On this episode we talk to content creator Frederick Taylor about documenting the HBCU-inspired dance style J-Setting and pushing the boundaries of Black art with forms like verticals.
Listen to “The White Meat Podcast” on Spreaker.Here’s the transcript:
David Dylan Thomas: Hey everybody, this is David Dylan Thomas. Welcome to the White Meat podcast. I am the writer and director of a movie called White Meat, and the premise is that underneath Washington Square Park are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people, which is true. What if one night they all come back from the dead as zombies, but they only eat white people?
This week we are talking to Frederick Taylor director of a great short dance documentary called If Cities Could Dance: J Setting. And we’re gonna learn all about that dance, its history his work and some of the work he’s also doing with verticals, which is something I’m still learning about.
One thing I wanted to highlight in the next couple weeks, on August 4th we are gonna be at Green Line Cafe in Philadelphia. We’re gonna be watching White Meat: Appetizer and then watching a great blaxploitation film called Sugar Hill, which also has people who are enslaved who come back as zombies.
So that’s gonna be a lot of fun, and we’re actually gonna be watching it on VHS, as the VHS club name implies. It’s a really great event. I’ll also be having a chat with Wi-Moto Nyoka, who we’ve had on the podcast before, a wonderful local filmmaker who we’ll be having a chat with about social justice zombies beforehand.
It’s all gonna be really exciting. 7:00 PM, August 4th at Green Line Cafe the one on 45th and, I wanna say Locust. Let me double check that for you. And no RSVP, you just kinda show up. And, yep, 45th and Locust. So I hope to see you there. So now we will get to our conversation with Frederick Taylor. Enjoy.
[musical interlude]
David Dylan Thomas: Welcome to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and today my very special guest is Frederick Taylor. Frederick, tell the good folks here what it is you get up to.
Frederick Taylor: I am a filmmaker but a little bit something more than that too these days. It’s actually content creator.
And by saying I’m a content creator, it’s that you dip or stick your finger into a lot of pies.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: Sometimes it’s writing a blog. Sometimes it’s a, it’s my social media platform, and sometimes it is actually filmmaking and at times it’s dabbling in things like music too.
And then bouncing around from different genres and things like that as well. And then of course now we live in a global community, so a lot of this stuff goes international too. So it’s not just siloed to one hemisphere on the planet.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Tell me a little, ’cause I feel a little bit of that polyglot too, right?
I’ll do books, I’ll do talks, I’ll do movies. Do you find that there’s a commonality, a theme, something running through all those different outlets for you as an artist?
Frederick Taylor: Absolutely. It is this strange thread that I have always felt since I was a child. Because I’m a child of the post-civil rights era.
I’m a child of “Sesame Street.”
I am a child of the big ’80s. I’m a child of the dissemination of conscious hip-hop and the elevation of gangster rap. I am a child who remembers when we couldn’t wait to get to 1999 because Prince had made a song about it.
That’s how old I am. 2000-00 party over, oops, out of time. So for me, that’s the through line is that all of these things come together, they go together. Yes, I listened to Public Enemy, but I also listened to The Cure.
Like I, I found something in a lot of different things, and I found that to be amazing and fascinating.
I remember when J.Lo was just a Fly Girl.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes. Oh my God.
Frederick Taylor: In Living Color.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Frederick Taylor: And I would think “Who’s that? She is cute.” And then little did I know she was going to become a big star someday. But those things are important to me, and those things are constant through lines in my work and expressing myself in a way where, I understand where all this stuff comes from.
I remember going and seeing the Raising Hell tour, which I’m hurting you, aren’t I? It’s, it stings a little.
David Dylan Thomas: No I’m envious because, like I wasn’t as into hip-hop then, and if I had truly recognized the greatness of Run-DMC at the time and had parents who were permissive enough to let me go to the Raising Hell tour, I would’ve gone to the Raising Hell tour.
Frederick Taylor: If you would’ve gone to the Raising Hell tour, you would’ve seen the opening act was the Beastie Boys. They had one song. It was Hold It Now, Hit It. It was all into that, and that was it. And I remember they came out on stage, everybody booed. This was at the old Spectrum in Philadelphia.
And, they did their one song, “Hold It Now Hit It,” and I never saw a group turn a crowd the way that they did.
David Dylan Thomas: Wow.
Frederick Taylor: It went from they hated them to they loved them. And I turned to my friend at the time and said, “They’re gonna be huge.”
David Dylan Thomas: Oh my God.
Frederick Taylor: And they did it, and, and foundationally, they’re one of the more important hip hop groups to come out of New York of all time. And, they have a legion of devout followers to this day, and I know so many middle-aged Jewish women who love them, who absolutely love them.
And, and I embrace that with a lot of pride because so much of that music came from the Black American diaspora.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: And I wave that flag with pride. And again, that is one of the things that fuels the art, that I know that I am pieces of many things, and I get to interpret them And it gives me an advantage when I sit down to say that I’m going to create versus a lot of other people really focus on their lane.
They stay in their lane. I don’t have one, okay?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: My lane was taken from my ancestors a long time ago. I have a Scottish and Germanic name.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: I don’t have a lane, and nor do I allow myself to be put into one. And I think that’s really important, too. Moving forward, even though the system, you can feel it, it’s squeezing things into lanes. The stereotype of the Black diaspora is being normalized.
David Dylan Thomas: It’s funny, too, you put it that way, because I think what happens is capitalism doesn’t like collage. And I think as artists, especially as Black artists, a lot of what we do is collage.
Frederick Taylor: Because it’s a survival instinct.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes. You have to work with what you’ve got …
Frederick Taylor: We’re making, turning lemons into lemonade all the time. We weren’t eating pig feet because we liked it.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: At least that’s what I tell myself.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And that, that skill, right? And so when you’re thinking about commodification, you wanna simplify your stories.
You wanna say, “This is a cap. You wear it on your head. The end.” You wanna say, “This is an action movie. People are gonna shoot each other and stuff’s gonna blow up. The end.” You don’t wanna say ‘I Love Boosters’ is a movie that’s satire, it’s kinda comedy, it’s also a little bit of sci-fi. There’s actually a little bit of horror.
You’re just like “Eeeeeeh, what’s the one line? What’s the five sentences,” right? And I think that’s where we run into trouble in terms of trying to sell it. I think what we’re doing is awesome.
Frederick Taylor: Oh, I do too. I think it’s I think it’s amazing. And I know it’s amazing because everybody wants it.
I know it’s amazing because everybody still talks about it. I know it’s amazing because I really enjoyed watching your film, and it’s a bunch of Black zombies eating white people in a coffee shop, and people loved it. And the only people I know that loved it more than Black people were actually white people.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh my God. Can I just-
Frederick Taylor: So I think it’s in- I think that’s incredible. It speaks to what this really is.
David Dylan Thomas: It’s funny you talk about Beastie Boys’ demographic being middle-aged Jewish women. I am telling you right now, based on the people I’ve pitched this to and the people who’ve seen it, the biggest demographic for this movie, I shit you not, is middle-aged white women.
They fucking love it. They fund it. They, and God bless them they, they are even more into it than Black people, if that’s even possible.
Frederick Taylor: Oh, yeah. The person that told me about it, that peeped the game to me about you, was a middle-aged white woman.
David Dylan Thomas: So let’s talk about that meeting. So I met you, I think, at the Westchester Film Festival-
Frederick Taylor: Yes.
David Dylan Thomas: And then again at the Rustin Day of Film. Tell me about the movie that you had at those festivals.
Frederick Taylor: I’ve had a longstanding relationship with the West Chester Film Festival and the Chester County History Center or Historical Society History Center. They were once the Historical Society, now they’re the History Center.
And the film that I had recently was called “J-Setting: If Cities Could Dance,” and it was all about a style of dancing called J-Setting that emerged out of the world of HBCU in Jackson, Mississippi from Jackson State College, hence J-Setting.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, okay.
Frederick Taylor: It’s a style of dance that was created interestingly enough, by LGBTQ Black men who, as we all know in art and culture have had a voice for a very long time. We know about them. The general market is just catching up to the level of innovation of gay Black men and the volume of it and the reach of it, and that they’ve been here since the beginning, and this is just another incarnation of that. This was a group of gay Black men who enjoyed watching step shows, HBCU battle of the bands.
They loved the marching, the stepping, all the other stuff, and one of the things they noticed was a lot of women were dominating it, and these gay Black men said, “We can do that, too.” Which that alone is fascinating because usually, the story’s in reverse, it’s a group of women seeing a bunch of men doing something, and they say, “We can do that, too.”
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: Now here’s a group of gay Black men saying, “You see all those Black women out there dancing like that? We can do that, too.” And that speaks to the power of Black women.
The mountain that we must climb as Black men when we face Black women. And also that great American story of overcoming, of saying, “I can do that, too. I can be a part of that. Nothing’s going to stop me. And it speaks to the uniqueness of gender in the African American community versus the white American community. And with all due respect to the white American community, there aren’t too many things that white women do that gay white men say, “I’d like to do that too.”
Doesn’t happen too often. Now, there are probably some things that are out there. I don’t know. I could be wrong.
Definitely one of them is not dancing.
David Dylan Thomas: So I’d love to, I’d love to hear more about that, ’cause I think… So for me personally, I remember seeing “School Daze” for the first time-
Frederick Taylor: Absolutely, yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: And seeing the step dance, step routine scene in that movie- … which I had never seen. I knew nothing about HBCUs. I’d ne- and I’d never seen anything like it in my life, and I was like, “What the fuck is this? This is amazing. Is this real? Did they make this up for the movie?” And it’s so I can imagine how impressionable how much of an impression that would leave.
Tell me what you know about that evolution, ’cause it sounds like J Setting has a deep, rich history that maybe begins before Jackson.
Frederick Taylor: Oh, absolutely. Ballroom from the ’80s and early ’90s as well. Madonna helped to popularize that. The crème de la crème of that within popular culture is the music video “Vogue” by Madonna. Which is exquisitely done. It’s great. It’s directed by David Fincher. It’s wonderful. It’s awesome, but it’s Black. It’s again the appropriation of Blackness into whiteness, and the whites go on for fame and fortune, and the people that invented it are long forgotten.
And it goes back to swing dancing.
It goes back to Alvin Ailey in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s as well. It goes back to these great musicals of the ’70s that Blacks did. One of the best Black musicals you can ever go see is “The Wiz.”
It’s just phenomenal.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: There are things that we do Fats Waller, “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
We’re an interesting group of people. We’re very creative. And J Setting is a synthesis of all of those things, and at the same time blowing apart the box of gender identity. And that’s one of the things that I found to be fascinating. I get into a lot of intense conversations with people of color, Black people in particular, about gender identity and sexuality and things like that, and they fall on, very aggressively fall on both sides.
They’re either like pro gay people have a right to be gay and it’s fine and leave them alone, or it’s like gay is wrong and it’s against, it’s an abomination against God and all this other stuff. You don’t really find too many Black people in the middle that are like, I never really thought about it before.
It’s not a big deal to me. I don’t know. Everybody’s got an opinion about this. And for them to have the courage to go head out there and express that and do this is incredible and it was worthy of documentation.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: And we need more Black filmmakers telling stories about courageous Black people that are doing things that are off the radar or that are being missed or that are being misunderstood within the annals of history.
So yes, when you were watching “School Daze” all those years back, you were watching a derivative of J-Settering. West African dance is also a part of that too. And I find that to be extraordinary, and I find that to be exciting. And I also like to say, the white kids don’t dance like white kids anymore, they dance like Black kids.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh my God. The domination– This is something, I was watching some, I think it was a Hasan Minhaj episode, and he was talk- the whole thing was about hip hop, and he was basically making the argument that hip hop has in fact taken over the world. It is the most dominant form of music literally all over the planet.
And like, when I took that on, I’m like, “Holy shit, he’s right.” And what a journey, because there was a time in my lifetime it could not get played on the radio.
Frederick Taylor: Oh yeah. I remember reading an article years ago in Time Magazine, and Time Magazine proclaimed it a trend, a passing trend. I wanna find the guy that wrote that article and interview him.
How does he feel about that now? Hip hop is like basketball. That’s why like basketball has permeated all over the planet too, because you just need a goal and a ball.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: Hip hop, you just need a mic and an MC, and someone that’s gonna play a record or s- scratch or do beats behind you. Or you can just go a cappella.
David Dylan Thomas: I’ve been reading “Decoded” by Jay-Z, and he talks about his first experience. They were just in the yard clapping, and one dude was just freestyling over the clapping for an hour. That’s all. I need a crowd and I need people with hands. That’s it.
Frederick Taylor: Exactly. That way anybody can do it, so it’s no strange coincidence that the people that do it in other areas of the world and do it really well are usually people that come from challenging backgrounds. You’re talking about the diasporas of Africa, the Americas, South America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, where they can get it. They can get in there. They can and they’re speaking their truth.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: Speaking their truth. And that’s what makes it extraordinary, and that’s what makes it so good. The problem with American hip hop, a lot of it, it’s not speaking a truth anymore. It’s been commoditized.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: They tell stories of commoditization, rather than things that really matter. Things that are extraordinarily profound. Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.
David Dylan Thomas: Motherfuck him and John Wayne.
Frederick Taylor: And that, that stirred me as a young man.
Like that spoke to me. That was the thing I knew that got under the skin of my other white friends, ’cause they would say, “What does he mean by that? What is he trying to say?” I’m trying to say that y’all are racist. That’s what- Because they don’t want, they don’t wanna hear it.
They don’t wanna deal with it.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: That’s the problem with the racists. The racists don’t wanna be called out as racists,
David Dylan Thomas: When do you think that… Th- this is a bit off topic, but not totally. When do you think that started? Because I look at history and I see a time when the word racist wasn’t bad, right?
When people would do, if, to be perfectly blunt, there would be a lynching, people would take a photo of the lynching and send it around as a postcard, and that was normal. No one was saying, “Oh my God, you’re a racist for having that postcard.” It was just, this is normal. And I’m really curious, when did it– And I’m glad it’s bad to be racist, but when did it become bad to be racist?
‘Cause I’m like, I don’t know how to shift y’all on that.
Frederick Taylor: When we had to storm the beaches of Normandy and we had to go deal with the ultimate racist where this is racism out of control.
This is racism that’s coming for you, too, and we saw gentlemen whom we had said a lot of racist things about and to, and like you had said, take pictures of their brethren lynched.
And they were still out there in the trenches fighting with us to stop the ultimate racism. One of those people was my grandfather.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh my God, really?
Frederick Taylor: He was part of the liberation of Europe.
David Dylan Thomas: My God.
Frederick Taylor: And so to no strange coincidence, when we get back from all that and we defeat evil, the narrative’s different.
The conversation’s different. Thurgood Marshall, who was a civil rights attorney at the time, who went on to become the first Black person to be on the Supreme Court, and he, he’s, he said, I’m paraphrasing here, but he said, “We are now ushering ourselves into a new era of woke culture.”
David Dylan Thomas: Yo, he said woke?
Frederick Taylor: Yes. So the term woke is a post-World War II term And this is why I get really angry sometimes at people that are misinformed.
It’s irritating. And it was something he brought up again in 1947 when Jackie Robinson integrated baseball as well. Things changed. And so this re-imagining of the term racist, that’s the era because, and I like to call it the Jackie Robinson effect because at that time, you had X number of teams in the major leagues.
You had 25-man rosters, so for every Black person you brought on a team, a white man lost their job.
And guess what? Nobody cared. Everybody was like this guy this Jackie Robinson guy, he’s way better than you, and, Don Newcombe’s way better than you. Roy Campanella’s way better than you. Hank Aaron’s way better than you. Willie Mays is way, way, way better than you.
And they don’t care. They’re like, “Pack your bags, you’re out of here.” And that’s when it ends.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: That’s when it ends. When the money hits the table, all of a sudden people are not racist anymore, or that racism needle shifts.
David Dylan Thomas: Right.
Frederick Taylor: It moves on to something else, but it– World War II, fighting, military, sports.
And then later, the music industry is one.
David Dylan Thomas: Sure. That, that makes perfect sense ’cause the other thing I noticed a shift in, ’cause I look a lot at our financial history, and post-World War II was the last time America really became anti-monopolistic, when it actually would go after banks that were too big or grocery stores that were too big.
Because we had an encounter not just with the ultimate racist, but with the ultimate consolidator of power. And for a brief moment, America’s “We don’t like it when you consolidate power. Break that shit up.” So that makes a lot of sense that there would be a shift in racism as well.
Frederick Taylor: Right.
And then snuck in there the term woke.
David Dylan Thomas: So I knew it was our word, but I didn’t know Thurgood was laying it down. I did not know it was that old.
Frederick Taylor: And then if you go back into the crates, blow dust off old hip hop albums, it’s referenced there. Jazzmatazz, Guru, a lot of that New York stuff. That was good, gritty, underground, conscious stuff. Woke was a term that was used in a lot of, lyrical rhyming.
David Dylan Thomas: I wanna, so I wanna get back to the doc for a minute, then I wanna move on to a couple other topics, but tell me about the process of getting that short made.
Frederick Taylor: It was a TV show. It was a continuing series that was on PBS. It was called “If Cities Could Dance.” They would go around to different cities all over the country and want to highlight different types of indigenous dancing to different cities. They had found out about J-Setting and they wanted to do a program in Atlanta.
But they ran into a big brick wall that the person that was the curator of J-Setting a gentleman by the name of Leland Thorpe, who had gone to Jackson State, who was one of the original orchestrators of the dance is one of the most authentic human beings I’ve ever met and one of the strongest Black men I’ve ever met.
And he pretty much told PBS no because he didn’t like the way they stepped to him.
And they weren’t really taking it seriously enough. They weren’t valuing it enough. And they had a problem. And they kinda came at him and they threw a bunch of white people at him to go do it, and that didn’t work.
And then finally I was asked to meet with him, talk to him, and he liked me. He trusted me. We bonded. He is originally from Mississippi, like myself, my family. Then we emigrated and migrated to the North, to Chicago, during the Great Migration. His family went to Detroit. We had a lot in common.
There is a certain amount of ancestral connection with heritage and specifically through the plantation system. Which plantation do you claim? Where are you from geographically as a Black person? Where were you imported? Were you imported in Annapolis, Maryland? Were you imported in Charleston, South Carolina?
Did you come through the Gulf and the Mississippi Delta? And so we were Mississippi Delta Blacks and so he and I had a lot in common, and we really kinda clicked and bonded. And then my mother’s younger brother was gay, and he unfortunately passed away of HIV. And there was a picture that was sitting on my desk at the time.
He was in my office and we were talking, and he goes, “Who’s that?” And I said, “That’s my uncle.” And I started talking about my uncle, and, my uncle’s gay. And my uncle was an original Soul Train dancer.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, we gotta do a whole podcast just about that.
Frederick Taylor: I love I love the great migration of people from the South Side of Chicago during the Soul Train era of the early 1970s.
On that train was Chaka Khan. On that train was Jody Watley. On that train was Jermaine Stewart famously sang the song, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off to have a good time. We can just drink cherry wine.” I still don’t know what cherry wine is.
David Dylan Thomas: I still know how that song goes. It’s amazing
Frederick Taylor: You will forever. You will forever.
David Dylan Thomas: Okay. So I just wanna pop back for a second to that, what plantation do you claim? ‘Cause I feel like culturally, I’m thinking about “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” and Kendrick Lamar being like, “Where you from, my nigga? Fuck who you know. Where you from?” We still identify based on where you’re from. That’s still so important to us.
Frederick Taylor: Yeah, because if we were captured by aliens and brought to another planet, and then we would run into other humanoids, we would be, “Where you from?”
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny too, ’cause like you’re reminding me of I read once that a core tenet of Afrofuturism is that the apocalypse has already happened.
And I’m like, “Of course it has.” If I wrote a story about a bunch of humans who were kidnapped from Earth hundreds of years ago, and now live on a totally different planet, and are, quote-unquote, “liberated,” but are still treated like shit, you’d be like, “Oh yeah, this is a post-apocalyptic novel.”
Frederick Taylor: I would say, y- to take it one step further, it’s not that it’s happened, it is happening-
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: Real time. And everybody is being swallowed. But people don’t like to hear that. I say to people all the time, “If you do not own an N-word, you are one.”
And I say that to white people all the time, and I actually did a little four-minute film short about it that no one will play in a festival. And it upsets people and angers them. But it’s my truth, and I hold to it, and most people don’t like to hear it. Slowly they’re getting the point, though.
They circle back later and say, “You know that thing you said to me a year ago? Okay, I believe it now.” People don’t wanna be put into the Black bucket-
I say, ’cause when these people complain about the administration this, the administration that, the overreach of the military, ICE, the police, voting, the cost of eggs. Welcome to the bucket.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. I feel like this century is like America welcome to the rest of the world the hard way.
We had it at 9/11, which was horrible, but was a Tuesday for most countries. We had it with this economic downturn, which many countries have been living with for decades. We’ve had it with now this more like totalitarian regime, which again, most other countries are like, “Oh yeah what are you talk- what’s the problem? That’s how we’ve been living for this whole time.”
And to a degree, it isn’t that we haven’t had the state killing civilians on the streets. It’s just happening to white people now, right? Like that, I feel like that rude awakening is a hallmark of the 21st century, to be honest.
Frederick Taylor: Absolutely. The unfortunate murder of the young woman in Minnesota was the one I think that really clicked with people. We shot a mother of three for doing nothing, and they finally got the point, and then they killed another man who was standing up for somebody And they saw it and they got it.
Then all of a sudden it was, oh wait, the Breonna Taylor thing, the Trayvon Martin thing, the Castillo thing, the Emmett Till thing, the Medgar Evers thing. Finally getting it.
David Dylan Thomas: And it’s this thing, this is a theme, not to make it all about myself, but this is something that I really feel strongly about the way I approach horror, and I do wanna talk to you about genre in a minute.
But is that I approach horror from this perspective of when it happens to white people, it’s horror. When it happens to Black people, it’s history. And I think when we had Breonna Taylor, when we had George Floyd, it was outrageous, but it was expected, to be perfectly honest. Well, they’re Black, and we know Black people get killed by the cops.
It’s terrible, but it happens. Whereas when white people are getting killed by the state, it’s whoa. Nobody told me we were on the menu.
Frederick Taylor: No, and it’s an acceptable amount of collateral damage. Yeah, occasionally a Black person gets killed, but that’s just the process of policing them. It’s unfortunate. We feel bad, but we’re still not gonna change the system.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: One white girl goes missing in Costa Rica, and it’s a limited Netflix series.
David Dylan Thomas: And that, that’s the one I think a lot about Native American women who go missing, and we don’t even talk about it. All the time. It doesn’t even get they don’t even get a T-shirt, you know what I’m saying? It’s in, it’s like as bad as we get it, Native Americans get it three times worse. It’s insane.
Frederick Taylor: They’re not even a peop- they’re not they’re not people. If they did not renounce their Indigenous heritage and join the United States, they were put on reservations. That we perceive them as nothing. We still think of them as nothing. We have reduced them from 20 million people to two million people, and they still don’t have any rights, and they’re still out there dying and slowly whittling away and starving off.
And that is exactly what they want for everybody else in this country who cannot be commoditized. The Native Americans never became a commodity, so they have been dissolved genocidally.
We just happened, as Blacks, to be good at something that they wanted. That’s why we’re still here. But the ones that can’t do anything, see you, bye.
But if you can, gain over 2,000 yards in a 14-game season and make three in the snow in Buffalo, New York, you can murder somebody.
That’s the game. That’s how we do it.
David Dylan Thomas: So I will say I was expecting it to get deep, but not this deep this fast, but that’s just how we roll, and I’m down with it.
Frederick Taylor: Okay. Well done.
David Dylan Thomas: But I do wanna talk a little bit about, ’cause I know that “J Setting” isn’t your only doc, it isn’t your only outlet. Tell me a little bit about some of the other films you’ve made and some of the other projects you’ve worked on in your career.
Frederick Taylor: “Counter Histories,” which is another film. It was about a counter in 1961 in Rock Hill, South Carolina. It was really trying to reimagine that incident from a vantage point that allowed the viewer to know what it feels like to have to stand up for justice and to do it in a noble, non-violent way.
And that film was another film that was on PBS as well. It’s currently on Amazon. You can go watch it on Amazon. I encourage you to go watch it on Amazon. I think it’s a great film for our youth. Also our adults too.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: The thing that it does the most that I really like is that people that have grown up in the Deep South in segregated environments and don’t know that much about Black people, it changes them.
It rewires their brain. It rewrites the narrative. It resuscitates a lot of latent trauma that they knew and had heard of as younger people, and I’m talking about people 60 and up who heard the stories or remember incidents. And what I learned from making that documentary was that people aren’t inherently bad.
People are just really poor at dealing with trauma.
And so when they see another human being traumatized, instead of running towards it, dealing with it, they, they retreat.
And they shrink, and then they bury it, and they don’t think about it, and then weeks, months, years, decades go by.
And it may never come back up again. Or it may only come up at the end of life, or maybe there’s a documentary that triggers it to come out and then it helps them to change their value system or perception about something that is extraordinarily important that they should think about.
Because I think about other cultures. I think about my brothers and sisters from Vietnam. The people I grew up with, that their families fled at the fall of Saigon, and then these people grew up with me, and they went on to go to American University or become people or whatever.
And, when I listen to their trials and tribulations, it’s as heartfelt as mine. Sometimes even more, and you already mentioned Native Americans, and then you can throw so many other cultural groups into that mix too. And I will say this, the most hardened human beings I’ve ever seen, the most oppressed human beings I’ve ever seen in my life, Eastern Europeans.
David Dylan Thomas: Really?
Frederick Taylor: Oh, where it just, it took me out. These other groups, whether you’re in, and I’ve been to Kenya and I’ve been to Brazil and Peru and Chile and Nepal and things like that, they still have the ability to find some level of happiness in their universe.
There’s still joy.
They’re still making things. They’re doing things. They’re dancing. They’re singing. They’re eating great food. The sun comes out. Man, I’ve been to like Romania and, Constanza and Bucharest. I’m telling you now, man, it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame there where you’re seeing people with no agency and 16-year-old girls forced to parade around with disgusting 60-something-year-old men.
Everybody smokes. They eat terrible food. They’re miserable, a lot of them, and they have like super rich and super poor.
And I remember being there going– This was several years ago before the, this was during the Obama years I was over there, and I remember being there and I’m saying like, “Gosh, I hope this never comes to America.”
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, geez.
Frederick Taylor: I said that
David Dylan Thomas: That was gonna be my question actually is do you see this, were you looking into the future for us?
Frederick Taylor: Completely. Absolutely. ‘Cause this is his deal. This is why he plays footsie with all of these people that are like of Russian descent and all those, it’s all that weird stuff.
Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Narrative he’s trying to create. Melania’s not Melania by accident.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I was in India, which is amazing, but it was the first time I’ve really seen poverty, like for real real poverty, not American poverty, and what was shocking to me wasn’t so much the level of it, which was still shocking, but its proximity to wealth. That I could be standing in the lobby of one of the finest hotels in the world and not five feet outside the door are people begging for food. I had never seen that kind of proximity of supreme wealth to supreme poverty before. And again, I was thinking to myself, “Is this America in 10 years? In five years,” right?
Frederick Taylor: It would. I was at the JW Marriott in New Delhi, same thing. I walk outside the door, then there are people there, children, homeless, begging. I hear you.
Yeah. No doubt. But you could go down to the beach and you could still find joy. You could still find-
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah …
Frederick Taylor: pPople selling fruits, vegetables. You hear music. Someone’s playing a flute. Somebody’s dancing. Someone’s flying a kite, whatever. I’m telling you, Eastern Europe, nobody’s doing nothing. Okay?
They’re buying and selling human beings, okay? Like it’s totally, totally different. They treat their own worse than they treat us.
We just don’t always know that.
And once you travel, you really realize that.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: That’s why we need to develop mechanisms for raising ourselves up and be less concerned about getting in on what they’re doing.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: And I say this to a lot of my friends of color all the time who obsess about the Eurocentric gaze. They want to reimagine the musical “Hello, Dolly!” with them as the star, as the ethnic person, as the star. I’m like, “Why are you doing that?” Do you, do your own thing. Come up with your own construct, your own ideology.
Stop pushing your way into a party that nobody wants you there. No one’s interested. And I honestly believe that more now than ever. You get on streaming and surf looking for something and you’re like, “Wow, there’s a lot of white stuff out there these days.” More now than ever.
It’s mind-blowing what is going on around us, and it is creating a very challenging atmosphere for anyone who is different. And this isn’t about a Black thing, and this isn’t like a podcast about two Black guys who are pissed off. Maybe subtextually it is.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: But this is two intelligent guys talking about the world, and at the end of the day, there’s a lot of people behind the eight ball.
A lot.
David Dylan Thomas: And I kinda wanna talk about that global struggle, ’cause two things I’ve found myself contracting and expanding. Like contracting in terms of being like, wow, the lens through which I have seen storytelling, I am learning, is extraordinarily narrow. I’m looking at Greek myths, Roman myths, European myths, a little bit of Asian but this very like narrow storytelling platter.
And I’m like aggressively then seeking, and you gotta aggressively seek because none of it’s being served to you. It’s okay, what are the African stories? What are the African religions? What are the African myths? What are these– What is– and learning, making White Meat, which for plot reasons necessitated learning about Yoruba and voodoo and like all these sort of like things that are interconnected I’m realizing, oh my God, there is such a great pantheon of storytelling that we could draw on and we’re just not.
And so you say we’re two angry Black men. I think we’re two very hopeful Black men in, in, in that we are realizing there is a world beyond this narrow world we’ve been trying to get into, and that there is this totally un- this totally fertile land. Even just thinking of it artistically as I want something new, I want something fresh.
Okay, here is centuries, millennia, actually the oldest myths, ’cause we started there. The oldest myths, right? Anasasi, all this great stuff, Eshu, all this great stuff is there for you to draw from and nobody else is doing it. Get in there.
Frederick Taylor: Yeah. I hear you. We need to get in there, but we’ve been made to feel afraid to get in there.
We’ve been made to feel as though we cannot and will not get anything for ourselves if we get in there. We will not be liked.
There is this unbelievable subconscious driver with marginalized people in Western culture. They desperately want to be liked by the colonials, and it’s terrible. And I’m guilty of it myself.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, sure. Me too.
Frederick Taylor: And I have to catch myself. I have to audit myself. I have to curate myself. I can’t allow myself to just be dragged into their world. One of the things that has accelerated my exit out of their world has been this Trumpian era. I can’t say it any other way except that, you know.
2016 to now, it’s 10 years of just what the bleep? And it’s shown me something about people, and it’s shown me something about myself, and it’s shown me something about life and how I wanna live it, and then that all dovetails back into my art. And there was a time when I wanted to be part of the system.
I wanted to be, I wanted to be an energetic Black filmmaker in the white system making it happen, and I don’t want that anymore. I wouldn’t want to be Ryan Coogler.
I don’t want to be who’s the guy that just directed the Michael movie? Oh, Antoine Fuqua. I don’t wanna be Antoine Fuqua. I don’t wanna be, I don’t wanna be Issa Rae.
I don’t wanna be Ava DuVernay. I don’t wanna be any of those people. I wanna be me, and what does that look like? And I don’t think it looks like it’s something that’s in the system. And so I need to find other pathways. And so by staying outside of the system, I meet people like you. In the system, I hear stories about Ryan Coogler.
I don’t know him. That’s all I have to say. And the people I know that do know him, they don’t talk to me too much because they like being around him, because he’s more important. And so the level of importance that are put on people based on their income or their awards and things like that, it’s just not the game that I’m playing.
I am looking for innovation and, my big push now is, as one of my friends was screaming at me today, she’s Chinese American and she works in the business too. She’s a producer. She’s “Make it about business. Take your feelings out of it.” Make the business call. Make the– Get yourself to the next level, so you can leverage something to move you forward.
And I think that’s the answer in digging our way out of the Trumpian era. An era that has deteriorated to the point where we are throwing gender-based slurs at the former First Lady of the United States.
Things you could never have dreamed. It’s abominable, and I’m tired of anybody that is not offended by anything like that.
I have no patience for any of it.
David Dylan Thomas: Tell me about verticals
Frederick Taylor: Verticals are the new 45 records. I have a I have many mentors of many different backgrounds. Not only Black, but Asian, Latin, Jewish. And so I have an old Jewish friend who knows the music business left and right, up and down, from beginning to end.
And so much of this business, the music business, is wrapped around the Jewish American community and the Black American community. And he said basically where we are in the film business is where we were in the late 1950s going into the 1960s, moving from the Elvis era and the crooner era and the Frankie Avalon era and the Perry Como era into the Beatles and the Stones and Motown and all of this other stuff.
And what launched it was 45s. And originally in the 1950s, 45s were in jukeboxes And you went to the sock hop and jukeboxes and soda shops and stuff like that, and you listened to jukeboxes with all your friends, or you hung out at your friend’s house who had a bunch of 45s and they would play them in the house.
One person had them. 45s became super accessible to everyone in the early 1960s, and they went to radio stations. And so you had people like, Wolfman Jack, and he would play the hits. That’s what verticals are. Verticals play the hits, the 45s. They’re short, they’re quick, but they’re interesting.
They’re Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Love Is Like a Heat Wave.” It’s the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout.” It’s the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” But these quick hits, they’re under three minutes. They’re barely three minutes long. There’s this sweet zone with pop music, three and under, preferably two and a half down, where they just get in there, get inside of you like Jermaine Stewart.
We don’t know- … if it’s “Parted” or “Cherry Wine.”
David Dylan Thomas: Listener, if you don’t have it stuck in your head now before, you’re gonna have it now. If you’ve ever heard it in your life I apologize?
Frederick Taylor: You should apologize. You should open every podcast with that.
David Dylan Thomas: I’m gonna, I’m gonna put a little clip, little licensable clip of the song in there just to make sure you at least have it for a day, ’cause if I have to live with it, you have to live with it for a while.
Frederick Taylor: If you have to live with it, everyone else does too. You have to spread this virus around. That’s nice. That’s nice.
[song snippet from “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” lyrics: “We don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time. We could dance and party all night and drink some cherry wine.”]
Frederick Taylor: That’s what it is. It’s… They’re 45s. And so the idea here with verticals is that you wanna come up with ideas and concepts that are these little nuggets of standalone- That make people become addicted to your creative sensibility.
So what is your creative sensibility? What are you selling?
So it’s like now you gotta go back into the paradigm of the Beatles, and the Beatles they wore the black jackets, the white ties, and they had the little mop top haircuts, and they’re like… and that was, you were buying into that.
And then it was like cute song after cute song after cute song, that’s what you wanna go after. So The Temptations, The Four Tops, you know, The Supremes. Barry was a genius and he turned these things into brands. So every time they came out with a new song, a new 45, you’re hooked.
And it was on brand, on brand, on brand. And so the idea here is that you wanna create verticals that are on brand, that are a part of a bigger brand that is selling something. It’s to use your film as an example, in the vertical world, it would be this world of white meat appetizer.
What does that look like? What are these other storylines that are built off of that, that now you’re creating these verticals that are episodic? ‘Cause I always wonder the, your character, the white dude that’s at the window-What happened to him?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: That’s the power of your film.
It’s I give a shit about that guy. Where’s the, what happened to him? Where did he go? What’s his deal? How do you keep going on with that storyline?
David Dylan Thomas: So can I tell you something? So I, and without getting too spoilery, there is, I’ll just say there’s a character named White Boy Kyle, and people ca-
He has maybe 12 seconds of screen time, tops. But people, when I f- when I screened the movie at Pan African Film Festival, and that, that character has a moment, people audibly gasped. And I’m like, “I had no idea people cared about him that much.” It was a… but to realize in 12 seconds, that’s the part of the magic of film, in 12 seconds I can make you care so much about a character that you will have a reaction when something happens.
And I’m like, “Wow.” So to your point even, it’s like you can build up a lot of emotional equity in a very short amount of time.
Frederick Taylor: Yes. That’s the essential backbone of Bollywood.
That’s how Bollywood works.
David Dylan Thomas: Say, say more.
Frederick Taylor: There’s 47 characters in it. They all have a screen time of about 10 to 15 seconds, but you remember them all.
David Dylan Thomas: That’s amazing.
Frederick Taylor: Okay. Yeah. You’re, y- you made a global film. You made a global film. I literally watched it and I was just like, “This film is a global film. It’s not an American film.”
David Dylan Thomas: I will say, this is my li- little humble brag, it has screened in India, because a student film group at a university I was giving a talk at said, “Hey, can we show this to our student film group?” And I’m like, “Absolutely, please. Just take pictures.” And they loved it. They had a two-hour discussion about it after, so-
Frederick Taylor: Oh, completely.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes … I believe you. So for our listeners not as familiar, ’cause I only honestly learned the term maybe a year ago, what is a vertical when it’s at home?
Frederick Taylor: What is a vertical?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: It is you watch everything 16 by 9. This is just turning everything end over end, and it’s 9 by 16. And it fits in your phone. It’s a vertical. It’s inspired by your phone because what they discovered very quickly was that when people were watching video on their phones, they didn’t turn it. It’s just a weird, it’s a weird tick in people. People wanna keep their phone on a vertical.
So what it does is it’s a game changer, and so you are forced to completely change your idea about composition, and then by changing your idea about composition, you’re changing how you tell a story. You’re changing where the emphasis is. You’re changing what the acting performance is.
And it’s in its infancy right now. Like most verticals are very melodramatic, and I find them to not be that interesting.
I think they’re kinda boring. But the potential is amazing.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: You know what I mean? If you made a vertical about, somebody surviving a bombing raid in Iran, it would be an amazing vertical.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, I’m sure.
Frederick Taylor: And so we just aren’t making verticals yet that are living on the edge. That’s what makes you, again you did it again. You not only made an international film, you made a vertical. You literally made an entire-
David Dylan Thomas: Without intending to, by the way.
Frederick Taylor: Without intending to.
David Dylan Thomas: I didn’t know the term vertical existed when I made it.
Frederick Taylor: It’s unbelievable. It was unbelievable because I was just like, “Who’s this guy?” I didn’t even think you were Black. I was just- Who is this, who is this guy? This guy named-
David Dylan Thomas: I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not, but I take it.
Frederick Taylor: It’s a complete and total compliment. … I was just blown, I was blown away. The numbers of futuristic notes that you hit on stylistically, creatively, and then also on a technical level. You’ve proven conclusively you can do something in the vertical format that can be dramatic, ironic, action oriented, dialogue driven, socially relevant, and with the participation of culture.
Right now, one of the problems with verticals is that they are void of culture.
It’s like I don’t wanna watch these verticals coming out of China about a woman who is lusting after her pool boy.
I don’t care. I realize certain people do, but I wanna see more of what you’ve got.
That would be interesting. I wanna see more of what I can do. I’d love to do, I wanna do more J setting and do it verticals, and then inside of the verticals people are learning dance steps and all these, all this other stuff you can do.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. So it seems to me like the jigsaw pieces are there. You’re not, y- ironically you’ll be one of two documentarians covering dance in this season of the of the podcast. And I think I, I may or may not have mentioned to you Kayla Watkins, who made an amazing doc called “Bumpa” about twerking and whining and kind of Afro-Caribbean dance.
But I’ll make sure the two of you, if you want get a chance to talk. But that, that TikTok was already seeding the ground for you will watch things vertically and learn dances from them. Just as a concept, that is now old hat. So it feels like there is a, all the jigsaw puzz- puzzle pieces are there for you to create in a choice.
Tell me a little more, we’re gonna start to wrap up soon, but tell me a little more about what space you wanna carve out in verticals and how you’re working in that space.
Frederick Taylor: I want to go at it from a multi-tier perspective. Right now I don’t have a lot of people that sign off on it and everybody’s really trying to focus on me doing the melodramatic stuff.
I get it. I see the relevance in why you would do it, but you can do so much more.
So I wanna do things that are journalistic. I wanna do things that are dramatic. I wanna do things that are comedy. I wanna do things that are instructional. I think there’s a lot that can be done in the vertical space.
They can be tutorials as well. And they can be windows into universes that you normally can’t get into. Because you’re dealing with a very narrow format as, as well. The biggest challenge at times is the sound quality and stuff like that but that can be overcome with a certain amount of technical prowess. But I see them as the potential to go big.
No one do- everyone laughs at me in my face when I say that I believe you can make a vertical that is so interesting and so good that then you could turn it around and make it 16 by nine, and it could get all the way back to a theater.
David Dylan Thomas: I believe it.
Frederick Taylor: I do too. I, I– and again, with yours it just convinced, I was like, “Yeah, this White Meat Appetizer, are you kidding me?” And if someone gave you that money tomorrow, if Jordan Peele called you up and said, “Hey, I got the money for White Meat Appetizer,” game on.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I’ll tell you this much. Seeing, again, going back to the Pan African Film Festival, seeing a vertical on a big screen works. The detail.
I could see things that I could not see on my phone, that I could not see. And I’m a big believer that things that people see on their phone, at home, streaming, whatever, if you give them the opportunity to see it with an audience and it’s really compelling, they will absolutely come out.
They will pay cash money to go see that thing on a big screen, even if they’ve seen it before on their phone. I guarantee it.
Frederick Taylor: You just need a smart filmmaker, and the problem is we don’t have a lot of smart filmmakers. And I’m gonna go even deeper. Within our own community, not a lot of smart filmmakers.
I mean- … we’re, we, we– too many people in our community are serving the system rather than being innovative and creative based on their own life experience. They’re spending too much time copying or trying to be on trend and doing what other people are doing instead of doing something innovative and new.
I did this really great interview with Doug E. Fresh years ago that I wanna turn into a vertical. We were just walking around in New York City, and we were just talking about the good old days of hip hop and stuff like that, and I said, “What makes the origins of hip hop, the old days, the old school, so much more interesting and better than new school?”
And he said, and I quote, “We were all different, and if you came on stage and you were anything like anybody else, you got booed off the stage.”
So you… Kool Moe Dee was Kool Moe Dee, Salt-N-Pepa was Salt-N-Pepa, LL was LL, Biz Mark was Biz. That was it. You can’t do that. That’s taken. That lane’s taken.
Find another lane. Figure it out. That’s the difference. That’s what we need to get back to. That’s what made jazz great. That’s what made blues great. That’s what made gospel great. That’s what made Motown great. They’re all different. That’s what we’re really good at is being different within- inside of our own diaspora, and now we suck at it. We’re too homogenized ’cause they’ve homogenized us.
David Dylan Thomas: We’ve been convinced to, to homogenize, right? Like the world you’re describing, the world Dougie’s describing is one that incentivizes difference. The platforms we are on now incentivize sameness.
They say, “Oh, you want this many…” ‘Cause the goal is not artistic integrity, whatever you wanna call it, or even expression. It’s get this many followers. It’s get this much whatever. And so there will be formulas for that, and whenever you have a formula, you are encouraging sameness. It seems to me that what culturally was being incentivized back in Dougie’s day was like, “No, if you want people to like you, if you want to do something that is gonna be encouraged, okay, we’re gonna set up a system where being different is the thing that’s gonna get rewarded.”
Frederick Taylor: Yes. But they don’t want different in the Black community because they’re satiated. They’re cool. We’ve given them so much, they’re like we’ve got enough. We’re fine. We don’t need any more. We don’t need any more apples. We have plenty of apples to make all different versions of apple pie with.
We got ice cream, we got souffle, we got pie, we got… they– So they don’t need any more… if we walked in the door tomorrow with “This is a new Black thing. It’s different. It’s not hip-hop, it’s not jazz, it’s not blues, it’s not gospel. It’s a new Black genre,” they would be like, “Eh.” “Eh. Eh.”
They don’t need it. They don’t want it. They’re like, “We’ll keep recycling the Black stuff that we already got, that we’ve already bought.” How many movies do you watch that have like Black music in it and no Black people?
David Dylan Thomas: Oof. That, that speaks to a larger virus infecting the creative community and especially the corporate creative community today, which is member berries, if you ever watch “South Park.”
It’s this idea of nostalgia, right? And that we’re only gonna fund nostalgia because nostalgia’s the only thing we feel is the safe bet. And in a extended way, and I did not come up with this, fucking “South Park” came up with it, that’s how you get Trump. His slogan is literally nostalgia.
“We will make America great again.” “I will take you back to the days when you felt safe.” And we’re doing it with art now, right? We’re saying, “Hey, let’s not do anything new. Let’s recycle old shit.” Which the lie to that could not be more obvious because “Obsession” is new, “Backrooms” is new.
There’s no shit like that anywhere. Fucking “Sinners” was a remix, but it was a new remix. Like it’s.
Frederick Taylor: Yeah. Yeah They wanna take us back to the days when women couldn’t get credit cards and Medgar Evers got shot to death in his driveway. They forget about that part.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Which was not even that long ago. Oh my God. We could clearly go on for another hour, but I wanna respect your time, audience time, but we will definitely talk again.
Frederick, if folks wanna keep up with what you’re doing what you get up to, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Frederick Taylor: The best way for them to do that is you can go to my business website, which is Tomorrow Pictures, which is tomorrowpictures.com, spelled the normal way, T-O-M-O-R-R-O-W-P-I-C-T-U-R-E-S.com.
There’s also my artist site, and this is where you can just Google this and you’ll get everything. And it is F-R, the number 3, D-E-R, the number 1, C-K.com, and you’ll get the artist site, or you can just type that alphanumeric code in and you will get everything I’ve ever done on the internet, and in the world, basically.
So everything aggregates to that. Another way I try to beat the system.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. You gotta have your own platform, huh?
Frederick Taylor: You gotta have your own platform. You gotta have your own– And y- you’ve gotta have a way for people to get near you and get access to you. So those are the big ways to find everything about me.
And of course you can go on Amazon, and I encourage you all to watch “Counter Histories: Rock Hill”. It’s a really good lesson in what America can and should be, and what does make America great is when we all have a voice and we can be a part of it, and one last thing really quick with “Counter Histories.”
There’s a shot that’s not in it that I always wanted to do, and ’cause it’s all set up, like 1961, these guys walk into a diner, and it’s like they sit at the counter, they get in trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I thought, what would happen if I did a shot or a scene where they walk in and no one does anything wrong to them?
They’re happy to see them. And that could’ve been 1961.
And so it’s not, “Let’s make America great again.” It’s like, “Let’s come to terms with what America is.”
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: Again. And let’s rewrite history here moving forward. And those are the kinds of films that I wanna make.
I wanna go back and I wanna make that film in 1961 where everybody’s treating each other good.
But then I get, people are like, “Oh, you can’t do that. That’s not the truth.” “That’s reality,” whatever. I don’t care about reality. Was Jimmy Stewart sitting there getting ready to jump off the bridge in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and then an angel comes and saves him?
Was that real? Was that real? No, come on. Yeah. How come white people get to celebrate, like- … the what-if’s in life, but the rest of us maligned people cannot. We are stuck inside of reality. It’s like I hate the ending of “Boyz n the Hood” because Morris Chestnut gets killed.
I think Ice Cube should’ve gotten killed. Every Black person argues with me about this ’cause like that’s reality. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I’m like, “No.” Most intelligent Black people that work hard in school actually escape the ghetto if they wanna do it, okay? That’s reality, because I’m from the South Side of Chicago, 35th, Martin Luther King, okay?
So whatever.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Frederick Taylor: That’s my reality. Not that the ghetto kid lives on and the good kid is dead. What if that film was made the other way? And I think if that film was made the other way, that film would be a real classic.
The way that it is now, it’s a rite of passage film that I think has crippled the entire genre, that every single hood film that you watch since then looks like that film stylistically. You can’t even pick the dates of hood films when you watch them. I can’t tell the difference. They look the same. They look like they’re shot the same. The exposures are the same, the lens is the same. Editing’s the same, the music’s the same, the melodrama’s the same. Get out of here. It’s just, it there’s a whole reformation that needs to happen inside of Black film art, and you took a step forward in that direction, my friend, with your film. I admire you. And you have a legion of middle-aged white women out there that fight for you in the streets, and I gotta respect that.
I don’t know how you did it. It was amazing.
David Dylan Thomas: Thank you, and I respect the hell out of your film, too. I especially loved that you spent so much time just focusing on the dance. There wasn’t a lot of exposition. It was like, let the dance speak for itself. Folks, if you get the chance to see this movie, and if you’re in LA, you will.
We’re both gonna be at Film Invasion LA in late August. Go to filminvasionla.com to see the showtimes. I’m looking forward to seeing you out there, my brother.
Frederick Taylor: You got it. You will, and we’re gonna go we’ll do the Hollywood thing and, Yeah we’ll go to dinner.
David Dylan Thomas: We’ll go to what?
Frederick Taylor: We’ll go to dinner.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We’ll do dinner. All right. My people call your people. We’ll set it up.
Frederick Taylor: Yes, we’ll make all of that happen. There’s a few interesting places right there on Hollywood Boulevard to go to go to hang out and reminisce about a time when they wouldn’t have allowed us even to walk in.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Frederick Taylor: Absolutely. Those are my favorite places to go. I like to go to the places where like, where people are not allowed to go.
David Dylan Thomas: Just get out the Green Book and go to all the ones they’re telling you not to go to.
Frederick Taylor: Exactly. Those are the ones I wanna go to. Totally.
David Dylan Thomas: All right, man. I’ll see you soon.
Frederick Taylor: All right, brother. You take care of yourself.
David Dylan Thomas: Thank you, and for the “White Meat” podcast, I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time.
