Washington Directing Sammy Davis Jr. Biopic
Source: Variety
Tuesday, July 6, 2004

Variety reports that Denzel Washington will direct the life story of entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment have optioned screen rights to Wil Haygood's book "In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr."

The film will be produced by Imagine's Brian Grazer and Washington, who is not planning to act in the film. The two are currently working together on the crime drama Tru Blu, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Washington and Benicio Del Toro.

Haygood will write the first draft of the script based on his sprawling book that traces Davis' career back to age 4, when he began singing and dancing with his father on the vaudeville circuit.

Washington made his directorial debut on Antoine Fisher. On the acting side, he is eyeing The Great Debators, at Miramax and the Alcon-based Brothers in Arms, a David Chisolm-scripted account of the all-black 761st tank battalion in World War II, based on a book by basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton.



This looks like it could be very interesting, but I'm even more interested in a flick starring Denzel AND Benecio Del Toro..that's gonna be some A-list acting for your ass right there. :wink:
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the directing in antwone didn't really seem spectacular... i think denzel is a far more accomplished actor than director... i hope his skill improvies since the sammy davis jr. story could be really interesting for a modern audience, if done right.
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the directing in antwone didn't really seem spectacular... i think denzel is a far more accomplished actor than director... i hope his skill improvies since the sammy davis jr. story could be really interesting for a modern audience, if done right.
Yeah, I remember you weren't all that fond of Fisher...he did an ok job to me, but his style could change up when it's time for him to go behind the camera again.
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yeah... i found the movie kind of forgettable. like, the directing just didn't strike me, but neither did the story of the acting. not a bad movie, just not... good..
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i read an article that said that Sammy Davis Jr. belonged to the Church of Satan.
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i read an article that said that Sammy Davis Jr. belonged to the Church of Satan.

Because he's Jewish? :tongue:

I've got a dumb question for those of you who are more movie-knowledgeable. How does one know when the directing is good? I saw Fisher and wasn't very impressed. However, I don't know if that's because the directing was bad or the story was bad. How do you separate the two?
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Because he's Jewish? :tongue:

I've got a dumb question for those of you who are more movie-knowledgeable. How does one know when the directing is good? I saw Fisher and wasn't very impressed. However, I don't know if that's because the directing was bad or the story was bad. How do you separate the two?

it's not a stupid question. figuring out bad directing is like inference, and knowing what a director's job is. basically, he oversees the whole product, from camera shooting angles to editing work, to telling how the actors should act and where they stand. if the overall dialogue was convincing and the story pretty good, you can tell that the screenplay was well done, but if the dialogue was convincing but the actors just sounded flat or laughable, you can tell that either the director or the actor was terrible. usually, it's easy to figure that out, as in, you can tell that it's the actor if only one of the characters was bad but some of the others were good.

also, you can tell bad directing if positioning of the actors is bad, camera work is sloppy, or editing is rough. all these in combination indicate a bad director. case in point: in spiderman 2, my case for poor directing is that he chose to have his extras scream in that B-movie way (see something. stop, terrified look. deep breath. loud, high pitched, female scream that goes through both speakers, while camera simultaneously does a close up of her terrified face as she looks up at the off-screen thing that scares her. pause. stop screaming. run away.) this was aggravating and made the movie seem more comical.

also, every dialogue scene is shot at least twice, once with the camera pointed at one person speaking, the whole time, and once with the camera pointed at the other person. it's then the editor's job to splice the two takes together to have the camera switch between the two people as they talk. good editor if the transitions are seamless, especially if the editor has to alter the dialogue for the sake of length. raimi as director/editor (usually they work together on this) chose to edit scenes so that he included long shots of one character speaking off camera while another character was shown on camera, reacting to the dialogue. this is usually a bad choice for many reasons, not the least of which is that on the big screen, if there isn't something very powerful happening on camera, it looks kind of silly. there must always be action, reaction, or some sort of movement. therefore, the reacting actor is forced to exaggerate reaction, and done poorly, can just look silly. thus, in spidey 2, some scenes had tobey looking alternately horrified, sad, surprised, shocked (rinse and repeat) as he reacts to onscreen dialogue (at the end of each sentence, he changes his facial expression).

real conversations aren't like this... you pretty much sit there, take in the several sentences and then react... but being on screen requires more movement and emotion that that, so often actors who are forced to react unnaturally for the camera. that's why most directors choose to edit dialogue the normal way -- the bulk of what's onscreen during a dialogue exchange is the speaking character. it's simply easier to have an actor react to what he's saying than to react to what someone else is saying.

but, as we've already established, good/bad directing like good/bad acting is all subjective. some people will like raimi's choices, some people will hate them. to figure out for yourself is to take all the little choices that are made in the film's creation and to decide whether or not they strengthened or weakened the movie. like, in traffic and city of god, did you like the colour filter that was placed over the lenses to give the film different feels? (city of god was shot very warmly, with lots of yellow and warm colours, traffic was shot cooly, with lots of grey and blues)... that's a director's choice.

now here's a challenge -- figuring out the difference between good producers and bad producers.
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it's not a stupid question. figuring out bad directing is like inference, and knowing what a director's job is. basically, he oversees the whole product, from camera shooting angles to editing work, to telling how the actors should act and where they stand. if the overall dialogue was convincing and the story pretty good, you can tell that the screenplay was well done, but if the dialogue was convincing but the actors just sounded flat or laughable, you can tell that either the director or the actor was terrible. usually, it's easy to figure that out, as in, you can tell that it's the actor if only one of the characters was bad but some of the others were good.

also, you can tell bad directing if positioning of the actors is bad, camera work is sloppy, or editing is rough. all these in combination indicate a bad director. case in point: in spiderman 2, my case for poor directing is that he chose to have his extras scream in that B-movie way (see something. stop, terrified look. deep breath. loud, high pitched, female scream that goes through both speakers, while camera simultaneously does a close up of her terrified face as she looks up at the off-screen thing that scares her. pause. stop screaming. run away.) this was aggravating and made the movie seem more comical.

also, every dialogue scene is shot at least twice, once with the camera pointed at one person speaking, the whole time, and once with the camera pointed at the other person. it's then the editor's job to splice the two takes together to have the camera switch between the two people as they talk. good editor if the transitions are seamless, especially if the editor has to alter the dialogue for the sake of length. raimi as director/editor (usually they work together on this) chose to edit scenes so that he included long shots of one character speaking off camera while another character was shown on camera, reacting to the dialogue. this is usually a bad choice for many reasons, not the least of which is that on the big screen, if there isn't something very powerful happening on camera, it looks kind of silly. there must always be action, reaction, or some sort of movement. therefore, the reacting actor is forced to exaggerate reaction, and done poorly, can just look silly. thus, in spidey 2, some scenes had tobey looking alternately horrified, sad, surprised, shocked (rinse and repeat) as he reacts to onscreen dialogue (at the end of each sentence, he changes his facial expression).

real conversations aren't like this... you pretty much sit there, take in the several sentences and then react... but being on screen requires more movement and emotion that that, so often actors who are forced to react unnaturally for the camera. that's why most directors choose to edit dialogue the normal way -- the bulk of what's onscreen during a dialogue exchange is the speaking character. it's simply easier to have an actor react to what he's saying than to react to what someone else is saying.

but, as we've already established, good/bad directing like good/bad acting is all subjective. some people will like raimi's choices, some people will hate them. to figure out for yourself is to take all the little choices that are made in the film's creation and to decide whether or not they strengthened or weakened the movie. like, in traffic and city of god, did you like the colour filter that was placed over the lenses to give the film different feels? (city of god was shot very warmly, with lots of yellow and warm colours, traffic was shot cooly, with lots of grey and blues)... that's a director's choice.

now here's a challenge -- figuring out the difference between good producers and bad producers.


The whole B-movie was supposed to be a quote unquote "homage" to his horror movie roots, as was that chainsaw in the operating table scene with Evil Dead. I do think he kinda upped the camp factor in this one a little more, and I would've preferred to sacrifice that in place of Spidey cracking more jokes than he did....the number one thing I did NOT approve of. And this is very off-topic, but Squidward from Spongebob is based on Sammy Davis' voice. :wink:
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i read an article that said that Sammy Davis Jr. belonged to the Church of Satan.
Because he's Jewish? :tongue:

I've got a dumb question for those of you who are more movie-knowledgeable. How does one know when the directing is good? I saw Fisher and wasn't very impressed. However, I don't know if that's because the directing was bad or the story was bad. How do you separate the two?


well, the article said that he left the Church of Satan to convert to Judaism.

rotten.com (http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/entertainers/music/sammy-davis-jr/) seems to agree with the article i read, except that he was inducted to the Church of Satan after he converted to Judaism.
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Wow, kittygirl, thanks for that detailed explanation.

I think I know what you mean. I've seen at least a couple of movies where I thought the plot sucked but the movie was passable. Undoubtedly some of that was the directing. But now I'll be able to watch more for specifics.
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Wow, kittygirl, thanks for that detailed explanation.

I think I know what you mean. I've seen at least a couple of movies where I thought the plot sucked but the movie was passable. Undoubtedly some of that was the directing. But now I'll be able to watch more for specifics.

i'm on my king arthur hype, but if you get a chance, check out king arthur. this was an example of an OKAY movie made really good by good directing. pay close attention to how fuqua uses the camera angle and directing of the actors to convey emotion through small facial expression and not terribly tight and overdrawn closeups. notice how he gets emotion to be conveyed by having some characters look away quickly, some characters stare up, a twitch of the mouth, etc....

these are all directing choices. also check out scenes he staged to make the characters more iconic, as well as the colours of the movie to give it a Dark Ages, dirty gritty feel.
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