american black

Cool Ass Effie Brown

I consider myself a guy with his ear to the ground but I have been sleeping on Effie Brown. In case you haven't been paying attention either Effie is a hollywood producer. A Black, Female, Hollywood producer who has her own production company called Duly Noted.

Duly Noted is kicking off its first year with eight films on its slate, half of which have already either secured financing or appear close to doing. She recently did an interview for IAVF Independent:

Brown arrived in Los Angeles with absolutely no connections to the film world. “I was just a black girl from New Jersey, the only person I knew who ever went into film. My family back East were like, ‘you’re going to LA to go to film school? Are you high?’”...

...Once in Tinseltown, Brown called the Black Business Bureau and told the operator she wanted to work on a black film. “It was very ghetto fabulous,” she remembers fondly. “The operator put me in touch with her cousin and her cousin, called someone.” Brown scored her first job as an intern on Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats (1991), and her days of sweeping cigarette butts began.
 

But what really gave Brown her big break was participating in IFP’s first year of Project Involve, where women of color were introduced to people in the film industry through a mentoring partner. There, Brown met producer Laurie Parker (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and music supervisor on We Don’t Live Here Anymore), whom she is still working with years later. Despite a potentially bumpy start, Parker went on to open many doors for Brown. She says: “In my first interview with Laurie Parker, I was so arrogant, I said something stupid like ‘I’m going to be as big as Oprah.’ Thank god she thought it was cute.”...

"I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school" (Tyler Durden, Danielle Gray and the Supreme Court)

I always get kinda Tyler Durden-ish  whenever I think about the Supreme Court. Ever since the 2000 debacle trust in the judiciary  has skewed downward. The power they abused in that Presidential election has now come to bite them in the proverbial ass and all of us will suffer for it for years to come.

That's why I was kinda surprised to read an admitted  federal judicial starf***er's post about incoming law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Danielle Gray. She seems like the kind of person the Justices and other young people need to be hanging around. Maybe the new over-achieving Black chick will be able to knock to sense into the heads of her soon to be power-broker colleagues. (And please do not confuse her with  Chantel Febus , a Janice Rogers Brown in training, clerking and trading lynch mob stories with Justice Clarence Thomas).
 

1. Danielle Gray (Harvard '03/Garland '03-'04)

Tidbits:

(a) after clerking for Big Pimpin' Feeder Judge Merrick Garland, Danielle Gray worked on the policy staff of Barack Obama's Senate campaign, then joined the Washington office of O'Melveny & Myers (her current place of employment);
(b) originally from Long Island, she went down south to Duke for college;
(c) not surprisingly, she is "an ardent Blue Devils fan," who "adores J.J. Redick and most of all Coach K";
(d) "she performed superbly in a 1L Ames [moot court] competition against two current members of the Elect, Michael Gottlieb and [Dorothy] Hien Tran (who were also outstanding, and who are now Danielle's good friends)";
(e) Danielle "came up with an incisive interpretation of Shaw v. Reno during a Law of Democracy class at Harvard Law School that was thereafter known as the 'Gray Thesis' (I'm not positive, but the Gray Thesis may have shown up on the exam)";
(f) she was one of the three primary authors of the Harvard BLSA (Black Law Students Association) amicus brief in Grutter v. Bollinger;
(g) she was voted "most likely to be a Supreme Court justice" by the HLS class of 2003 (the honor won by future Stevens clerk Sam Spital in 2004);
(h) she has "a keen sense of humor"; and
(i) she is "an all-around delightful person," "one of the most charming people you'll ever meet" -- "[i]f you don't like Danielle, you are per se a bad person!"

It's nice to see people like Ms. Gray having a chance to clerk despite the cheap-labor conservatives who have taken over the courts.

Underneath Their Robes has profiles of all the the folks who will be clerking at the Supreme Court, organized by justice: WHR, JPS, SOC, AS, AMK, DHS, CT, RBG, SGB. Very interesting reading. 

Weekend Notes

In Tampa we had a visit today by Kerry. They expected 1200 to attend the rally. Over 15000 showed up.

CinemaNow Gets "Fahrenheit 9/11" Exclusive: Which doesn't really mean anything, firstly because
you can easily find copies of the movies for streaming and download online...example, check out Russell Beattie's site or if you are really into democratic online video propaganda (like I am!) check out the Never Forget site.

It includes fun clips like Rice's 9/11 Commission Testimony and the other famous female cheap labor conservative Britney Spears' and her gum smacking support of Bush.

Keith Olbermann had some interesting things to say on his MSNBC 'blog':

...And I think the political analysts have forgotten to examine the psychology of an electorate under the stress of war and fear. For the longest time, even when Mr. Bush’s approval ratings were at their apex in the post-Afghanistan and immediate post-Saddam periods, I kept wondering if he wouldn’t fall victim to the Winston Churchill effect.

Mid-20th Century British politics aren’t taught much in American schools any more, but it has fascinated me always that in the spring of 1945, with Hitler dead, England’s gamble to fight the Nazis having been vindicated, and his own gallantry and leadership acclaimed universally, that the British promptly voted Churchill out of office in favor of a first-time Prime Minister in Clement Attlee. It astonished Churchill, and British pollsters, and world leaders in general...

And in case you didn't hear: The Miami Dolphins have filed a lawsuit against former running back Ricky Williams, who retired abruptly before the start of training camp and owes the team nearly $9 million.