Episode 295: Wil Haygood Talks ‘Colorization,’ Black Films in a White World, and Meeting James Baldwin

PHOTO: Julia Ewan

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By Brendan O’Meara

Wil Haygood is here. I’m going to repeat that: Wil Haygood is here.

He’s here to talk about his latest book, Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World (Knopf, 2021).

This conversation I did as part of Goucher College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. It was a live event, rebroadcast with my slick editing skills for you. 

Wil has been a long-time reporter for The Washington Post, where his piece on Eugene Allen, the butler for several presidents in the White House became a book and was the basis for Lee Daniels The Butler, starring Forrest Whittaker and Oprah Winfrey. You might have heard of them.

Wil has also written books on Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis Jr. His talent, ability, and rigor might only be surpassed by his generosity. How generous? He blurbed my book Six Weeks in Saratoga way back in early 2011 before the book came out that summer. 

Continue reading “Episode 295: Wil Haygood Talks ‘Colorization,’ Black Films in a White World, and Meeting James Baldwin”

Episode 62—Penny Lane is Her Real Name

By Brendan O’Meara

Tweetables from Penny Lane (@lennypane):

“You can beg, borrow, and steal, cut corners and set your expectations are low, or say, ‘Fuck that! My time is important and I’m going to pay myself.'”

“I wanted the movie to be a con the way Brinkley conned people.”

“You just have to muddle through.”

“Being a director, your only job is to understand the big-picture goals of the film.”

Penny Lane is a documentary filmmaker whose films include Nuts!Our Nixon, and The Voyagers. The latter got her a nod from Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings

The Voyagers is a gorgeous movie and a love letter of sorts to her then-fiance. Popova writes:

The Voyagers is a beautiful short film by video artist and filmmaker Penny Lane, made of remixed public domain footage — a living testament to the creative capacity of remix culture — using the story of the legendary interstellar journey and the Golden Record to tell a bigger, beautiful story about love and the gift of chance. Lane takes the Golden Record, “a Valentine dedicated to the tiny chance that in some distant time and place we might make contact,” and translates it into a Valentine to her own “fellow traveler,” all the while paying profound homage to [Carl] Sagan’s spirit and legacy.

In this episode we talk about that, but also her longer films Nuts! and Our Nixon, and also about raising the bar of her own ambitions and finding ways to make her work more visible. Anybody who may be hiding in obscurity will find this episode inspiring. 

Documentaries Mentioned

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Grizzly Man
The Gleaners and I

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