John Singleton

Black History Month – February 19, 1992

On this day in 1992 John Singleton became the first African American and the youngest ever in Academy Award history to be nominated for best director. The movie “Boyz n the Hood” was his first film and was follow by other critically acclaimed movies such as “Poetic Justice” with Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur and “Baby Boy,” starring Tyrese Gibson and Omar Gooding. People, this cat knew how to tell our stories.

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Singleton’s 1991 film debut Boyz n the Hood, an inner city drama starring Cuba Gooding, Jr., Angela Bassett, Ice Cube, and Laurence Fishburne, was both a critical and commercial success. For his efforts, Singleton received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director. The film has since attained classic status and, in 2002, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. That’s right, the National Film Registry.. alongside other classic’s like “The Color Purple”and the Shawshank Redemption.” If the President doesn’t start a nuclear war in the next couple of years, it a possibility that distant generations living among the stars will be be watching Doughboy and Ricky. For some of those “Empire” fans out there, John was sitting in the black chair directing some of those episodes too.

On October 12, 1996, John married Ghanaian actress Akosua Gyamama Busia, who is the daughter of Ghana’s second Prime Minister Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia. They have a daughter named Hadar Singleton, born on April 3, 1997, who appeared in “Tears of the Sun”. Not sure what part she played, but the movie was on Netflix a while back. I would give it a hot three boxes of popcorn out of five. A few years ago at Loyola Marymount, John put the mouth on them and told his audience, “They ain’t letting the black people tell the stories. They want black people to be what they want them to be and nobody is man enough to go and say that. They want black people to be who they want them to be, as opposed to what they are. The black films now — so-called black films now — they’re great. They’re great films. But they’re just product. They’re not moving the bar forward creatively. … When you try to make it homogenized, when you try to make it appeal to everybody, then you don’t have anything that’s special.”

And you know something.. he’s right…

Some John Singleton Joint’s

• Boyz n the Hood (1991) (Nominated — Academy Award for Best Director)
• Poetic Justice (1993)
• Higher Learning (1995)
• Rosewood (1997)
• Shaft (2000)
• Baby Boy (2001)
• 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
• Four Brothers (2005)
• Abduction (2011)
• Empire (2015) (TV series; one episode “Dangerous Bonds”

Boyz n the Hood: 16 Surprising Facts About Boyz n the Hood.

*The psychotic movie Silence Of The Lamb took Best Director in 1992 *