The quality of acting varies considerably. ![]() ![]() Club scenes were shot in such a way that it was hard to tell if anyone was actually in the club. According to the By the Numbers film data site, Rocky and Taxi Driver had even lower budgets in 1976.īut the movie Sparkle proved to be an oddity: a film inspired by ’60s music, but set in the ’50s, with a soundtrack of Curtis Mayfield songs that is pure ’70s. The budget Rosenman quotes - $1.2 million - was not huge but neither was it oppressive. Instead, Rosenman said, the studio wanted a shorter running time, music by Curtis Mayfield and direction by Sam O’Steen, then and later known mainly as a film editor. They planned to have Schumacher direct and music by Motown mainstays Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. Sparkle clearly aspired to be more like Sounder, with Schumacher’s original script taking more than three hours to tell “an epic and sweeping story of a black family,” Rosenman said in the Daily Beast. But other filmmakers seized the moment to make uplifting films like Sounder, also from 1972, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. Pictures like Shaft in 1971 and Super Fly the following year helped set the tone for many of those films. Hollywood around then was recognizing the box-office potential of what came to be called “blaxploitation" - movies with African-American stars, aimed directly at the African-American audience, often with action and sex and modest budgets. It might have seemed like a good time to get such a story into movie theaters. who wrote the screenplay, bonded over their love of Motown music in the early ’70s before either had gotten into the film business - and the idea that became Sparkle is what made them want to go to Hollywood. Indeed, Howard Rosenman, who produced Sparkle, told the Daily Beast that he and Joel Schumacher. An inspiration for both productions was the story of the Supremes (and original Supreme Florence Ballard died a little more than a month before Sparkle premiered). Sparkle, played by Cara, then becomes a music star, but her success has been tempered by the suffering of many of the people she has known. It’s immediately clear that McKee is the star of the trio, but she is also the most troubled, falling into an abusive relationship with the thug Satin (Canton native Tony King) and into drug addiction. The original Sparkle starred Lonette McKee, Irene Cara and Dwan Smith as sisters who with the encouragement of a would-be music mogul (Philip Michael Thomas) become a successful singing group. While that earlier film was not a success at first, it has added admirers over the years, becoming in film historian Donald Bogle’s words “one of black America’s first cult films.” You might think that is a pitch to the fans of the late Whitney Houston, who gave her last screen performance in the film, or to the admirers of Jordin Sparks, the last woman to win American Idol and one of the stars of the film.īut there’s also considerable nostalgia underlying Sparkle, which retools the story from a 1976 film of the same name. The website for the new movie Sparkle urges folks to “gather your girlfriends for a night out” to see the movie.
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