By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders.
Tyler Perry
Tyler Perry is on a role making film after film. There's been one a year for the past three years, and now he's going into production on two this spring and summer. The latter one is A Jazzman's Blues, and Perry does double duty acting and directing.
Interview: Tyler Perry Has Jazzman's Blues
"I play a jazz singer in 1947 who's in love with a woman that's passing for white, who's married to someone in the town," Perry said. "I meet up with a Holocaust survivor who becomes my manager and my character becomes the biggest jazz singer in the world and comes back to get this woman. It's a straight drama. It's a departure from anything I've done. It was written 12 years ago. So I had to do these movies in order to have the leverage to do this one."
As Perry continues to deal with dramatic issues from spousal abuse to child abuse and divorce, the Holocaust also comes from personal encounters. "My mother worked all her life at the Jewish Community Center in New Orleans, where she cared for all of these children. As I got older, I got intrigued by it because I didn't know what it meant to be Jewish. I thought there were black people and there were white people. Period. As I was growing up, I realized there was a Holocaust museum not too far from my house so I went and met this woman named Franka. She was speaking to a bunch of children, children that my mother was helping at the community center. She talked about how she survived and it blew me away. I left with her on my heart and on my mind and I started writing this story. Being in New Orleans and Bourbon Street and the music and the jazz and walking from end to end, it all kind of came together for me."
The script is still out to actors, but Perry has high hopes. "The people who are reading now, and maybe I shouldn't say this, to play my mother, I want Diana Ross. And to play the Holocaust survivor I want either Ben Kingsley or Alan Arkin. Those are my top ideas, so we'll see what happens."
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