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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Independent filmmaker accuses Malia Obama of ripping off her movie for Nike commercial
An independent filmmaker is accusing former first daughter Malia Obama of cinematically plagiarizing her work in a recent Nike commercial. Director Natalie Jasmine Harris claimed Obama ripped off a scene from her recent short film "Grace" in which two characters play "pat-a-cake" in her Nike commercial, starring WNBA star A'ja Wilson. Harris maintains that Obama ripped off the "cinematic tools" used to shoot the childhood game. "Initially, I was disappointed and hurt — not just for myself but for my entire team," Harris told Business Insider. Michelle Obama Says The 'Ultimate Job' For A Parent Is To Let Kids Fail And Build Resilience Obama's Nike commercial, "Teaching the Pro," features a young girl explaining the complex choreography of a customized game of "pat-a-cake" to Las Vegas Aces Center A'ja Wilson as she initially struggles to keep up. Harris, 27, claimed that the camera angles, shots, framing and even the color palette used in the ad echoed a similar scene from "Grace," which she described as a "Black Southern Gothic short about a girl who's being baptized and questioning her feelings for her best friend." Read On The Fox News App "If they wanted these shots that were similar to my shots, why not hire me to direct?" Harris asked Business Insider. Harris claimed she met Obama, 26, at a directors' brunch and other events at Sundance 2024, where their short films "Grace" and "The Heart," respectively, were in competition. Obama, who goes by Malia Ann professionally, was also a writer on the Amazon Prime series "Swarm." Female Athletes Direct Pointed Messages Toward Nike In New Ad The "Grace" director said her experience speaks to a larger frustration that big brands aren't willing to provide opportunities to burgeoning filmmakers. She said that brands' reluctance to take a chance on unknown filmmakers results in a loss of innovative films and original storytelling. "The route that used to work for the Spike Lees and Steven Spielbergs of the world feels less viable today. If we're continuously overlooked, how is the next generation of filmmakers going to exist?" Harris told Business Insider. Harris has enjoyed her fair share of commercial work, shooting spots for Verizon and Hyundai. Her student film "Pure" was purchased by HBO, but still, she describes independent filmmaking as a "struggle" and says she relies on freelance work to pay the bills. She said she has not heard back from Obama or Nike since she began speaking out about the similarities. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture The filmmaker claimed that she was reluctant to raise the issue, fearful of taking on a president's daughter and a major brand, but felt she had to address what she sees as a major problem in her industry. "I've poured too much into my work to just sit by and watch." Obama, Nike and Harris did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for article source: Independent filmmaker accuses Malia Obama of ripping off her movie for Nike commercial
Business Insider
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Malia Obama's Nike ad echoes my short film. It's part of a bigger problem.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Natalie Jasmine Harris, a 27-year-old filmmaker. It has been edited for length and clarity. Reps for Malia Obama, Nike, the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, and the production company Iconoclast didn't respond to requests for comment. Earlier this month, at the Denver airport on the way home from a TV directing mentorship program, I was scrolling on Instagram when Malia Obama's Nike ad with the basketball star A'ja Wilson appeared on my feed. At first, I was confused, wondering whether it was real. It featured two people playing pat-a-cake in a way that echoed an early scene from my 14-minute short film " Grace," which is a Black Southern Gothic short about a girl who's being baptized and questioning her feelings for her best friend. I'd met Malia at Sundance in 2024, when "Grace" and her short film " The Heart" were both in competition. We saw each other at the director's brunch and a couple other events. Initially, I was disappointed and hurt — not just for myself but for my entire team. I sent the commercial to friends who had the same reaction I did. One put together a shot-by-shot photo comparison. Since posting about the issue online, there have been a lot of people who don't understand my disappointment. They're like, "You didn't invent pat-a-cake." And that's very true. But it's not about the game, it's about the cinematic tools used to depict it. My cinematographer, Tehillah De Castro, noted a lot of similarities from a technical perspective, from the camera angles to the shots to the framing composition and the color palette. Over time, I've moved through that initial shock into a deeper frustration around how instances like this are very common — and need to change. It speaks to a larger issue of brands not supporting independent artists and opting for folks who already have name recognition, which doesn't breed innovative films or original storytelling. If they wanted these shots that were similar to my shots, why not hire me to direct? The route that used to work for the Spike Lees and Steven Spielbergs of the world feels less viable today. If we're continuously overlooked, how is the next generation of filmmakers going to exist? Despite early success, being a young director has been a struggle I knew I wanted to be a director from a young age. I started making documentaries in high school about social justice during the Black Lives Matter movement. A lot of my work centers joy in coming-of-age experiences, black women, and queer stories — things that are personal to me. Despite graduating from New York University in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, I've had a lot of success so far. My thesis film, " Pure," ended up getting bought by HBO shortly after I graduated, and it won the DGA Student Film Award. I also won a contest to direct a commercial for Hyundai and did a commercial for Verizon. In addition to going to Sundance in 2024, "Grace" is also a Vimeo Staff Pick and will be on Criterion in June. Still, being a young director has been a struggle. Festivals are great, but they don't pay the bills. I've taken on other full-time and freelance jobs. Right now, I'm working on my first feature, which I've spent the last several years writing and pitching. But I've often run into roadblocks with production companies and financiers saying, in so many words, that no one wants to be the first person to bet on me — coupled with the fact that I'm young and don't have an established name. I would like there to be some acknowledgment I haven't heard from Malia Obama or Nike since speaking out, but I would like for there to be some acknowledgment. I was initially hesitant to speak out, since it involves a former president's daughter and a beloved brand like Nike. Criticizing something involving the WNBA was also hard because it means a lot to me personally, and it already gets such a lack of a spotlight. But I've poured too much into my work to just sit by and watch. Sometimes it can feel like filmmaking is something that's supposed to be a hobby for the wealthy rather than something that can actually be a career. But I don't want to give up. I have a beautiful community of friends and family and colleagues fighting the same fight, and there's hope in that. I still have a lot of stories I want to tell. And I want to be a name someday, too.
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ryan Coogler's ‘Sinners' and the Art of the Deal With the Devil
In 2050, thanks to an advantageous deal he made with Warner Bros., Ryan Coogler will own the rights to 'Sinners,' the Black Southern Gothic blockbuster he wrote and directed. The contract gave him final cut and a piece of the box office revenue right from the start, too. Owning his movie about Black ownership in the Jim Crow South was, Mr. Coogler has said, a nonnegotiable. Since the film came out, these contract stipulations have been much discussed, even controversial. That has little to do with why 'Sinners' is so enthralling to watch — after all it's a genre-bending and -blending film, steeped in horror, blues and history, and even has vampires — but everything to do with the film's central theme, and why it is so resonant: the art of the deal. Negotiation is a central thread in 'Sinners,' a repeated motif about the power and consequence of deal-making in America. (This essay includes spoilers for 'Sinners.') The protagonists of 'Sinners' are identical twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, Mr. Coogler's longtime collaborator. After serving in World War I and becoming involved with Chicago gangsters, the slick-talking duo return in 1932 to their Mississippi Delta hometown to set up a juke joint, enlisting their gifted cousin Sammie to play guitar. The town, Clarksdale, happens to also be the location of the crossroads where the legendary blues musician Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil for mastery over his guitar. With a satchel full of cash and a truck full of liquor, the twins come back to the South having realized that 'Chicago is Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations.' Their for-us-by-us plan was to generate wealth by owning and operating a blues-drenched sanctuary for Black joy, a private escape from the daily terror of racial oppression. Many of the clientele are Black sharecroppers who have been forced into exploitative contracts by white landowners, a point made evident in 'Sinners' when a customer tries to use wooden coins to buy a drink. The fake money is good only at the plantation store. Nobody Black had the leverage to negotiate a good deal in the Jim Crow South. Despite the vampires in the film, the real monsters are the ordinary-seeming men, like Hogwood, the covert Klansman from whom Smoke and Stack buy the mill they are going to turn into the juke joint, who smile as they take your money and shake your hand, and have no intention of honoring the terms. During this time, legalistic disfranchisement was common for Black blues musicians, who were often unaware of how royalties worked, or were intentionally not told how they worked, or were just given a bottle of booze as payment. Bessie Smith thought she was signing a lucrative deal in 1923 with a white executive, Frank Buckley Walker, who oversaw 'race records' for Columbia. Walker crossed out the royalty clause in her contract, and Smith was given a fixed fee of $200 per recording; she thought that was a good deal for a Black musician at the time, unaware that white country artists on Columbia often had royalty agreements, even though Smith was more successful than many. Smith received a little less than $30,000 for the 160 recordings she made for Columbia even though her estimated sales reached over six million records in the 1920s. Smith died in 1937 in Clarksdale, from injuries sustained during a car crash on Highway 61, only a few miles from the mythical intersection where Johnson is said to have made his bargain with the devil. Johnson did not register any of his music and died penniless a year later, with no royalties for the 29 songs he recorded. However, his music keeps making money 87 years later for Columbia Records and other musicians covering his free, unprotected work, including Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan. All of which is the historical context for why Mr. Coogler's successful negotiation matters to more than just him. And also, arguably, why it upset some people in the film industry. On April 18, the day 'Sinners' opened, Vulture published an article titled 'Hollywood Execs Fear Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners' Deal 'Could End the Studio System.'' The reporter cited an unnamed studio executive calling the contract a 'very dangerous' precedent. The most incendiary sentence, to me, was this: 'The Coogler deal has come to be regarded as Hollywood's latest (if not nearly greatest) extinction-level threat.' When asked about the coverage on the 'Democracy Now!' program, Mr. Coogler said, 'I think a lot has been made of my deal in particular,' adding, 'I've been in this industry long enough to know what kinds of deals are possible, and nothing in this deal is a new thing.' When the interviewer asked Mr. Coogler why he thought his agreement was drawing particular scrutiny, he laughed and responded, 'I'd rather not say.' And in fact his copyright arrangement is unusual, but not unprecedented. Quentin Tarantino secured a copyright-controlled deal for 'Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.' Similarly, in news media coverage at the time, nobody treated similar deals for Mel Gibson, Richard Linklater and Peter Jackson with such alarm, or even interest. Why is it somehow out of line for a bankable auteur like Mr. Coogler, who has a $2.5 billion track record with box office juggernauts like the 'Black Panther' and 'Creed' franchises? Instead of viewing Mr. Coogler's contract as a threat, why not criticize a movie industry that has exploited Black talent since it began? Again, I know the answer, which is why I do not see Mr. Coogler's deal as a threat to what the Vulture article termed the 'time-honored industry power balance.' The power was never in balance for Black people to begin with. There is a goosebumps-inducing monologue early in 'Sinners' by the old bluesman Delta Slim, riding in a car with Stack and Sammie as they pass a chain gang of Black prisoners. Delta Slim recalls his Black friend who tried to save money honestly and move away from Mississippi only to be castrated and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan for the audacity of wanting more for himself. Slim's poetic speech of sorrow breaks into a dirge as his grief-drunk words dissipate into waves of uncontrollable moans, overtaken by a thunderhead of concentrated anguish as the groans morph into the bent, blue notes of the blues. Delta Slim slaps his thigh repeatedly like a bass drum — beat after beat after beat — an ancestral boom that resonates with the call-and-response reverberations in the leftover rhythms from the chain gang's pounding hammers made into instruments to communicate to one another across the landscape of pain. Having the power and privilege to make your own decisions is a central narrative struggle in 'Sinners.' Throughout the film, characters are making and breaking deals, negotiating their needs and desires for money, sex, power, family, love, escape, music and freedom. In an early scene, Smoke asks a Black girl to watch his car and cargo for a small fee, and then teaches her how to negotiate: to never settle with the first offer, but to counteroffer, know her worth and ask for more. In the coda of the film, we found out Sammie has lived a long life as a blues musician. (The older Sammie is played by the real-life blues legend Buddy Guy. The film was partly inspired by whiskey-sipping memories Mr. Coogler had of listening to old blues records and family stories about Mississippi with his uncle James, who loved Buddy Guy.) We found out that Smoke made a final deal with Stack (now a vampire) before he died to let Sammie live as a living testimony, an agreement made in thinking about what survives out of violence as a legacy to what came before, which is the main reason Mr. Coogler — who will be only 63 when the copyright of the film reverts back to him — fought for that copyright deal in the first place, for his children. In an interview with Jelani Cobb for 'The New Yorker Radio Hour,' Mr. Coogler talks about how hard Spike Lee had to work to get the funding he needed for his film 'Malcolm X.' 'Hearing Spike talk about 'Malcolm X' and going door to door with Black celebrities to raise money for —— ' Here, Mr. Coogler cuts off his words as if to stop himself from breaking down, followed by a shaky sigh as his emotions overtake him as they do Delta Slim in his moving monologue. Mr. Cobb then asks, 'What does that mean to you to have to do that?' Mr. Coogler pauses as his voice trembled and trailed off. 'I'm getting emotional because it's hitting me now because I'm talking about the ease of which I can make a vampire movie this expensive.' The ease that Mr. Coogler pinpoints here is why his deal for 'Sinners' is so important and crucial to me as a Black writer navigating what's possible. When I was negotiating my first book deal, I was given this piece of advice from one of my mentors: 'They will make you feel like you have to be so grateful for everything that you're not allowed to ask for anything. Ask anyway. Ask for what you need.'
