Daniels, Lee Louis 1959–

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Lee Louis Daniels 1959–

Film producer, talent manager

The first black to be sole producer of a multi-award-nominated, Oscar-winning movie, Lee Louis Daniels forged a career in film through determination and clever application of talents. Working his way up from would-be screenwriter to worker, manager, then owner of a Los Angeles nursing agency, by age 21 Daniels had built a financial base to bankroll his Hollywood dream. After he advanced into casting direction and talent management, in 2001 he produced his first film, Monster’s Ball, which won an impressive array of awards. Daniels has always supported black talent, and it was because of this that Halle Berry was given the opportunity to become the first black female to earn an Oscar for best actress in a feature film.

Daniels learned how to cope with adversity in his youth. Born on December 24, 1959 in inner-city Philadelphia, he was born to Clara Watson and William Daniels, a police officer. Like his four siblings, Daniels attended West Philadelphia public schools and evolved a survivor’s knack for making his own luck. In 1972, when Daniels was in junior high school, his father was shot and killed in the line of duty. This left Clara Daniels to raise five school-age children on her own. The image of a tough female survivor made a lasting impression on Daniels and eventually on his film career.

After graduating from high school, Daniels enrolled in the film and theater program at Lindenwood College—now Lindenwood University—a four-year liberal arts school in St. Charles, Missouri. He saw, however, little connection between classwork and the day-to-day demands of the entertainment industry. So with seven dollars in his pocket, he chucked college and set out for Los Angeles to write screenplays and explore filmmaking, a route also chosen by his sister, Leah Daniels-Butler, a casting director for Warner Brothers Television in Burbank, California.

Daniels recognized the need for financial stability, understanding that he had to make money before he could make movies. He found a lucrative niche in southern California’s expanding home healthcare market. While working for a nursing agency during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, he dispatched caregivers to treat invalids suffering heart disease, cancer, paralysis, diabetes, emphysema, and other catastrophic and crippling illnesses. He rapidly rose to manager, then owner of the company. By expanding the staff from five nurses to 500, he garnered his first million dollars by age 21.

During this time Daniels established care for a producer’s elderly mother. Impressed by the up-and-coming youth, the producer learned of Daniels’s interest in film and suggested that he get into casting. Daniels agreed and soon applied the same inch-by-inch strategy that had brought him a profitable healthcare company and, in two years, mounted the in-house ladder from casting assistant to casting director. At the top of his profession, he formed Lee Daniels Entertainment, a respected talent management agency in New York City. Over twenty years he guided the film, television, and theater careers of a string of winners, including Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Loretta Devine, Michael Biehn, Wes Bentley, Amber Valletta, and Morgan Freeman.

Apart from the prestige and financial rewards of his career, Daniels nurtured strong principles concerning a

At a Glance…

Born on December 24, 1959 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; son of Clara Watson and William Daniels; children: Clara Infinity and Liam Samad. Education: Attended Lindenwood College, St. Charles, Missouri.

Career: Nursing agency worker, 1978-79; nursing agency manager and owner, 1980; casting assistant and talent manager, 1981-; co-president, Lion’s Gate Films; film producer, 2000-.

Awards: For Monster’s Ball: 22nd Shadows Awards, 2002; Screen Actors Guild, 2002; Writers Guild of America, 2002; best picture, American Film Institute Award, 2002; best picture, Berlin Film Festival, 2002; Golden Globe nominee for best picture, 2002; Black Oscar, 2002; National Board of Review, Best Picture, 2002; selection as one of the five most influential blacks in America, Vibe magazine, 2002.

Addresses: Office —Lee Daniels Entertainment, 151 West 74th Street, Suite 6D, New York, New York 10023 Phone: (212) 875-9808 Fax: (212) 580-0853. Email —[email protected]. Website: —http://www.leedanielsentertainment.com/

fair on-screen representation of non-white people. He hated the standard portrayal of blacks as one of two extremes—over-sexed or laughable. He pondered a Hollywood truism in Essence: “Studios will open the door if you have a ghetto flick or one of those buffoon comedies.” To record his vision of multi-faceted humanity in black characters, he left entertainment management and direction to produce an engrossing interracial drama destined to become an anti-Hollywood classic.

To express actual white-against-black disharmony and bigotry, Daniels rescued from neglect the script of a disturbing biracial romance, written in 1995 by Milo Addica and Will Rokos. Repeatedly read and discarded by directors Sean Penn and Oliver Stone and by actors Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Tommy Lee Jones, the story appealed to Daniels. Upbeat and positive he could turn the script into a viable screen experience, he exulted in Essence, “The material was brilliant, so I knew I could get a good director.” Daniels explained to Contemporary Black Biography (CBB) that he admired the script, not because it cast a positive light on the black experience in the South, but because it allowed him to “remain true to the world I know—the black world.” Rather than judge the story because of its focus on black people, he chose it because of its honesty and left it unchanged, just as the writers stipulated.

Daniels’s first venture into film production clicked after he assembled the principals. Allotting a frugal budget of $2.5 million to the best talent he could find, he signed on Swiss-born independent director Marc Forster, fresh from the Sundance film Everything Put Together (2000). The next stage, hiring the principal actors, required an intuitive balance of a black female and a white male to bring to life the unlikely pairing of a destitute roadhouse waitress with a racist prison guard. Initially, Daniels preferred character strength over beauty for the female lead, whom he described for Jet magazine as a “beaten-down woman at the end of her rope.” Actress Halle Berry saw the possibilities of the part and hammered away at Daniels until he assigned her the role of Leticia Musgrove, the boozy, downtrodden widow who lapses into despair over single motherhood, unemployment, a broken car, and the limbo of homelessness.

Daniels proposed a test of Berry’s rightness for the part of Leticia, which required a moody, dark, but earnest figure. When he requested to meet with her in character as a penniless waitress at a roadside diner, she instead dressed her coiffed, bejeweled best and demanded that he have faith that she could portray pain and hopelessness. Her bargaining chip met Daniels’s second requirement—an agreement that she work for minimal salary. Opposite her, Daniels paired Billy Bob Thornton, the cast’s one true Southerner. As Sergeant Hank Grotowski, a prison guard, he expressed his familiarity with Southern violence and racism, which the role counters with a gentle compassion and willingness to reform. Hip-hop star Sean P. Diddy Combs was cast as Leticia’s husband, a prisoner on death row. Daniels picked 10-year-old Coronji Calhoun to play Leticia’s overweight son Tyrell, cast writers Addica and Rokos as members of the prison staff, and found room for one of Daniels’s own children, five-year-old Clara Infinity Daniels, to play a neighbor child.

The producer had three months to shoot his unrelentingly atmospheric picture. In five weeks over the steamy months of May and June of 2001, shooting took place in New Orleans and at the found support from Warden Burl Cain and hired inmates as extras. Their pay went to the institution’s Inmate Welfare Fund, which bankrolled television sets for the prison commons.

Response to Daniels’s troubling, sexually-charged drama was immediate. Critic James Berardinelli of ReelViews remarked on the staying power of Hank and Leticia, who “do not let go of you.” According to the Lee Daniels Entertainment website, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called Monster’s Ball “unforgettable,” and Mike Clark of USA Today declared it “one of year’s most emotionally stirring films.” Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times admired the drama for its complexity and depth, culminating in episodes of redemptive, life-altering love.

Daniels was surprised that the script that had so obsessed him found favor with so many movie-goers and cinema critics. He commented in Jet, “It was a struggle to get this film made. I never thought it would provoke such strong reactions.” The 74th Academy Awards presentation on March 24, 2002, overwhelmed star Halle Berry, who wept as she savored an historic advance for black actresses: she became the first black actress to win an Oscar for Best Actress. In tribute to the shift from whites-only wins, critic A. O. Scott of the New York Times declared the award “Oscar’s step toward redemption. “The Chicago Tribune’s film reviewer Michael Wilmington called the film’s nominations and major wins a “social landmark.”

A host of recognition and prizes began rolling in—honoraria from the Golden Globe awards and the 22nd Shadows Awards, acclaim from Essence magazine and the National Board of Review, recognition by the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America award for best script. Lauded by a Men’s Empowerment League and by faculty and students at Harvard University’s celebration of thirty years for the Afro-American Studies Department, Daniels was delighted with the shift away from all-white Oscar winners. Daniels foresaw a new day for black talent. He remarked confidently to Los Angeles Times reporter Lorenza Munoz, “We are treading new water here.”

At age 42, Daniels, who received best picture awards from the Berlin Film Festival and the American Film Institute, stood on the up-slope of his career. In reference to the quality of the story he put on film, Jet magazine cited his credo that “The truth is the truth and the work is in the truth and the truth is in the work.” Mulling over the success of Monster’s Ball, he felt vindicated in his demand for screen depictions of real life. Yet he remained humble about accepting credit for generating greater possibilities for black entertainers. A note of caution tempered Daniels’s joy in triumph. To Bucks News Network, he warned, “Blacks still have to go out and make it happen. I don’t think things are going to be offered to us. We have to go and take it.” In 2002, immersed in the filming of Donkey Skin, a retelling of a Charles Perrault fairy tale, Daniels exemplified the focused, hard-charging producer who was willing to take risks to secure respect and homage for black entertainers.