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“I moved there for love”-not of movies, but of a woman, who eventually dumped him. He knew what he calls “important people”-Martin’s star Halle Berry, for instance-but he saw no path to a career of his own.īy 2007, Jenkins was in San Francisco.
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I like to say it was beaten out of me,” Jenkins says of his time on Hollywood’s bottom rung. Martin took care of the car: she bought Jenkins a Ford Taurus before moving to New York. At the time, says Jenkins, he had “no car, no money,” and no particular ambitions. Jenkins worked for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films, where he was an assistant to Darnell Martin, who was then directing the television film Their Eyes Were Watching God. For most of the intervening 13 years, he was still sorting through accidents, choices, and vaguely conceived hopes that only lately came together.įirst, there was a two-year interlude in Los Angeles. Yet, by Jenkins’ own telling, it was never certain-nor even likely- that he would close a very wide gap between his film school moment and the present rush of an Oscar season. Scott, co-chief film critic of the New York Times, in describing Moonlight’s reception in Telluride.
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“There were tears and standing ovations, a reception that is likely to continue as the film makes its way into theaters,” wrote A.O.
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With or without Oscars, Moonlight has already completed Jenkins’ personal transformation, from a talented amateur to a professional filmmaker of stature. It is considered a strong contender for writing, acting, directing and Best Picture awards, though Best Actor consideration is a puzzlement-Chiron is alternately played by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes. Even more than My Josephine, Moonlight is packed with Jenkins’ feelings about being black in the South based on Tarell McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film follows its lead character, Chiron, from childhood in the Miami project where both Jenkins and McCraney lived with drug-addicted mothers, to a self-created manhood. Now, of course, he is riding a wave of acclaim for Moonlight, which has been welcomed by both critics and viewers since A24 introduced it at the Telluride Film Festival in early September, and is working its way toward Oscar night with recent wins from LAFCA and BIFA. “I put in all the things I feel about being black in the South,” Jenkins recalls of a short that marked him as a cinematic artist. And, as classmate Adele Romanski, a producer of Moonlight, recalled from the stage at a recent Los Angeles screening, it was widely regarded as the school’s best work.
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Loosely inspired by the Asian and New Wave films he had been watching in what he calls his “very lonely year off”, it told the story of an Arabic man named Aadid who works the night shift in a laundry that cleans American flags for free in post-9/11 America, and is obsessed with Napoleon’s Josephine. On returning to the school, Jenkins found his voice with a 2003 short entitled My Josephine. His dream, he realized, was to make something markedly different from the work of his Florida State peers, who included Wes Ball, now working on the Maze Runner films for Fox, and Amy Seimetz, who directed Sun Don’t Shine and was a co-creator of The Girlfriend Experience. And he started watching foreign movies, working his way straight through the international shelves at a local Blockbuster. So Jenkins bought a subscription to Sight & Sound, the British film monthly. “It was one of the few times I felt legitimate pressure, when I was taking that year off.” “There was a thing you’d hear, that I got in there because I was a black kid, and there weren’t any black kids in the program,” he recalls. Now, he was on the brink of blowing that opportunity, deserved or not. He was aware of whispers, he says, that he had been admitted partly because he was an under-represented African-American. He took a year off but the hiatus left him feeling uneasy. It was a rude awakening,” recalls Jenkins, who had grown up in a Miami ghetto, the son of a crack-addicted mother. “What am I doing here? I’m a kid from the projects. “My movies were not good,” he explains of his first efforts-not good enough in his own view to merit a spot in a backwater program school that had only about 75 students and few of those dazzling industry contacts that come with a cinematic education at the University of Southern California or New York University. What happened next goes to the business of existential choices: Jenkins, essentially, failed. Los Angeles Film Critics Name 'Moonlight' Best Picture Of The Year A24