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Boston Globe
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ed Sullivan emerges as a civil rights pioneer in ‘Sunday Best'
It's a lively pop history lesson, and a bittersweet one. Jenkins, a stellar journalist and filmmaker, erudite, comically barbed pop culture and race riff 'ego trip's Big Book of Racism,' he described himself to me as 'a big, scary Black man.' His other documentaries include the hip-hop fashion study 'Fresh Dressed' and 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues,' which, like 'Sunday Best,' looks at an establishment figure whose actions were more progressive than they may have seemed during his lifetime. Armstrong is among the artists we see performing on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and its predecessor, 'Toast of the Town.' So are (deep breath) Ike and Tina Turner, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald … you get the picture. Sullivan famously had Elvis (in 1956 and 1957), and the Beatles, in 1964 and 1965. But he also had all of the above, and many more. Advertisement Every Sunday night on CBS from 1948 to 1971 Sullivan booked and championed artists he admired, regardless of color. This was a big deal, especially in the '40s and the '50s, but even into the '60s, when 'The Ed Sullivan Show' was sharing airspace with news footage of fire hoses and police dogs assailing civil rights protesters. As the doc explains, Sullivan got heat from CBS and from his major sponsor, Lincoln-Mercury, for his color-blind booking. Lincoln-Mercury dropped him in 1962; the company never came out and pinned the decision on Southern viewers' objection to Sullivan's booking, but that clearly played a part. Segregationists railed against Sullivan, who had the temerity to challenge notions of white supremacy. The doc also traces Sullivan's early life, beginning with his childhood in Harlem (then largely Irish and Jewish), where he developed a healthy distrust of racism. 'Sunday Best' leans into performance footage, which is a very good thing. Try not to get chills watching a 13-year-old Stevie Wonder blazing through the harmonica parts of 'Fingertips,' or the Jackson 5, with a pipsqueak Michael Jackson up front, jamming through 'The Love You Save.' Jenkins makes the wise choice to let many of the songs keep playing over footage that diverges from performance. For instance, the music from an early James Brown appearance keeps playing as we follow the story of how a young Sullivan, as a New York sports columnist, laid into New York University for benching a star Black player for a home game against the University of Georgia. 'What a shameful state of affairs,' we hear Sullivan say as the text of his column appears on the screen. Advertisement How, you might ask, do we hear him say this? This brings us to the oddest feature of 'Sunday Best,' and it takes a little getting used to. As onscreen text tells us at the beginning of the doc, 'Ed Sullivan's voice has been recreated in select portions of this film. His words have been taken verbatim from thousands of columns, articles and letters he wrote throughout his life.' It's a strange sensation, hearing a voice we know only from its public utterances speaking in more intimate tones, and how you respond probably depends on your feelings about the age of no-limits AI. The whole thing has a bit of a bringing-out-the-dead vibe. It bothered me at first, but before long I accepted it as part of the film's general landscape. It's an intriguing way to go right to the source, and it cuts down on the wall-to-wall talking head factor that drives so many documentaries. 'Sunday Best' can get dangerously close to anointing its subject as Saint Ed. The film has a single-minded argument to make, and it's not terribly interested in painting a warts-and-all portrait. But it makes that argument well, and with a head-nodding beat. The Motown connection is a sort of capstone for the whole enterprise; as we hear testimonials from Robinson and Motown founder Berry Gordy, still alive and kicking at 95, we realize that the label was tailor-made for Sullivan's mission of presenting Black artists to as many people as possible. It seems some civil rights trailblazers come in unlikely packages. Advertisement SUNDAY BEST Directed by Sacha Jenkins. On Netflix starting Monday. 90 minutes.
Boston Globe
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sacha Jenkins, filmmaker who mined the Black experience, dies at 53
He was 'an embodiment of 'for us, by us,'' journalist Stereo Williams wrote in a recent appreciation on Okayplayer, a music and culture site. 'He was one of hip-hop's greatest journalistic voices because he didn't just write about the art: He lived it.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up And he lived it from early on. Mr. Jenkins, raised primarily in the Astoria section of Queens, was a graffiti artist as a youth, and sought to bring an insider's perspective to the culture surrounding it with his zine Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language, which he started at 16. He later co-founded Beat-Down newspaper, which covered hip-hop; and the feisty and irreverent magazine Ego Trip, which billed itself as 'the arrogant voice of musical truth.' Advertisement Mr. Jenkins later served a stint as the music editor of Vibe magazine and wrote for publications such as Spin and Rolling Stone, before turning his attention to the screen. Advertisement 'There's a huge void, right?' he said in a 2022 interview with Okayplayer. 'There weren't a lot of documentaries about hip-hop for the longest time. I think hip-hop generated some of the strongest, most powerful storytellers of our generation with the music so it's only natural that we would create projects in the film and television realm that would have resonance.' He joined Mass Appeal, a New York-based media and content company, as the chief creative officer in 2012. Three years later, he directed 'Fresh Dressed,' a documentary that chronicled the rise of urban and hip-hop fashion, tracing elements of Black style from the antebellum plantations of the South to the world's fashion tents. Other notable documentaries included 'Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men' (2019), an Emmy-nominated four-part series that depicted the members of the groundbreaking hip-hop group from Staten Island as 'human-scaled -- determined, gifted, anxious, fallible,' music critic Jon Caramanica wrote in a review in The New York Times. 'Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James' (2021) explored the radiant and sordid career of the punk funk master, who minted anthems of debauchery including the 1980s hits 'Super Freak' and 'Give It to Me Baby,' but who also crossed the line from personal hedonism to criminal abuse. The film premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Mr. Jenkins dipped further back into history with 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues' (2022), which drew heavily from the personal writings of the artist known as Satchmo, from his reel-to-reel audio diaries and from his letters, read by rapper Nas. The film shed light on the inner racial struggles of a jazz giant who generally kept mum on the topic while becoming a global celebrity beloved by white audiences. Advertisement Mr. Jenkins's films 'were homecomings for Black folk who watch these films with the hope that it's us behind the camera,' artist and writer DJ Lynnée Denise, wrote in an essay. She argued that his work stood in contrast to white directors Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese, whose documentaries about Black music 'replicate centuries of symbolic and material imbalance between Black performers and white industry.' Sacha Sebastian Jenkins was born Aug. 22, 1971, in Philadelphia, the younger of two children of Horace B. Jenkins, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, and Monart Renaud, a visual artist from Haiti. His family moved to Silver Spring, Md., a suburb of Washington, and after his parents separated, his father moved to Harlem and the rest of the family settled in Astoria. Mr. Jenkins came of age in New York at a fertile time in hip-hop culture, as it was spreading from such areas as the South Bronx toward the mainstream. 'We grew up writing graffiti, dancing in the street, rapping in staircases,' he said. People were 'plugging turntables into lampposts on the street.' He became enmeshed in the graffiti art scene, but, as he recalled in an interview last year with the multimedia company Idea Generation, he spent 'more time thinking about graffiti and writing about graffiti and publishing magazines about graffiti than doing graffiti.' After launching Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language and Beat-Down newspaper, he joined forces with two friends, Elliott Wilson and Jeff Mao, to form Ego Trip magazine, which covered hip-hop and a variety of topics, including skateboarding and punk rock. 'White kids who like rock love hip-hop by this point,' he said. 'You can't keep putting people in boxes.' Advertisement In the late 1990s, Ego Trip expanded to books, including 'Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism!' which caught the eye of producers at VH1. The cable network enlisted the Ego Trip team to develop satirical shows including 'TV's Illest Minority Moments,' which lampooned the media's depictions of people of color, and 'The (White) Rapper Show,' a reality competition. Mr. Jenkins also published several books, including collaborating with Eminem on the rapper's 2008 book 'The Way I Am.' In addition to his wife, Mr. Jenkins leaves a son, Marceau, a stepdaughter, Djali Brown-Cepeda, and a grandson. Mr. Jenkins's tart views on race in America were on display in 'Everything's Gonna Be All White,' his 2022 Showtime docuseries that sought to tell 'a tale of two Americas, one white, one not,' featuring pointed commentary about racism from a broad swath of people of color. The documentary touched on the notion of a Black Jesus, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and 'white noise,' which Mr. Jenkins argued happens to people of color when they internalize messaging from the white power structure. 'It's a subliminal fuzz, constant, like a ringing in your ear,' he said in an interview that year with the film and television news site The Credits. 'It's always there, right, but you become used to it. If you focus on that frequency, it's going to confuse you, encourage you to make the wrong decisions, like not being conscious of casting folks of color in a film about folks of color.' This article originally appeared in
