Reginald Hudlin, director of films like “Boomerang” and “House Party,” never expected to be going to the Oscars as a best-picture-nominated producer of a slavery-era spaghetti Western by Quentin Tarantino.
“I didn’t think it was happening when it was happening,” Hudlin says, laughing.
The wide-ranging career of the 51-year-old filmmaker has included a three-year stint as President of Entertainment for BET, executive producing TV shows like “The Boondocks,” writing the Marvel comic book “Black Panther” and directing episodes of “Modern Family” and “Everybody Hates Chris.” So when Tarantino called up Hudlin to ask if he wanted to help produce “Django,” he was stunned.
“Quite frankly, I just didn’t believe him,” Hudlin recalled in a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. But Hudlin had long known Tarantino, who told him that a conversation they had had years earlier about Hollywood’s depictions of slavery (or lack thereof) helped lead Tarantino to write “Django Unchained.”
A week later, Hudlin was in Louisiana scouting locations for the film that would eventually land five Academy Awards nominations and gross more than $340 million worldwide. He shares the best picture nomination with producers Stacey Sher (who produced Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”) and Pilar Savone (who has risen in Tarantino’s productions since being the director’s assistant on “Kill Bill”).
Hudlin is the most prominent African-American behind the scenes of the hit film, which courted the black community ahead of its release and mostly won its support. Spike Lee was one notable exception. (He refused to see it, saying “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust.”) And a limited-edition line of action figures of the film’s characters — including slaves and slave-owners — drew protests and eventually the dolls’ withdrawal from sale.
“We knew from the beginning that we were working with nitroglycerin,” says Hudlin. “Was there a tremendous amount of discussion and conversation and analysis to make sure we were calibrating this thing exactly right? Absolutely. It was explosive material, but I always had confidence that as a team, we would deliver the right movie.”
For Hudlin, “Django” represents the kind of film he’d like to see more of: original movies with multi-ethnic casts that don’t reuse well-trod genre tropes.
“Django” goes against the conventional thinking that neither films starring black actors nor Westerns can find large audiences abroad. It’s been a huge success internationally, taking in more than $187 million.
“If those historical models were always correct, we wouldn’t be talking right now,” says Hudlin. “Those films travel because the world is represented in those films. The audiences are voting with their dollar saying: We want more diversity.”
The success of “Django” has already spawned much chatter about a possible sequel, which Hudlin grants he’s had “extensive conversations” with Tarantino about. But for now, he’s planning to just enjoy the Oscars, which he’ll attend with his wife and mother. With Ben Affleck’s “Argo” the generally accepted front-runner, Hudlin says he’s not “polishing my acceptance speech,” but proudly going as only the fourth black best picture nominee.
“Hopefully,” he says, “there will be a day soon where we don’t count anymore.”
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More