Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 American blaxploitation film written, co-produced, scored, edited, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles. His son Mario Van Peebles also appears in a small role, playing the title character as a young boy. The film tells the picaresque story of a poor black man fleeing from the white police authorities.
Bruce Gowers was a British television director and producer, best known for his work on large-scale live music and event productions.
John Witherspoon, was an American actor and comedian who performed in various television shows and films. Witherspoon played Willie Jones in the Friday series, and starred in films such as Hollywood Shuffle (1987), Boomerang (1992), The Five Heartbeats (1991), and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). In addition, Witherspoon made appearances on television shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1994), The Wayans Bros. (1995–1999), The Tracy Morgan Show (2003), Barnaby Jones (1973), The Boondocks (2005–2014), and Black Jesus (2014–2019). He wrote a film, From the Old School, in which he played an elderly working man who tries to prevent a neighborhood convenience store from being developed into a strip club.
Ed Guerrero is an American film historian and associate professor of cinema studies and Africana studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His writings explore black cinema, culture, and critical discourse. He has written extensively on black cinema, its movies, politics and culture for anthologies and journals such as Sight & Sound, FilmQuartely, Cineaste, Journal of Popular Film & Television, and Discourse. Guerrero has served on editorial and professional boards including The Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board.
Robert "Bobbito" Garcia, also known as DJ Cucumber Slice and Kool Bob Love, is an American DJ, author, streetball player, streetball coach, and member of the Rock Steady Crew. He is known as a former co-host of hip hop radio show The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, alongside Adrian "Stretch Armstrong" Bartos, from 1990 until 1999. He later moved to Washington, D.C., where he currently hosts a new podcast on NPR called What's Good? alongside Bartos.
Nelson George is an American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Khalil Kain is an American actor, film producer known for his role as Raheem Porter in the 1992 crime thriller film Juice and as the second Darnell Wilkes on the UPN/CW sitcom Girlfriends (2001–2008). He is also known for his role as Patrick Peet in the 2001 horror film Bones.
D'Urville Martin was an American actor in both film and television. He appeared in numerous 1970s movies in the blaxploitation genre. He also appeared in two unaired pilots of what would become All in the Family as Lionel Jefferson. Born in New York City, Martin began his career in the mid-1960s and soon appeared in prominent films such as Black Like Me, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Rosemary's Baby. Martin also directed films in his career, including Dolemite, starring Rudy Ray Moore.
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based at Warner Bros. Discovery's corporate headquarters inside 30 Hudson Yards in Manhattan's West Side district. Programming featured on the network consists primarily of theatrically released motion pictures and original television programs as well as made-for-cable movies, documentaries, occasional comedy and concert specials, and periodic interstitial programs.
Amanda Ingrid Seales, formerly known by the stage name Amanda Diva, is an American comedian and actress. From 2017-2021, she starred in the HBO comedy series Insecure. In 2019, HBO released her first stand-up comedy special I Be Knowin. Then, in 2020, Seales launched Smart Funny & Black, a comedy gameshow that showcases Black culture, history, and experience. Seales was also one of the co-hosts of the syndicated daytime talk show, The Real
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime. The genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the protagonists and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, antagonists or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
YouTube TV is an American streaming television service operated by YouTube, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Announced on February 28, 2017, the virtual multichannel video programming distributor offers a selection of live linear channel feeds and on-demand content from more than 100 television networks and over 30 OTT-originated services, as well as a cloud-based DVR.
Mass Appeal is an American media and content company based in New York City. The name originates from the Gang Starr song "Mass Appeal" from the album Hard to Earn. The company was founded in 1996 as a graffiti fanzine and since has grown to encompass a magazine, website, film, television, music label and creative agency.
"Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get" is a 1971 single written and produced by Tony Hester and performed by The Dramatics.
The 19th Annual CableACE Awards ceremony was held on November 14, 1997, and was the final edition of the CableACE Awards. Below are the nominees and the winners from that ceremony in the main categories.
The 18th Annual CableACE Awards were held on November 16, 1996. Below are the nominees and the winners from that ceremony in the major categories.
Josh Swade is an American documentary filmmaker and author, working primarily in the sports and music genres. His feature films include Ricky Powell: The Individualist, about street photographer Ricky Powell, which premiered on Showtime in 2021; One & Done, about basketball player Ben Simmons, which premiered on Showtime in 2016; and the 2012 ESPN 30 for 30 documentary There's No Place Like Home. He has directed and produced several ESPN 30 for 30 Shorts, and several short films on popular musicians, including The Black Keys, Rick Rubin, Sheryl Crow, Major Lazer, and Gary Clark Jr. He also wrote the book The Holy Grail of Hoops: One Fan's Quest to Buy the Original Rules of Basketball.
The 17th Annual CableACE Awards were held on December 6, 1995. Below are the nominees and winners from that ceremony in the major categories.
Peter Gwynne Morgan is a television and film writer/producer. A winner of the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming for his work on Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, he is married to American documentary director Marina Zenovich.
