On Sat, 15 Oct 2016 15:40:08 -0700 (PDT), Russ Letson
<
russ.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I haven't seen the movie either but if it was focused on his
> isolation era, I would say without reservation that Bill Evans (sax -
> not piano) would qualify as close to a "white buddy" as anyone I can
> think of...
Miles has referred to Gil Evans as his best friend in his autobiography.
> Was the buddy in question a muso?
No, a made-up character played by Ewan McGregor. A journalist, maybe
from Rolling Stone or something like that.
> Like I said, I haven't seen the movie and to be very clear, I find the
> insistence that the script include a "white buddy" in order to
> bankroll it reprehensible.
The belief seems to be that black people will go to see "white" movies
but many if not most white people won't go to see a "black" movie
(although whites will go to see blacks in starring roles, which is
somehow different from a "black" movie). Once they had a white
character, they had studio interest.
This attitude could be true or not true, I really don't know. I don't
go see most "white" movies either, so I'm not knowledgeable. I probably
go to less than one movie a year in a theater, on average. For a long
time TV has had better character development and more interesting story
lines. And with Netflix, etc., there's less reason to go. Hmm, not
unlike what happened to live music with radio, TV, records, CDs, tapes
and digital...
For what it's worth, Don Cheadle is an excellent actor. His talent is
wasted in the movies that have gotten the most people to see him
(Avengers, Iron Man). I found his role in ER to be the best character
of that season and he was pretty riveting in Hotel Rwanda. I haven't
had the chance to see Miles Ahead yet as the local theater that had it
showed it at screwy times (1:00 PM and 9:00 PM on weekdays and like
that. It was weird).