The year 1968 was a time of great social and political upheaval in America. Coincidentally, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington also opened to the public that year. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the museum is presenting a time capsule of that important period and the cultural icons who shaped it. The exhibit is especially timely as the nation once again grapples with political and social turmoil. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Moscow’s most famous landmarks — Red Square, the Kremlin, and the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral — are swarmed with World Cup fans doing a bit of sightseeing in between matches. Just upriver, more adventurous tourists will find an anonymous-looking apartment block whose history sheds light on the Soviet Union’s darkest days.

The House of the Embankment embodies the history of revolution and dictatorship in miniature. It lies just upstream from the Kremlin and was completed in 1931 to house the Soviet Union’s governing elite.

“These people living here were the so-called ‘old Bolsheviks’ [revolutionaries]. And they were people close to each other — in their spirit and ideology — as well as their fate,” said Olga Trifonova, who runs the House of the Embankment museum, inside one of the block’s roughly 500 apartments.

The museum displays some of the luxurious fittings and furniture the first residents enjoyed. The block offered in-house theaters and cafeterias, libraries and sports halls.

Soon, however, the ostentatious lifestyles of the residents began to look at odds with the ideals of the revolution.

In the mid-1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin began the “Great Purge” to rid the country of those deemed enemies of the working class. A million people were imprisoned and 700,000 executed. The residents of the House of the Embankment — once the elite of the revolution — were among the first in line. Arrests and disappearances created a crushing paranoia.

“The residents of the house stopped paying visits to each other. One stopped having confidence in other people,” Trifonova said.

During the 1930s, 800 of the residents were arrested. Close to half of them were executed.

Olga Trifonova’s late husband, Yuri, grew up in the House of the Embankment. His father was arrested during the purges in June 1937 and never seen again. His mother was sent to a Gulag prison in Kazakhstan. In 1976, Yuri Trifonov wrote a best-selling book about his memories, which gave the apartment block its name. He died in 1981.

“This is a story about the nature of fear. How fear mutilates a human for his entire life,” Trifonova said.

Memories of that fear appear to be fading. An opinion poll last year crowned Stalin as Russia’s most outstanding historical figure.

But the grim history of the House of the Embankment is not forgotten, according to Dmitry Taganov of real estate firm INCOM, which is selling some of the apartments on the block.

“Many buyers are scared off by the gloomy background of this House. Many people undoubtedly know about that, even the ones belonging to the younger generation.”

A younger generation that is forming its own historical image of Stalin and the legacy of Communism.
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A book about an alleged prophecy describing Donald Trump’s win as U.S. president is being produced as a movie by Liberty University, but students at the Christian college are pushing back on the film.

The production, in which Liberty University students are technicians, editors and set decorators for class credit, tells the story of Mark Taylor, a retired firefighter from Orlando, Florida. Taylor said in 2011 God told him Trump would become president of the United States. Trump won the election in 2016.

“This movie could reflect very poorly on all Liberty students and Liberty University as a whole,” states an online petition called “Cancel the Liberty University Film Programs Heretical Film Project,” created by Liberty students.

The author’s “claims to have received prophecies directly from God … do not align with the Bible’s message,” states the petition signed by more than 2,000 respondents.

Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, partnered with Christian filmmaker Rick Eldridge, owner of Reel Works Studio in Charlotte, N.C., to produce the book, which was published in July 2017. 

Liberty University staff contends that this has been an excellent learning experience for students in cinematic arts at the university.

“We think this feature-length work experience is unique to our department among film schools,” said Stephan Schultze, Liberty professor of cinematic arts and director of the film. “This distinction gives our students a skill set that makes them ready for the workforce upon graduating.”

Movie production experience

Students agree they have gained hands-on experience working on the movie production. But some said they object to the alleged prophecy and the message.

In their online petition, they cited a later interpretation of the Bible, 1 John 4:1, that suggests believers “test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

“We should be very wary of modern-day prophets,” the petition says. “Mark Taylor has claimed God told him that electing Trump will save the world, which is unbiblical at best and heretical at worst.”

“Liberty’s mission statement and purpose is to be a light on a hill and to train champions for Christ,” the petition continues. “Openly supporting both a ‘modern-day prophet’ and Trump as a school does not convey this mission.”

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. is an outspoken Trump supporter and was appointed to the Trump Task Force for Higher Education in 2017.

Schultze said the Liberty students who worked on the film served in positions that usually go to people with at least five years of experience in the film industry.

The Liberty students pushed back, saying they were “of the distasteful opinion that the producer had only come to Liberty to make his film because he could get free student labor that would significantly lower the cost of making the film,” according to a source who asked to remain anonymous. “Many of us felt used at times, which was another reason why we petitioned against the film in the first place.”

Students were given other options to working on the prophecy film, but those were of lesser experience, the source said. Well into the making of the film, students said, “it became clear … after the initial script reading and the many rewrites … the film did have a political agenda, which we were against.”

Biopic-style film

Schultze said the film is a biopic that “chronicles real-life events, following a fireman [Taylor] suffering from PTSD who believes he has heard a message from God, that Donald Trump will be the next president.” He did not respond directly to whether he thought the film was heretical but said he would “advise people to watch the movie first.”

“I think the film will be well-received, and people will be inspired to know that our students have created a narrative film whose quality is strong enough to warrant a national theatrical release on more than 1,200 screens,” he said.

“This is been a great experience for students, and I believe it will provide them with the edge they need for employment upon graduating,” Schultze added.

He said that Liberty University did not receive or pay any fees in exchange for the movie being produced there. He said there was a “cost benefit to student involvement,” but there was also “a risk to engage newly skilled labor still in a steep learning curve. It all evens out in the end because additional shooting days are required for the teaching process to take place on set. Our students’ education is a huge benefactor in the process.”

Students contested that the experience had enhanced their learning.

“Many do not want this movie on their resume and some are even considering … dropping out,” the student petition said.

Eldridge of Reel Works said he wants the film’s message to resonate with its viewers.

“We hope that they will be inspired by all that is great about our country,”  Eldridge said of the audience in an email to VOA. “All the while we hope that they will be entertained by the story and the many voices who will speak during our reflective conversations after the dramatic story.”
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It might seem meshuganah — crazy — to stage a beloved musical in a language that most of the audience won’t understand. But Tevye the dairyman and his family will speak Yiddish in an off-Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey.

 

Previews start Wednesday for the show, which will be the first-ever U.S. production of “Fiddler” in the language its characters would have spoken.

 

“I always knew what this play was about and that’s how I had the chutzpah to tackle it,” Grey said during a rehearsal at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, which is housed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. “We work in English first on the scenes so that everybody understands the characters, and the third or fourth time we do it in Yiddish, and we just keep at it.”

There will be supertitles in English and Russian for theatergoers who don’t know their schmaltz from their schmutz.

 

“Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in 1964 starring Zero Mostel as Tevye and ran for eight years. It has been a favorite of schools and community theater groups ever since and has been revived on Broadway four times. Its songs including “Sunrise, Sunset” and “If I Were a Rich Man” are familiar even to people who’ve never seen the show.

 

Based on stories by Sholom Aleichem originally written in Yiddish, “Fiddler” is set in 1905 in a Jewish village in czarist Russia.

 

A Yiddish version of “Fiddler” translated by actor and writer Shraga Friedman as “Fidler afn Dakh” was performed in Israel in 1966 but was never staged in the United States until now.

 

In the Yiddish version of the show, the song “To Life!” doesn’t have to be translated from “L’Chaim!” — It’s just ‘L’Chaim!” “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “Ven ikh bin a Rotschild,” from a story by Aleichem about a man who imagines he were as wealthy as a member of the Rothschild family.

The new production shows how decades of work to preserve Yiddish by organizations including the Folksbiene — Yiddish for World Stage — have paid off.

 

“For more than a generation we’ve had an explosion of contemporary Yiddish arts and culture by musicians, poets, theater makers, scholars and writers who have studied the language and its history and its incredible volume of modern literature and eclectic music,” said Alisa Solomon, the author of “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” published in 2013.

 

Solomon said “Fiddler” is “free to just kind of be itself in a way that 50 years ago it couldn’t be in some circles because there was an absence of that vibrant Yiddish culture.”

 

Yiddish, which is based on German with elements taken from Hebrew and other languages and is written with the Hebrew alphabet, was once spoken by millions of Eastern European Jews but fell victim both to the Holocaust and the pull of assimilation. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won a Nobel Prize for his stories written in Yiddish, famously said the language “has been dying for a thousand years, and I’m sure it will go on dying for another thousand.”

 

Immigrants to the United States built a thriving Yiddish theater scene that launched the careers of famed acting teacher Stella Adler and stars such as Edward G. Robinson. The Folksbiene was founded in 1915 and was once one of more than a dozen Yiddish theater companies on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It presents plays from the Yiddish theater canon as well as new work and adaptations of Yiddish literary works such as “Yentl,” based on Singer’s story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.”

 

Grey’s father, Mickey Katz, was a musician and actor who performed Yiddish comedy songs, but Grey said he doesn’t speak much Yiddish himself and has been learning while rehearsing.

 

Grey watched as the actors rehearsed the tavern scene from “Fiddler” in which Tevye agrees to let the butcher Lazar Wolf marry his eldest daughter. To a non-Yiddish speaker, the most easily understood words were schnapps and vodka.

 

The 86-year-old is best known for his role as the master of ceremonies in “Cabaret,” a musical that improbably turned the rise of Hitler into popular entertainment.

 

“He brings a whole other dimension in terms of his theatrical knowledge and sense,” said Zalmen Mlotek, the Folksbiene’s artistic director. “It’s an experience.”
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It was 50 years ago the sci-fi epic “2001: A Space Odyssey” by author Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, opened in theaters across America to mixed reviews. The almost three-hour long film, was too cerebral and slow-moving to be appreciated by general audiences in 1968. Today, half a century later, the movie is one of the American Film Institute’s top 100 films of all time.

Film director Douglas Trumbull was a special photographic effects supervisor on the “2001” set. He describes Kubrick as a perfectionist and an innovative genius, who spent four years producing the film.

“He started out with the intention of making a more conventional movie, with dialogue and suspense and character development and drama and things that movies are normally are made out of. And during the production he began stripping away all of the conventions of normal melodrama because he was working on this 70mm giant widescreen Cinerama process and the movie progressively became more immersive. And the more immersive it became and the more experiential it became the less you had to talk about it,” says Trumbull.

To create this immersive experience Kubrick built “a centrifuge set, the big center piece of the movie” as Trumbull describes it. 

The cameras were tied on the rotating set and were filming in 360 degrees. This is how Kubrick created the illusion of the spacecraft crew walking from the floor to the ceiling. And then there was the music.

“The movie differentiates itself in many ways with using classical music rather than a score which underscores every moment and the composer will often gouge the strings at the moment you are supposed to be afraid. Kubrick did not want any of that manipulation,” says Trumbull.

The music of Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz is in step with Kubrick’s crisp, slow moving images of space: an otherworldly spectacle watched on huge Cinerama curved screens in 1968.

Many describe the effect as ‘hypnotic,’ enhancing the message of “2001:A Space Odyssey,” that humanity’s intellectual advancement was aided by alien intelligence.

Kubrick steered clear of images of stereotypical aliens. Instead, the alien presence appears suddenly, through a looming black monolith, transmitting signals that teach apelike anthropoids how to use tools for hunting and survival. Millions of years later, in Kubrick’s imagined high tech world of 2001, the aliens make contact again through the monolith.

This time, the sleek rectangle prods humans towards an exploration voyage to Jupiter.

“And they get to Jupiter and that’s where the transformation takes place.” By “transformation,” Trumbull means the evolution of Dave Bowman, the only surviving astronaut aboard Spacecraft Discovery 1, into a noncorporeal entity after he makes contact with aliens through a stargate that transcends time and space. Trumbull, takes credit for the visual effects that created the famous Stargate.

“I seemed to be able to come at it with some new solutions for Stanley that no one had thought out before and he began to trust me. So, I would go to him and say ‘I think I have the solution for the Stargate,’ for example, that was one of the high points for me on the movie. And it was this idea that you could take photography and open the camera shutter for a long period of time, several seconds, and move lights and blink them on and off in patterns and create three dimensional light streams for the star gate, which seems to me to be in perfect harmony with the idea of the Stargate which of itself was supposed to be a transition through time and space,” Trumbull says.

Other innovations followed.

“There was one artist who was in charge of painting the Earth for example, no one had any photographs of the Earth yet, because they had not added orbiting satellites yet,” says Trumbull. “And so, he worked out this technique painting with water colors on glass and then painting the clouds on glass and then going back and scratching it with a razor blade which started creating things that simulated the way clouds naturally form on the Earth. Then, I painted all the stars in the movie. All the stars are spattered white paint from my airbrush onto black shiny paper and I’ve worked out this technique of reducing the pressure of the airbrush until it started to sputter, and it would sputter stars which would become completely irregular and very natural looking, not like I painted them with a paintbrush, which would look artificial.”

Trumbull compares Kubrick’s filming of “2001” to today’s all-immersive Virtual Reality filmmaking:

“You know, the time when the ‘2001’ was made, it was in a time of Cinerama and these 70-millimeter spectacles of “Sound of Music,” “West Side Story,” and giant-screen theaters and you would go out, it was a big deal to go out to see a big-screen movie.”

Today, he says, the equivalent all immersive 360-degree filming and viewing would be virtual reality.

“A lot of people want to have their virtual reality experience, they want to go into another dimension, they want to have some experience that transcends their everyday reality. That’s what I think virtual reality promises.”

Equally significant to the film’s technology is the plot.

“The story it was trying to express was extremely cosmic and very big. Because the idea was that some super intelligent highly evolved civilization way beyond our imagination that to us would look like a god would be incomprehensible to us, like magic, was intervening in human affairs from time to time just to make sure we got through,” says Trumbull. 

A powerful sub plot was the antagonistic relationship between man and artificial intelligence. Hal, the ship’s malfunctioning central computer, and Bowman, clash over the ship’s control. 

Bowman prevails. His psychedelic-looking passage through the Stargate ends in a static hotel room the aliens have recreated from his memory in order to make contact with him in a different dimension. There, on the bed, Bowman, a very old man, is dying before he gets transformed into a transparent star child.

To celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary, artist Simon Birch recreated that hotel room at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. Exhibit curator Martin Collins explains the lasting power of the film.

“The movie did not seek to pose specific answers to its largest questions. What would be the fruits of space exploration, what would be the potential meaning of contact with extra-terrestrials, what would be the possible transformations that might occur to humanity as it undertakes exploration outside the planet? So, all of these larger questions are kind of implied here in this room and I think we hope that these visitors will sit back a little bit and think about why this room is here and think about this larger set of questions that Kubrick and Clark posed in “2001: (A Space Odyssey).” 

The film has been remastered in HD format and has been released in IMAX theaters to celebrate its 50th anniversary. It feels as contemporary as ever.

“I think the movie has stood all these 50 years because it’s unique, it’s spectacularly beautiful, it’s 70mm giant screen. You have to see it on a giant screen to say ‘ah, now I understand why it’s so beautiful, and why these shots last so long, because they are worth looking at. And then the story is this very cosmic evolutionary future looking. And so, when the movie is over, there is a lot to think about,” says Trumbull.
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The weirder it gets, the more Lakeith Stanfield looks right at home.

 

It was Stanfield, as the bodysnatched Andrew Hayworth, personifying the nightmare of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” In Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” his cosmically lackadaisical pot-smoking philosopher Darius is the epitome of the show’s freewheeling surrealism. And in Boots Riley’s comic and caustic social satire “Sorry to Bother You,” Stanfield is the entry-level telemarketer Cassius (“Cash”) Green, whose swift rise introduces him to a darkly dystopian world.

 

“I do find I’m a little more comfortable than the average person in strange situations, which is probably why I’m an actor,” says Stanfield. “I’ve been in some strange situations. Like orgies. And I was in an orgy in this movie. It wasn’t strange to me at all. I had no reservations about getting naked. I was supposed to be naked in this, full frontal.”

 

He grins. “Maybe I am, I don’t know.”

 

Since his acclaimed feature-film debut in 2013’s “Short Term 12,” Stanfield, 26, has become one of the most arresting, unpredictable, and in-demand actors in Hollywood. He has played Jimmie Lee Jackson (“Selma”), Snoop Dogg (“Straight Outta Compton”‘), Miles Davis (“Miles Ahead”) and, um, Chandler, in Jay-Z’s “Friends”-style music video “Moonlight.” In even his soberer parts, Stanfield has a disarmingly laid-back, unflappable presence, like his antennae is tuned to a different frequency than everyone else.

 

Glover, the “Atlanta” creator, vividly remembers first meeting Stanfield.

 

“He barely talked to me,” Glover said in an email. “He was not concerned with getting the job at all. He was already living in a different dimension than the rest of us.”

 

“Sorry to Bother You,” which opens Friday on the heels of ecstatic reviews, Stanfield may have found the best feature-film vehicle yet for his particular dimension. The movie is a years-long passion project for Riley, the Bay-area hip-hop pioneer and activist, who along the way also spoke to Glover and Peele about the role. It’s a wild, anti-capitalist romp through workplace America, all seen through the dazed eyes of Stanfield.

“What holds the movie together — which is why I picked Lakeith — is there’s all this crazy stuff happening but you have to believe that character,” says Riley. “If it’s an actor that’s like, ‘Oh, this is how I show I’m scared. This is how I show I’m confused’ — it wouldn’t work. Lakeith doesn’t care about what his face looks like. He just gets to that emotion.”

 

In the film, Cassius is catapulted into overnight success once he begins using what an older employee played by Danny Glover terms is “your white voice.” Stanfield’s rise, though, has been predicated on remaining himself.

 

“It’s a hard thing to be yourself and be available,” Stanfield said in a recent interview in Soho. “It’s much easier to use the white voice, which I’ve also done. But at some point, I become exhausted with it and I have to say what’s on my mind and do what I feel. Part of that is the reason why people put cameras on me.”

 

Stanfield has previously channeled into music his underprivileged upbringing in the Southern California desert city of Victorville. In eachof the 2015 music videos for his hip-hop duo Moors, Stanfield (who recently apologized for a freestyle with homophobic lyrics) returns to an image of drowning on the seafloor.

 

“At the time I made those, I felt smothered by circumstances,” says Stanfield. “There was a lot of family drama at the time. I watched a family member that I love try to kill themselves by suffocation. I was writing from that place. The reason why you haven’t seen very much follow-up to that kind of material is because, luckily, I haven’t been in those kinds of situations.”

 

Drawn into acting by a high-school drama class, Stanfield came to Los Angeles at 18. He recalls spending hours staring at Echo Lake in between auditions, with nothing else to do.

 

“I was homeless. And I was hungry sometimes,” Stanfield says. “But I didn’t really view it as hard. I always kept a positive idea about it. I remember being in my car listening to Jimi Hendrix and eating McDonald’s and being like: One day, I’m going to remember this moment. And I still do.”

 

Stanfield’s breakthrough came via Destin Daniel Cretton’s college short film “Short Term 12,” which five years later became the feature about a foster care facility for at-risk teens. By then, Stanfield was in Sacramento working at a marijuana factory. His character, who gradually comes out of his shell, mirrored Stanfield’s own journey. But any reticence is now long gone.

 

“I always want to expand,” says Stanfield. “I can learn something from everyone and everything and hopefully I get to play a dog that is also a cat, that is also a man and a woman and a flower so I can just be all versions of life.”

 

“Playing a flower would be awesome,” adds Stanfield, smiling, before referencing his “Atlanta” character. “It’s a very Darius thing to say.”

 

Exactly where Darius ends and Stanfield begins can be difficult to define. A lot of Darius’ eccentric serenity comes directly from Stanfield, who improvises much of Darius’ non-sequitur musing. “In some ways, he is me,” says Stanfield.

 

“I think he’s not acting. Acting is pretending. And Keith doesn’t seem to pretend much,” explains Glover. “Darius, like Lakeith, is living in the now. I can honestly say Lakeith is the only person in the world I know who could play Darius.”

 

There’s some method to Stanfield’s madness, even if the method is the sort that worries directors. Riley discovered that himself, when he realized Stanfield didn’t know his lines as shooting approached on “Sorry to Bother You.”

 

“And he’s like: ‘I don’t usually do that until right before,’ says Riley. “His brain is still going through a process of finding the words. It might just be a millisecond more, but it’s not that polished thing. That makes the lines more real for him. That’s what all the fantastical elements and the absurdity rely on.”

 

Last summer, Stanfield had a baby with his girlfriend, actress Xosha Roquemore. He has his biggest budget film yet coming in October: “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” In a since-deleted Instagram post, Stanfield noted of the largely Swedish cast: “I’m the only black person in this film.”

 

But having grown up gravitating toward movies that he saw himself in, Stanfield likes the idea that “Sorry to Bother You” could be “some kid’s ‘Menace to Society’ … but with less guns.”

 

“Now, black bodies can occupy space where we have these fantastical and absurd things happening, which we haven’t seen,” he says. “You can’t do that when you’re too busy trying to make yourself seem human. We can still talk about those things, but now we can also talk about these other things.”
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“Space Jam 2?” A whole new “House Party” franchise? 

With the leadership of LeBron James, anything is possible. 

As James comes from Cleveland to Los Angeles looking to take the Lakers to more championships with a blockbuster $154 million contract announced this week, he could also push those two 1990s properties closer to reality and go from part-time presence to major player in Hollywood. 

James hasn’t yet spoken about his plans for Los Angeles. But if he wants to, he’s already shown he can act, and not just in that good-for-an-athlete way. 

His one real film role, playing himself in the 2015 Amy Schumer film “Trainwreck,” directed by Judd Apatow, won big raves.

The Associated Press’ Lindsey Bahr called him “a comedic revelation.” Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post said he showed “expert, deadpan timing.” 

James’ co-stars agreed. 

“He was really good. Like everything with him it was very effortless,” said Bill Hader, who played the movie’s male lead with James as his sidekick and previously acted with James when he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” “He’s always listening. I know actors that don’t listen, they’re just waiting to say their line. He listened.”

Hader said there was frequent improvisation on “Trainwreck,” and LeBron easily kept up with the sketch comedy pros like Hader. 

“You’ll never believe this, but he was super confident,” Hader told the AP with a laugh by phone from the Toronto set of the film “It 2.”

“But not cocky,” Hader added.

“I remember Chris Rock was on set and rattled off a line suggestion really fast for LeBron, and LeBron said it back during the scene verbatim,” Hader said. “I remember thinking, “I can’t do that.” 

He wouldn’t be the first Laker to try acting. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal had their share of famous, and infamous roles. And Kobe Bryant ended up with an unlikely Academy Award for an animated short based on a poem he wrote about basketball.

Whether or not he appears on screen, James has already begun a major media career that can only get a boost from LA. 

Gone are the days when athletes had to be in a major market to make it in film and television, as James himself has shown through his years building his brand in Cleveland. 

But there’s nothing like face-time for becoming a force in Hollywood. 

James and his business partner Maverick Carter have a production company, SpringHill Entertainment, that has a deal with Warner Bros. and office space on the legendary movie company’s lot, where he could become a regular. 

“Certainly the proximity will make it easier for LeBron personally to be part of future projects,” said David Schwab, an executive vice president at Octagon, a global sports and entertainment marketing and management firm. “The advantage of a market like New York, Los Angeles and Golden State is the ability to have coffee, lunch or dinner daily” with key decision makers. “In a smaller market you don’t get those consistent opportunities,” he said. 

Schwab said James’ partners at Warner Bros. and elsewhere are most likely “excited that he’s in Los Angeles as they could possibly use LeBron personally to close business deals with future partners of their own.”

James, via SpringHill and his digital film company Uninterrupted has already brought some projects to big and small screens, with many more in the works.

Here are some highlights:

"Space Jam 2.'' The idea of James reviving the 1996 movie starring another candidate for greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, has been in circulation for several years. The movie with Jordan battling animated aliens alongside Bugs Bunny and his Warner Bros. cartoon buddies brought mixed reviews and eyerolls at the time, but has become a cult classic. Justin Lin of the "Fast & Furious'' films has been attached as director. 
"House Party.'' Stephen Glover and Jamal Olori of "Atlanta'' are writing a script that James and SpringHill hope will revive the franchise that starred Kid n' Play and spawned three big-screen sequels from 1990 to 1994. 
"Smallfoot.'' James will have another chance to show off his comic chops as the voice of a skeptical yeti in Warner Bros' animated film. 
"Now We're Talking.'' A digital comedy series on Uninterrupted that features two rival professional football quarterbacks who become broadcasters and frequent pro athlete cameos is about to enter its second season. 
SpringHill is also producing several more television projects including the game shows "The Wall'' and "Do or Dare'' and "Rise Up,'' a documentary about the civil rights movement for the History Channel. 

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