not, you’ve done your time. You get out, [but] you still can’t vote, can’t get a job, can’t get a student loan, can’t move, can’t live as a full citizen in this country.
“And then we’ll talk about the horrors of incarceration, and folks won’t even know we’re talking about this because we’re watching this very famous case. We talk about the mothers and the heartache and the memories.”
When They See Us keeps in tandem with DuVernay’s other projects highlighting social justice, from Selma to the little-seen Middle of Nowhere to the internationally-released Netflix documentary 13th, which also looks at the prison system in America.
Finally, the title, When They See Us, is about how people are seen by others, according to producer Berry Welsh (Quincy), who also worked on the series. He said, “It invites you to challenge your idea of what are other people seeing when they see you and what are you seeing when you see other people.”
When They See Us is streaming on Netflix.
The post How Ava DuVernay Stays on Her Path with ‘When They See Us’ appeared first on Black Girl Nerds.
A strange large mass of material has been detected under the Moon’s largest crater and may contain metal from an asteroid that crashed into the lunar surface and formed the crater, according to […]
The post Researchers Discover Mysterious Material Under Moon’s Largest Crater appeared first on Geek.com.
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When we learned of the alleged incident between Jussie Smollett and two masked attackers, Lee Daniels was the first person to come out expressing his concern, outrage and support for Smollett, who had been the star of his hit show “Empire” since its origin.
Now, knowing everything we do about that story and the remaining questions of its validity, the decision to support Smollett was one Daniels might have thought twice about. In a recent interview with Vulture, Daniels, 59, said that he’s “beyond embarrassed” about the support he lent to Smollett.
He said, “If it turned out that [Smollett] did it, was guilty, and al of it’s [the narrative from the Chicago police] accurate” then it will feel like betrayal.
Daniels said, in his mind, there’s some doubt about whether or not Smollett staged the attack. “If it were to happen to your son and your child, how would you feel?” he said. “You would feel, Please, God, please let there be that glimmer of hope that there is some truth in this story. That’s why it’s been so painful.”
And while Daniels wishes he hadn’t spoken out on behalf of Smollett, he’s not entirely clear on what happened.
“We weren’t there. I can’t judge him.”
These new thoughts from Daniels come a week after he confirmed that despite some rumors, Smollett would not return for the final season of “Empire.”
He also stated that Smollett’s case influenced Fox’s decision to end the show after season 6.
While the show, as we know it, might end, Daniels says he’s hoping to do it in a way that would set the franchise up for a spinoff.
“We’re trying something out, and if it works, then Empire is over and we have a great spinoff,” he continued. “And if it doesn’t, then Empire may not very well be over. But the intent is to have our last season with a great spinoff.”
Yesterday, Smollett broke his four month silence on social media to post speech from Moonlight screenwriter Tarrell Alvin McCraney as he discussed his play Choir Boy at the Tony Awards this past Sunday.
He captioned it, “So much #pride.” but made sure to turn the comments off.
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