At the crossroads of artistry and addiction, director Lee Daniels finds his connection with the late blues icon Billy Holiday.
“I had to tell her story because it lived with me on so many different levels,” Daniel told The Post. “Not only as an artist, but also as an artist who struggles with drug addiction.”
61-year-old Daniel, in his new film “The United States vs. Billy Holiday”, revealed Friday’s substance abuse in Hulu on Friday and the 1940s jazz singer’s troubles with the federal government. Film stars Andrey Day as Billy Holiday, Which has already been nominated for two Golden Globes Display.
Holiday’s painful childhood and painful tale of toxic life has been made famous on the Broadway musical of the 1972 classic “Lady Siz the Blues,” Diana Ross, and the musical “Emerson Bar & Grill,” on Broadway. Audra Macdonald in 2014.
But in his tribute to the veteran songwriter, Danielle chose to focus less on Holiday’s troubled past, and more on her ailing relationship with federal agent Jimmy Fletcher.
“It’s not a biopic,” Daniels said. “It’s really a detective love story.”
The affair began when Fletcher was openly tapped by Harry Anslinger, the head of the racist Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to take him to the holiday for his heroin use.
But Anslinger’s real motive for targeting Holiday was to stop him from singing his anti-Semitic anthem “Strange Fruit”.
‘She calls social injustice when no one else is there.’
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“I feel cold thinking about those songs,” Daniels said. “They are very powerful because she calls social injustice when no one else will.”
“Strange Fruit” was originally a poem written in 1937 by Jewish high school teacher and civil rights activist Abel Meropol. The Bronx native wrote the poem after seeing a ghoulish picture of a double lynching, and set the words for the music for the holiday to begin the performance. In 1939 in racially integrated New York City nightclubs.
The protest song highlighted the violence perpetrated by white people who murdered black Americans, hanging them from trees in the isolated south.
Between Holiday’s opioid abuse, the spectacle of extramarital affairs – including an intimate relationship with actress Tallullah Bankihead and repeated stress in prison on a drug charge, the film reaches a climax: a horrifying scene, in which the holiday is a terrible one Crime stumbles upon.
“[The lynching scene] The hardest thing I had ever done before in my life. “
Lea daniels
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Daniels said, also directing the Hollywood blockbuster “Precious” and “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”
In the scene, Holiday wanders off his tour bus and sees the children weeping in front of a signature of the Ku Klux Klan, a burning cross. His father helplessly tries to save his mother as his limp body hangs from a branch.
At the time, Holiday vowed to continue performing “Strange Fruit” despite attempts by the FBI to silence him.
“He didn’t want to be a hero,” Daniels said. “She does not think of herself as a civil rights leader, even though she was one. She only knew that she had to sing this song. “
Daniels and Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks wrapped up the film ahead of the nationwide demand for social justice that led to the murders of George Floyd and Bryo Taylor in 2020. Daniels said he hoped the film would inspire the Senate to pass Emmett. The AntiLinching Act, legislation that would officially punish hate crime.
‘I want this film to open the dialogue that promotes change.’
Lea daniels
“I want this film to open the dialogue that promotes change,” Daniels said. “If we are working to remove systemic racism, I think we will have a better America.”
The Holiday Call for Change, “Strange Fruit”, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978, declared a “Song of the Century” by Time in 1999 and added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2002.
As a tribute to Danielle’s late Lady Day, who died of cirrhosis, who was handcuffed to a hospital bed a few months before she was born in 1959, the filmmaker says she approved the film.
“On the last day of the shooting, I dreamed that I saw Ms. Holiday sitting in a 1950s car,” Daniels said.
“I asked him, ‘Is it okay that I’m filming you?”
He said, ‘Are you going to correct me?’ She then smiled. ”
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