Reggie Rock Bythewood | |
---|---|
Born | The Bronx, New York City | July 7, 1965
Occupation(s) | Film director, writer, actor, film producer |
Spouse |
Reggie Rock Bythewood (born July 7, 1965) is an American filmmaker and actor. [1] He is known for directing the film Dancing in September (2000) and creating the television series Shots Fired and Swagger .
Bythewood grew up in The Bronx, New York City. He loved going to the movies and to Yankees games with his father. However, his main love was boxing. When his parents split up, his mother forbade him to pursue the sport. He was not allowed to go to the neighborhood boxing gym anymore because she thought it was too dangerous. During this time, hip hop was considered a fad outside of New York. However, in the Bronx, it was an emerging art form. Bythewood was consumed by the movement. He was a rapper in a neighborhood hip hop crew. During assemblies in junior high school, he and other school mates were allowed to get on stage and break dance.
After junior high, Bythewood's main focus became acting. He went to the High School of Performing Arts as a drama major. However, the school did not allow students to work as professional actors. During his senior year, Bythewood was cast in the soap opera Another World , he left Performing Arts and attended Quintanos School for the Young Professionals. While on the set he acted with Morgan Freeman, Joe Morton, Kyra Sedgwick and many others.
After high school, Bythewood acted in a John Sayles film The Brother from Another Planet . Sayles inspired Bythewood to write and direct and he shifted his focus away from acting. He graduated from Marymount Manhattan College with a BFA in theater. He co-founded a New York City based theater company called The Tribe which performed plays written and directed by Bythewood. The aim of the theater company was to entertain while raising consciousness. Several activists attended Bythewood's plays including Black Panther Jamal Joseph who became one of his best friends.
In 1990, he was offered a role in the soap opera One Life To Live . However, he turned down the offer and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting. He became one of the first members of Walt Disney's prestigious Writers Fellowship Program. From there, he was hired as a writer on the hit NBC comedy series A Different World where he met his future wife, Gina Prince-Bythewood. He went on to write and produce Dick Wolf's drama series New York Undercover . He also did production rewrites for action films produced by Joel Silver. After attending the Million Man March, he wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee's indie film Get on the Bus . Bythewood was also one of the film's investors. With the 2007 Writer's Strike looming, Bythewood was hired to do the rewrite for Notorious . He completed several drafts and the film was green lit. When the strike ended, Bythewood went back to the project to do more revisions and stayed on until the film wrapped. He was given written by credit along with the film's initial writer, Cheo Hodari Coker.
Bythewood made his feature film directorial debut on the acclaimed indie flick Dancing in September which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. It was acquired by HBO and became an HBO original movie. He also directed Biker Boyz , the documentary "Daddy's Girl" (starring Laila Ali), the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary "One Night in Vegas", and Gun Hill the two-hour pilot which he won the 2014 NAACP Image Award for. In 2017, he co-created the ten-hour event series Shots Fired with Gina Prince-Bythewood and directed the season one finale starring Sanaa Lathan, Richard Dreyfuss, Helen Hunt, and Stephan James.
Bythewood was chairman of the B-Dads organization. Along with other fathers, he fed homeless families in Los Angeles, California, raised thousands of dollars for the Sickle Cell Disease Foundation and conducted workshops on fatherhood. He has also spoken on various panels regarding police reform such as the annual convention for NOBLE (National Organization of Black Law Enforcement).
Bythewood resides in Southern California with his wife, filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood, and their two sons. The two met on the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air before both being hired on A Different World and married in 1998. [2]
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
---|---|---|---|---|
1996 | Get on the Bus | No | Yes | No |
2000 | Dancing in September | Yes | Yes | Yes |
2003 | Biker Boyz | Yes | Yes | No |
2009 | Notorious | No | Yes | No |
2014 | Beyond the Lights | No | No | Yes |
Acting roles
Year | Title | Role |
---|---|---|
1977 | Fight for Your Life | Floyd Turner |
1984 | The Brother from Another Planet | Rickey |
Exterminator 2 | Spidey | |
1988 | The Beat | Church Bystander |
1989 | Vampire's Kiss | Danny Lambeaux |
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Creator | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1992-1993 | A Different World | No | Yes | No | No | 5 episodes |
1993 | South of Sunset | No | Yes | No | No | Episode "Newspaper Boy" |
1994-1997 | New York Undercover | No | Yes | Yes | No | Wrote 16 episodes |
1997-1998 | Players | No | Yes | No | Yes | |
2007 | Reflections | No | Yes | Co-producer | No | TV short |
2010 | 30 for 30 | Yes | No | No | No | Episode "One Night in Vegas" |
2017 | Shots Fired | Yes | Yes | Executive | Yes | Wrote 3 episodes, directed episode "Hour Ten: Last Dance" |
2021-2023 | Swagger | Yes | Yes | Executive | Yes | Wrote 5 episodes, directed 5 episodes |
TV movies
Year | Title | Director | Writer | Executive Producer |
---|---|---|---|---|
2007 | Daddy's Girl | Yes | No | No |
2014 | Gun Hill | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Acting role
Year | Title | Role | Note |
---|---|---|---|
1982-1983 | Another World | R.J. Morgan | 6 episodes |
John Thomas Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. He is known for writing and directing the films The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Passion Fish (1992), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), Lone Star (1996), and Men with Guns (1997).
Laurence John Fishburne III is an American actor. He is a three-time Emmy Award and Tony Award winner known for his roles on stage and screen. He has been hailed for his forceful, militant, and authoritative characters in his films. He is known for playing Morpheus in The Matrix series (1999–2003), Jason "Furious" Styles in the John Singleton drama film Boyz n the Hood (1991), Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller in Francis Ford Coppola's war film Apocalypse Now (1979), and "The Bowery King" in the John Wick film series (2017–present).
Gina L. Gershon is an American actress and singer. She has starred in such films as Cocktail (1988), Red Heat (1988), Showgirls (1995), Bound (1996), Face/Off (1997), The Insider (1999), Demonlover (2002), P.S. I Love You (2007), Five Minarets in New York (2010), Killer Joe (2011), and House of Versace (2013). She has also had supporting roles in FX's Rescue Me and HBO's How to Make It in America. She also portrayed Jughead's mom Gladys Jones on The CW teen drama series Riverdale and Lauren Bloom's mother Jeanie Bloom on the NBC medical series New Amsterdam.
David Russell Strathairn is an American actor. Known for his leading roles on stage and screen, he has often portrayed historical figures such as Edward R. Murrow, J. Robert Oppenheimer, William H. Seward, and John Dos Passos. He has received various accolades including an Independent Spirit Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Volpi Cup, and has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Passion Fish is a 1992 American drama film written and directed by John Sayles. The film stars Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, Vondie Curtis-Hall, David Strathairn, Leo Burmester, and Angela Bassett. It tells the story of a soap opera star (McDonnell), who after getting paralyzed in a car accident, is forced to return to her family home and rely upon a series of nurses, forcing each of them to leave her employment until one shows up guaranteed to stay.
The Brother from Another Planet is a 1984 low-budget American science fiction film, written and directed by John Sayles.
Gina Maria Prince-Bythewood is an American film director and screenwriter. She began her career as a writer for multiple television shows in the 1990s, including the anthology series CBS Schoolbreak Special, for which she was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards. Prince-Bythewood made her feature film directorial debut with Love & Basketball (2000), for which she received an Independent Spirit Award.
Saundra Santiago is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Detective Gina Calabrese in the NBC original crime drama series Miami Vice (1984–1990). She also played Carmen Santos on the CBS soap opera Guiding Light and the second Carlotta Vega on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live.
Love & Basketball is a 2000 American romantic sports drama film written and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood in her feature film directorial debut. The film is produced by Spike Lee and Sam Kit and stars Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps. It tells the story of Quincy McCall (Epps) and Monica Wright (Lathan), two next-door neighbors in Los Angeles, who are pursuing their respective basketball careers before eventually falling for each other.
Disappearing Acts is a 2000 American made-for-television romantic drama film directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, and stars Sanaa Lathan and Wesley Snipes. The film is an adaptation of the New York Times best-selling 1989 novel of the same name by Terry McMillan, and originally aired on HBO on December 9, 2000.
Dancing in September is an American romantic comedy-drama television film written and directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood. It stars Nicole Ari Parker and Isaiah Washington, alongside Vicellous Reon Shannon, Malinda Williams, Jay Underwood, Michael Cavanaugh, Mel Jackson, and Jenifer Lewis. It follows a struggling African-American television writer who gets her sitcom picked up by the neophyte WPX network through an executive producer hired specifically to develop shows aimed at the black market.
Nancy Laura Savoca is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter.
Gregory Gerald Antonacci was an American television actor, director, producer, and writer. He portrayed Johnny Torrio in Boardwalk Empire in every season, from 2010 to 2014, and as Phil Leotardo's right-hand man Butch DeConcini in The Sopranos from 2006 to the series finale in 2007.
Edwina Findley, also known as Edwina Findley Dickerson, is an American actress. Findley played the recurring roles in the HBO television dramas The Wire (2003–04) and Treme (2010–13), and from 2014 to 2020 starred as Kelly Isaacs, one of the lead characters in the Oprah Winfrey Network drama series, If Loving You Is Wrong.
Tomi Adeyemi is a Nigerian American writer and creative writing coach. She is best known for her novel Children of Blood and Bone, the first in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, which debuted #1 on The New York Times Best Sellers List, and won the 2018 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, the 2019 Waterstones Book Prize, and the 2019 Hugo Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and in 2020, she was named to the TIME 100 Most Influential People of 2020 in the "Pioneers" category. In 2022, Paramount Pictures was developing Children of Blood and Bone into a major motion picture with Gina Prince-Bythewood attached to direct.
Silver & Black is an unproduced American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics characters Silver Sable and Black Cat. It was to be produced by Columbia Pictures in association with Marvel and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film was intended to be an installment of Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU), with Gina Prince-Bythewood directing from a screenplay she co-wrote with Lisa Joy, Chris Yost, and the writing team of Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
Wayne Péré, sometimes credited as Wayne Pére or Wayne Pere, is an American character actor.
Kiandra "KiKi" Layne is an American actress. She is best known for her starring roles in such films as the romantic drama If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), the drama Native Son (2019), the action superhero film The Old Guard (2020), and the romantic comedy Coming 2 America (2021).
The Old Guard is a 2020 American superhero film directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Greg Rucka, based on his comic book of the same name. It stars Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Harry Melling, Veronica Ngo and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and follows a team of immortal mercenaries on a revenge mission.
The Old Guard is a series of graphic novels created by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández and published by Image Comics. It has released over 16 issues from three series. A film adaptation from Netflix and Skydance Media was made in 2020, with a sequel in the works. The series follows a group of immortal soldiers, known as The Old Guard, led by a woman named Andromache of Scythia (Andy) who has been alive for several thousands of years.