A Woody Allen Film At Mount Morris Baths?

About four or five years before I was an employee at Mount Morris Baths in Harlem, I went there to interview the owner Walter Fitzer and his son for an article I planned to write for a gay publication about the bathhouse and its history. That article, unfortunately, never got written.* From that interview I remember Walter telling me that the filmmaker Woody Allen (or someone in his production company) approached him about shooting a scene or scenes in the bathhouse. Walter told me that he declined the offer. If what he said was true, he passed up a great opportunity to immortalize the bathhouse on film and  get paid for the use of the premises.

*I recently published an article in the Gay City News (April 17, 2025) about my two and a half years working there.

The "Summer Of Soul" Movie

 

Summer of Soul, released in 2021, is a movie I hope to see on a DVD. It's a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Among the performers who appeared on stage were Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, B. B. King, and Mahalia Jackson. The above wall mural appeared on the side of a building that's located on the corner of West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The building is one block from Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park), where the historic event took place.

More Harlem Street Art

This wall mural was painted to advertise the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect, starring Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, and Marlon Wayans. It was located on 124th Street, near Lenox Avenue.

"12 Angry Men," A Film Classic

The playwright Reginald Rose's jury room drama, 12 Angry Men, began as a one-hour play performed live on network television in 1954. When it became a feature-length movie, released in 1957, it was a box office flop, despite receiving widespread critical acclaim.

Decades later, writes Phil Rosenzweig, in his book, 12 Angry Men: Reginald Rose and the Making of an American Classic (Fordham University Press, 2021), it "is revered as one of America's greatest motion pictures," written by one of television's Golden Age writers.

The stage play version, popular with both professional and amateur productions, caused one current critic to note that the play "still manages to grip an audience as though it were ripped from today's headlines." One New York Times writer, however, called attention to the "legal and social anachronisms" present in the play (and the movie) such as an all-white, all-male jury, the allowing of jurors to smoke in the jury room, and the mandatory death penalty (in New York State). There is one other anachronism, Juror #8 (Henry Fonda's character in the movie) brings a switchblade knife to the jury room that's similar to the one used as evidence in the murder trial. Today, with metal detectors present at the courthouse entrance, the knife would have been immediately confiscated by court officers.

Otherwise, I agree with the Times writer's assessment that "the play [as well as the movie] remains fresh, engaging, and powerful."

I Enjoy Watching Movies On DVD

I recently heard on a radio news broadcast that the retailer Best Buy was discontinuing the sale of DVDs because more and more people are watching movies via streaming services rather than on DVDs.

My introduction to streaming came about when my upstairs neighbors, Harry and Lilia, would invite me to their apartment numerous times for dinner, conversation, and the use of their laptop computers.

Harry or Lilia, while sitting on the living room couch, remote in hand, would skim through the menu offerings on Netflix, reading the plot summaries before deciding on what to watch.

From what I could see, streaming doesn't offer the kinds of features found on a DVD like audio commentaries, scene selection, behind-the-scenes mini-docs, blooper clips, trailers, etc. (Good reasons not to buy bootleg copies because they lack these important features.)

Being old school, I prefer to have the physical disc in hand. As the novelist Larry Duplechan points out in his memoir/film history book, Movies That Made Me Gay (Team Angelica Publishing, 2023, paperback), the DVD is a good backup because "you can't trust streaming services to keep your favorite old movies posted."

Remake "The Cotton Club" Movie

Prior to seeing Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Cotton Club in 1984, I had interviewed several people who had either worked at the nightclub or knew someone who did. The interviews were for a syndicated article I was writing about the upcoming movie.

Like the film critic Rex Reed, in his Guide to Movies on TV & Video, 1992-1993 Edition (Warner Books, 1992), I had heard a lot about this "Harlem bastion of glamour, sequins, and jazz that characterized the Roaring Twenties in New York night life."

So when I went to see the film I was full of excitement and high expectations. For the first time I would be seeing the fabled night spot on the big screen, and see an exploration of the lives and working conditions of the black performers who worked there in a Jim Crow environment, in, of all places, Harlem.

And, like Reed, I was disappointed. "[W]here," he asked, "is the Cotton Club? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor."

The movie was more focused on the white gangsters who owned the place than it was on the black performers who were its backbone. This was a missed opportunity to explore the racial and socio-economic aspects of the period. Instead of watching this movie, "You [will] learn more about the Cotton Club," wrote Reed, "and the people who made it famous just by listening to old records by Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Waters." Amen.

In the hands of Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons, Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, or another capable black director the movie would have been more riveting, more incisive, and more thoughtful. It certainly would have been more black-centered.

If there is one movie that deserves a remake, The Cotton Club is it.

Note: I wrote a similar blog post in February 2015.

The 1984 article I wrote was published in this blog as "Exotic Negroes at the Cotton Club " on February 12, 2013.

Biopics Are Not The Gospel

When one watches a movie based on true events, one should keep in mind that the movie is not a documentary and that the filmmakers for dramatic reasons fictionalize and change details about what really happened.

A case in point would be 2020's One Night in Miami, an otherwise well-done, riveting movie directed by the Oscar-winning actress Regina King.

The movie takes place in February 1964 when Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) comes to Miami to vie for the heavyweight championship against his rival Sonny Liston.

Following Ali's victory in the ring, he, the singer Sam Cooke, the firebrand orator Malcolm X, and the football player Jim Brown hole up in a motel room where they share their innermost thoughts, experiences, and aspirations. No one knows for sure what was actually said that night. Kemp Powers, the screenwriter, can only conjecture about what may have occurred, relying on his imagination.

Jim Brown, who recently passed away, was the last surviving participant in that motel gathering and would have known how close Powers came to accurately depicting that night. However, a couple of facts were not accurately presented.

For instance, when Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali are by themselves, Brown expresses to Ali his reluctance to admit to the others that he is giving up his football career to pursue movie acting. What's missing in that scene is Ali telling Brown to relax since he himself appeared in the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight two years prior.

Another scene gets the chronology wrong about when Sam Cooke wrote and recorded "A Change is Gonna Come."  Malcolm goes to the record player and plays Bob Dylan singing "Blowin' in the Wind" and asks Cooke why he hadn't written a song that was as socially and politically relevant. That confrontation, according to the movie, causes Cooke to write "A Change is Gonna Come." Actually, Cooke recorded the song less than a month before the motel gathering in Miami.

Peter Guralnick, Cooke's biographer, in an essay in the companion booklet to the 30-song CD Sam Cooke: Portrait of a Legend, 1951-1964 (2003), relates that after hearing the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary's hit recording of "Blowin' in the Wind," he told his friend and song publishing partner J.W. Alexander, "Alec, I got to write something. Here's a white boy [Bob Dylan] writing a song like this...." (Guralnick calls "A Change is Gonna Come" Cooke's magnum opus.)

If one were to examine One Night in Miami closely, there are no doubt other inaccuracies. But, hey, that's Hollywood. You can still enjoy the movie. Just don't accept everything you're seeing and hearing as the gospel.

Are STEM Students Free To Launch Rockets?

The movie, October Sky, released in 1999 and based on Homer Hickam's memoir, Rocket Boys, is a riveting celebration of American know-how and determination.

It's set in a small West Virginia coal-mining town in 1957 when the Soviet satellite Sputnik is launched spearheading the Soviet/American space race.

Hickam, who later became a space engineer, at the time was a high school student, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, with dreams of designing rocket ships. His father, who works in the mines, vehemently disapproves and wants him instead to follow in his footsteps. But Hickam continues to pursue his dreams.

Young Hickam, along with his school buddies, and with the full  support of his science teacher, enters a student science competition and begins test firing rockets, many of which either fail to launch or blow up without ever leaving the ground. In the end, they achieve a successful launch.

After I watched this movie (which was a few years ago on either a VHS cassette or a DVD), I concluded that the kids today who are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) programs in high schools would not be able to enjoy the same freedom to experiment with rockets as Hickam was. And  their efforts, because of national security concerns, would be stymied by government interference and/or accusations of terrorist activity.

On The Road With Langston Hughes And Friend

I enjoy a good road-trip movie like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Thelma & Louise (1991). And for a long time I've seen the movie potential of a road trip by car that Langston Hughes and his traveling companion, Zell Ingram, a young artist, took in 1931. (Ingram is described by the biographer Arnold Rampersad in his The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986) as "a big, handsome, young black man, about twenty-one years old, who lived with his mother over a popular Cleveland hot-dog shop.")

The trip took them from Cleveland to Florida. And from there to Cuba and Haiti; then back to Florida, where they picked up the black civil rights activist and college president Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach. She became Hughes's second traveling companion all the way to New York City.

While Hughes and Ingram were in Cuba and Haiti, they encountered enough adventures and misadventures to make a feature-length movie a riveting cinematic experience.

Sometimes I think I should become a movie producer.

How About A James Baldwin Biopic?

Earlier today I re-read the chapter on James Baldwin in Christopher Bram's wonderful book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve/Hachette Book Group), published in 2012. The chapter is an excellent summation of Baldwin's life and literary career.

What prompted me to re-read the chapter was the idea that came to me that Baldwin's life, especially his early life, would make a riveting biopic. Drawing on previous biographies and his essays, the film would trace his evolution as a writer from his impoverished childhood in Harlem to his first few years in Paris where he, as an American expatriate, struggled to survive while completing his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

I think this would be the sort of cinematic project that would interest directors like Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, and Ava DuVernay.

Concerning who would portray Baldwin, a good choice would have been the late Chadwick Boseman, who somewhat resembled Baldwin. Unfortunately, since Boseman is no longer available, Don Cheadle, who did a brilliant job of portraying Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), would be another possible choice.

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.

Composer Billy Strayhorn Was Never In The Closet

A biopic about composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's friend and musical collaborator, is long overdue.

In the 1990s, director Irwin Winkler was set to turn David Hajdu's biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), into a movie. It never happened. I remember Winkler being quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that Strayhorn was not open about his homosexuality. Clearly Winkler hadn't read the book. I, who read a significant portion of the book, learned early on that Strayhorn was very much open about his sexuality.

"...Strayhorn," writes Hajdu (pronounced Hay-doo) on page 79, "made himself a triple minority: he was black, he was gay, and he was a minority among gay people in that he was open about his homosexuality in an era when social bias forced many men and women to keep their sexual identities secret."

Maybe it was a good thing that the movie was never made. Who knows what other inaccuracies would have crept into the script.

In the right hands a Strayhorn biopic could become a powerful and memorable cinematic experience. Someone like director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) might be that someone who could accurately bring Strayhorn's life and musical achievements to the big screen.

The big question then becomes this--who would be a good candidate to play Billy Strayhorn?

A TV Script About Aphra Behn, Britain's First Female Playwright

The first time I encountered the name Aphra Behn (1640-1689), Britain's first female playwright, was in a book one of my aunts gave me more than fifty years ago. The book is called English Literature: From the Beginnings to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Volume One by Bernard D. N. Grebanier (Barron's Educational Series, Revised Edition, 1959). (Grebanier was a professor of English Literature at Brooklyn College, in New York City.) I still have the book, although it's no longer in excellent condition, the result of numerous readings.

What brought the book to mind was an article I saw on the website Deadline.com about the unproduced film and TV scripts selected for the Brit List, a list, reported the website, "compiled each year from recommendations by British production companies, talent agencies, sales companies, financiers, distributors and broadcasters."

Out of nearly 300 scripts submitted, 18 were selected. Among those selected was the TV historical drama script Aphra by Jessica Lambert (it received eleven recommendations; a minimum of seven recommendations was needed to be included on the list). 

In the summary, Aphra Behn is described as "a bisexual libertine who lived an incredible double life as a 17th century spy." Professor Grebanier, with obvious distaste and disapproval, called Behn "the author of many novels, plays and poems, nearly all astoundingly indecent for a woman." 

I hope Aphra gets made into a television film real soon. From its description, it sounds like a fascinating script about a fascinating woman.

New York In The Before Times

Watching the marvelous 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada makes me long for the New York of the before times, meaning the pre-COVID-19 New York.

In the movie, starring Meryl Streep, we see people on the streets, in restaurants, fashion shows, art galleries, and in the workplace (the offices of the fashion magazine Runway) without a face covering, without social distancing, without a single hand sanitizer dispenser in sight.

If only we could bring back that New York ASAP!

"Hollywood Babylon" Books On TV?

I don't know if Kenneth Anger published a third or fourth sequel to his books Hollywood Babylon (Straight Arrow Books, 1975) and Hollywood Babylon II (Dutton, 1984), but if he hasn't he should. Both books are sitting side by side in my bookcase.

These books are focused on the dark side of Tinseltown fame--suicides, murders, drug addiction, sex scandals, mental breakdowns, etc.

I'm surprised that HBO, Showtime, the History Channel or one of the other cable networks hasn't done a documentary series based on the Hollywood Babylon books. If they did, I'm certain the number of viewers would be astronomical.

Netflix Saves An Iconic Manhattan Movie House

The Paris Theatre, the last single-screen movie house in Manhattan, recently closed its doors. For a long time I'd thought about seeing a movie there but never got around to doing it. When the theatre closed, I thought my opportunity to visit was forever gone. Then I read in Time Out New York magazine (December 11-24, 2019, Issue 1177), that Netflix came to the Paris Theatre's rescue by signing a long-term lease.

Netflix, reported Time Out, will use the Paris Theatre "to stage screenings and special events." And since the Academy Awards only allows films that have had a theatrical release to be nominated for an Oscar, Netflix films will have a ready-made venue.

Now if we could just convince Netflix to take over the long-vacant Metro Cinema, located on Broadway and 99th Street, at one time a venue for art-house films. The Upper West Side was once the home to many movie houses. Now there are none. Bringing back the Metro Cinema would be a wonderful thing.

And while we're at it, maybe Netflix can also revive the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, which was located near Lincoln Center. It closed down about two years ago.

Watching Movies Inside A Train Station

Here's an interesting bit of New York cinema history that I recently learned about via an electronic message that appeared on a curbside Link NYC kiosk: In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, there was a movie theatre inside the world-famous Grand Central Terminal.

Numerous questions came to mind upon learning this: who operated the theatre?; where in the terminal was it located?; how many people did it seat?; was it ornate?; did the train noises disturb moviegoers?; were the moviegoers mostly commuters?; etc., etc., etc. I would love to have those questions answered.

No doubt it, like other theatres, was a single-screen venue; no multiplexes back then.

Who knew that Grand Central Terminal was large enough to house a movie theatre?

The Black Panther Sequel Arrives In 2022

According to the website Deadline.Com, Black Panther 2 will be in theatres on May 6, 2022. So mark your calendars. The first one grossed $1.35 billion at the box office worldwide.

I thoroughly enjoyed Black Panther and I'm looking forward to seeing the sequel.








According to the website Deadline.Com, Black Panther 2 will be in theatres on May 6, 2022. So mark your calendars. The first one grossed $1.35 billion at the box office worldwide.

I thoroughly enjoyed Black Panther and I'm looking forward to seeing the sequel.
















                                                                                                                           
                                     

           
                                                                                   






                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                               

A Warning Against Film Piracy

The most memorable DVD "FBI Anti-Piracy Warning" was the one I saw before the start of the 1945 film And Then There Were None, which was based on an Agatha Christie mystery novel, and starred Barry Fitzgerald. In this warning, a computer-generated image of a man is seen in prison stripes walking forlornly into a prison cell. The cell door slides shut, the scene blacks out briefly. He is next shown sitting on his prison cot, head in his hands. Then the "FBI Warning" message crawls up the screen as a mournful harmonica is heard throughout the segment.

If that doesn't send home the message that film piracy has serious consequences then nothing will.

An Overlooked Christmas Song

During the Christmas season, the same Christmas tunes are heard everywhere over and over: on the radio, over supermarket public address systems, etc. We hear tunes like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "White Christmas," "Santa Baby," "Winter Wonderland," to name a few.

One tune missing from that playlist is one that was featured in the 1974 thriller The Odessa File, which starred Jon Voight as a young German journalist. At the beginning of the film, he is seen driving on a German city street with his car radio playing Perry Como singing a song called "Christmas Dream." The song, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and English lyrics by Tim Rice, is, to my ears, very beautiful and deserves airplay.

The movie, set in 1963 and based on a novel by Frederick Forsyth, is about the search for an escaped Nazi war criminal who ran a concentration camp. Does being on such a movie's soundtrack taint the song? I hope not.

I've read the lyrics and I could find nothing offensive or off-putting about it. The fact that Perry Como sang it should be reason enough to consider putting it on a station's Christmas playlist.