Thrillers
When it comes to filmmaking, there’s modesty and then there’s Carl Franklin. The Bay-Area-bred actor cum director, screenwriter, and producer, who once said of thrillers, “that’s not my forté,” is one of the genre’s most eloquent, if reluctant savants. Featuring star turns from the likes of Denzel, Don Cheadle, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bill Paxton, Franklin’s films are as criminally under-seen as they are brimming with craft.
For Week 4 of Black Is Not A Genre, we’ll be celebrating a double feature of two Franklin classics: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), the noir period piece, based on the serial detective novels of Walter Mosley, and Franklin’s striking, critically acclaimed feature debut, One False Move (1992). The former, an inexplicable box-office flop despite its tailor-made franchise potential, the latter, a sleeper-hit crime drama originally destined for straight-to-video release; both films are indicative of the peculiar, often confounding plight of Black filmmakers working in distinct genres.
Our special guests are:
Jearold Hersey is an Austin based designer and lifelong film fan. many moons ago he was a film critic for his college newspaper and for the tribune in Mesa, Arizona. Locally, he’s a member of Austin film society and runs a weekly movie club, which is now in it’s fourth year and is currently doing a monthly genre study for 2020
Kahron Spearman is an Austin-based writer, journalist and culture critic, whose work can be found in the Austin chronicle, the daily dot, Localeur, and Texas music magazine.