Bridgett M. Davis
Elmore Leonard, author of more than 40 novels, is renowned in the literary community. From his westerns and early novels of crime based in Detroit and South Florida, right through his complex and virtually plotless later work, Elmore Leonard dissected an America whose founding sins have continued to haunt it all the days. Leonard’s depiction of America is as real as Twain’s Hannibal, Faulkner’s Mississippi and Steinbeck’s Monterey. The new documentary ELMORE LEONARD: “But don’t try to write” explores the prolific author’s legacy and his influence on generations of writers. The documentary features exclusive images and previously unseen home movie footage, family photographs, and in-depth interviews with both literary experts and those who knew him well, including colleagues, family, and childhood friends.
Twenty-something Cicely has a lot to work through. She's estranged from her mother, a Blaxploitation film star. Videos of her mother's nude scenes disgust Cece now and remind her of when her mother worked long hours and left her in the care of a boyfriend who sexually abused the pre-teen child. Cece's battled her weight for ten years, losing 57 pounds. An old boyfriend, Joel, casts her in a film he's directing for a tyrannical writer-producer who expects Cece to play nude scenes as an artist's model. She refuses to disrobe, not only for the film, but also with Joel in the privacy of their rekindled romance and with women in a sauna. Can she find the calm and will to disclose herself?
In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis’s mother. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: “Dying is easy. Living takes guts.”
