Join Street Food Cinema outside as they pay tribute and honor recently deceased filmmaker John Singleton who passed away suddenly on April 28. Come July, 27th there will be a special screening of Singleton's powerful debut feature film Boyz N The Hood 2019 at Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles. A fluent, stylish and powerful film about life in South Central LA, nearly three decades after its release, this is a film that offers humanity, idealism and a lack of cynicism, bolstered by such intelligent and powerful performances.
John Singleton's cinematic promise as a young director captivated audiences with this explosive drama both then and now when he was fresh out of film school. As a matter of fact, he and I were at film school at the same time. Not at the same school though. He was at USC while I was at a lesser known institution a bit North of Southern California in San Francisco. We did have a mutual instructor in the form of screenwriter, Richard Boyle. Best known for the early Oliver Stone success, Salvador in 1986, Boyle was at USC when Singleton wrote Boyz N The Hood. A year later I was Boyle's teaching assistant as I worked for my own BA in Film as an undergrad. I heard first hand about how every fellow student and instructor knew that Singleton' rare talent who was about to make an impact on an industry like no other before.
At it so happens, this special event revisits the same park where Singleton joined Street Food Cinema as they celebrated the 25th anniversary of Boyz N The Hood just a few years ago. The image to the left is a link to a video of Singleton at that event making the introduction to that night's screening at Exposition Park on July 9, 2016. No doubt there will be many introductions made at the upcoming screening as well. Likely, many of those introductions will be very moving. No doubt the place will be packed with the many fans who have been moved and effected by the work of John Singleton. And, no doubt, it will be the night for which the 2019 Street Food Cinema season will be remembered.
The complete Street Food Cinema 2019 schedule for Los Angeles can be found here streetfoodcinema.com/schedule/los-angeles/ .