Black Movies That Should Be Made

I'm hoping that the following proposed black film projects will finally get made:

1. About thirty-two years ago, one of the New York tabloids announced that there was a proposed film about dancer/choreographer Arthur Mitchell under consideration. I think it was supposed to be a docudrama that followed Mitchell from his early life in Harlem to his ascendancy to becoming the first black male principal dancer with the New York City Ballet to his co-founding of the Dance Theatre of Harlem shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2. The Billy Strayhorn biopic, based on Lush Life, David Hajdu's biography of the composer and Duke Ellington collaborator (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996). The author's name is pronounced Hay-doo.

3. A film about Philippa Schuyler, the child piano prodigy and the biracial daughter of the Harlem Renaissance writer George Schuyler. She was later killed in May of 1967 in a helicopter crash while working as a journalist in South Vietnam. In the 1940s, Joseph Mitchell, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote a lengthy article about her when she was a child. It was included in his collection, Up in the Old Hotel, and Other Stories (Vintage Books, 1993). Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, was chosen to portray Philippa.

4. Spike Lee's plan to film a story about the 1938 boxing match between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.

5. The director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther and Fruitvale Station) and the actor Michael B. Jordan's  desire to make a movie about Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, who died in 1337.