05/26/2026
My love of film began on Saturday afternoons at the Melba, a neighborhood theater in Baychester in the Northeast Bronx. Those afternoons were devoted to Blaxploitation films; a subgenre made from the scraps Hollywood offered an audience it never fully valued. Still, those movies put people who looked like me on screen, and that mattered. I didn’t need American Graffiti; I had Cooley High, a story I connected with as a Black kid from the inner city, one that let me imagine my own high school years as full of joy and possibility as Preach and Cochise’s.
By the time I reached high school in the 1980s, those films had mostly vanished. Where full Black stories had once existed, I was now expected to settle for Black characters in minor roles or, at best, as comic sidekicks. Now and then, a film had a Black lead, but it rarely filled the gap those earlier movies left behind.
Now, however, the cinematic landscape is changing. As viewing platforms multiply, the moment is right for a new wave of Black cinema to deepen cultural conversation. Just as Melvin van Peebles and Gordon Parks once sparked my imagination, I hope to inspire the next generation of Black moviegoers and emerging Black filmmakers, while also giving those less familiar with Black life a vivid entry point into its rich storytelling traditions.
To that end, I founded Cool Oz Productions, a Brooklyn-based film production company dedicated to developing character-driven sci-fi and suspense films rooted in Black folklore told against an urban backdrop. We are currently developing our first feature, Gabriel’s Horn. As its writer, I envisioned a Black Heaven, one where all its occupants are Black and an archangel who, struggling with his faith, abandons Heaven in search of a new foundation. In parts of this country, portraying Heaven as Black is considered blasphemous, no matter how thoughtfully realized. But for the kid who grew up in Baychester, it fulfills a promise he made to himself more than forty years ago, sitting in a darkened theater on countless Saturday afternoons.
