Black billionaire Johnson on making movies, money

Kam Williams

Robert L. Johnson was born in Hickory, Miss., on April 8, 1946, the ninth of 10 children born to parents Edna and Archie, who later moved the family to Freeport, Ill. The bright young Bob earned a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Illinois before heading to the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University to pursue a master’s degree in international affairs.

After graduating from Princeton, Johnson embarked on a career in media, beginning with stints at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Urban League and the National Cable Television Association. Then, in 1980, he took a loan of $15,000 to launch Black Entertainment Television (BET), the first cable network aimed at African Americans. Full story

’07 Newport festival pays tribute to jazz legends

Kevin Cox

America’s oldest outdoor jazz festival returns to New England next week when the 2007 JVC Jazz Festival descends on Newport, R.I., from Aug. 10-12.

This year’s edition of the festival, first established in 1954 by producer/promoter George Wein, pays tribute to jazz legends Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and William “Count” Basie on the 50th anniversary of their historic Newport performances.

“One night this past fall, I was home listening to a reissue of one of those great 1957 recordings at Newport,” said festival artistic director Dan Melnick, “and it occurred to me that we should acknowledge the 50th anniversary of some of those sets at this year’s festival.”


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‘Caddy’ needs a trip to the chop shop

Kam Williams

In the 1980 comedy masterpiece “Caddyshack,” the late Rodney Dangerfield stole the show as a nouveau riche tycoon who outraged the old-moneyed members of the exclusive country club he was thinking of buying. The running joke in that fish-out-of-water classic revolved around his bull-in-a-china closet boorish behavior and bad taste as he offended the uptight members of polite society.

“Who’s Your Caddy?” resurrects the same premise, but essentially does so in blackface, relying on the racist notion that you can take a brother out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the brother.

The picture stars Outkast rapper Big Boi (a.k.a. Antwan Andre Patton) in the Rodney role, recast and typecast here as C-Note, a mythical hip-hop icon from Atlanta who’s “getting his pimp thing together.” Full story