13734: AT&T Directs Diversity.

Adweek reported on a new AT&T diversity-mentor program that connects young filmmakers with celebrity talent—including Octavia Spencer and Common. Gee, it’s odd that the telecommunications company didn’t tap acclaimed director Milana Vayntrub for the project.

AT&T Is Pairing Young Filmmakers With Celebrity Mentors to Bring Diverse Voices to the Screen

Hello Lab’s new program supports rising talent

By Sami Main

AT&T’s Hello Lab, a millennial and Gen Z-driven content studio, frequently partners with YouTube creators to help them produce out-of-the-box projects that just happen to be sponsored by AT&T.

The studio announced today a new program that will partner young filmmakers with award-winning professionals from the industry to help them create the project of their dreams.

AT&T refers to this as a diversity-focused initiative as it deals with issues and narratives from people of color, the LGBTQ community and women. Each young filmmaker will be paired with a mentor and an entire team of advisers like studio and production company executives, agents and attorneys.

Academy Award winners Octavia Spencer and Common are two of the mentors this year, along with Rick Famuyiwa, Desiree Akhavan and Nina Yang Bongiovi.

“There are a lot of film programs out there designed to empower young filmmakers,” said Octavia Spencer, in the press release for the announcement. “But the word ‘empower’ is a sort of a catch-all, isn’t it? What I love about this program is that it’s tactical. It’s enabling young filmmakers to make actual, physical work. It’s giving them the first crucial part of their reel.”

Spencer is mentoring Gabrielle Shepard with Mike Jackson, a partner at John Legend’s Get Lifted Film Co.

The five filmmakers in the program will debut their short films on DirecTV Now in the fourth quarter of 2017; AT&T’s Hello Lab will help the young group create high-quality work, and the support team will provide help with pitching their work, managing budgets and directing character-driven narratives.

“I wanted to be a part of this program because opportunity is everything. Connecting with young filmmakers, such as Nefertite Nguvu, is an honor,” said Common. “It’s the young and gifted visionaries who take the arts to levels we haven’t seen.”

Common will mentor Nguvu with Shelby Stone, the president of production at his company Freedom Road Productions.

“I am blessed to have the career that I do, and hope to be able to support and inspire her artistic vision and goals through the AT&T Hello Lab Mentorship Program,” he said.

“Nurturing the next generation of creative minds is crucial for the entertainment industry,” said Valerie Vargas, svp of advertising and Creator Lab for AT&T. “The AT&T Hello Lab Mentorship Program gives voice to filmmakers that may otherwise be silenced, and we can’t wait to see the ideas this unique group of creators develop.”

9597: Maya Angelou Uncommonly Irked.

From The New York Post…

Rapper N-bombs poet pal

Maya lyrical lashing

By Larry Getlen

It might be the most uncommon hip-hop beef ever.

Legendary poet Maya Angelou told The Post she’s horrified that one of her biggest fans, the rapper Common, put her on a song peppered with the “N” word — which she abhors.

The song “The Dreamer,” off the album “The Dreamer, The Believer,” features a poem that Angelou penned and recited at the rapper’s request. It urges people to follow their dreams, with such lines as “From Africa they lay in the bilge of slave ships / And stood half naked on auction blocks /… and still they dreamed.”

Common’s lyrics, however, include such lines as “Told my n---a [Kanye West] I’m ’bout to win the Grammys now” and the boast “N---as with no heart, I’m the pacemaker.”

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet was petrified when she heard the lyrics.

“I had no idea that Common was using the piece we had done together on [a track] in which he also used the ‘N’ word numerous times,” Angelou said.

Angelou said she never knew Common used the “N” bomb at all, calling it “vulgar and dangerous” to the black community.

“I’m surprised and disappointed. I don’t know why he chose to do that. I had never heard him use that [word] before. I admired him so because he wasn’t singing the line of least resistance.”

Common tried to squash the squabble, insisting that he’s spoken with Angelou about his use of the “N” word — and claiming they have agreed to disagree.

“She knows I do use the word,” he told The Post. “She knows that’s part of me.”

But he admitted he never bothered to tell her he’d be using the word on the track she worked on.

“I told her what ‘The Dreamer’ was about and what I wanted to get across to people,” he says. “I wanted young people to hear this and feel like they could really accomplish their dreams.”

Common’s dreams in the song include living in Miami with “exquisite thick bitches.”

Angelou and Common met several years ago when they recited poetry at the same benefit. Since then, the two have grown tight. He has rapped at her birthday bash, and she once said he could be her son.

Common said the best lesson he has learned from Angelou is to “continue to be true to your voice.”

This is the second time this year that the rapper’s lyrics have gotten him in trouble. The White House was slammed in May for inviting him to a poetry event there because of anti-police lyrics, including “Tell the law my Uzi weighs a ton” and a line about President Bush: “Burn a Bush, ‘cause for peace he no push no button.”

8782: UnCommon Controversy.

From The New York Daily News…

By inviting Common to the White House, Barack and Michelle Obama miss a golden opportunity

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

The conservative backlash against the Obama administration’s decision to invite Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., the rapper known as Common, to the White House on Wednesday night for a poetry slam is both overblown and off the mark.

Citing the lyrics of a poem that Common recited during an HBO appearance, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and even the New Jersey State Police have all joined the chorus of voices depicting the emcee as “dangerous,” “controversial” and a ghetto “radical.” In fact, he is none of these things. Common, a Chicago-native formerly known as Common Sense, is — as far as these things go — a socially conscious lyricist who has toiled in relative obscurity for most of his career, and to some degree, still is overshadowed by his far more flamboyant and ignorant colleagues. He is what used to be called a “backpack rapper,” meaning that your white, pot-smoking college roommate would be exponentially more likely to find him interesting than would any gun-toting thug on the street. To criticize him as some diabolical “threat” to God-fearing, law-abiding Americans is both disingenuous and willfully blind to the overall body of his work.

However, there are some real reasons to be disappointed with the White House over this invitation. The truth is that the first black First Family has — or perhaps I should say “had” — an unprecedented opportunity and platform to push black America forward and away from the dumbed-down and omnipresent influence of hip hop music and culture. Michelle Obama could have used the occasion of her highly publicized poetry slam to highlight and promote the work of literary artists who are not part of the hip hop echo chamber. In fact, that is what she did do, but these other artists have been forgotten in the controversy surrounding Common. Why was it necessary to invite him in the first place?

As Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, put it, Common was invited to the event “partly because of his efforts to bring poetry to audiences that don’t get to experience it. And we think that’s a positive thing.” This is a problematic justification for a couple of reasons.

First, these audiences are precisely the ones that most need to be shown that poetry — and for that matter, literature, self-expression, black identity and life in general — exist outside of a hip hop vacuum. Using a rapper, even a backpack rapper, as the means of reaching out to these audiences only reinforces the very provincialism the White House is supposedly seeking to counter.

Second, it is our sad reality to find ourselves in an era in which the bar for what is considered to be “positive” is set so low that anyone who rhymes words together for a living and refrains from advocating selling drugs may be said to fit the label. No, Common is not the negative force so many conservatives would now have us believe he is. But neither is he anything all that great, either. He’s pretty neutral in the grand scheme of things.

On the other hand, the Obamas, since they took the national stage by storm several years ago, were and still are in many of our eyes truly positive examples not of black people but of Americans in general. On more than one occasion, the President has spoken candidly and bravely about a slew of cultural traps that continue to bedevil our nation’s black youth. And when he has spoken, we have listened. This is why it is so dismaying to see him undermine his laudable message and example through his and his wife’s sometimes too-close proximity to hip hop artists and powerbrokers.

We don’t need the Obamas to tell us that Common is a great poet or that Jay-Z and Lil’ Wayne are cool entertainers. That is the message we hear everywhere around us. What we do need desperately is for the Obamas to use their unrivaled visibility and influence to push us in new and uncomfortable directions. Sadly, this was another missed opportunity to do just that.

Williams is author of “Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd.”