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Ethan Hawke And Maya Hawke Have A Running Joke About ‘Wildcat,’ Their Flannery O’Connor Movie

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Ethan Hawke and his daughter, Maya Hawke, have a running joke about their Flannery O’Connor film.

“Wildcat,” directed by Ethan and starring Maya as O’Connor, was created with genuine authenticity. It’s a deeply creative look at the Southern Catholic novelist and short story writer behind “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” weaving in and out of her imagination and actual life.

Lupus claimed O’Connor’s life in 1964, when she was 39. She won the National Book Award posthumously in 1972. Though she is well-known for her language and sharp social satire, she has recently faced criticism for racism in her private correspondence and her depiction of race in her work. It was a difficult but potentially rewarding region. However, the Hawkes can’t help but giggle as they imagine pitching to a major studio or streamer.

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Ethan Hawke And Maya Hawke Have A Running Joke About ‘Wildcat,’ Their Flannery O’Connor Movie

Here’s how things could go:

Maya: “We want to make a film about an unfortunate-looking woman with lupus.” She struggles with her beliefs and does not have any lovers.

Ethan: “She’s a really brilliant writer but she’s completely unsuccessful.”

Maya: “Also, her minor success has recently been utterly disregarded, and people are mostly concerned in deleting her from the canon these days. “What do you think?”

Jonathan: “Sounds like the makings of a commercial, hit movie!”

If it isn’t clear, “Wildcat” (in select theaters Friday) was produced independently. To flesh out the cast, both Hawkes relied largely on friends with whom they had previously collaborated. The large ensemble includes Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Steve Zahn, and Vincent D’Onofrio, to mention a few.

Maya had the concept for a movie about the day she decided to devote her life to acting. Despite having two successful actresses as parents, including mother Uma Thurman, she had hesitated due to her passion of reading. She was concerned that if she attended Juilliard, she would be forced to choose a decision. So, in a little act of defiance, Maya decided to audition not with a monologue from the theatrical canon, but with one she had revised from O’Connor’s “Prayer Journal” with her father during his breaks while filming “The Magnificent Seven.”

“If I showed them that I was really interested in literature, and if then they still wanted me, then it would probably be a place that would still allow me to explore language and writing and poetry the way that I wanted,” Maya said. “What a rebel.”

Ethan had also read O’Connor early on, at the suggestion of his mother, who encouraged him to read female authors in addition to Faulkner and Hemingway. They were both drawn to this prickly woman who wrote about faith without preaching, as well as about race and white Christian hypocrisy, in a way that few others had. She was also talented, self-deprecating, and suffering with the sickness that killed her father. At 24, she received her diagnosis and returned to Milledgeville, Georgia, to live with her mother (portrayed by Linney).

Ethan has little interest in biopics, particularly “in the age of Wikipedia.” However, upon deciding to direct and co-write the film, he was inspired by films such as Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” and Jane Campion’s “An Angel At My Table.” They were about real people, Jake LaMotta and Janet Frame, but they did not require any prior knowledge of boxing or literature. They were only films about individuals.

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Ethan Hawke And Maya Hawke Have A Running Joke About ‘Wildcat,’ Their Flannery O’Connor Movie

“(‘Wildcat’) is a kind of treatise on imagination, reality and faith and how those three things intersect with each other,” he remarked. “I’m not attempting to teach a college course on Flannery. We used her life experience as a starting point for a conversation.

Before delving too deeply into the process, they addressed themselves difficult questions about filming a film about someone who has made racist remarks.

“It begged the question: Do we want to make a film about someone who said some hurtful words at some point? What would it say about us if we did? And how do you become a decent anti-racist? Ethan said. “One of the things I realized was that you can’t create a story about America, past or present, without mentioning America’s wounds, crimes, and sins. One academic put it beautifully: Flannery O’Connor is a racist in rehabilitation, much like our society.

Maya pondered if depiction was always a celebration or if it could be an observation. She hopes it’s the latter, which she describes as a politeness that is frequently provided to films about complicated guys but may be less so when it comes to female characters.

Something remarked by novelist James McBride when Ethan was writing on “The Good Lord Bird” remained with him as well.

“He used to say how important it was that you don’t paint racists with horns on their head because people don’t have horns and racism is real,” Ethan added.

After much research and deliberation, they decided not to back down from the topic or defend her.

“I’m interested in this woman, and I’m interested in all the truths of her life,” he added.

“Wildcat” also served as inspiration for Maya’s upcoming album, “Chaos Angel” (due out May 31). The title and title track are based on a scene she shared with Philip Ettinger in which O’Connor discusses wrestling with her guardian angel.

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Ethan Hawke And Maya Hawke Have A Running Joke About ‘Wildcat,’ Their Flannery O’Connor Movie

“That idea really hit me in my gut,” Maya remarked. “We resist our better selves… As soon as we finished shooting the film, I went to make this album.”

Maya is now 25, the same age her father was when he finished “Before Sunrise” and was performing on stage in Chicago in Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child.” They are close and like-minded, frequently finishing one other’s words. However, Hawke admits that he is little envious of Maya’s musical abilities.

“There’s a part of me that has joked my whole life that all I really am is a failed musician,” he remarked. “All art strives to be music. It’s the simplest emotional connection we may form with one another. So, to see her thrive in this art form? I’m a little jealous of her for that.”

SOURCE – (AP)

Kiara Grace is a staff writer at VORNews, a reputable online publication. Her writing focuses on technology trends, particularly in the realm of consumer electronics and software. With a keen eye for detail and a knack for breaking down complex topics, Kiara delivers insightful analyses that resonate with tech enthusiasts and casual readers alike. Her articles strike a balance between in-depth coverage and accessibility, making them a go-to resource for anyone seeking to stay informed about the latest innovations shaping our digital world.

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Bernice Johnson Reagon, Whose Powerful Voice Helped Propel The Civil Rights Movement, Has Died

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Nashville, Tennessee  – Bernice Johnson Reagon, a musician and scholar who utilised her rich, powerful contralto voice to support the American Civil Rights Movement and global human rights campaigns, died on July 16, according to her daughter’s social media post. She was 81.

Reagon was best known as the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, an internationally recognized African American female cappella group that she managed from 1973 until her retirement in 2004. The Grammy-nominated group’s purpose has been to educate, empower, and entertain. They sing songs from various genres, including spirituals, children’s music, blues, and jazz. Some of their original compositions pay tribute to American civil rights leaders and foreign liberation movements, such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, Whose Powerful Voice Helped Propel The Civil Rights Movement, Has Died

“She was incredible,” said Tammy Kernodle, a prominent professor of music at Miami University with a focus on African American music. She referred to Reagon as someone “whose divine energy, intellect, and talent all intersect in such a way to initiate change in the atmosphere.”

According to an obituary posted on social media by her daughter, musician Toshi Reagon, Reagon’s musical activism began in the early 1960s when she worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became an initial member of the Freedom Singers. In 2010, the trio reassembled and was joined by Toshi Reagon to play for then-President Barack Obama in a White House performance series televised nationally on public television.

Reagon was born in 1942 in Dougherty County, Georgia, outside of Albany. In the early 1960s, he attended music workshops at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an activist training ground. At an anniversary celebration in 2007, Reagon explained how the institution helped her recognize her musical history as unique.

“From the time I was born, we were always singing,” Reagon told me. “When you’re in a culture and, quote, ‘doing what comes naturally to you,’ you don’t notice it. I believe my work as a cultural scholar, singer, and composer would have been very different if someone had not drawn my attention to the people who need songs to stay alive, to keep themselves together, or to boost the energy in a movement.”

Reagon was arrested and dismissed from Albany State College after participating in a civil rights march. She eventually graduated from Spellman College. While a graduate student of history at Howard University and the vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company, she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock.

In 1965, Reagon recorded her debut solo album, “Folk Songs: The South,” for Folkways Records. She joined Atlanta’s Harambee Singers as a founding member in 1966.

According to the Smithsonian, Reagon began working with the institution in 1969 when she was asked to organize and manage a 1970 festival program called Black Music Through the Languages of the New World. She went on to curate the African Diaspora Program and establish and lead the Program in Black American Culture at the National Museum of American History, where she ultimately became curator emeritus. She produced and played on many Smithsonian Folkways recordings.

Reagon was a distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington for a decade, commencing in 1993 and ending as a professor emerita.

According to Kernodle, we think that music has always been a component of civil rights activity, but it was people like Reagon who made music “part of the strategy of nonviolent resistance.” They brought those songs and practices from within the church to the streets and jail cells. And they popularised such songs.”

Bernice Johnson Reagon, Whose Powerful Voice Helped Propel The Civil Rights Movement, Has Died

“What she also did that was very important was that she historicised how that music functioned in the civil rights movement,” according to Kernodle. “Her dissertation was one of the first real studies of civil rights music.”

Reagon won two George F. Peabody Awards, including one for her role as lead scholar, conceptual producer, and host of the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.”

She has received the Charles E. Frankel Prize and Presidential Medal for distinguished contributions to public awareness of the humanities, a MacArthur Fellows Program award, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Centre for Nonviolent Social Change’s Trumpet of Conscience Award.

SOURCE | AP

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Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, Last Of The Original Four Tops, Is Dead At 88

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NEW YORK — Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last surviving original member of the famed Motown quartet the Four Tops, which was known for singles like “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” died at the age of 88.

Fakir died of heart failure on Monday at home in Detroit, according to a family representative, surrounded by his wife and other loved ones.

The Four Tops were one of Motown’s most successful and enduring ensembles, peaking in the 1960s. From 1964 to 1967, they had 11 top 20 successes, including two No. 1s: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” and the operatic classic “Reach Out, I’ll Be There.” Other songs, frequently about love, agony and grief, were “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette,” and “Just Ask the Lonely.”

Many of Motown’s greatest artists, like the Supremes and Stevie Wonder, grew up at Berry Gordy’s Detroit-based corporation, which he created in the late 1950s. However, Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade when Gordy signed them up in 1963 (after the group had turned him down a few years earlier), and they already had a polished stage act and versatile vocal style that allowed them to perform anything from country songs to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”

When they started, they called themselves the Four Aims but soon changed their name to the Four Tops to prevent confusion with the white harmonizing quartet, the Ames Brothers.

The Tops had recorded for several companies, including Chicago’s renowned Chess Records, but needed more commercial success. However, Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson partnered them with the songwriting-production combination of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland, and they soon caught on, combining tight, haunting harmonies (with Fakir as lead tenor) underneath Stubbs’ eager, often frantic baritone.

Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, Last Of The Original Four Tops, Is Dead At 88

After Holland-Dozier-Holland departed Motown in 1967, the Tops had more occasional success, with hits including “Still Water (Love),” and a pair of top ten songs for ABC/Dunhill Records in the early 1970s, “Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” They last entered the top 20 in the early 1980s with the romantic song “When She Was My Girl.”

They remained a prolific concert act, occasionally touring alongside current members of the Temptations, a friendly competition that began when the groups played together at the all-star 1983 television concert commemorating Motown’s 25th anniversary. While the Temptations and other colleagues struggled with drug addiction, internal conflict, and personnel changes, the Four Tops stayed unified and whole until Payton died in 1997. (Benson died in 2005, Stubbs in 2008).

“The things I love most about them — they are very professional, they have fun with what they do, they are very loving, and they have always been gentlemen,” Wonder said of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Fakir later performed as the Four Tops alongside lead vocalists Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir, and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr., Lawrence Payton’s son.

“As each one of them (the original members) passed, a little bit of me left with them,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I found myself in a quandary as to what I was going to do from that moment on but after a while I realized that the name together with the legacy that they had left us simply had to carry on, and judging by the audience reaction it soon became pretty evident that I did the right thing and I really do feel good about that.”

In addition to the Rock Hall of Fame, they were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. More recently, Fakir was working on a Broadway musical based on their lives and finished his memoir, “I’ll Be There,” which will be published in 2022.

Fakir has been married twice, the last time to Piper Gibson, and has seven children. (Six people survive him). In the mid-1960s, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.

Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, Last Of The Original Four Tops, Is Dead At 88

Fakir, a lifelong Detroit native who remained there even after Gordy relocated the label to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi heritage and grew up in a violent neighborhood where competing Black and white gangs sometimes clashed. He aspired to be a professional athlete from a young age, but he was also a great vocalist whose tenor caught the attention of his church choir. He was in his teens when he met Stubbs, and the two first performed with Benson and Payton at a birthday celebration hosted by a local “girl” group that Fakir described as “high-class, very fine young ladies.”

“Singing was the by-product of us going to the party looking for the girls!” Fakir stated during a 2016 interview.

“We advised Levi to simply choose a song and sing the lead. We’d back him up. When he started, we all fell in like we had been practicing the song for months! Our combination was fantastic. We were looking at each other as we sang, and then we remarked, “Man, this is a group!” “This is a group!”

SOURCE | AP

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American Who Made Social Media Threats Against Taylor Swift Detained Ahead Of German Concert

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BERLIN — An American man who made threats against Taylor Swift on social media was seized before her first concert in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and will be held in custody until her gigs there end, authorities said Thursday.

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American Who Made Social Media Threats Against Taylor Swift Detained Ahead Of German Concert

According to police, the accused stalker, a 34-year-old whose name has not been disclosed, had a ticket to Taylor’s concert at Gelsenkirchen’s Veltins-Arena on Wednesday. They stated that he was detained at event admission checks because an early assessment could not completely rule out a risk.

According to police, the man threatened Taylor and her partner on social media. They say he was detained after receiving tips from the event’s organizers.

The American superstar will perform in Gelsenkirchen on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as part of her Eras tour. According to authorities, a local court has ordered that the suspected stalker be detained until Saturday.

They went on to say that Swift and the audience were always safe. The event drew approximately 60,000 people on Wednesday evening and went off without incident.

American Who Made Social Media Threats Against Taylor Swift Detained Ahead Of German Concert

Before the concerts, Gelsenkirchen temporarily renamed the town “Swiftkirchen” and honored the singer on a “Walk of Fame” dedicated to local luminaries.

Taylor has plans to perform in two more German cities after Gelsenkirchen: Hamburg and Munich.

SOURCE | AP

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