Latest news with #CosbyShow
Evening Standard
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
This Bitter Earth at Soho Theatre review: Billy Porter makes an assured directing debut
Pleasingly, though, the play refuses to settle for being *just* about the politics or the love affair, or to follow predictable tramlines. There are nice digressions into the morals of Googling your partner's parents, the legacy of the Cosby Show and why Barack Obama was a revelation for white people not black people. Each man learns how the other takes up space differently in society. That Jesse won't dance is at least as galling for Neil as the fact he won't march.
Daily Mail
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Jennifer Lopez's producing partner shares shocking information on Marilyn Monroe's 'murder' in tell-all book
Jennifer Lopez 's producing partner is sharing some of Hollywood's darkest secrets in a new book. Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas has drawn from her years in show business to write her debut novel, Climbing in Heels. On Tuesday she talked to People about the page turner as she offered excerpts. And one of her stories has to do with the death of Marilyn Monroe at age 36 in 1962 as she offered a Hollywood insider's take on it. 'I was working in the theater department and one day an old man came shuffling up and said he was here to see my boss,' she recalled. 'He said to no one in particular, "They killed Marilyn." I said, "Excuse me?" 'He said, "I didn't want it to happen. I really liked the kid. She called me Uncle Milty." But she was just getting out of control ... so they killed her.' When Goldsmith-Thomas later asked her boss who the man was, she showed her a book with photos of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis and JFK's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford and told her. 'Milt Ebbins. There was a time when his name could open any door in Hollywood. He was Peter Lawford's manager. He was the keeper of their secrets,' she said. Milton Keith Ebbins was an American trumpeter, bandleader, songwriter, talent manager and movie/television producer. He began his career as a trumpet player and bandleader in the early-1930s. He died in 2008 at the age of 96. Elaine used to be a secretary before she started producing movies. Her book follows three young women working at one of Tinseltown's biggest talent agencies and some of its biggest stars including Julia Roberts, Madonna and Nicolas Cage. Goldsmith-Thomas, who began her own career at the William Morris Agency in the early 1980s, told Page Six it was like working in the 'Wild Wild West.' 'You know, people like Harvey Weinstein were not the anomaly, they were the norm,' she told the outlet. Details in the book include a male assistant who is allowed to listen in on his boss while he is having sex with actresses auditioning for a role. 'That was a story I had heard from a trainee who was allowed to listen in as his boss, that was his bonus … his little treat. His boss let him listen in as he f***ed actresses.' Goldsmith-Thomas recalled her own close call when she met Bill Cosby. The Cosby Show star threw a luncheon for all the William Morris secretaries to show his thanks for the success of the sitcom. During a brief encounter, the Emmy winner asked her about her future plans. She had recently graduated from college and Goldsmith-Thomas told the comic she would love to represent him one day. 'Later, I got a call from the executive secretary on the first floor saying, "Mr. Cosby was very impressed by you. And we're going to give you contracts to sign, bring them over to his hotel, The Beverly Wilshire,"' she explained. 'And I went into the bathroom, I was really excited getting ready — oh my God, I felt seen, I felt really seen. 'And my friend who worked for the president of the agency happened to be there. I told her and she said, "Don't do it." I said, "Why?" She said, "Don't do it." 'Now she didn't say anything bad would happen … there was just something about the way she said it that frightened me enough that I didn't go.' Cosby has been accused by some 60 women of drugging and raping them. He was convicted of aggravated indecent assault in 2018. The conviction was later overturned, and Cosby, who has denied all the allegations, was released in 2021. Writing the book 'made me look back,' she recalled, revealing that when she was still fresh in the business when agents in Los Angeles would have their secretaries send cocaine cross-country in something called the 'New York pouch that went back and forth to New York overnight.' Sexual harassment was common in the workplace when the Second Act producer was still new in the business. 'I mean the guys in the mail room, they'd go, "Hey, could I have a little keppy?" — meaning, "Can I have a little [oral sex]?" I'd go, "How can you ask me that? We're friends" … "Well, you don't ask, you don't get," they'd say.' Lopez and her future producing partner met when they were both attending a performance of Cabaret starring the late Natasha Richardson in 1998 and the two connected 'on a very visceral level.' Together they have worked on more than a dozen projects together including Hustlers, Kiss of the Spider Woman, which will be released in October, and Office Romance, in which Lopez is starring with Ted Lasso's Brett Goldstein. It was the Hustlers star who insisted Goldsmith-Thomas write the book. 'Jennifer is extraordinary because here's a dancer who became an actor, who became a singer, who became a global brand, who is probably one of the biggest stars on earth and she's incredibly kind,' she said of her friend. 'I felt when I worked with Jennifer that I had a partner — that she put her shoulder next to mine and we'd push. It sounds funny, but the sky wasn't the limit; it was a resting place.'
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
HillmanTok: a Cosby Show-inspired college is thriving on TikTok even as Black education is under threat
In 1987, the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World made its US TV debut and followed the elder child, Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet), as she studied at her parents' alma mater. The fictional historically Black college (or HBCU), Hillman, would go on to become a byword for Black excellence. 'The influence of kids wanting to go to school, period, I think is very powerful,' one of the stars of the series, Jasmine Guy, said while touring HBCU campuses with her former castmates in 2024, 35 years after the sitcom ended. 'Because they could see themselves there.' The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Hillman College is credited with driving record levels of enrollment at actual HBCUs in the 1980s and 90s, and remains a source of inspiration for Black creatives to this day. The actor-screenwriter Lena Waithe had the fabled campus in mind when she launched her production company, Hillman Grad. 'I want to call it something that is close to my heart, and that is the world of A Different World and what that show represented for me and so many other people,' she said. Four decades later, that fantasy world lives on and finds itself reckoning with the reality of a second Donald Trump administration hellbent on rolling back diversity programs and gutting the Department of Education. On TikTok, the hashtag HillmanTok has become a free online space where Black scholars share their expertise in subjects that the administration is trying to excise from libraries and school curricula. Anyone who scrolls to their content on TikTok and sticks around for the lesson is part of the class. 'I'm mindful of the weight of this particular teaching and this particular time,' says Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina A&T, the country's largest HBCU. 'Honestly, it feels a little ancestral.' Last fall, Barlow posted an introductory two-minute TikTok video for her African studies class; 250,000 users subscribed to the class channel overnight and within a week it hit 4m views. 'I thought it was going to be a trend for a short time, and then we'd move on to the next thing,' says Barlow, who posted the video on the same day Trump retook office and rescinded a federal TikTok ban. But then a sixth-grade math teacher named Cierra Hinton seized on the enthusiasm and started the hashtag HillmanTok. She encouraged Black educators to post instructional videos under the banner, and was inundated with hashtagged submissions. Like Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter, another digital social justice movement was born – the world's first crowd-sourced HBCU. In an emotional response video, Hinton took a measure of satisfaction in helping 'people come together and build something that is bigger than we ever imagined, something that means so much'. HillmanTok class subjects run the gamut from US history to mathematics to culinary arts. There are even electives on African American food studies and Stem careers. 'I am finally about to post the syllabus,' Carlotta Berry says in the greeting for her Engineering 101 HillmanTok course. 'You can learn asynchronously by watching any of my videos.' The HillmanTok educators aren't limited to real-world academics like Berry, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana. Shannan E Johnson, a former creative executive at the Syfy channel, has a course on screenwriting. The music journalist Touré has a course on the prehistory of hip-hop. 'This is actually a reprise of the class I did 20 years ago at NYU,' he joked. 'We're overenrolled, as usual.' Just as A Different World regularly dealt with weighty subjects such as war, homelessness and the Aids epidemic at the risk of losing advertiser support, HillmanTok also offers culturally urgent lessons on resistance and restorative justice. 'People have always been trying to limit and marginalize the impact and effect of Black education,' says Jelani Favors, the director of North Carolina A&T's Center of Excellence for Social Justice. 'But it was those teachers opening up their classroom doors, pouring into young idealists and finding ways to unlock their potential to engage in the deconstructing of Jim Crow and white supremacy.' This is all happening against the backdrop of a Black college enrollment gap in which Black men account for 26% of the student body. All the while Maga donors add insult to injury by trashing the value of HBCU education overall. 'Howard was not Harvard,' the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said in a dig at the former vice-president Kamala Harris's scholarship at Howard University, the most prestigious HBCU. 'You couldn't even point this out [when she was running]. This is probably a racist thing to say.' That's just the start of the slights against HBCUs, which were founded to provide educational opportunities for Black students at a time when it was illegal or impossible to attend college in the US. A 2023 investigation by the Biden administration found that HBCUs had missed out on more than $13bn in federal funding for more than three decades because state governors blocked the funds. North Carolina A&T, which has a 14,000-student enrollment, was owed more than $2bn alone. HBCUs could well end up suffering more under Trump, who has made a U-turn from allocating $250m in funding to freezing educational grants and loans – which is how most HBCU students cover tuition. Last month, he signed an executive order to close the Department of Education – a critical lifeline for HBCUs, which have a much harder time fundraising than predominantly white institutions. That HillmanTok is poised to become a resource for a Black student population that could find itself locked out of the traditional college experience makes it more relevant than just another Khan Academy, YouTube University or MasterClass. Inevitably, that momentum faces new headwinds from the rush to capitalize on the Hillman name – not unlike the Black Lives Matter movement did at the end. Some HillmanTok supporters have taken exception to attempts to sell merchandise and live events under the name. What's more, as a number of trademark claims have been filed for the name, Black TikTok users have raised concerns about a white business interest winning control. 'Anytime something looks like it's going to make some money or turn into a movement, you see this,' says the Howard University law professor Nicole Gaither, who adds that the case for each filing also holds potential ramifications. It just really depends on how the US Patent and Trademark Office is going to view this. 'Lena Waithe has Hillman registrations that are related to entertainment services, but she also has education services related to manners and etiquette. And she sells apparel,' Gaither aded. While that plays out in the background, Barlow remains strictly committed to the work. Last month TikTok and the United Negro College Fund hosted an event in Washington to connect HillmanTok instructors with Capitol Hill lawmakers and bring awareness to inclusive education and Black history preservation. While there, Barlow conducted TikTok interviews with the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and the representative Jasmine Crockett for her class. Crockett implored her students to 'take advantage of this moment and realize we don't have a million Leahs running around. Please value her and value your education.' HillmanTok continues a tradition of Black self-determination through education that dates back to the flouting of anti-literacy laws during slavery. 'We always find a way, regardless of what is happening – we, meaning Black people,' says Barlow. 'We have always been resilient, autonomous and used agency to get information where it needs to go.' The Hillman brand wasn't always such an easy sell. Where The Cosby Show was largely written and produced by white people for white audiences as a showcase for Black respectability, A Different World boldly entrusted young Black creatives with the task of relating the cultural experiences that young Black students were having in real time. A Different World faced bitter critical reception when it debuted. One newspaper reviewer called it 'a greed-motivated sitcom' in a slam of the show's creator, Bill Cosby – who patterned the college after the women's HBCU Spelman College, where he was once a major benefactor. After that rough first season, control over the sitcom was passed to the Fame alumna Debbie Allen (sister of The Cosby Show matriarch Phylicia Rashad) – who not only brought her own college experience at Howard into the production process, but also an army of Black writers and consultants. She empowered actors to give feedback and introduced clauses into their contract that freed them up to write and direct episodes, adding to the show's diverse perspectives. For a kicker, Allen enlisted Aretha Franklin to record the theme song. Also in the middle of that first season, Bonet became pregnant with her first child, Zoë, with her then husband Lenny Kravitz. Cosby, scoffing at the cultural optics of Denise being portrayed as an unwed mother in college, had Bonet written off the series and reabsorbed into The Cosby Show. 'I thought that show just wasn't going to come back because she was and is the star,' Guy said. But after reconfiguring around the romance between Whitley (Guy) and Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), A Different World became a ratings colossus alongside The Cosby Show and a mainstay in Black households for generations. Among others, the sitcom introduced the world to Jada Pinkett Smith and the Oscar winners Halle Berry and Marisa Tomei – who took the role playing Bonet's white roommate after Meg Ryan passed. (It certainly worked out for the both of them.) And unlike with The Cosby Show, the disgraced Cosby's involvement has not dinted A Different World's popularity over the years. (He only appears briefly in the pilot.) Last fall, the cast reunited for a national HBCU tour to spark enrollment and scholarship fundraising and found that many of the students who remain inspired by the show had been born long after its initial 144-episode run. In February, A Different World finally made its debut on Netflix – six months after the streamer announced the development of an Allen-produced sequel that would focus on the Hillman experience of Whitley and Dwayne's daughter, with the pilot to begin shooting over the summer. It remains to be seen whether this new version of the series will address Magaworld's assault on Black education. It wouldn't be the same show if it didn't. 'The issues we were dealing with then,' said the series co-star Dawnn Lewis, 'we're still dealing with in some shape or form today.' @amfamstudies Clip highlights from North Carolina A&T's Leah Barlow from her actual African American studies course. @toureshow The music journalist offers a deep rewind on the prehistory of hip-hop. @ The University of Oklahoma education studies professor Christy Oxendine unpacks the history of US education. @drdre4000 The Holy Cross chemistry professor Andre Isaacs puts the fun in functional groups. @iamalawyerinreallife The Atlanta defense attorney Danielle Obiorah shows civil servants how to protect themselves against Doge cuts in Federal Employee Rights 101.
