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| Anthony Mackie (top right) portrays Perry, a young gay man, and
Roger Robinson plays Bruce Nugent, an elderly gay man, in Rodney
Evans’ award-winning film ‘Brother to Brother.’
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Name: Rodney Evans
Age: 33
Occupation: Filmmaker
Residence: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Relationship status: Single
Education: Bachelor’s degree in modern culture and media/film
production from Brown University in Providence, R.I.; master’s degree from
the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif.
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HOME > ENTERTAINMENT > FEATURE
By: RHONDA SMITH COMMENTS
 
continued...
An audience member in L.A. asked if I thought about taking one
of the scenes, the breakup scene, and putting it into a larger narrative context,
based on the experience I had gone through. I decided to start writing to see
what a film like that would look like. That led to me thinking about how my
life would be different if I lived in a different time period, like the Harlem
Renaissance. I found videotape of [Nugent] in the Shomberg Library in Harlem.
He blew my mind. He was a unique, wise, witty, sharp human being. All of that
was communicated in the videotape. I went on a two-year search trying to figure
out who he was. I thought of him as my doppelganger.
First, because the research process was
so in-depth. The screenwriting and research, which took two years, went hand-in-hand.
Then the fund-raising was incredibly difficult. We shot about 25 percent of
the film in the fall of 2001. Then we ran out of funds and used those initial
scenes to raise the rest of the budget. We called the actors back in the fall
of 2002 and we picked up where we left off. A main actor [Earle Hyman] left,
so I ended up having to recast the part of the older Bruce [Roger Robinson].
I think it’s extremely rare for a movie to be shot that way, but we all
decided the film would be made by any means necessary. We all had our own specific
personal connections to the material.
A lot in Harlem on the same block where
Niggerati Manor was in the ’20s and ’30s; also in Brooklyn and on
the Lower East Side.
A little over $500,000.
We’re in the middle of our national
release now. I think we’ve been really blessed and it’s been pretty
much universally positively accepted. Audiences have really embraced it and
I think it serves to fill a huge void about African-American and gay and lesbian
communities. It’s pointing to a specific type of diversity that’s
missing in a lot of films that are being done. It illuminates the gay history
of the Harlem Renaissance, by illuminating the work of Langston Hughes and Zora
Neale Hurston, especially for people who don’t know their backstories.
It’s also shedding light on lesser-known figures like Nugent and Howard
Thurman. For the black gay community, it’s really served as a defining
moment. People at screenings have stood up and said they’ve been waiting
for this film their entire life.
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