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Leigh Whipper (1876-1975) |
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- Scatman Crothers, Porgy and Bess, 1958. Producer Samuel Goldwyn couldn’t convince Harry Belafonte to be Porgy - “a black man on his knees… that was not where my head was at.” And when director-ogre Otto Preminger replaced Rouben Mamoulian as director, Whipper quit as the Crab Man (which he created on-stage for Mamoulian in 1927), because Preminger “had no respect for my people.” The founder of the Negro Actors Guild sure got that wrong. It was foot-in-the-mouth producer Sam Goldwyn, for example, who described Sammy David Jr as a monkey.
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