About John Ridley: John Ridley IV is an American screenwriter, film director, novelist, television showrunner and writer known for 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Academy Award in 2013 for Best Adapted Screenplay.
There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton...
Fact is, awards shows were never really about recognizing achievement. They were a publicity ploy cooked up in the late 1920s by MGM topper Louie Mayer and his newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which was itself, back in the day...
I got a call saying that George Lucas wanted to meet me. Of all the phone calls I've received - Oliver Stone wants to meet you; Spike Lee wants to meet you - that was the one call I never in a million years thought was going to happen.
Our touchstones of slavery are 'Song of the South,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'The Birth of a Nation.' It's hard to separate the cinematic quality from the underlying themes. I appreciate the films, but the message was repugnant.
I still have my first 'Black Lightning' that I got way back in the day, and my first 'Steel.' And I proudly display those comics, by the way. I have a lot of comics, but those are among the ones that mean the most to me.
I've never been much of a European traveler. London once on a book tour, and Italy because that's where Ferraris are from. That's about it.
I understand politicos gotta make bank. But cloistering with the Hollywood elite is not how you prove you're a man of the people.
I've written films that are violent. I'm not big on sitting and watching violence.
Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue of his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.
If some of us can get an Oscar for extolling that it's hard out there for a pimp, why can't others of us admonish: 'Then quit acting like a pimp'?
Let's be very clear: Living 'unforgiven' is not the sole domain of blacks. It can be found in any successful person.
There is not a country on earth whose people don't deserve to be free and safe.
As long as we remain committed to holding high our individuals of supreme finish, others will be inspired to loose themselves of the gravity of the waywards and downtroddens.
I don't really have anything against the French except that, as an American, I've been bred to despise them with the same zeal as soccer and Renny Harlin films.
It's not that white guys shouldn't be allowed to engage in discussions on race in America. But there's nothing more exhausting than white male liberals' dogmatisms on race that were clearly formed during a conversation they had with that one black gu...
If faux liberal white guys want to support and defend Obama, by all means please do so. But I would suggest they try to limit that support to matters of policy and not perspectives on race.
While most trudge through their days straight-jacketed in the social compact, living for others as much as or more than for themselves, a select few excel.
Yes, it's hard to stay in shape, but it's also hard to raise kids. That doesn't mean you get to drop them off at your local fire station when they get to be a handful.
Why do we cling to bigotry? Because bigotry, plainly, is convenient. It is a near-effortless way to both elevate one's stature and make a pity grab in this culture of victims that we have become.
With writing, timing is everything. Being in the right place at the right time.
It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans - those who have sealed the Deal, who aren't beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their indivi...
