Black pursues the Perry Reese project
James Black is a former Dover High School All-Ohioan and Akron Zips running back who played one year for the Cleveland Browns before pursuing his passion for acting. Most recently he has taken on the role of producer as he aims to tell the story of local coach Perry Reese.
Throughout his acting career, James Black has shared screen time with A-list actors like George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Kurt Russell. With 133 acting roles to his credit, he has stayed busy pursuing his passion for acting.
Black is a former Dover High School All-Ohioan and Akron Zips running back who played one year for the Cleveland Browns before pursuing his passion for acting. He has been living in Los Angeles, working on his craft in both television and on the big screen.
However, in 2016 Black took a gigantic leap into the role of movie producer when he began fashioning a script about the life of legendary former Hiland High School boys basketball coach Perry Reese, Jr.
Black quickly found himself in a foreign world, where each step, every move and everything he thought he knew about making movies took on a very new and challenging look and feel.
“Each day it’s something that opens my eyes and challenges me,” Black said. “Right now everything is moving along at 1,000 mph because it’s coming at me so fast and it’s all so new, but it has been an amazing challenge that I am just taking one day at a time.”
Those days have begun to transform Black from a guy acting out a role in front of the camera to the man behind the lens who directs the flow of the film from its infant planning stages to the final cut of a feature-length movie that will eventually portray the story of an African American Catholic basketball coach who made a major impact in a conservative Mennonite Amish community.
The journey on a trek that is now in its third year has given Black some insight into the production part of a movie. While he continues to sprinkle acting gigs into his schedule, the still-untitled Reese project has taken up the major part of his life, and Black will be the first to concede that he is swimming in the deep end without a life preserver.
With so many things to do and so much of it brand-new to him, Black has tried hard not to let the enormity of the situation get the best of him. So far he has done quite well in surrounding himself with quality people who have helped him walk through the process.
“What I was trying to do was to live in that land of naivety and not worry about all of those little details so I wouldn’t get bogged down,” Black said. “Fortunately I know a lot of people who have produced movies before, and they have all said the same thing: Move forward, gung ho, just do it, and when you get to that point where you struggle, they will show me how to cross that bridge.”
Black said as a first-time movie producer, there are new experiences at every turn. From securing a capable lawyer to writing the story and connecting with people and companies who produce movies, each step brings new challenges for the rookie producer.
Black laughed about a meeting with the writers in which he and his manager went with them to discuss the progress and direction. Black was more than prepared with a barrage of questions, a barrage which he soon found was unnecessary.
“I had about 15 pages of questions, and my manager came in with one page of notes,” Black said. “I was blown away because in his one page of notes he asked every one of the questions I had in my 15 pages. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how you say it.’ It was fantastic and broke everything down in about two hours with the styling of the script and how character development and how the movie flows. It’s like when you have a great quarterback and you give him CliffNotes and he knows exactly what to do with the direction I wanted to take.”
While his people do their jobs and take care of business, Black has found he has taken on an unexpected role in the production of the Reese movie.
“The one thing I have found is that I have to play the cheerleader,” Black said. “When someone gets stuck, I have to encourage them and say, ‘You can do it.’ Then they go out and get it done. The nice thing right now is that all of the people on my team have been through this before in other movies, and they are very talented, so I can lean on them for a lot.”
Black said even though they have a production company in place, they are not allowing anything to jump up and bite them, so they also are preparing other options should the unthinkable happen and things change.
Black said as the entire crew continues to work on getting every bit of the script exactly how they want it with each word planned out and every movement created the way he envisions it, they are connecting with other production companies, some of them quite famous and have shown interest in the Reese story.
For Black it is one day at a time as he learns on the fly about the art of producing a movie. He said the plan is to bring the film crew back to Ohio so they can film in the most authentic style possible.
“When we met with the production company, they asked where I felt I’d like to do the filming, and I told them I’d like to film back where it happened, and they felt that would be ideal, to bring everything back to where it took place,” Black said.
Because Black is so passionate about the content and message of the movie, his crew is extremely high-spirited. In addition, with the nation now embroiled in equality issues, Black believes this story is timely and appropriate to create discussion on some very important topics.
And even though he is a first-time producer, he still maintains that his newness to the production world shouldn’t stand in the way of his ability to create something beautiful and meaningful that will be entertaining and thought-provoking.
Black talked about actor-turned-producer/director Jordan Peele, whose initial foray in producing a movie turned into the massively successful movie, “Get Out,” last year.
“Jordan has been very inspirational to me, and there have been so many others who have done what I am doing their first time out and have been successful,” Black said. “The things that I have realized about each of these success stories is that they stayed true to the story, they stayed true to who they are and stayed true to the vision that they wanted to portray.”
Black said he has seen in different interviews from first-time producers that each of the success stories features someone who maintained their point of view. They listened to advice but didn’t ever venture from that purpose that drove them to want to produce the movie, and they waded through all of the “advice” that came from people trying to alter their vision.
“Jordan Peele did something that hadn’t been done before in making a horror movie about race relations, and this huge voice came from a guy who has never directed a movie before,” Black said.
Black would love to add his name to that growing list of first-time directors who have experienced great success, and while he would like it to happen immediately, he understands the process takes time, time he needs to invest to tell the story of coach Reese with the truth and perspective he believes it deserves.