Hardwood (film)

Last updated
Hardwood
Directed by Hubert Davis
Written byHubert Davis
Produced byPeter Starr
Erin Faith Young
CinematographyDavid Tennant
Edited byHubert Davis
Music byFraser MacDougal
Dave Palmer
Distributed by National Film Board of Canada
Release date
  • March 17, 2005 (2005-03-17)(Cleveland International Film Festival)
Running time
29 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

Hardwood is a 2005 documentary short film about Canadian director Hubert Davis' relationship to his father, former Harlem Globetrotters member Mel Davis. Through interviews with his mother, his father's wife, his half-brother, and Mel Davis himself, Hubert Davis explores why Mel made the decisions that he did, and how that has affected his life. [1]

Contents

Hardwood was met with high critical acclaim and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject. [2] It also aired on PBS as part of its Point of View series in 2005.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mel Brooks</span> American actor, comedian and filmmaker (born 1926)

Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 21 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mel Gibson</span> American actor and filmmaker (born 1956)

Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for his action hero roles, particularly his breakout role as Max Rockatansky in the first three films of the post-apocalyptic action series Mad Max and as Martin Riggs in the buddy cop action-comedy film series Lethal Weapon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Burns</span> American documentarian and filmmaker (born 1953)

Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mel Tormé</span> American recording artist (1925–1999)

Melvin Howard Tormé, nicknamed "the Velvet Fog", was an American musician, singer, composer, arranger, drummer, actor, and author. He composed the music for "The Christmas Song" and co-wrote the lyrics with Bob Wells. Tormé won two Grammy Awards and was nominated a total of 14 times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Coyote</span> American actor, voice actor, and director

Peter Coyote is an American actor, director, screenwriter, author, and narrator of films, theater, television, and audiobooks. He worked on films, such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Cross Creek (1983), Jagged Edge (1985), Bitter Moon (1992), Kika (1993), Patch Adams (1998), Erin Brockovich (2000), A Walk to Remember (2002), and Femme Fatale (2002).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ossie Davis</span> American actor, director, writer, and activist (1917–2005)

Raiford Chatman "Ossie" Davis was an American actor, director, writer, and activist. He was married to Ruby Dee, with whom he frequently performed, until his death. He received numerous accolades including a Grammy Award and a Writers Guild of America Award as well as nominations for five Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and Tony Award. Davis was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1995, Kennedy Center Honors in 2004

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kevin Brownlow</span> English filmmaker and film historian

Kevin Brownlow is a British film historian, television documentary-maker, filmmaker, author, and film editor. He is best known for his work documenting the history of the silent era, having become interested in silent film at the age of eleven. This interest grew into a career spent documenting and restoring film. Brownlow has rescued many silent films and their history. His initiative in interviewing many largely forgotten, elderly film pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s preserved a legacy of early mass-entertainment cinema. He received an Academy Honorary Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 13 November 2010. This was the first occasion on which an Academy Honorary Award was given to a film preservationist.

The San Francisco International Film Festival, organized by the San Francisco Film Society, is held each spring for two weeks, presenting around 200 films from over 50 countries. The festival highlights current trends in international film and video production with an emphasis on work that has not yet secured U.S. distribution. In 2009, it served around 82,000 patrons, with screenings held in San Francisco and Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Michel Cousteau</span> French oceanographic explorer

Jean-Michel Cousteau is a French oceanographic explorer, environmentalist, educator and film producer. The first son of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, he is the father of Fabien Cousteau and Céline Cousteau.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Talbot</span> American journalist

Stephen Henderson Talbot is a TV documentary producer, writer and reporter. Talbot directed and produced "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023. He is a longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and worked for over 16 years for the series Frontline.

Hubert Davis is a Canadian filmmaker who was nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Cultural and Artistic Programming for his directorial debut in Hardwood, a short documentary exploring the life of his father, former Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis. Davis was the first Afro-Canadian to be nominated for an Oscar.

Daron Murphy is co-founder of the social justice creative agency Art Not War. Since the agency was founded in 2011, Murphy has written, directed and produced hundreds of short films and online videos that have earned billions of views worldwide.

Melville A. Leven was an American composer and lyricist who had a long association with the Walt Disney Company, although he also wrote songs for Peggy Lee, The Andrews Sisters, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, and Les Brown, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley Nelson Jr.</span> American documentary filmmaker

Stanley Earl Nelson Jr. is an American documentary filmmaker and a MacArthur Fellow known as a director, writer and producer of documentaries examining African-American history and experiences. He is a recipient of the 2013 National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He has won three Primetime Emmy Awards.

<i>The Hobart Shakespeareans</i> 2005 television film

The Hobart Shakespeareans of Hobart Boulevard Elementary School is a 2005 documentary film that tells the story of the inspirational inner-city Los Angeles school teacher Rafe Esquith whose rigorous fifth-grade curriculum includes English, mathematics, geography, and literature. The pinnacle of student achievement each year is the performance of a play by William Shakespeare; in the year of filming, that play was Hamlet.

Following Sean is a 2005 documentary film directed by Ralph Arlyck, and a follow-up to his 1969 student short Sean, which features four-year-old Sean's thoughts on marijuana, police presence, and freewheeling lifestyles. The film's notoriety landed a screening in the White House and a variety of predictions regarding the outcome of Sean's life - whether he could grow up to embody the hippy philosophy, or whether he would turn out a drug dealer or stock broker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Daniel Metzgar</span> American film director

Eric Daniel Metzgar is a filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco.

<i>Aruba</i> (film) 2006 Canadian film

Aruba is a 2006 Canadian coming-of-age dramatic short film and the fiction debut of director Hubert Davis. It was his first major work after his Academy Award-nominated film Hardwood.

Immy Humes is an American documentary filmmaker and television producer. Her first independent documentary was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991, and she continues to make films about contemporary American life. Humes has also taught filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, NYU/Brooklyn Polytechnic and City College of New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brent E. Huffman</span> American film director

Brent Edward Huffman is an American director, writer, and cinematographer of documentaries and television programs, including Saving Mes Aynak (2015). His work has been featured on Netflix, Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, VICE, NBC, CNN, PBS, Time, The New York Times, Al Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English and premiered at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), and many other U.S. and international film festivals. He is also a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he teaches documentary production and theory.

References

  1. "PBS Synopsis". PBS . Archived from the original on 2009-02-08. Retrieved 2017-08-29.
  2. "NY Times: Hardwood". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times . 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-10-17. Retrieved 2008-12-07.