I remember James Earl Jones was in The Second Civil War. I watched that one long ago, but as I recall it was a U.S. turned into a mess by mass immigration. Politicians would fill an area with Koreans because the Koreans voted for their party, so they'd win that seat. An Indian would only support a proposal if they got more money for Hindu temples. And so on. Finally Idaho refuses to take in more busloads of immigrants and declares independence, and the issue is then if the federal government should attack them or not. Jones plays a reporter covering events. It was a surprising movie, as it showed the high-flying speeches about immigration to be just a joke, with cold calculation behind it all, to the detriment of Americans who are supposed to keep paying taxes and keep their mouths shut.
Ah yes, the Black tech genius, and the Black computer genius. Often with a fly around his neck. There was a push for that in the 1980s especially - like a TV show about kids solving crime, and the computer genius in the group was Black. Hollywood was working hard on making computers a "Black thing," when it was a White an Asian thing.
It reminds me of how in Dune the director Villeneuve replaced the scientist and desert explorer Liet Kyne, a White man with red hair, with a Black woman with rasta hair.
And Chani, who was Liet Kynes' half-White daughter in the novel with the last name Kynes, is played by the insufferable Latina leftist Zendaya, who also replaced Mary Jane in the Spider-Man movies. Ruining the two best scenes in the second Dune movie by staring angrily, like a modern college leftist, at the MEN declaring war and making unwelcome alliances. In the novel Chani perfectly understood the necessities.
And to digress: The Harkonnens are now made to fill the Hollywood-invented White Psychopath Monster role, with their heads shaved. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen had long black hair in the novels but we can't show that! Shaved heads on all of them to make them look alien, removed from the viewer. They are "othered" as the leftists say, something they claim racist Whites do with non-Whites, when it is actually done to Whites by the Hollywood bosses, especially to White men with blond hair.
The Harkonnen planet now has a "black sun" which it doesn't have in the novels. The "black sun" being a word for the swastika. (Incorrectly; the European swastika is a symbol for Odin's all-seing eye, sacrificed in Mimer's well.) The first look we get of the planet is when a ship lands, and you see it from below as the four hangar doors it flies down through form a pattern reminiscent of a swastika. In the arena under the "black sun" the light isn't black at all but stark white, so that Feyd-Rautha becomes chalk white when he kills the three imprisoned Atreides fighters. The last and longest-lasting of them being an Asian, because we must neutralize the horrible fact that it was an Asian doctor who betrayed the Atreides. (With a very Chinese name, so Villeneuve couldn't change that.)
Villeneuve also falsely made Duncan Idaho a mulatto, and sprinkled Blacks everywhere in the Atreides, Fremen and emperor ranks. While the ultra-evil Harkonnen ranks are only Whites, the only ones to be so. It is especially laughable that the Fremen would be both Blacks and Arabs. These have lived in close societies in the desert for THOUSANDS of years, and apparently it's in racial harmony. (And without mixing so the distinct races disappear, curiously.) The real-world historical relationship between Arabs and Blacks was the Indian Ocean slave trade, where Arabs enslaved Africans until the White British forced them to stop. Somalis sold African tribesmen to the Arabs, and the Zanzibar Arabs captured Africans or bought them from other Africans. But never mind - racial harmony, and the all-White Harkonnen are the evil ones.
I guess if computers weren't forbidden in the Dune universe (by commandment in the Book of Orange: "You shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind") they'd be run by Blacks. In fact, the Atreides-employed Mentat, of the order who use spice to hone their minds and take the role of computers, is turned into a Black man. Never mind that you are distorting a classic White-written novel; "cultural appropriation" is only an expression when you can use it against Whites.
As I've pointed out humorously, every movie that has a black computer genius character has problems with its computers and technology. Maybe should have hired the Asian guys from Caltec instead....
Much like how every hospital drama that has an overabundance of black, gay, and female doctors has lots of huge tragedies, personal lives in turmoil, drug problems, cheating, and dramatic deaths. All other hospitals in town must have all the extra Asian, white and Jewish male doctors who do their work competently and all go home on time to their wives and kids and watch Matlock.
On ER, RN Julianna Margulies was a one woman OB/GYN course: I'm late! I'm spotting! I'm crowning!
Poor JEJ was too old to be the sonar tech (Harvard grad Courtney Vance, future L&O ADA) in Hunt for Red October, but he got to be both deputy director of the CIA and an Admiral.
Add "Saving Hope" to those hospital shows. I could list the endless propaganda, but you know the playbook, ticking off the boxes. Saving Hope was made in Canada, the hospital was called ... Hope Zion.
One interesting note was that the main character Charles Harris was played by Michael Shanks, and his love interest Alex Reid (male name, tick a box) was played by Erica Durance. They played Daniel Jackson in Stargate (ten years earlier) and Lois Lane in Smallville respectively, so both had experience from supernatural shows, and here they played in a show where Charles Harris starts seeing the spirits of coma patients and the dead.
(Harris got buff for the role, such a big difference that I didn't recognize him when I watched an episode. Like Chris Pratt getting buff for Guardians of the Galaxy after playing goofy and pudgy in Parks and Recreation. And Michael Chiklis got really buff and shaved his balding head to play a tough cop in The Shield, after having been a mild-mannered family-guy police chief in The Commish. Supposedly his wife made Chiklis change to get new roles.)
I guess we should be grateful Villeneuve had the restraint not to make them red-skinned with horns jutting out of their heads, which is how George Lucas adroitly let us know that Darth Maul was a really, really, terrible bad guy.
It's feeble and amateurish how heavy-handed Thuh Man must be depicted these days, lest anybody regard life as nuanced and complex. Like, everybody employed by the empire must be deranged Einsatzgruppen, and not just imperial citizens with families of their own trying to get by.
At some point after the original trilogy, I got dragged to Star Wars: Rogue One. When Darth Vader showed up, all the kids in the audience started cheering. I started cheering too, hoping that the anonymous masked guy in the black cape would show more human depth and range than Felicity Jones and Diego Luna. Alas it was not to be, as whoever it was lacked the graceful, measured movements of the late David Prowse.
Anyway, God rest the soul of James Earl Jones, an actor's actor and master of his craft.
I liked them too, and especially the awesome speech in the second movie. But isn't it absurd that the hair-and-eyebrow-less Harkonnen kill their servants six times in the second movie, to show how evil they are? When they didn't do that even once in the first movie.
(Rabban beats a man to death early on for not defeating the Fremen; he later kills an ornithopter crew member for losing sight of the Fremen. The baron kills all three of his servant girls by dropping them from high up. Feyd-Rautha kills two servant girls to test a new blade. He kills a man who suggests he be cautious. There's one more I think, but I forget.)
Evil White people! Like the blond Vecna psychopath in the fourth Stranger Things season, who turns out to have been the villain behind everything. As soon as he showed up, blond and dressed in a white shirt, I knew he'd be evil. He has an inhuman way of staring and talking. Or the albino assassin in The Firm with Tom Cruise, or the giant albino gladiator killed by Spartacus in the Spartacus series, after which the rain comes back to Rome, or the white-skinned oh-so-other-than-us Borg in Star Trek, or the white-skinned, blue-eyed White Walkers in Game of Thrones. (In a documentary it is showed that the two Jewish directors simply referred to them as "the Whites" in production. In the novels they're called the Others, but the directors wanted to name them White Walkers. There's no reason why the dead would have clear-blue eyes, but the author George R.R. Martin is a Hollywood script writer.) And now the orcs are white, not dark, in Rings of Power.
Well, I hope Dune 2 leads to Austin Butler, playing Feyd-Rautha, getting more roles. The other actors said that they were really impressed by him. I showed my girlfriend what he looks like when you can see his hair and she swooned. He has some Finnish ancestry and Harkonnen is a Finnish name. (And Baron Harkonnen is played by the Swedish, always stellar, Stellan Skarsgård. Incidentally Liet Kynes in the old Dune movie was played by the Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who was in so many great movies.)
A bow, a fly. LOL Typical of leftists or "centrists" to look for the one thing you can pick on; that's to make yourself feel superior while you ignore the points being made.
So, in your universe it makes sense to call a bow-tie a "fly" and not knowing that weird locution somehow marks me as a "leftist" or "centrist"? You're a moron.
Aw, look at the little baby trying to score a point! It's a local dialect, don't be such a bigot, little "moron". And looking at the list of Substacks you follow it's laughable, all about trying to sound intellectual while avoiding the actual facts. Look how you're still whining and trying to find something to make you sound superior, that explains it.
Aww, you thought you were special. And yet you still have zero to contribute to the actual topic.
Why are you using a "local dialect" in a non-localized forum?
Oh, yes, because you are a moron.
And, no, I don't have much to contribute on the subject of movies with black computer nerds, which is why I didn't post anything about them but limited myself to a query about your inexplicable language choices. "Fly" = bow-tie, eh? It seems to be something akin to wearing your belt around your knees to expose your undies, but I guess I've learned something.
Well, now that you've researched my Substacks (that you were motivated to do that is revealing; I have no interest in yours) have you found anything that backs up your diagnosis of me as a "leftist" or "centrist"? That might offer an interesting insight into the processes that go on in a diseased mind like yours.
I had mentioned at the other place that JEJ might be the most famous actor who never crossed over into being a movie star. He starred in The Great White Hope (Ritt, 1970) and received an Academy Award nomination* for that, but the film itself bombed. He was the lead in a few more movies in the early-to-mid 70s but never really caught fire, so he settled in to being a well-respected supporting actor. His being in a movie was almost a seal-of-approval, as he had the gravitas to pick and choose his roles by this point. The role of the King in Coming to America could have easily devolved into a caricature, but JEJ brought humanity to it.
*He had won the Tony for playing the same role on Broadway, but was never even nominated for a competitive Oscar again
I have always been a big James Earl Jones fan. My favorite role of his as the leader of the black scabs who ends up joining the union in John Sayles' Matewan . I think he took a paycut to do that.
I remember being surprised to see Jones slumming it in his senior years in crappy black comedies, often in bit roles, and often more than a bit potty mouthed. I know as actors age they have to take crappier roles than what they had at their height but his voiceover work should have protected him from some of the schlock-roles I saw him in.
Anyway, Geoffrey Holder was one of the best one-off Bond henchmen ever. Live and Let Die had him playing a voodoo priest and Holder was absolutely delightful hamming it up as Baron Samedi. Samedi even survived (or so it seemed) his apparent death via voodoo, as Holder appears in the last scene in character and winks at the audience. I would have liked Holder to come back and perhaps play a Bond first: a former henchman who gets elevated to Big Boss position. I think Samedi would have been excellent in such a role (avoid the voodoo going forward of course; magic and Bond do not work).
"Beloved James Earl Jones, who died at 93 (no doubt due to the vax), pioneered the now common role of black tech wiz in Dr. Strangelove, in which he played Lt. Lothar Zogg, the radioman on T.J. Kong’s B-52. (Did Stanley Kubrick have a thing for ethnically improbably names?)"
One time we noticed Mr. Jones, who was in town for some thing or other at Lloyd Richard's reliably socially-conscious Yale Dramat, getting ice cream at Ashley's, and this woman was having him sign something and getting all specific, like "please write 'To my dear friends [say] Brenda, Becky, and Bobbi comma from Darth Vader comma with love and'" just on and on. At first he was probably glad that he didn't have to wear that eighty-pound Dr. Doom getup and could just loop in his base for three hours at 2.333333 &c &c k each -- he said he didn’t want his name on the credits for the later-retitled "A New Hope" out of respect for David Prowse, the British actor who wore it on screen, but also he probably thought the movie was trash. He did take on the whole costume role for a couple of the later films, though, with credit -- hard to resist doing in the biggest releases up to that time.
I saw him on Broadway some time ago playing the patriarch in Kaufman and Hart's still-entertaining warhorse "You Can't Take It with You". The confrontationally color-blind casting in films like Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" usually strikes me as an affectation that won't age well, but Mr. Jones seemed to be made up a bit paler than his actual pale-anywayness and came off perfectly with an otherwise honked-out cast.
Almost off topic but speaking of "Hamlet", by far the best production I've seen on stage or screen was Jonathan Kent's breathlessly sped-up production with London's Almeida Theater Company, which featured a peeking-between-your-fingersly realistic duel between Hamlet (Ralph Fiennes) and Laertes (Damian Lewis) staged by the late great greater greatest fight director William Hobbs, the Olympics-level fencer who also choreographed the duels in Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" film, Michael York and the equally great, etc. Christopher Lee in Richard Lester's "Three [and sequel Four] Musketeers", Ridley Scott's "The Duelists", and "Rob Roy" with Liam Neeson (although the ending of that one was a bit of a drag -- the fault of the script and not Mr. Hobbs).
My suggested but unused epitaph: "I am your father." Yeah, and you're my half-daughter and I'm my own uncle, but still.
Just want to shout out the three part Homicide: Life on the Streets episode with JEJ, Louise Thigpen, and Jeffrey Wright playing a really rich black Baltimore family. Homicide is streaming now!!
These were the opening three episodes of the 6th season, a really brilliant year (except they'd kicked off Melissa Leo for not being cute enough) that so completely finished the Luther Mahoney arc the series never recovered (seventh season is crap, movie's not much better).
But it has a ton of really great conversations about race. One of my favorites was between two white cops (both new to the series that year), Ballard (woman) and Ghardy (man):
Ballard: I was outta line? I questioned him like I would anybody else.
Ghardy: Yeah, but he's not anybody else.
Ballard: Right. He's Hal Wilson, Fabulous Felix's heir apparent. When I told people back home where I was headed, everyone said the same thing, "Ooh, Baltimore, tough town. "Baltimore's hardcore.It's the big time." But I knew what they meant.
Ghardy: Which is what?
Ballard: Baltimore is black, you know. But I thought, "Sure, the cities will be different, "but if it's Puget Sound or Chesapeake Bay, my job doesn't change." I still work cases and close cases.
Ghardy: Welcome to the big time.
Ballard: If I was heading this case, I would turn around, go back and get hair and blood samples from the father and son, and we'd know in hours whether they were involved.
Ghardy: But it's not up to you.
Ballard: The way Pembleton sees it, any move against the Wilsons makes us racist. I don't need that.
Ghardy: Even if Pembleton wasn't the primary. Say you caught the case. You think you could work this murder the way you want? Not a chance in hell. Giardello would still be in our faces, still maneuvering to protect Wilson and his family. All I'm saying is, you and I, we're just workin' the case, just takin' in the facts, tryin' to identify suspects through common sense. Giardello and Pembleton, they are covering Wilson's ass because Wilson's ass is the same color.
Ballard: OK, hold up a second.
Ghardy: It is what it is. I'm not saying that Giardello's a bad lieutenant, I'm not saying that I think that Pembleton is a lousy cop. But the racial stuff on this case is right there on the table. Nobody's talkin' about it but it's there.
and that's only one of four blisteringly blunt conversations between the cops.
I'd forgotten he was in Conan. Brought a great sense of menace and complexity to that pure beefcake movie. Master craftsman and he had a great life. 🙏 Narrated the KJV too.
Didn't he audition as the King in "Coming to America"?
Would he have to have wipers?
I remember James Earl Jones was in The Second Civil War. I watched that one long ago, but as I recall it was a U.S. turned into a mess by mass immigration. Politicians would fill an area with Koreans because the Koreans voted for their party, so they'd win that seat. An Indian would only support a proposal if they got more money for Hindu temples. And so on. Finally Idaho refuses to take in more busloads of immigrants and declares independence, and the issue is then if the federal government should attack them or not. Jones plays a reporter covering events. It was a surprising movie, as it showed the high-flying speeches about immigration to be just a joke, with cold calculation behind it all, to the detriment of Americans who are supposed to keep paying taxes and keep their mouths shut.
Ah yes, the Black tech genius, and the Black computer genius. Often with a fly around his neck. There was a push for that in the 1980s especially - like a TV show about kids solving crime, and the computer genius in the group was Black. Hollywood was working hard on making computers a "Black thing," when it was a White an Asian thing.
It reminds me of how in Dune the director Villeneuve replaced the scientist and desert explorer Liet Kyne, a White man with red hair, with a Black woman with rasta hair.
And Chani, who was Liet Kynes' half-White daughter in the novel with the last name Kynes, is played by the insufferable Latina leftist Zendaya, who also replaced Mary Jane in the Spider-Man movies. Ruining the two best scenes in the second Dune movie by staring angrily, like a modern college leftist, at the MEN declaring war and making unwelcome alliances. In the novel Chani perfectly understood the necessities.
And to digress: The Harkonnens are now made to fill the Hollywood-invented White Psychopath Monster role, with their heads shaved. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen had long black hair in the novels but we can't show that! Shaved heads on all of them to make them look alien, removed from the viewer. They are "othered" as the leftists say, something they claim racist Whites do with non-Whites, when it is actually done to Whites by the Hollywood bosses, especially to White men with blond hair.
The Harkonnen planet now has a "black sun" which it doesn't have in the novels. The "black sun" being a word for the swastika. (Incorrectly; the European swastika is a symbol for Odin's all-seing eye, sacrificed in Mimer's well.) The first look we get of the planet is when a ship lands, and you see it from below as the four hangar doors it flies down through form a pattern reminiscent of a swastika. In the arena under the "black sun" the light isn't black at all but stark white, so that Feyd-Rautha becomes chalk white when he kills the three imprisoned Atreides fighters. The last and longest-lasting of them being an Asian, because we must neutralize the horrible fact that it was an Asian doctor who betrayed the Atreides. (With a very Chinese name, so Villeneuve couldn't change that.)
Villeneuve also falsely made Duncan Idaho a mulatto, and sprinkled Blacks everywhere in the Atreides, Fremen and emperor ranks. While the ultra-evil Harkonnen ranks are only Whites, the only ones to be so. It is especially laughable that the Fremen would be both Blacks and Arabs. These have lived in close societies in the desert for THOUSANDS of years, and apparently it's in racial harmony. (And without mixing so the distinct races disappear, curiously.) The real-world historical relationship between Arabs and Blacks was the Indian Ocean slave trade, where Arabs enslaved Africans until the White British forced them to stop. Somalis sold African tribesmen to the Arabs, and the Zanzibar Arabs captured Africans or bought them from other Africans. But never mind - racial harmony, and the all-White Harkonnen are the evil ones.
I guess if computers weren't forbidden in the Dune universe (by commandment in the Book of Orange: "You shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind") they'd be run by Blacks. In fact, the Atreides-employed Mentat, of the order who use spice to hone their minds and take the role of computers, is turned into a Black man. Never mind that you are distorting a classic White-written novel; "cultural appropriation" is only an expression when you can use it against Whites.
As I've pointed out humorously, every movie that has a black computer genius character has problems with its computers and technology. Maybe should have hired the Asian guys from Caltec instead....
Much like how every hospital drama that has an overabundance of black, gay, and female doctors has lots of huge tragedies, personal lives in turmoil, drug problems, cheating, and dramatic deaths. All other hospitals in town must have all the extra Asian, white and Jewish male doctors who do their work competently and all go home on time to their wives and kids and watch Matlock.
On ER, RN Julianna Margulies was a one woman OB/GYN course: I'm late! I'm spotting! I'm crowning!
Poor JEJ was too old to be the sonar tech (Harvard grad Courtney Vance, future L&O ADA) in Hunt for Red October, but he got to be both deputy director of the CIA and an Admiral.
Add "Saving Hope" to those hospital shows. I could list the endless propaganda, but you know the playbook, ticking off the boxes. Saving Hope was made in Canada, the hospital was called ... Hope Zion.
One interesting note was that the main character Charles Harris was played by Michael Shanks, and his love interest Alex Reid (male name, tick a box) was played by Erica Durance. They played Daniel Jackson in Stargate (ten years earlier) and Lois Lane in Smallville respectively, so both had experience from supernatural shows, and here they played in a show where Charles Harris starts seeing the spirits of coma patients and the dead.
(Harris got buff for the role, such a big difference that I didn't recognize him when I watched an episode. Like Chris Pratt getting buff for Guardians of the Galaxy after playing goofy and pudgy in Parks and Recreation. And Michael Chiklis got really buff and shaved his balding head to play a tough cop in The Shield, after having been a mild-mannered family-guy police chief in The Commish. Supposedly his wife made Chiklis change to get new roles.)
I guess we should be grateful Villeneuve had the restraint not to make them red-skinned with horns jutting out of their heads, which is how George Lucas adroitly let us know that Darth Maul was a really, really, terrible bad guy.
It's feeble and amateurish how heavy-handed Thuh Man must be depicted these days, lest anybody regard life as nuanced and complex. Like, everybody employed by the empire must be deranged Einsatzgruppen, and not just imperial citizens with families of their own trying to get by.
At some point after the original trilogy, I got dragged to Star Wars: Rogue One. When Darth Vader showed up, all the kids in the audience started cheering. I started cheering too, hoping that the anonymous masked guy in the black cape would show more human depth and range than Felicity Jones and Diego Luna. Alas it was not to be, as whoever it was lacked the graceful, measured movements of the late David Prowse.
Anyway, God rest the soul of James Earl Jones, an actor's actor and master of his craft.
That's quite a comprehensive analysis of ethnic casting decision trees in The Current Year, and in my opinion, accurate.
Nevertheless, I still liked the movie in spite of all the exaggerated virtue signaling.
I thought Villeneuve got the overall aesthetic right. "Weaponized Apple Store", someone called it.
I liked them too, and especially the awesome speech in the second movie. But isn't it absurd that the hair-and-eyebrow-less Harkonnen kill their servants six times in the second movie, to show how evil they are? When they didn't do that even once in the first movie.
(Rabban beats a man to death early on for not defeating the Fremen; he later kills an ornithopter crew member for losing sight of the Fremen. The baron kills all three of his servant girls by dropping them from high up. Feyd-Rautha kills two servant girls to test a new blade. He kills a man who suggests he be cautious. There's one more I think, but I forget.)
Evil White people! Like the blond Vecna psychopath in the fourth Stranger Things season, who turns out to have been the villain behind everything. As soon as he showed up, blond and dressed in a white shirt, I knew he'd be evil. He has an inhuman way of staring and talking. Or the albino assassin in The Firm with Tom Cruise, or the giant albino gladiator killed by Spartacus in the Spartacus series, after which the rain comes back to Rome, or the white-skinned oh-so-other-than-us Borg in Star Trek, or the white-skinned, blue-eyed White Walkers in Game of Thrones. (In a documentary it is showed that the two Jewish directors simply referred to them as "the Whites" in production. In the novels they're called the Others, but the directors wanted to name them White Walkers. There's no reason why the dead would have clear-blue eyes, but the author George R.R. Martin is a Hollywood script writer.) And now the orcs are white, not dark, in Rings of Power.
Well, I hope Dune 2 leads to Austin Butler, playing Feyd-Rautha, getting more roles. The other actors said that they were really impressed by him. I showed my girlfriend what he looks like when you can see his hair and she swooned. He has some Finnish ancestry and Harkonnen is a Finnish name. (And Baron Harkonnen is played by the Swedish, always stellar, Stellan Skarsgård. Incidentally Liet Kynes in the old Dune movie was played by the Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who was in so many great movies.)
"Ah yes, the Black tech genius, and the Black computer genius. Often with a fly around his neck."
I have never seen anyone with a fly around his neck. What does THAT mean?
A bow, a fly. LOL Typical of leftists or "centrists" to look for the one thing you can pick on; that's to make yourself feel superior while you ignore the points being made.
So, in your universe it makes sense to call a bow-tie a "fly" and not knowing that weird locution somehow marks me as a "leftist" or "centrist"? You're a moron.
Aw, look at the little baby trying to score a point! It's a local dialect, don't be such a bigot, little "moron". And looking at the list of Substacks you follow it's laughable, all about trying to sound intellectual while avoiding the actual facts. Look how you're still whining and trying to find something to make you sound superior, that explains it.
Aww, you thought you were special. And yet you still have zero to contribute to the actual topic.
Why are you using a "local dialect" in a non-localized forum?
Oh, yes, because you are a moron.
And, no, I don't have much to contribute on the subject of movies with black computer nerds, which is why I didn't post anything about them but limited myself to a query about your inexplicable language choices. "Fly" = bow-tie, eh? It seems to be something akin to wearing your belt around your knees to expose your undies, but I guess I've learned something.
Well, now that you've researched my Substacks (that you were motivated to do that is revealing; I have no interest in yours) have you found anything that backs up your diagnosis of me as a "leftist" or "centrist"? That might offer an interesting insight into the processes that go on in a diseased mind like yours.
I had mentioned at the other place that JEJ might be the most famous actor who never crossed over into being a movie star. He starred in The Great White Hope (Ritt, 1970) and received an Academy Award nomination* for that, but the film itself bombed. He was the lead in a few more movies in the early-to-mid 70s but never really caught fire, so he settled in to being a well-respected supporting actor. His being in a movie was almost a seal-of-approval, as he had the gravitas to pick and choose his roles by this point. The role of the King in Coming to America could have easily devolved into a caricature, but JEJ brought humanity to it.
*He had won the Tony for playing the same role on Broadway, but was never even nominated for a competitive Oscar again
I have always been a big James Earl Jones fan. My favorite role of his as the leader of the black scabs who ends up joining the union in John Sayles' Matewan . I think he took a paycut to do that.
RIP James Earl Jones.
I remember being surprised to see Jones slumming it in his senior years in crappy black comedies, often in bit roles, and often more than a bit potty mouthed. I know as actors age they have to take crappier roles than what they had at their height but his voiceover work should have protected him from some of the schlock-roles I saw him in.
Anyway, Geoffrey Holder was one of the best one-off Bond henchmen ever. Live and Let Die had him playing a voodoo priest and Holder was absolutely delightful hamming it up as Baron Samedi. Samedi even survived (or so it seemed) his apparent death via voodoo, as Holder appears in the last scene in character and winks at the audience. I would have liked Holder to come back and perhaps play a Bond first: a former henchman who gets elevated to Big Boss position. I think Samedi would have been excellent in such a role (avoid the voodoo going forward of course; magic and Bond do not work).
> "Mr. Jones would have made a fine King of America."
Mr. Anglin proposed Elvis Presley for that role. Of course, he's dead now. But then so is Jones.
"Beloved James Earl Jones, who died at 93 (no doubt due to the vax), pioneered the now common role of black tech wiz in Dr. Strangelove, in which he played Lt. Lothar Zogg, the radioman on T.J. Kong’s B-52. (Did Stanley Kubrick have a thing for ethnically improbably names?)"
Nah, just Albanian chauvinism
James Earl Jones did a great guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory with what is referred to as an Adam Westing role.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJRA6oHOK88
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheBigBangTheoryS7E14TheConventionConundrum
With a nice cameo from the late Carrie Fisher
Supposedly that was the first time that they had met even though they were not on screen at the same time.
One time we noticed Mr. Jones, who was in town for some thing or other at Lloyd Richard's reliably socially-conscious Yale Dramat, getting ice cream at Ashley's, and this woman was having him sign something and getting all specific, like "please write 'To my dear friends [say] Brenda, Becky, and Bobbi comma from Darth Vader comma with love and'" just on and on. At first he was probably glad that he didn't have to wear that eighty-pound Dr. Doom getup and could just loop in his base for three hours at 2.333333 &c &c k each -- he said he didn’t want his name on the credits for the later-retitled "A New Hope" out of respect for David Prowse, the British actor who wore it on screen, but also he probably thought the movie was trash. He did take on the whole costume role for a couple of the later films, though, with credit -- hard to resist doing in the biggest releases up to that time.
I saw him on Broadway some time ago playing the patriarch in Kaufman and Hart's still-entertaining warhorse "You Can't Take It with You". The confrontationally color-blind casting in films like Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" usually strikes me as an affectation that won't age well, but Mr. Jones seemed to be made up a bit paler than his actual pale-anywayness and came off perfectly with an otherwise honked-out cast.
Almost off topic but speaking of "Hamlet", by far the best production I've seen on stage or screen was Jonathan Kent's breathlessly sped-up production with London's Almeida Theater Company, which featured a peeking-between-your-fingersly realistic duel between Hamlet (Ralph Fiennes) and Laertes (Damian Lewis) staged by the late great greater greatest fight director William Hobbs, the Olympics-level fencer who also choreographed the duels in Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" film, Michael York and the equally great, etc. Christopher Lee in Richard Lester's "Three [and sequel Four] Musketeers", Ridley Scott's "The Duelists", and "Rob Roy" with Liam Neeson (although the ending of that one was a bit of a drag -- the fault of the script and not Mr. Hobbs).
My suggested but unused epitaph: "I am your father." Yeah, and you're my half-daughter and I'm my own uncle, but still.
Just want to shout out the three part Homicide: Life on the Streets episode with JEJ, Louise Thigpen, and Jeffrey Wright playing a really rich black Baltimore family. Homicide is streaming now!!
These were the opening three episodes of the 6th season, a really brilliant year (except they'd kicked off Melissa Leo for not being cute enough) that so completely finished the Luther Mahoney arc the series never recovered (seventh season is crap, movie's not much better).
But it has a ton of really great conversations about race. One of my favorites was between two white cops (both new to the series that year), Ballard (woman) and Ghardy (man):
Ballard: I was outta line? I questioned him like I would anybody else.
Ghardy: Yeah, but he's not anybody else.
Ballard: Right. He's Hal Wilson, Fabulous Felix's heir apparent. When I told people back home where I was headed, everyone said the same thing, "Ooh, Baltimore, tough town. "Baltimore's hardcore.It's the big time." But I knew what they meant.
Ghardy: Which is what?
Ballard: Baltimore is black, you know. But I thought, "Sure, the cities will be different, "but if it's Puget Sound or Chesapeake Bay, my job doesn't change." I still work cases and close cases.
Ghardy: Welcome to the big time.
Ballard: If I was heading this case, I would turn around, go back and get hair and blood samples from the father and son, and we'd know in hours whether they were involved.
Ghardy: But it's not up to you.
Ballard: The way Pembleton sees it, any move against the Wilsons makes us racist. I don't need that.
Ghardy: Even if Pembleton wasn't the primary. Say you caught the case. You think you could work this murder the way you want? Not a chance in hell. Giardello would still be in our faces, still maneuvering to protect Wilson and his family. All I'm saying is, you and I, we're just workin' the case, just takin' in the facts, tryin' to identify suspects through common sense. Giardello and Pembleton, they are covering Wilson's ass because Wilson's ass is the same color.
Ballard: OK, hold up a second.
Ghardy: It is what it is. I'm not saying that Giardello's a bad lieutenant, I'm not saying that I think that Pembleton is a lousy cop. But the racial stuff on this case is right there on the table. Nobody's talkin' about it but it's there.
and that's only one of four blisteringly blunt conversations between the cops.
Jones is phenomenal.
I named our elder cat after Mr. Jones. Loved him so much in Conan and Field of Dreams. Rest in peace.
I'd forgotten he was in Conan. Brought a great sense of menace and complexity to that pure beefcake movie. Master craftsman and he had a great life. 🙏 Narrated the KJV too.