Director John Singleton, who made one of Hollywood\u2019s most memorable debuts with the Oscar-nominated Boyz N the Hood and continued over the following decades to probe the lives of black communities in his native Los Angeles and beyond, has died. He was 51.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Singleton\u2019s family said on Monday \nthat he died in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, after \nbeing taken off life support. Earlier this month, the director suffered a\n major stroke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Singleton was in his early 20s, just out of the \nUniversity of Southern California\u2019s School of Cinematic Arts, when he \nwrote, directed and produced Boyz N the Hood. Based on Singleton\u2019s \nupbringing and shot in his old neighborhood, the low-budget production \nstarred Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ice Cube and centered on three friends in \nSouth Central Los Angeles, where college aspirations competed with the \npressures of gang life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For many, the 1991 release captured the \nexplosive mood in Los Angeles in the months following the videotaped \npolice beating of Rodney King. Boyz N the Hood also came out at a time \nwhen, thanks to the efforts to Spike Lee and others, black films were \nstarting to get made by Hollywood after a long absence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Singleton\n became the first black director to receive an Academy Award nomination,\n an honor he would say was compensation for the academy\u2019s snubbing Lee \nand Do the Right Thing two years earlier, and was nominated for best \nscreenplay. At 24, he was also the youngest director nominee in Oscar \nhistory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think I was living this film before I ever thought \nabout making it,\u201d Singleton told Vice in 2016. \u201cAs I started to think \nabout what I wanted to do with my life, and cinema became an option, it \nwas just natural that this was probably gonna be my first film. In fact,\n when I applied to USC film school they had a thing that asked you to \nwrite three ideas for films. And one of them was called Summer of \u201984, \nwhich was about growing up in South Central LA.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Singleton\u2019s \ndeath on Monday followed a turbulent week during which his family \nmembers made opposing court filings regarding his health. Singleton had \nbeen in intensive care in a Los Angeles hospital since he had a stroke \non April 17. A court filing last week by his mother, Shelia Ward, \nrequested she be appointed Singleton\u2019s temporary conservator to make \nmedical and financial decisions while he was incapacitated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ward\u2019s\n filing said that Singleton was in a coma. But on Friday, Singleton\u2019s \ndaughter Cleopatra Singleton, 19, filed a declaration disputing that \naccount. She maintained that her father was not in a coma and that \ndoctors did not \u201chave a concrete diagnosis.\u201d She opposed her grandmother\n becoming conservator, or guardian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Singleton\u2019s passing prompted \nwidespread praise for a filmmaker who, as his Shaft star Samuel L. \nJackson said, \u201cblazed the trail for many young film makers,\u201d while \n\u201calways remaining true to who he was and where he came from.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ava\n DuVernay called him \u201ca giant among us.\u201d Spike Lee said, \u201cWe\u2019ll miss you\n but your films will live on.\u201d Jordan Peele, the Oscar-winning Get Out \nand Us filmmaker, called him \u201ca brave artist and a true \ninspiration.\u201dNone of Singleton\u2019s subsequent movies received the acclaim \nof Boyz N the Hood and he was criticized at times for turning characters\n into mouthpieces for political and social messages. But he attracted \ntalent ranging from Tupac Shakur to Don Cheadle and explored themes of \ncreative expression , identity and the country\u2019s racist past, notably in\n Rosewood, based on a murderous white rampage against a black community \nin Florida in 1923.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He also made the coming-of-age story Baby \nBoy, a remake of the action film Shaft and an installment in the Fast \nand Furious franchise, 2 Fast 2 Furious. More recent projects included \nthe FX crime drama Snowfall, which he helped create. Starring Damson \nIdris, Snowfall returned Singleton to the Los Angeles of his youth and \nthe destructive effects of the rise of crack cocaine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDrugs \ndevastated a generation. It gave me something to write about, but I had \nto survive it first,\u201d Singleton told the Guardian in 2017. \u201cIt made me a\n very angry young man. I didn\u2019t understand why I was so angry, but I \nwasn\u2019t someone who took my anger and applied it inward. I turned it into\n being a storyteller. I was on a kamikaze mission to really tell stories\n from my perspective an authentic black perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Singleton \nwas married twice, and had five children. Besides his career in movies, \nSingleton also directed the memorable, Egyptian-themed video for Michael\n Jackson\u2019s \u201cRemember the Time,\u201d which included Eddie Murphy and Magic \nJohnson. He cast hip-hop artists and other musicians in many of his \nfilms, including Ice Cube in Boyz N the Hood, Janet Jackson and Shakur \nin Poetic Justice and Tyrese Gibson in Baby Boy.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Director John Singleton, who made one of Hollywood\u2019s most memorable debuts with the Oscar-nominated Boyz N the Hood and continued over the following decades to probe the lives of black communities in his native Los Angeles and beyond, has died. He was 51. Singleton\u2019s family said on Monday that he died in Los Angeles, surrounded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60267,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60268,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60266\/revisions\/60268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}