Oscar winner Mo’Nique went NUCLEAR on Lee Daniels, Tyler Perryand Oprah … blaming the trio for her getting shut out of Hollywood — in not so many words.
The comedian did a standup special Saturday night at the Apollo Theater, and went off about getting blackballed. She insisted that’s the wrong term to use. She prefers … “whiteballed” … “by some n*****s who had no balls.”
Mo’Nique had a falling out with “Precious” director Lee Daniels after she won the Oscar for that movie, and she’s made the ‘blackballed in Hollywood‘ claim before. But this is the first time she’s lumped in Oprah and Tyler.
She’s also never said it this viciously — “Y’all can suck my d***, if I had one!”
BEVERLY HILLS, CA - AUGUST 16: Director Tyler Perry arrives at the screening of 'Too Close to Home' at The Paley Center for Media on August 16, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)
How about no?
01/03/2017 03:01 pm ET
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Zeba BlayVoices Culture Writer, The Huffington Post
AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN VIA GETTY IMAGES
Tyler Perry thinks the backlash to “Too Close To Home” is just reverse racism.
Tyler Perry is best known for making movies and TV shows that focus on black characters, but last year the filmmaker premiered “Too Close To Home,” a show featuring a predominantly white cast. Following its August 2016 premiere, the TLC drama received backlash from black social media users for having only a few black actors, compared to its mainly white leads.
Perry dismissed the criticism early on, but last week, ahead of the show’s return from hiatus on Wednesday, January 4, he weighed in again, declaring that the backlash is just “reverse racism.”
“[It’s] totally reverse racism, because [the criticism] was coming from African-American people,” Perry told the Associated Press on Dec. 30, speaking of the backlash.
“I don’t know if it was because they thought I should only be giving jobs to black people. Well, I think that’s ridiculous. If you look at the hundreds of black people I’ve given jobs to and even the ones I’ve made millionaires, people of color, I just think it’s unfair,” he said.
The 47-year-old filmmaker added that after traveling the world and meeting more people, he realized “we’re all the same.”
“We all got the same dramas. So I’m not seeing color as much as I did anymore in the sense of our stories. Our stories are so similar,” he added.
Perry’s response is similar to one he stated in an August interview on the Tom Joyner show. At the time, he said he was “so sick” of explaining why his show had a mostly white cast.
“What the hell? Nobody asked Norman Lear why he wrote for black people all those years,” Perry explained at the time. “Stop asking me that damn question. People are people.”
Perry is right. Black filmmakers should be allowed to explore and tell new stories without facing criticism, especially when their white counterparts often have free reign to cast whoever they want.
And black filmmakers like Spike Lee, known for his movies focused on the black experience, has made equally great films with white leads including “25th Hour” and “Inside Man.” So criticizing Perry for having one show with more white than black actors while ignoring the mostly black casts in his past and future projects is ridiculous.
That being said, Perry ruins his defense by blaming the backlash on “reverse racism.” “Reverse racism” is largely a myth; a tricky term that falsely equates racism and prejudice. Racism is a concept that operates on both an individual and systemic level, and the exclusion of white actors throughout the film and television industry is most definitely not systemic. So yes, the ongoing backlash Perry faces may be unnecessary and even unfair, but “reverse racism?” That’s still not a thing.
Allen Hughes, one of the directors of the beloved 1993 drama Menace II Society, is bringing a four-part documentary event series about the long-running partnership between Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre to HBO. Hughes’ The Defiant Oneswill debut in 2017, the network announced Thursday. The series will be “set amid many of the defining events of the past four decades,” according to a press release.
“The Defiant Ones has everything you expect in a great story — drama and humor, tragedy and triumph,” HBO Programming boss Casey Bloys said Thursday. “Allen Hughes takes you on a journey through some of the most important flash points of popular culture, and I’m delighted that we can bring this unforgettable saga to our viewers.”
Hughes filmed Dre and Iovine over a period of three years for the documentary, conducting extensive interviews with his subjects while telling a larger story about how “defiance and determination” helped them make a “series of Americans Dreams” into reality. Eminem, Nas, Ice Cube, Bono, David Geffen, Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Bruce Springsteen, and many more were also interviewed. Additionally, Defiant Ones boasts “never-before-seen footage” of artists such as Eazy-E, U2, and N.W.A. in the studio.
The result, the network said Thursday, is a “master class” in how to work one’s way up from the bottom in any situation. “This epic look at America shows how you can consistently defy conventional wisdom and even logic, and still win big,” a network spokesperson explained. The Defiant Ones debuts next year.
Jamie Foxx and Marvin Gaye (Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Billboard)
After many others’ efforts to produce a Marvin Gaye biopic were shot down, Jamie Foxx has emerged triumphant. The actor-singer earned the approval of the Gaye family to bring the “Let’s Get It On” singer’s life story to television screens after a three-year process.
“I’ve been a huge fan my whole life,” Foxx said to The Hollywood Reporter. “His brilliance in music [is] unparalleled. Marvin Gaye’s story has always fascinated me.”
The currently untitled limited series is executive produced by Foxx and Suzanne de Passe and Madison Jones of de Passe Jones Entertainment, which is responsible for projects such as “Songbird: The Miriam Makeba Story,” and “The Temptations” miniseries on NBC. De Passe’s involvement should come as no surprise considering her ties to Motown, the label Gaye was signed to. She served as founder Berry Gordy’s creative assistant in the 1960s before becoming president in 1981.
As for the Gaye series, de Passe’s production company will promote it to traditional and stream-based TV services. Plus, she and Jones are discussing which songs in the singer’s catalog will be used in the show with Gaye’s music rights holders, Sony/ATV.
In a first, Foxx’s project on the Motown star, who died in 1984 after being shot by his father, was approved by Gordy and Gaye’s son, Marvin Gaye III. The singer’s estate is famously protective of the star’s content, so past efforts by the likes of Lenny Kravitz, F. Gary Gray and Jesse L. Martin to produce a biographical film have been shot down by the family.
“We’ve been involved in a number of attempts to get this done, and now we’ve been able to marshal all the forces,” de Passe said. “And Jamie’s come on board as a partner, so we’re excited to get going.”
“This project will be a powerful and definitive telling of Marvin Gaye’s life story,” Gaye III said.
Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” was not as fortunate, premiering to a disappointing $7.1 million across 2,105 theaters. The biopic about slave rebellion leader Nat Turner was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered to a rapturous standing ovation and sold to Fox Searchlight for a record-shattering $17.5 million. But the release was derailedafter rape allegations against Parker and his “The Birth of a Nation” co-writer Jean Celestin resurfaced. Both men were accused of sexually assaulting a college classmate over a decade ago. Though they were ultimately acquitted of those charges, news broke this summer that their accuser had committed suicide in 2012. The ensuing controversy overshadowed the strong reviews and may have hurt the film’s Oscar chances.
“This is a pretty pedestrian result,” said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “Clearly, not all press is good press.”
Searchlight, however, believes that the film’s A CinemaScore could lead to robust word-of-mouth, which might help “The Birth of a Nation” draw an audience in the coming weeks. Distribution chief Frank Rodriguez said he was pleased by how diverse the audience for the film was — 54% of ticket buyers were African-American and 42% were Caucasian. He stressed that it was difficult to know how many people had opted not to see the picture because of coverage of the rape accusation.
“The film stands on its own,” said Rodriguez. “What it was before at Sundance, the actual celluloid, the image, is still the same, but the perception may have changed and there’s not too much anyone can do about it.”
It’s said the role of art in a situation of oppression is to create revolution.. The Birth of a Nation film encompasses that role. A revolution of the mind should occur after viewing this brilliant film. The way you view religion, juxtaposing the role and mindset of slave catchers with proposed policies of renewing stop and frisk, and senseless killing of people of color by law enforcement, role of religion to control our mindset as well as other organizations in our community, how religion can be used to submit to oppression or reject it, raping of our women, destruction of our family, and how many things have changed as a result of our resolve and protest against oppression as a people, but how many have remained the same. Very few films can move you emotionally like Birth of a Nation. It’s a must see…
During an interview on “Good Morning America,” Nate Parker absolutely refused to apologize for the controversial rape case for which he was acquitted seventeen years ago.
“I was falsely accused,” he insisted in speaking with “GMA” co-host Robin Roberts. “I was proven innocent and I’m not going to apologize for that.”
Parker and his college roommate, Jean Celestin, were both accused of raping an 18-year-old woman at Penn State University. Parker was acquitted, though Celestin was convicted of sexual assault. The conviction was later overturned.
“You have a daughter in college … what do you tell her?” Roberts asked of the rape charge.
“She knows how I feel about her and I’ve addressed it so many times,” Parker replied.
He then insisted that the focus should not be on him but on his new movie, Birth of a Nation.
“I think the important thing, you know, is this isn’t about me,” Parker said. “The story of Nat Turner as an American, as American people, the story about a man who was erased from history, at some point. I think that’s where our focus should be.”
There’s no debating that host Chris Rock has absolutely crushed it during the first hour of tonight’s Academy Awards. His fire commentary on #OscarsSoWhite is everything we could have hoped for and more. But while we thought we’d seen the worst of bricked jokes with that feigned Ryan Goslingand Russell Crowe beef to announce the Adapted Screenplay category, we really weren’t ready for whatever was going on with that 10-second Stacey Dash cameo in which she wished the Oscars audience a happy Black History Month.
No stranger to controversy (and her fair share of racist trolling), tonight wouldn’t be the first time that Dash has said something that set the Internet aflame. But this…this was something else. When Chris Rock introduced her following a great sketch of Oscar finalists re-imagined with black actors, Stacey took the stage and said:
Let’s see that one more time.
…And that was pretty much it. Understandably, the Internet (and Oscars audience) reacted accordingly—the Oscars attendees with complete silence (heard above), and Twitter with the following:
The Weeknd, ladies and gentlemen:
And then, Stacey Dash dropped her response to what we can probably assume she foresaw happening. In an article titled “Who is Stacey Dash and why did she just walk across the #Oscar stage?,” she wrote the following:
When they added ME to increase the diversity, I’m sure many black people rolled their eyes. I’m not “black enough,” they say. But guess what? I’ve heard that all my life. I would rather be a free thinking, black than a cookie cutter black who thinks – and votes – just like all my friends.
Yes, I’m the actress from the South Bronx who has always dreamed of winning an Oscar. But God has a great sense of humor and this is my first encounter with one of my dreams of destiny. Bringing diversity to Hollywood… not merely because of color, but politics as well. (After all, different colors of skin is an easy kind of diversity. Ideological diversity is much harder, because it forces everyone to come face to face with actual beliefs. Hollywood needs BOTH.)
