Click here to see them in 1973 on the cover of Ebony
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Mag: Ebony Magazine
Opening night cast
Jennifer Holliday – Effie White
Sheryl Lee Ralph - Deena Jones (Moesha TV SHOW)
Loretta Devine – Lorrell Robinson also appeared in the film
The choreographer worked with Michael Jackson – CLICK HERE
The Cast
Beyoncé Knowles as Deena Jones.
Jennifer Hudson as Effie White.
Anika Noni Rose as Lorrell Robinson
The choreographer worked with Michael Jackson – CLICK HERE
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Click Here: Read Part 1
Click Here: Read Part 2
Click Here: Watch a Video of the Photo Shoot
Q: How does it feel to know you have changed history? Do you think about that a lot?
A: Yeah, I do, I really do. I’m very proud that we opened doors, that it helped tear down a lot. Going around the world, doing tours, in stadiums, you see the influence of the music. When you just look out over the stage, as far as the naked eye could see, you see people. And it’s a wonderful feeling, but it came with a lot of pain, a lot of pain.
Q: How so?
A: When you’re on top of your game, when you’re a pioneer, people come at you. It’s there, who’s at the top, you want to get at them.
But I feel grateful, all those record-breaking things, to the biggest albums, to those No. Is, I still feel grateful. I’m a guy who used to sit in my living room and listen to my father play Ray Charles. My mother used to wake me up at 3 in the morning, ‘Michael, he’s on TV, he’s on TV!’ I’d run to the TV and James Brown would be on TV. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
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Click Here: Read Part 1
Click Here: Watch a Video of the Photo Shoot
Q: Another big moment was the Motown 25 performance …
A: I was at the studio editing “Beat It”, and for some reason I happened to be at Motown Studios doing it–I had long left the company. So they were getting ready to do something with the Motown anniversary, and Berry Gordy came by and asked me did I want to do the show, and I told him ‘NO.’ I told him no. I said no because the Thriller thing, I was building and creating something I was planning to do, and he said, ‘But it’s the anniversary …’ So this is what I said to him. I said, ‘I will do it, but the only way I’ll do it is if you let me do one song that’s not a Motown song.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘Billie Jean’. He said, ‘OK, fine.’ I said, ‘You’ll really let me do “Billie Jean?” He said, ‘Yeah.’
So I rehearsed and choreographed and dressed my brothers, and picked the songs, and picked the medley. And not only that, you have to work out all the camera angles. I direct and edit everything I do. Every shot you see is my shot. Let me tell you why I have to do it that way. I have five, no, six cameras. When you’re performing–and I don’t care what kind of performance you are giving–if you don’t capture it properly, the people will never see it. It’s the most selfish medium in the world. You’re filming WHAT you want people to see, WHEN you want them to see it, HOW you want them to see it, what JUXTAPOSITION you want them to see. You’re creating the totality of the whole feeling of what’s being presented, in your angle and your shots. ‘Cause I know what I want to see. I know what I want to go to the audience. I know what I want to come back. I know the emotion that I felt when I performed it, and I try to recapture that same emotion when I cut and edit and direct.
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Q: How did it all start?
A: Motown was preparing to do this movie called The Wiz … and Quincy Jones happened to be the man who was doing the music. Now, I had heard of Quincy before. When I was in Indiana as a child, my father used to buy jazz albums, so I knew him as a jazz musician.
So after we had made this movie–we had gotten pretty close on the film, too; he helped me understand certain words, he was really father-like–I called him after the movie, out of complete sincerity–’cause I’m a shy person, ESPECIALLY then, I used to not even look at people when they were talking to me, I’m not joking–and I said, ‘I’m ready to do an album. Do you think … could you recommend anybody who would be interested in producing it with me or working with me?’ He paused and said, ‘Why don’t you let ME do it?’ I said to myself, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.’ Probably because I was thinking that he was more my father, kind of jazzy. So after he said that, I said, ‘WOW, that would be great.’ What’s great about working with Quincy, he let’s you do your thing. He doesn’t get in the way.
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Article Headline: LaToya Jackson on: fame, family and her future in Paris – Interview – Cover Story
Article Date: July, 1992
Article Source: Ebony Magazine
For months she seemed to be everywhere–exposing everything and shocking almost everybody.
Week after week, you couldn’t look at a newspaper, magazine, or TV talk show without seeing LaToya, flanked by her manager/husband, defending her decision to pose nude and write that book, Growing Up In The Jackson Family, the best-selling autobiography in which she calls her upbringing “stifling and manipulative” and accuses her parents of abusing her mentally and physically.
Not surprisingly, the book enraged her parents, who fervently denied all of their daughter’s accusations and blamed Jack Gordon, her manager/husband, for “brainwashing” their middle daughter and turning her against them. “Writing this book was therapy for me,” LaToya says today, insisting that not only did Gordon not influence her to write the book, he had nothing to do with her decision. If LaToya could have anticipated the scope of her parent’s fury, she was unprepared for the reaction of the Black community which was swift and severe. “Black people were very angry with me for writing the book,” says LaToya, who moved first to London, then Paris, following a “stressful and difficult” promotional book tour. “A lot of people didn’t believe me, or didn’t want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.”
Eventually, however, LaToya says she grew to understand the public’s anger. “People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image,” she sighs. “But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me. Now that it’s out, I feel free–like a bird that’s been let out of a cage. For the first time in my life, I feel free to live my life, my dreams.”
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REMOVE THAT SCARF! YOUR HANDSOME!
Awww…
