About four years ago, Elvis Mitchell was having dinner with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. As the former film critic for the New York Times and a longtime voice on NPR, he is afforded such audiences.
Soderbergh asked Mitchell what he was doing with his career, and Mitchell told him he had an idea for a movie, a documentary about the history of Black film, filtered through his own experiences growing up in the 1970s. "He looks at me and he goes, 'that's a great idea. I can cash flow this for you,' " says Mitchell.
A few years later, after ironing out the details (and Mitchell learning what it meant, exactly, to "cash flow" a project), the pair was filming Harry Belafonte — Mitchell interviewing, Soderbergh shooting — and the screen legend shared a wonderfully profane quip about the prime of his career where he said about himself, in the third person, "Belafonte could really not be f---ed with." "That's when I thought yeah, we've got a movie here," Mitchell says.
