“Pac had just gotten out of jail and no one wanted to touch him,” Curtis Hall says. In late 1995, after Laurence Fishburne and other actors had passed, Def Pictures President Preston Holmes brought up Shakur’s name. Later, they took the project to Live Entertainment, PolyGram Films and Def Pictures, a PolyGram subsidiary. “The day he completed filming, he read it, called me back and said, ‘I loved it.’ ” “I sent it to Tim Roth, who at the time was doing ‘Rob Roy,’ ” Curtis Hall says. He had planned to direct and star, but after his agent read it and liked it, they decided on two tried and true Hollywood rules: “Never self-finance, and cast a star.” “Seeing Spike’s movie made me say, ‘I want to do this, and I’ll even do it without Hollywood if I have to.’ ”Ĭurtis Hall later appeared in Lee’s “Crooklyn” and also appeared in the films “Heaven’s Prisoners,” “Broken Arrow” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.” He also appeared in the TV series “I’ll Fly Away,” “A Man Called Hawk” and “South Central,” all the while learning more about the craft of directing and developing his own stories.Ĭurtis Hall wrote “Gridlock’d” in 1993 while studying with an American Film Institute workshop. “I was about to make a career change, because there was no money in Broadway, and there was a lull from the late ‘70s to mid-’80s in terms of opportunities for blacks behind the camera in Hollywood,” he says. “Seeing Spike Lee’s ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ really inspired me to become a filmmaker,” he says. Curtis Hall also has a 17-year-old son, Che, from a previous relationship.)īut soon he found his true creative passion. After 15 years of courtship, they were married last year, and Lemmons recently gave birth to their first child, Henry. (Around this time he began dating actress-writer Kasi Lemmons, who recently made her directing debut on “Eve’s Bayou” starring Samuel L. He left Juilliard three years later (“After I figured out that I didn’t want to be an opera singer,” he quips), to become a Broadway singer and dancer in 1980 for “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.” After graduating from high school and dissociating himself from his old crowd, he moved to New York City at 20 to enroll in Juilliard’s prestigious music program, studying voice. You have a small window of time, or you’ll never kick.” (Efforts to reach Curtis Hall’s parents, who live in Detroit, were unsuccessful.)īut Curtis Hall kicked and never looked back. We were like these two homeless kids, running through this maze. My friend didn’t have a Social Security card. “Because of that I had no address to list on the forms. “I was living at home and I didn’t want to know about it,” Curtis Hall says. To clean up, Curtis Hall says he and a friend went to hospitals and other public detoxification programs and were pushed from one desk to another-a situation he plays to humorous effect in “Gridlock’d.” The hardest part, he says, was getting help, not actually quitting. He says that he was never a heavy heroin user and had quit altogether by the time he graduated from high school in 1974, at age 17-but not without some tribulations.
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