“If you watch Boyz N the Hood, you can see me becoming better as a filmmaker,” he said. In an important move, Steve Nicolaides, a producer on Boyz N the Hood, scheduled the inexperienced director to shoot his story from beginning to end, in continuity. Singleton signed with CAA while he was a sophomore at USC and landed a deal at Columbia Pictures when he was a senior.
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“No one was going to have the vision to tell the stories that I wanted to tell except for me.” “I learned that no one was going to write the films I wanted to do except for me,” he said. Later, as a student in the school’s Margaret Mehring Film Writing Program, he learned an important lesson, he told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway in a wide-ranging 2014 interview. Race, Barriers and Battling Nerves: A Candid Conversation With Oscar's Only 4 African-American Directing Nominees in 90 Yearsīoyz N the Hood first showed up on Singleton’s application to the USC School of Cinematic Arts he was calling it Summer of ’84 back then. That film earned an Academy Award nom for lead actor Terrence Howard and captured the original song trophy for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” Singleton also helmed Rosewood (1997), a period piece about a racist attack 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), the second installment in the high-octane franchise Four Brothers (2005), with Gibson, Mark Wahlberg, André Benjamin and Garrett Hedlund as unlikely family members and Abduction (2011), a thriller starring Taylor Lautner.Īs a producer, Singleton said he used $4 million of his own money to back Hustle & Flow (2005). Jackson as the iconic private eye and Baby Boy (2001), a coming-of-age tale set in South Central and starring Tyrese Gibson. Singleton also wrote and directed the romantic drama Poetic Justice (1993), starring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson Higher Learning (1995), about three incoming college freshman (Omar Epps, Kristy Swanson and Michael Rapaport) the remake of Shaft (2000), starring Samuel L. He would become a major influence to young African-American filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Barry Jenkins. He was the first African-American to have been nominated in the latter category and, at 24, the youngest person named as well. In his all-too-brief career, Singleton directed just eight films after his startling debut, Boyz N the Hood (1991), for which he received Oscar nominations for original screenplay and directing. “This was an agonizing decision, one that our family made, over a number of days, with the careful counsel of John’s doctors,” they said. They said Monday morning he would be removed from life support.
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Singleton had gone to Cedars seeking medical care April 17 and was there when he suffered a stroke in the intensive care unit, his family said three days later.