Posted by Larry Gleeson
After a profitable Opening Evening and a full day of basic movie screenings, as we speak brings extra movies, a tribute to Russ Tamblyn at Membership TMC and a screening of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954). “It will be straightforward to get misplaced in a movie that includes 14 main roles, notably with Howard Keel and Jane Powell, two of MGM’s finest musical performers, because the leads. However one spotlight is Russ Tamblyn—who turned 20 throughout manufacturing—because the youngest brother, Gideon. MGM solid its contract gamers alongside skilled dancers like Tommy Rall and Jacques d’Amboise, who may need been anticipated to hold the majority of Michael Kidd’s athletic choreography. However Tamblyn’s expertise as each a dancer and a gymnast led to his being given a standout second within the movie’s large “Barn Dance” quantity, whereas his appearing abilities delivered a few of the movie’s most memorable scenes.” (TCMFF)
As well as, Donald Bogle is about to obtain the Robert Osborne Award later within the night on the Hollywood Legion Theatre. “Turner Basic Films pays tribute to our late host, Robert Osborne, with the Robert Osborne Award, offered yearly on the TCM Basic Movie Pageant to a person whose work has helped protect the cultural heritage of basic movie for future generations. In 2023, TCM honors movie historian, creator, and professor Donald Bogle for his pioneering research of African American cinema and his tireless efforts to raise the achievements of Black performers and filmmakers. ” (TCMFF)
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Donald Bogle is among the foremost authorities on African People within the films. In a collection of provocative, culturally important books, Bogle nearly single-handedly pioneered the research, appreciation, and worth of the work and achievements – in addition to the heroic struggles – of Black artists working in movies, primarily in Hollywood, the place they boldly helped alter the face and panorama of American cinema. The vary and scope of his protection of Black movie historical past has been breathtaking: from the silent period and the movies of the Lincoln Movement Firm, headed by Black actor Noble Johnson; to Oscar Micheaux; to the controversial however invigorating performances of such Black stars as Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson, Fredi Washington, and Louise Beavers; to such breakthrough performers as Ethel Waters and Lena Horne; to the work of Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier; to the arrival of such later African American administrators as Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks; to the rise of such filmmakers as Spike Lee, John Singleton, Charles Burnett, Julie Sprint, Kasi Lemmons, Carl Franklin, Antoine Fuqua, and Ryan Coogler; to such iconic stars as Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, and Viola Davis. Bogle has chronicled all of them in his distinctive, vigorous, witty, and piercing model that has made his books extremely readable, satisfying, and enlightening. Movie historian Leonard Maltin has commented: “Nobody is aware of extra (or has written extra extensively) concerning the historical past of African American contributions to cinema than Donald Bogle.” Vogue hailed him as “that pioneering safekeeper of the historical past of blacks in movies.” “Let’s all nod in appreciation to Donald Bogle for placing the whole lot in historic perspective,” filmmaker Spike Lee has written. “Mr. Bogle continues to be our most famous Black-cinema historian.”
Many know Bogle finest for his ebook Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive Historical past of Blacks in American Movies. The winner of the Theatre Library Affiliation Award for Movie and now in its fifth expanded, up to date version, TCMMB is taken into account a basic research of Black film pictures in America and is utilized in programs at schools and universities across the nation. In his current ebook Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Movies, The Filmmakers — revealed by Turner Basic Films in 2019 — Donald Bogle continued his pioneering examination of African American movie historical past. Its Foreword was written by John Singleton, the late Oscar-nominated director of the basic Boyz N the Hood (1991).
Amongst Bogle’s different books is his groundbreaking Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography, which was praised by critics and led to a rediscovery of Dandridge, the mesmerizing and tragic star of Carmen Jones (1954) and the primary African American (feminine or male) to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead appearing class. Enthralled by the ebook, Whitney Houston wrote: “Dorothy Dandridge’s abilities and items, like these of Josephine Baker, Billie Vacation, and Paul Robeson, have been by no means totally appreciated. She was, fairly merely, forward of her time. Donald Bogle’s ebook brings her triumphs and tragedies to life with richness, class, and dignity.” Houston optioned the rights to the ebook and was initially set to play Dandridge in a manufacturing for Disney. Finally, Houston didn’t play the function. However the ebook is now thought of a basic Hollywood biography, and a brand new version was revealed in 2021.
Bogle can be the creator of the critically acclaimed Warmth Wave: The Life and Profession of Ethel Waters. The New York Instances E-book Evaluate wrote that “Bogle . . . has researched Waters totally and presents, fastidiously, the nice many info of her lengthy life and profession.” Hailing the Waters ebook as “an exemplary biography,” Liberty Journal wrote: “Bogle masterfully makes use of Waters’s story to look at the financial, aesthetic, and racial politics of the Twenties-60s in style tradition. This work is the whole lot a biography must be.” “Highly effective biography,” commented Publishers Weekly. “Bogle’s thorough and unflinchingly sincere take a look at Waters’s sensible and flawed life will undoubtedly be the definitive biography of this nice girl.”
An up to date, expanded version of Bogle’s ebook Brown Sugar: Over A Hundred Years of America’s Black Feminine Superstars – which is a surprising examination of the lives and careers of African American entertainers from the early years of the 20th century to the current with uncommon, seldom revealed pictures, from the eras of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker to as we speak’s Beyoncé – has additionally been revealed. Brown Sugar was tailored by Bogle right into a four-hour, four-part documentary for PBS and German Academic Tv. Bogle wrote and co-executive-produced the collection that was a winner of the American Girls in Radio and Tv Commendation Awards “in recognition of excellence in programming that presents a constructive and life like portrayal of ladies.” He’s additionally the creator of such books as Shiny Boulevards, Daring Desires: The Story of Black Hollywood; Primetime Blues: African People on Community Tv; and Blacks in American Movies and Tv: An Illustrated Encyclopedia.
His ebook Elizabeth and Michael: The Queen of Hollywood and the King of Pop, a Love Story was praised by columnist Liz Smith, who devoted one in every of her final columns to discussing the ebook. “A surprisingly complete, delicate, and entertaining take a look at Taylor and Jackson, and never simply their friendship,” wrote Smith. “Bogle has, basically, written three books in a single: Taylor’s biography, Jackson’s, and the story of their mutual coming collectively, the how and why. . . The author is aware of his topics and his back-and-forth bios of Taylor and Jackson are extraordinarily nicely carried out.” In a starred overview, Kirkus commented: “Exhaustively researched. . . with a recent and fair-minded perspective. . . Devoted followers of both star. . . will admire the stability and compassion underscoring Bogle’s remedy. A grounded and persistently absorbing biography.” Within the fall of 2016, Folks journal named it probably the greatest new books.
Bogle has additionally appeared as a movie/cultural commentator on quite a few tv applications, together with Henry Louis Gates’s Peabody award-winning PBS collection The African People: Many Rivers to Cross (2013). On this bold, sprawling documentary collection, which traces African American historical past from the interval of slavery to the current, Bogle was initially interviewed at size by Gates concerning the careers of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux; singer/actress Ethel Waters; and Ebony journal’s significance within the cultural lifetime of Black America within the late Nineteen Forties/Nineteen Fifties. The New Yorker.com praised “the very delicate interviews that Gates conducts with vital thinkers starting from the feminist scholar Paul Giddings to the movie historian Donald Bogle.”
He has served as a commentator on quite a few different documentaries. His articles have appeared in such publications as Movie Remark, Ebony, Elan, Essence, Spin, and Freedomways. He curated a significant retrospective on Sidney Poitier on the American Museum of the Transferring Picture and one other on Dorothy Dandridge at New York’s Movie Discussion board, in addition to retrospectives on Blaxploitation Cinema and on Pictures of African American Girls within the Films, additionally at Movie Discussion board. On the American Museum of the Transferring Picture, Bogle additionally performed onstage public interviews with Spike Lee and Sidney Poitier.
Bogle has a protracted affiliation with Turner Basic Films. Beforehand, he was the cohost and commentator with Robert Osborne for TCM’s award-winning 38-film collection, Race and Hollywood, which traced the depictions of African People in Hollywood from the silent interval, with D. W. Griffith’s The Start of a Nation (1915), as much as Carl Franklin’s Satan in a Blue Gown (1995) and Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus (1996). He conceived the collection, choosing all of the movies to be broadcast. Later he served as one in every of TCM’s on-air visitor hosts, introducing over twenty movies, together with such classics as Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Scorching (1959) and Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Marriage ceremony (1952) with Ethel Waters. In 2018, he co-hosted a two-night collection for TCM with Ben Mankiewicz on Slavery and the Films. He has made different vital appearances on TCM from 2019 to the current.
Bogle has been one of many principal movie historians who’ve participated in Turner Basic Films’s annual TCM Basic Movie Pageant in Los Angeles. He has launched movies for packed screenings and performed on-stage interviews with administrators John Singleton and Spike Lee; Academy Award-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr.; actor Richard Roundtree, the star of the Blaxploitation period movie Shaft (1971); Katharine Houghton, a star of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); Nancy Kwan, star of The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Flower Drum Tune (1961); Richard Sherman, the Oscar-winning composer of Mary Poppins (1964); pop star Lulu, featured in To Sir, with Love (1967); and quite a few others. He additionally moderated the Pageant’s extremely attended panel dialogue on the controversial “Cultural Legacy of Gone with the Wind.”
His different appearances on the TCM Pageant have included engrossing visible shows on his books Shiny Boulevards, Daring Desires and Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, which obtained rousing ovations. Bogle additionally supplied the commentary for a night screening of a collection of controversial Black cartoons that had been taken out of circulation by Warner Bros. in 1968 due to their inflammatory stereotyped content material. The Pageant marked the primary public screening of the cartoons in over forty years. Bogle was additionally one of many commentators for TCM’s seven-part documentary collection on the historical past of Hollywood, titled Moguls & Film Stars (2010). ” (TCMFF)
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