‘He craved an Oscar’: James Baldwin’s long campaign to crack Hollywood
The Guardian -

He pitched slave-ship dramas to Ingmar Bergman, cast Marlon Brando as a bisexual man and wrote a Malcolm X screenplay that horrified the FBI. Why was this cinephile spurned by Hollywood?It’s fair to say James Baldwin wasn’t a fan of The Exorcist. “It has absolutely nothing going for it,” he wrote in his 1976 memoir-meets-criticism collection The Devil Finds Work. “Except Satan, who is certainly the star.” William Friedkin’s 1973 horror hit about a possessed schoolgirl might have caused havoc in...

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