Director John Singleton dies at 51. Known for ‘Boyz N The Hood,’ he was the first African American nominated for best director, the Associated Press reports
By Matt Schudel Matt Schudel Obituary writer Email Bio Follow April 29 at 4:32 PM John Singleton, a screenwriter and film director whose powerful 1991 debut, “Boyz N the Hood,” earned him two Oscar nominations and was considered groundbreaking for its humane depiction of the lives of young black men on the violent streets of South Central Los Angeles, died April 29 at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 51.
“I’m a writer first, and I direct in order to protect my vision,” he told the New York Times. “It’s my story, I lived it. What sense would it have made to have some white boy impose his interpretation on my experience?” But Mr. Singleton exuded such confidence that the singer read the script and showed up for a second audition, which made Columbia executives more enthusiastic about the film’s potential.
Critic Roger Ebert pronounced the movie not just a “brilliant directorial debut, but an American film of enormous importance.” The characters, he wrote, “live in a neighborhood where violence is a fact of life, where the searchlights from police helicopters are like the guard lights in a prison camp, where guns are everywhere, where a kid can go down to the corner store and not come home alive.”
“I got out of film school in spring 1990, so they were looking for the next Spike Lee, the next black filmmaker with the vision to make a mark in commercial Hollywood,” Mr. Singleton told the Guardian newspaper in 2018. “So I was the guy. They gave me a chance, gave me $6 million to make a movie, and I knocked it out of the park!”
In 2005, Mr. Singleton bankrolled and produced the box-office hit “Hustle & Flow,” the story of a Memphis pimp and aspiring rap star written and directed by Craig Brewer, and in 2017 he was executive producer of A&E’s documentary “L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later,” which examined racial violence in Los Angeles. The same year, Mr. Singleton created the FX television series “Snowfall,” set amid the 1980s crack cocaine era in Los Angeles, which is still airing.
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