It’s Thursday, P.O.U. Family and lurkers! We will continue with highlighting African-American/Black Female Movie Directors.
Troy Yvette Beyer (born November 7, 1964) is an American film director, screenwriter and actress.
Born in New York City to an African American mother and a Jewish father, Beyer began her acting career with a role on the children’s program Sesame Street when she was just four years old. She studied acting and psychobiology at City University of New York’s School for the Arts. After landing a bit part in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), Beyer moved to Los Angeles, where she became a regular on the ABC prime-time soap opera Dynasty in 1986, playing Jackie Deveraux, the daughter of Diahann Carroll’scharacter Dominique Deveraux. She went on to earn ShoWest’s Newcomer of the Year Award for her leading role in the feature Rooftops (1989).
Since then, Beyer has acted in features such as Disorderlies (1987), Weekend at Bernie’s II (1993), Eddie (1996) starring Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man (1998) starring Kenneth Branagh and Robert Downey Jr., and John Q, (2002) starring Denzel Washington.
But it was in 1997 that she put her writing skills to use, making her screenwriting debut with B*A*P*S, starring Halle Berry. Unhappy with how her script had been changed during the course of filming, the following year she decided to direct her next screenplay, Let’s Talk About Sex (1998), also playing a starring role. Beyer made a trailer and took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where she handed it out to film executives. The film was quickly picked up by Fine Line Features. She next wrote and directed Love Don’t Co$t a Thing(2003) for Warner Brothers, based on the hit 1987 movie Can’t Buy Me Love.
Beyer appeared in music videos for Prince’s songs “Gangster Glam” (one of the six “Gett Off” remixes and “Sexy MF” and Biz Markie’s 1991 minor hit single “What Comes Around Goes Around”.
She was married to producer Mark Burg and they have a son.
Beyer is a motivational speaker and self-help author who has written a book entitled Ex-Free: 9 Keys to Freedom After Heartbreak. She is a regular guest on The Steve HarveyMorning Show.
Cheryl Dunye (born May 13, 1966) is a film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye is a lesbian and her work often concerns themes of race, sexuality and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians.
Dunye was born in Liberia, and grew up in Philadelphia. Dunye has taught at the University of California Los Angeles, UC Riverside,Pitzer College, Clairemont Graduate School, Pomona College, California Institute of the Arts, The New School of Social Research, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.She is currently an associate professor at Temple University and a mother of two children.
Dunye began her career with six short films which have been collected on DVD as The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye. Dunye’s feature debut was The Watermelon Woman(1996), a film which explored the history of black women and lesbians in film.
The Watermelon Woman sparked controversy in 1997, through its funding by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants. Rep. Pete Hoekstra wrote a letter to the NEA chairwoman, Jane Alexander, stating that The Watermelon Woman “is one of several gay- and lesbian-themed works cited by the Michigan Republican as evidence of “the serious possibility that taxpayer money is being used to fund the production and distribution of patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies.”’ Because of this controversy the NEA restructured itself by awarding grants to specific projects, rather than giving funding straight to arts groups for dispersion.
Behind The Watermelon Woman: in 1993 Dunye was doing research for a class on black film history, by looking for information on black actresses in early films. Many times the credits for these women were left out of the film. Dunye decided that she was going to use her work to create a story for black women in early films. When confronted about the ommissions in film history, Dunye Replied, “That it’s going to take more than just my film for that picture to be corrected,” says Dunye. “There needs to be more work, there needs to be more black protagonists. There are a lot of talented actresses that have nothing to do but “mammy” roles again and again, modem day mammies. There needs to be a focus that gets them working, getting some of those Academy Awards like they should.”
The Watermelon Woman Aired on the Sundance Channel on August 12th, 1998. Dunye was the only female director to be showcased during that month. (Armstrong) Dunye was selected as one of POWER UP’s 2008 Top-10 Powerful Women In Showbiz.
She directed the 2001 television movie Stranger Inside based on the experiences of African-American lesbians in prison.
Taking a turn from self-written lesbian-focused films, she directed My Baby’s Daddy starring Eddie Griffin, Michael Imperioli, and Anthony Anderson in 2004, although a character in the film turns out to be lesbian. She directed The Owls, co-written with novelist Sarah Schulman, which made its debut at the Berlin International Film Festival.
As of 2010, Dunye is working on a film called Adventures in the 419, also co-written with Schulman, which was selected as one of the works-in-progress films in the Tribeca All Access program during the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.