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In our Member Lens series, we’re spotlighting a cross-section of current Film Independent Members to see how they got where they are now, what they hope to do next and what being a part of Film Independent means to them. This profile originally ran in May 2022.

May is for Members! This week only: 50% off Filmmaker Lover or Filmmaker Pro. This month, we’re celebrating our Membership experience for filmmakers and film lovers all over the globe. All month-long you can enjoy an array of special discounts on Membership.

Melissa Haizlip isn’t someone who had to go searching for culture. The New York-based director, producer and actor grew up immersed in a world of creators, her uncle Ellis—host of the landmark PBS variety show Soul! (1968-1973) and subject of Haizlip’s Peabody-award nominated 2018 documentary Mr. Soul!—acting as the catalyst bringing of the 20th century’s most important...

When there is a Black principal actor in a scary movie, we all know what their fate entails. Enter Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman and vet movie critic Mark H. Harris, who have made it their duty to hunt down the controversial cultural schisms in horror cinema from 1968 on in their teamed text The Black Guy Dies First (out Feb 7). Their prolific 2019 documentary Horror Noire is their first brainchild. Similar to the doc, their second joint dissects the same scary racial truths of early thrillers to modern blood-smearing tentpoles with encyclopedic cognition.

At a time when Black actors were forced into submissive or inarticulate roles, the actor showed strength moving through hostile white spaces with dignity

Upon the announcement of Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier’s death, I sent out a tweet that featured my favorite photo of him. The photo in question shows a shirtless Poitier, wearing dark sunglasses like Miles Davis on the cover of ’Round About Midnight, playing the saxophone alongside jazz man Sonny Stitt, while standing in the street, surrounded by a community of appreciative onlookers, otherwise known as “the people”. The reason I dig this photo so much is because it offers a more complex image of Poitier than the one that had come to define him at the height of his fame in Hollywood. I have never been able to confirm the context of this photo, but I have always assumed that it was taken while he...

Legendary animator Floyd Norman talks about his all time favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Floyd Norman: An Animated Life (2016)

Vertigo (1958)

Citizen Kane (1941)

Rope (1948)

The Trouble With Harry (1955)

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Song of the South (1946)

The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)

The Third Man (1950)

The Jungle Book (1967)

The Jungle Book (2016)

The Lion King (2019)

Pinocchio (1940)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

The Old Mill (1937)

Casablanca (1942)

Cinderella (1950)

Singin’ In The Rain (1953)

Paths of Glory (1957)

1917 (2019)

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

Star Wars (1977)

American Graffiti (1973)

Sorcerer (1977)

Other Notable Items

Michael Fiore

The Watts riots

The LAPD’s cruel mistreatment of Rodney King

The George Floyd protests

Move in Philadelphia

Walt Disney Pictures

Tfh Guru Roger Corman

Erik Sharkey

The Three Stooges

I Am the Greatest: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali TV series (1977)

Muhammad Ali

Fred Calvert

Alfred Hitchcock

Bernard Herrman’s Vertigo score

Robert Burks

The latest...

I first watched Mantan Moreland when I was a teenager. My father (born in 1941) grew up on the Charlie Chan series in which Moreland played a Black, nervous, jumpy, and bulging eye assistant to the fortune-cookie accented “Asian” detective. I didn’t know why at the time, but Moreland’s performance for some reason hurt me—and I couldn’t understand how my father could be watching these tasteless low-budget films.

Continue reading ‘Bamboozled’ Is Spike Lee’s Regrettably Timeless Masterpiece at The Playlist.

A 27-year-old victim of the Las Vegas mass shooting has woken from a coma and taken her first steps — with some help — about two weeks after she was shot in the head during the Oct. 1 massacre at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival, People confirms.

Tina Frost was at the outdoor concert on the Vegas strip that Sunday night when a gunman opened fire from his nearby hotel suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino, killing 58 and injuring hundreds of others.

Frost — reportedly an accountant and Maryland native who had relocated to San Diego — was struck in...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jack Hill's Spider Baby (1967) will be showing January 24 - February 23 and Pit Stop (1967) will be showing January 25 - February 24, 2017 in the United States.Quentin Tarantino, unsurprisingly a gushing fan of Jack Hill, once famously compared the exploitation specialist to venerable Hollywood icon Howard Hawks, presumably on the basis of his distinctly personal preferences and his unassuming, across-the-board genre dabbling. Of course, those genres explored by Hawks—from westerns to screwball comedies—were considerably different than those in which Hill excels, but the point is well taken: within his respective niches, Hill does it as well as anyone, with skill and without pretense. This includes quintessential Blaxploitation classics like Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), and some of the finest women-in-prison films ever made—yes, there are some very fine women-in-prison films—namely The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage...

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good. • H.L. Mencken

“There is only so far that you can push people into a corner… We’re frustrated and that’s why we’re out there in the streets.” • Charles, Member of the Crips gang

“I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.” • John Waters, Filmmaker and Writer

“This is a skewed portrayal of the protests; it is what the media chose to portray – the media that consumers bewilderingly seem to want. The real revolution is thousands of people across America standing in solidarity against police brutality.

Rex Ingram in 'The Thief of Bagdad' 1940 with tiny Sabu. Actor Rex Ingram movies on TCM: Early black film performer in 'Cabin in the Sky,' 'Anna Lucasta' It's somewhat unusual for two well-known film celebrities, whether past or present, to share the same name.* One such rarity is – or rather, are – the two movie people known as Rex Ingram;† one an Irish-born white director, the other an Illinois-born black actor. Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” continues today, Aug. 11, '15, with a day dedicated to the latter. Right now, TCM is showing Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-black musical adaptation of the Faust tale that is notable as the first full-fledged feature film directed by another Illinois-born movie person, Vincente Minnelli. Also worth mentioning, the movie marked Lena Horne's first important appearance in a mainstream motion picture.§ A financial disappointment on the...

The director has never been short of opinions – so why has he become evasive when we catch up with him in Brooklyn?

With the interview over, Spike Lee finally opens up. For 40 minutes the film director has sat in a defensive crouch, with his arms folded and his legs crossed, parrying questions as though they were accusations. More evasive than abrasive, he insists that neither new technology, changes in his personal life or the way that he's perceived have any effect on him or his work. A couple of times he responds as though there was another interviewee in the room.

Asked a perfectly reasonable questions such as: "How does an independent filmmaker like yourself measure success?", he'd say: "It depends who you ask."

"Well I'm asking you," I keep pointing out, hoping, in vain, for a credible answer.

Lee is small, slender and stylish. He is dressed all in black – sneakers,...

So as we go down our Halloween Countdown list, yesterday I reconsidered the-not-even-remotely classic 1974 Exorcist rip-off Abby and, as you know me by now, I try as much as I can to avoid the obvious. When everyone goes right I go left. I could have talked about Blacula or its sequel Scream Blacula Scream or J.D.’s Revenge, but I want to take a look at the 1942 “race” film Lucky Ghost, starring Mantan Moreland and F.E. Miller. The film is one of countless "race" movies made during the silent era to the late 40’s, aimed exclusively at black film going audiences, and it was directed by veteran B (and zero budget) movie director William Beaudine, who had maybe one of the most...

Actor-director-producer's success among black audiences is sucking the air out of the African-American movie conversation

So Tyler Perry is in yet another terrible movie? Stop the presses! Adjourn Congress! Declare martial law! Or just go back to sleep. Perry has been called "the KFC of black cinema" and "the worst film-maker in Hollywood" (by MSNBC talkshow host Touré), and widely lambasted for building an empire of cash on a body of work filled with self-hating and retrograde racial stereotypes of African-Americans. No less august a figure than Spike Lee has been moved to note that, "We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Slap'n'Eat?" (two noted mid-century black entertainers). Yet Tyler Perry is about the richest and most successful African-American entertainment impresario around: Berry Gordy-rich, Quincy Jones-ubiquitous, and a 100%-down home. His work doesn't travel internationally, suggesting that it is far from universal,...

Horror fans today are spoiled. With the vast array of films available on DVD and Blu-ray via storefronts like Best Buy and Fye, online outlets like Amazon and Deep Discount, and rental/streaming services such as Netflix, there are few films that are unattainable. Virtually anything one might hear of is available some way, somewhere. But it wasn't always so...

Back at a time before disc (or VHS for that matter), the only way - and I mean the Only way - to see classic and not so classic genre pictures was on broadcast television. As a kid, I remember getting the local TV Guide and a yellow highlighter and systematically going through the listings, marking each and every show time of movies I'd heard about either from friends or ones that were obliquely mentioned in Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland . I would meticulously go over each entry...

Movies from the “golden age” of black and white films (approximately the 1930’s through the 1950’s) almost invariably contain well-written dialogue and strikingly subtle humor, making them a favorite among many fans of cinema. The horror movies of this more subtle period in film history are therefore of a cerebral nature, primarily relying on the viewer’s imagination to generate the true sense of horror that modern movies generate through more visual means. It is these oft-ignored horror movies that will be the focus of a series of articles detailing the reasons why true fans of horror movies should rediscover these films. King of the Zombies (Monogram Pictures, 1941) is the first movie in this series.

King of the Zombies made its debut during World War II. The entire world’s consciousness was focused on the war resulting in a wide range of movies with at least a passing reference to the global conflict.

Video of the Year nominee is packed with characters from the Beasties' past.

By James Montgomery

Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood and Danny McBride in the Beastie Boy's "Make Some Noise" video

Photo: Capitol

If they've been anything over the course of their near-30-year career, the Beastie Boys have always been thorough, the kind of band that derives some sort of perverse pleasure from peppering their music with a sundry of pop-culture references, inside jokes and exhaustively sought, expertly placed samples.

And because of that, they've managed to create their own rather insular world, the kind of place where Mantan Moreland hangs out with Ted Danson, where Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" rubs elbows with Les Baxter's "Prelude in C# Minor." And luckily for all of us, each time they release an album, they pull the curtain back slightly, and invite us in for a drink. So it's...

One would think that directors would respect the work of other filmmakers, or at least keep their negative opinions to themselves. But that's not the case, and today we have some of the most famous director-on-director insults, with Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and Kevin Smith getting lots of hate. * Ingmar Berman on Orson Welles: "For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. 'Citizen Kane,' which I have a copy of - is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable." * Harmony Korine on Quentin Tarantino: "Quentin Tarantino seems to be too concerned with other films. I mean, about appropriating other movies, like in a blender. I think it's, like, really funny at the time I'm seeing it,...

Los Angeles, California (X17online) - Tyler Perry seemed to take a page out of his character Madea's book when talking about fellow filmmaker Spike Lee at a press conference this week. "I'm so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee," he said at a conference promoting his new film, Madea's Big Happy Family. "Spike can go straight to hell. You can print that." Lee started a war of words with Perry in 2009 when he said that Perry's films "harken back to Amos 'n' Andy." He also criticized Perry's TV shows. "I still think there is a lot of stuff out today that is coonery and buffoonery," Lee said. "I know it's making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better. ... I see these two ads for these two shows (Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns and House of Payne), and I am scratching my head.

While Spike Lee spent Tuesday sniping with Celtic fans at the Td Garden (and on Twitter), fellow writer/actor/director Tyler Perry gave Spike a piece of his mind at a press conference. “I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee,” said Perry, ostensibly promoting Madea’s Big Family. “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, ‘this is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘you vote by what you see,’ as if black people don’t know what they want to see.” Lee had suggested that Perry’s sitcoms Meet The Browns and House Of Payne were “coonery and buffoonery” in 2009, cracking “We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?...

The long-simmering war of words between Tyler Perry and Spike Lee is heating up again.

Perry, in both a message on his website and a press conference to promote "Madea's Big Happy Family," hit out against Lee, who in 2009 said, among other things, that Perry's films "harken back to 'Amos n' Andy'." While Perry's website message was vague and resilient, defending his work as both spiritually uplifting and fun, his words for Lee were blunt and harsh in the press conference.

"I'm so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee," Perry said during the press conference (via Box Office Magazine). "Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, 'this is a coon, this is a buffoon.' I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he...

After his electrifying performance as Blacula (1972), the great William Marshall was briefly considered a worthy successor to Christopher Lee's vampire king. A respected Shakespearean actor with an impressive theatre background, he was set to become a major horror star of the seventies, but like his fellow stage actor Robert Quarry, who achieved the same status as Count Yorga, his film career faded rapidly after the genre went through a radical re-think following the commercial success of The Exorcist (1973).

Marshall remained in New York to train in as an actor and director in Grand Opera and Shakespeare, although he had to support himself in a variety of jobs before making his professional stage debut. At 6ft 5inches, he was an impressively built, handsome, strong-featured actor with a booming bass baritone voice to match his towering presence. Not surprisingly, he quickly built up a formidable reputation as America's finest Shakespearean actor,...

Charlie Chan definitely has a place among the pantheon of famous fictional detectives. He is certainly one of the more controversial ones. Although Chan is undoubtedly a hero, many Asians resent the character as an ethnic stereotype. Chan is polite and soft spoken, never lacking an appropriate old Chinese proverb to suit the occasion.

The character of Charlie Chan was created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1923 as a rebuttal to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes so common in literature of the day, such as Fu Manchu. Biggers lived in Hawaii and resented the unflattering Asian clichés so he invented a benign Chinese Investigator working for the Honolulu Police Force. He wrote several Chan novels. The honorable Chinese Detective became so popular that he was soon adapted into film. There were many Chan films, starting in the silent film era. Early films actually starred Chinese actors but the Audience didn’t respond to Asian Leading men.

The New York Musical Theatre Festival and Mass Street Productions/Ryan J. Davis are proud to present the World Premiere of Street Lights, a contemporary musical drama by Joe Drymala. From the creators of the Broadway-bound White Noise, which was a hit at Nymf in 2006, Street Lights features a groundbreaking score that uses modern hip hop, R&B and pop to tell a timeless story in the musical language of today's youth, while creating a bridge to earlier generations by incorporating samples of old civil rights anthems within the modern songs and beats. Ryan J. Davis directs a cast of 14 including Carla Duren* (Bway: 110 in the Shade, Hairspray),Chad Carstarphen (Off-Bway: The Conscientious Objector), Miguel Jarquin-Moreland*, Kevin Curtis* (Nymf: Twilight in Manchego, Maccabeat), Gayle Turner* (Bway: The Wiz), Jim Stanek* (Bway: Story of My Life, Lestat, Little Women), Virginia Cavaliere (Regional: High School Musical), Joy Lynn Matthews* (Bway: The Music Man...

The New York Musical Theatre Festival and Mass Street Productions/Ryan J. Davis are proud to present the World Premiere of Street Lights, a contemporary musical drama by Joe Drymala. From the creators of the Broadway-bound White Noise, which was a hit at Nymf in 2006, Street Lights features a groundbreaking score that uses modern hip hop, R&B and pop to tell a timeless story in the musical language of today's youth, while creating a bridge to earlier generations by incorporating samples of old civil rights anthems within the modern songs and beats. Ryan J. Davis directs a cast of 14 including Carla Duren* (Bway: 110 in the Shade, Hairspray),Chad Carstarphen (Off-Bway: The Conscientious Objector), Miguel Jarquin-Moreland*, Kevin Curtis* (Nymf: Twilight in Manchego, Maccabeat), Gayle Turner* (Bway: The Wiz), Jim Stanek* (Bway: Story of My Life, Lestat, Little Women), Virginia Cavaliere (Regional: High School Musical), Joy Lynn Matthews* (Bway: The Music Man...