Writer's Circle: The Combat Jack Show: The Cheo Hodari Coker Episode
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http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/luke...e-cage-cheo-hodari-coker-showrunner-interview
In the week Marvel's Luke Cage arrives on Netflix, here's our interview with showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker...
James interviewed Luke Cage's showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, covering Coker's comic book influences, the importance of world-building and somewhat less plausibly, a future Visionaries movie.
(Note: anyone who knows John Byrne's Alpha Flight inside out might get a spoiler for Luke Cage Episode 7, but we'll take a chance on that being a relatively small number of you.)
Hi, I'm James for Den of Geek.
Hey, I was reading a piece on your site the other day that said Luke Cage maybe falls into some of the tropes that superhero shows have. And you know, that was a big challenge for us, to keep it in that genre and be original.
On one hand, being a geek I want to tell the best comic book story possible, as someone who came up on Claremont & Miller's Wolverine as well as stuff like God Loves, Man Kills and even Kraven's Last Hunt which is probably my favourite Spider-Man story. Believe it or not, John Byrne's Alpha Flight was one of the biggest influences on the twist we have in episode 7 - the fact that you could do that, it rocked my world when I read it back in the day. People sometimes say because it's comic books it can't be serious drama, but if you're a long-term reader of comics you know darn well some of the best storytelling comes from this.
That's one of the things we wanted to do with the show, hit those kind of notes - but then having worked on Ray Donovan and being a fan of very serious drama, I really though that it was important that we also crafted a show that could compete against anything out there on Netflix or anywhere else. And that's what I really hope we've done, gotten the balance of both superhero and drama.
It surprises me how often you see comics storylines turning up in genre TV, like Dark Phoenix Saga gets retold again and again, and Days of Future Past in Heroes - it's like there's a club of people who learnt from those stories and then broadcast the themes and ideas to a wider audience than the comics necessarily reached.
That's the thing about TV, it gives you so much time to tell your story, it's comparable to comics. When you talk about Dark Phoenix and the Hellfire Club - to develop and tell those stories correctly would just be so good.
Instead of trying to cram them into a two-hour movie...
Exactly. I mean sometimes that criticism can get on your nerves because the movies are the movies, but I would love to really see those stories given some real time to develop.
You must be really enjoying having your own Marvel toys to play with then.
Oh my god, are you kidding me? It's like I finally get to prove my mother wrong! Reading comic books was actually quite a lucrative career move. It's a dream doing this, it really is.
Marvel's 'Luke Cage' Taps Cheo Hodari as Showrunner
No! Not me. Though I get why they've heard that. It's that sometimes using them as a guide means you can become very literal, and it ties you so close to a property that you lose the ability to step back and change things. When you step out of one medium to another it changes. The perfect example, because I'm also a huge JK Rowling fan, is the Harry Potter movies. I've read all the books and you notice the first two movies that Chris Columbus did, he was almost so afraid to not change anything that he literally filmed conversations word-for-word, and the fans were like "Come on...".
So when Alfonso Cuaron took over the third movie and got a bit looser with it - not making departures, but let it breathe a little - that's when they took off. And my hope with Luke Cage was that I'd stay close to the source material but let it breathe and take some chances. The audience doesn't want to see a direct translation. They think they do, but if you give them one they'll call it stiff and wooden.
The interesting thing to me is that you've got characters created as part of blaxploitation who you then have to bring into a modern context, so it'd be hard to do a literal translation anyway.
Right. For me, it was important that we not look at the 70s iteration with disdain. We didn't want it to be like Austin Powers. I mean of course we preserved the Sweet Christmas of it all, but at the same time we wanted it to be a modern character. We're not ashamed of our blaxploitation past. We relish in it. But we took the parts that still apply to modern times.
And obviously you've got New York to play with, which was the centre of Marvel's comics - especially in the 60s and 70s when the writers and artists were for the most part living there while making them. So I'm intrigued by the way you've created this sort of romantic version of Harlem which harks back to how it was in the 70s, but also has modern issues to deal with.
It's kind of a mix of the Harlem that used to be and bits that still exist. It's a Harlem that people who live there recognise. And that was important to me - to try and make Harlem feel like a real place and then inject superheroes into it - not a theme park. The way I see it is like a hip-hop western. You've got the mysterious man with no name, who's reluctant to do anything... things happen and he decides he can't sit back.
From the first trailer there's no walking away from how you've added a very modern political dimension to the story, so I'm interested to know whether that was something you were actively keen to do with the character, or whether you just felt it would've been inauthentic to have avoided it.
Well, if you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there. I wanted Luke Cage to very much be an African American superhero rather than a superhero that happens to be black. I felt it was important to give him that cultural grounding, but also show that it doesn't make him an obtuse or one-sided character. I wanted to show that he can be literary and sensitive, and funny, you know, in addition to kicking a lot of ass.
I wanted the nuance you rarely used to see in the modern Black experience before shows like Queen Sugar, Atlanta, Insecure. It's kind of a renaissance, because blackness isn't one thing, it's a lot of different aspects. The fact that Guy Ritchie is a different writer-director than Julian Fellowes. They're both still British, but there's nuance. What happens sometimes when you have black storytellers is that they try to make it like "This is THE black experience" whereas I wanted to make sure Luke Cage was diverse in its complexities portraying Black America.
So you've got Misty Knight in there who's a big addition to the series and canon, what was the thinking behind adding her to the kind of Netflix canon?
It was mostly just like "here's the chance to use a cool character." The same way that Claire Temple was interesting in Daredevil, here's a chance to give Luke a new foil with her own rich storyline. The great thing about Simone Missick is that she so embodies the role the same way Mike embodies Luke Cage. There are times when it's almost like the Misty Knight show, and she gets her moments to shine.
And finally, just to do some quick rumour-busting, I saw on your IMDb page that you're involved with a Visionaries movie which seems like a super-obscure property to be looking at. What's the story behind that?
Okay, so I was part of the Hasbro writers room with Brian Vaughan, and Joe Robert Cole and Nicole Perlman and all the other writers, there were about 12 of us. We all discussed how we could turn the various Hasbro properties into movies. Technically was I part of Visionaries? Well, we all talked about all of them - but we were all individually assigned different movies. Which I did I cannot disclose, because the only company more secretive than either Marvel or Netflix is Hasbro. I'm just lucky that I get to make money playing with toys and comic books. It's just the best job in the world!
Cheo Hodari Coker, thank you very much!
Read more: http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/luke...dari-coker-showrunner-interview#ixzz4Lh1vmdhv
In the week Marvel's Luke Cage arrives on Netflix, here's our interview with showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker...
James interviewed Luke Cage's showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, covering Coker's comic book influences, the importance of world-building and somewhat less plausibly, a future Visionaries movie.
(Note: anyone who knows John Byrne's Alpha Flight inside out might get a spoiler for Luke Cage Episode 7, but we'll take a chance on that being a relatively small number of you.)
Hi, I'm James for Den of Geek.
Hey, I was reading a piece on your site the other day that said Luke Cage maybe falls into some of the tropes that superhero shows have. And you know, that was a big challenge for us, to keep it in that genre and be original.
On one hand, being a geek I want to tell the best comic book story possible, as someone who came up on Claremont & Miller's Wolverine as well as stuff like God Loves, Man Kills and even Kraven's Last Hunt which is probably my favourite Spider-Man story. Believe it or not, John Byrne's Alpha Flight was one of the biggest influences on the twist we have in episode 7 - the fact that you could do that, it rocked my world when I read it back in the day. People sometimes say because it's comic books it can't be serious drama, but if you're a long-term reader of comics you know darn well some of the best storytelling comes from this.
That's one of the things we wanted to do with the show, hit those kind of notes - but then having worked on Ray Donovan and being a fan of very serious drama, I really though that it was important that we also crafted a show that could compete against anything out there on Netflix or anywhere else. And that's what I really hope we've done, gotten the balance of both superhero and drama.
It surprises me how often you see comics storylines turning up in genre TV, like Dark Phoenix Saga gets retold again and again, and Days of Future Past in Heroes - it's like there's a club of people who learnt from those stories and then broadcast the themes and ideas to a wider audience than the comics necessarily reached.
That's the thing about TV, it gives you so much time to tell your story, it's comparable to comics. When you talk about Dark Phoenix and the Hellfire Club - to develop and tell those stories correctly would just be so good.
Instead of trying to cram them into a two-hour movie...
Exactly. I mean sometimes that criticism can get on your nerves because the movies are the movies, but I would love to really see those stories given some real time to develop.
You must be really enjoying having your own Marvel toys to play with then.
Oh my god, are you kidding me? It's like I finally get to prove my mother wrong! Reading comic books was actually quite a lucrative career move. It's a dream doing this, it really is.
Marvel's 'Luke Cage' Taps Cheo Hodari as Showrunner
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No! Not me. Though I get why they've heard that. It's that sometimes using them as a guide means you can become very literal, and it ties you so close to a property that you lose the ability to step back and change things. When you step out of one medium to another it changes. The perfect example, because I'm also a huge JK Rowling fan, is the Harry Potter movies. I've read all the books and you notice the first two movies that Chris Columbus did, he was almost so afraid to not change anything that he literally filmed conversations word-for-word, and the fans were like "Come on...".
So when Alfonso Cuaron took over the third movie and got a bit looser with it - not making departures, but let it breathe a little - that's when they took off. And my hope with Luke Cage was that I'd stay close to the source material but let it breathe and take some chances. The audience doesn't want to see a direct translation. They think they do, but if you give them one they'll call it stiff and wooden.
The interesting thing to me is that you've got characters created as part of blaxploitation who you then have to bring into a modern context, so it'd be hard to do a literal translation anyway.
Right. For me, it was important that we not look at the 70s iteration with disdain. We didn't want it to be like Austin Powers. I mean of course we preserved the Sweet Christmas of it all, but at the same time we wanted it to be a modern character. We're not ashamed of our blaxploitation past. We relish in it. But we took the parts that still apply to modern times.
And obviously you've got New York to play with, which was the centre of Marvel's comics - especially in the 60s and 70s when the writers and artists were for the most part living there while making them. So I'm intrigued by the way you've created this sort of romantic version of Harlem which harks back to how it was in the 70s, but also has modern issues to deal with.
It's kind of a mix of the Harlem that used to be and bits that still exist. It's a Harlem that people who live there recognise. And that was important to me - to try and make Harlem feel like a real place and then inject superheroes into it - not a theme park. The way I see it is like a hip-hop western. You've got the mysterious man with no name, who's reluctant to do anything... things happen and he decides he can't sit back.
From the first trailer there's no walking away from how you've added a very modern political dimension to the story, so I'm interested to know whether that was something you were actively keen to do with the character, or whether you just felt it would've been inauthentic to have avoided it.
Well, if you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there. I wanted Luke Cage to very much be an African American superhero rather than a superhero that happens to be black. I felt it was important to give him that cultural grounding, but also show that it doesn't make him an obtuse or one-sided character. I wanted to show that he can be literary and sensitive, and funny, you know, in addition to kicking a lot of ass.
I wanted the nuance you rarely used to see in the modern Black experience before shows like Queen Sugar, Atlanta, Insecure. It's kind of a renaissance, because blackness isn't one thing, it's a lot of different aspects. The fact that Guy Ritchie is a different writer-director than Julian Fellowes. They're both still British, but there's nuance. What happens sometimes when you have black storytellers is that they try to make it like "This is THE black experience" whereas I wanted to make sure Luke Cage was diverse in its complexities portraying Black America.
So you've got Misty Knight in there who's a big addition to the series and canon, what was the thinking behind adding her to the kind of Netflix canon?
It was mostly just like "here's the chance to use a cool character." The same way that Claire Temple was interesting in Daredevil, here's a chance to give Luke a new foil with her own rich storyline. The great thing about Simone Missick is that she so embodies the role the same way Mike embodies Luke Cage. There are times when it's almost like the Misty Knight show, and she gets her moments to shine.
And finally, just to do some quick rumour-busting, I saw on your IMDb page that you're involved with a Visionaries movie which seems like a super-obscure property to be looking at. What's the story behind that?
Okay, so I was part of the Hasbro writers room with Brian Vaughan, and Joe Robert Cole and Nicole Perlman and all the other writers, there were about 12 of us. We all discussed how we could turn the various Hasbro properties into movies. Technically was I part of Visionaries? Well, we all talked about all of them - but we were all individually assigned different movies. Which I did I cannot disclose, because the only company more secretive than either Marvel or Netflix is Hasbro. I'm just lucky that I get to make money playing with toys and comic books. It's just the best job in the world!
Cheo Hodari Coker, thank you very much!
Read more: http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/luke...dari-coker-showrunner-interview#ixzz4Lh1vmdhv
How Luke Cage Got Marvel to Say the N-Word
Last year, the Marvel-Netflix collaboration Marvel’s Jessica Jones brought its viewers a pearl-clutching shock right in the middle of its first episode: a shockingly realistic sex scene in which the title character gets screwed from behind while the camera focuses tightly on her impassioned face. After years of creatively conservative Avengers-movie fare, one was left wondering, Can you even do that in a Marvel property? Marvel’s Luke Cage, the latest product in the brand’s Netflix mini-empire, forces the viewer to ask that question again roughly a third of the way through its first installment when it deploys the most charged word in the English language.
“But when the smoke clears, it’s niggas like me that let you hold on to what you got,” intones the show’s bass-voiced antagonist, Cottonmouth, in a conversation with his cousin, the politician Mariah. “You know I despise that word,” she counters with a sneer. His reply: “I know. It’s easy to underestimate a nigga. They never see you coming.”
Over the course of the seven episodes released to critics, the word — usually pronounced in its “-a” variation, though occasionally veering toward “-er” — pops up more than two dozen times. It’s there in songs, in threats, in casual conversation. At times, it’s a topic of discussion, as when Luke tells a stick-up boy who’s just used it: “I’m not tired enough to ever let nobody call me that word.” More often, it just rolls off the tongue, blending into the cadences of a show with a nearly all-black cast. But it wasn’t necessarily easy to get the word onscreen.
“They had some trepidation, I’m not gonna front,” says show creator Cheo Hodari Coker of his initial conversations with higher-ups about the use of the N-word in a cinematic universe still mostly known for family-friendly superhero fare. “But my whole thing was that, in using this word, I didn't want it to be comfortable. I wanted [it to be] that, every single time that it's heard, you think about it.”
That said, Coker acknowledges the fact that, as the show goes on, it feels less like a statement and more like a common noun. Your ears still perk up, but the shock of it lessens. Indeed, he hopes viewers will understand how natural the word can be. “I also really wanted the show to kind of live on its own terms of, This is what it's like when you eavesdrop on black people talking to each other,” he says. “That word, at times, will come up in certain ways.”
“The word has dexterity in black culture,” says Mahershala Ali, who plays Cottonmouth, and thus has the distinction of introducing the N-word to the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe. “You could literally say it one way one second and say it a split second later and mean a totally different thing and a person can pick up on it.” He says using the word “wasn’t anything I lost sleep over at night.”
Mariah’s distaste upon hearing it said in that scene reflects the series’ larger exploration of respectability politics: the question of whether a black person has a responsibility to present a wholesome and inoffensive demeanor to the world. Alfre Woodard, who plays the character, says she can personally relate to that dilemma.
“With my dad, we were never allowed to say that word. Ever. We could swear, but you couldn't say that word,” she says, her eyes wide. “It meant something to him because, when he grew up, young black boys could be strung up for looking at you. So it meant another thing.” That said, she grew up and adopted it as part of her linguistic toolbox. “My [experience] was all like, 'Hey, my ... !’ It was always endearment. So everybody has a different context. You respect how everybody feels. You read situations and you respect that.”
Respectability politics played an even more intense role in Mike Colter’s portrayal of Luke. “I remember talking to [Cheo] about it and I was adamant that Luke was not a person that used that language,” Colter recalls. “He needs to be someone we can aspire to be. And I felt like, if he was the kind of guy that used that language all the time, like someone on the street corner who didn't respect himself or the people around him, then he, in a sense, had lost already, had given up.”
However, Luke does use the word in the aforementioned confrontation with the stick-up boy, which occurs after a series of traumas. “I ain’t layin’ back no more,” he snarls with a gun pointed at his head. “You wanna shoot me? Do it. Pull the trigger, nigga.” In Colter’s mind, Luke’s just too exhausted to be respectable in that moment.
“He's gone through so much and he has to deal with this guy,” Colter says. “On the day we were shooting, [Cheo] was like, 'Should we take it out?' And I said, 'No, I think I'm feeling it. I think it works in this moment because this is the one time he's gonna use it.'”
Even if there was some initial trepidation about introducing the N-word to Marvel’s film output, the company’s TV chief, Jeph Loeb, says he’s fine with the move. “That's the language of that world,” Loeb says. “Would I say that that's the language of the world of Jessica Jones, or is that the language of the world of Daredevil? No. It's not.”
Here, Loeb thinks it fits with the vision of the man who introduced it. As he recalls: “When Cheo came to us and brought us his first script and we read it, he went, 'That's the way people talk. I'm not gonna be apologetic about it in any way.’”
http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/luke-cage-n-word.html
Last year, the Marvel-Netflix collaboration Marvel’s Jessica Jones brought its viewers a pearl-clutching shock right in the middle of its first episode: a shockingly realistic sex scene in which the title character gets screwed from behind while the camera focuses tightly on her impassioned face. After years of creatively conservative Avengers-movie fare, one was left wondering, Can you even do that in a Marvel property? Marvel’s Luke Cage, the latest product in the brand’s Netflix mini-empire, forces the viewer to ask that question again roughly a third of the way through its first installment when it deploys the most charged word in the English language.
“But when the smoke clears, it’s niggas like me that let you hold on to what you got,” intones the show’s bass-voiced antagonist, Cottonmouth, in a conversation with his cousin, the politician Mariah. “You know I despise that word,” she counters with a sneer. His reply: “I know. It’s easy to underestimate a nigga. They never see you coming.”
Over the course of the seven episodes released to critics, the word — usually pronounced in its “-a” variation, though occasionally veering toward “-er” — pops up more than two dozen times. It’s there in songs, in threats, in casual conversation. At times, it’s a topic of discussion, as when Luke tells a stick-up boy who’s just used it: “I’m not tired enough to ever let nobody call me that word.” More often, it just rolls off the tongue, blending into the cadences of a show with a nearly all-black cast. But it wasn’t necessarily easy to get the word onscreen.
“They had some trepidation, I’m not gonna front,” says show creator Cheo Hodari Coker of his initial conversations with higher-ups about the use of the N-word in a cinematic universe still mostly known for family-friendly superhero fare. “But my whole thing was that, in using this word, I didn't want it to be comfortable. I wanted [it to be] that, every single time that it's heard, you think about it.”
That said, Coker acknowledges the fact that, as the show goes on, it feels less like a statement and more like a common noun. Your ears still perk up, but the shock of it lessens. Indeed, he hopes viewers will understand how natural the word can be. “I also really wanted the show to kind of live on its own terms of, This is what it's like when you eavesdrop on black people talking to each other,” he says. “That word, at times, will come up in certain ways.”
“The word has dexterity in black culture,” says Mahershala Ali, who plays Cottonmouth, and thus has the distinction of introducing the N-word to the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe. “You could literally say it one way one second and say it a split second later and mean a totally different thing and a person can pick up on it.” He says using the word “wasn’t anything I lost sleep over at night.”
Mariah’s distaste upon hearing it said in that scene reflects the series’ larger exploration of respectability politics: the question of whether a black person has a responsibility to present a wholesome and inoffensive demeanor to the world. Alfre Woodard, who plays the character, says she can personally relate to that dilemma.
“With my dad, we were never allowed to say that word. Ever. We could swear, but you couldn't say that word,” she says, her eyes wide. “It meant something to him because, when he grew up, young black boys could be strung up for looking at you. So it meant another thing.” That said, she grew up and adopted it as part of her linguistic toolbox. “My [experience] was all like, 'Hey, my ... !’ It was always endearment. So everybody has a different context. You respect how everybody feels. You read situations and you respect that.”
Respectability politics played an even more intense role in Mike Colter’s portrayal of Luke. “I remember talking to [Cheo] about it and I was adamant that Luke was not a person that used that language,” Colter recalls. “He needs to be someone we can aspire to be. And I felt like, if he was the kind of guy that used that language all the time, like someone on the street corner who didn't respect himself or the people around him, then he, in a sense, had lost already, had given up.”
However, Luke does use the word in the aforementioned confrontation with the stick-up boy, which occurs after a series of traumas. “I ain’t layin’ back no more,” he snarls with a gun pointed at his head. “You wanna shoot me? Do it. Pull the trigger, nigga.” In Colter’s mind, Luke’s just too exhausted to be respectable in that moment.
“He's gone through so much and he has to deal with this guy,” Colter says. “On the day we were shooting, [Cheo] was like, 'Should we take it out?' And I said, 'No, I think I'm feeling it. I think it works in this moment because this is the one time he's gonna use it.'”
Even if there was some initial trepidation about introducing the N-word to Marvel’s film output, the company’s TV chief, Jeph Loeb, says he’s fine with the move. “That's the language of that world,” Loeb says. “Would I say that that's the language of the world of Jessica Jones, or is that the language of the world of Daredevil? No. It's not.”
Here, Loeb thinks it fits with the vision of the man who introduced it. As he recalls: “When Cheo came to us and brought us his first script and we read it, he went, 'That's the way people talk. I'm not gonna be apologetic about it in any way.’”
http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/luke-cage-n-word.html
How Luke Cage Built the Gritty and Complex World of Netflix's First Black Superhero
If you ask Marvel's Luke Cage showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker to describe his next installment of the Netflix Marvel Cinematic Universe, he'd say it's a standard western motif, entrenched in hip-hop tradition and wrapped in a superhero cape.
If you ask critics what that means, they'll tell you that Luke Cage is profoundly culturally relevant, tapping into the heart of the black American experience at a time when racial tension seems to be at a boiling point.
The 13-episode first season continues the story of Luke Cage (Mike Colter), the bulletproof man first introduced in Marvel's Jessica Jones last year, after he retreats to Harlem. Luke arrives just in time to see the neighborhood starting to be engulfed by its own nefarious crime underbelly masked as "The New Harlem Renaissance." It's clear why a bulletproof black man feels especially relevant today, but Luke Cage elevates the illustration of the American black experience by integrating history and music into the complex storytelling. At the same time, the show invites its audience into the nuanced conversations currently happening within the black community, from the definition of progress and whether people of color can actually get ahead in this country to the propriety of using the N-word.
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"Honestly, the fact of the matter is, within hip-hop, within the black community, there's always been a very complex relationship with that word," Coker says of the dichotomy of the characters within Luke Cage who use the word - primarily the gangsters trying to take over, and those who disagree with it - Luke and City Councilwoman Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard).
"When you use the word, it's not casual. As far as I was concerned, any time this inappropriate word was used it was used in an appropriate fashion. It wasn't just used for the sake of using it. There's an element of it, that yes, it should be uncomfortable, but at the same time this is not a show for kids," Coker continues. "I've heard that word with deep love and I've also heard it used with abject hatred. The complexity of that word also has a certain history. To shy away from it would have ultimately stunted the expression of the show. Was Marvel and Netflix ultimately comfortable with that? Probably not, but I am. So if there's any flack for it, I'll deal with it."
Those character-dividing lines remain the same for the debate about how Harlem's progress should be made. Harlem's apparent underworld king (and also Mariah's cousin) Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali) has a cynical perspective that minorities can't truly become successful in America without getting their hands dirty. Meanwhile, Mariah is attempting to revitalize the city in a legitimate way - despite the fact she's accepting funding from her cousin's dirty business. Then there's Luke, who defines himself by a more black and white sense of right and wrong.
New Luke Cage trailer shows why you don't bring a gun to a superhero fight
"The fact of the matter is, there are plenty of politicians who basically say, 'Look, as long as I have my votes and I have my money, I'm good. I'll clean up enough to keep me elected, but in terms of real change? Whatever. That's just something we sell voters. Then you have people in the criminal world who want legitimacy, but at the same time, they're not going to get the same economic push or charge that they get from being illegal," Coker says.
The warring philosophies not only set up the antagonistic relationships that drive the show's plot, but reflect the complex and often contradicting history of Harlem itself. The neighborhood serves as its own character within the Luke Cage narrative, and grounds the comic-book story in a vivid, urban reality. Coker took pains to create Luke's world with the proper historical context and an expertly crafted musical backdrop because he realized very early on that to make Luke Cage believable his characters would have to live in a world that felt like the same one his viewers live in.
"With the cast that we had, we had to build a realistic, palpable place because it gave them the ability to say, 'Okay, I can really do some serious acting here.' At the same time, they can also serve the themes of comic books which also come from a very real place at well," Coker says. "Sometimes when people do these comic book adaptations, it's almost as if they aren't taking it seriously, like, 'Oh, it's a comic book so we can't go here.'...I want to have this [show] live in a world where we can compete with any drama in all of television. I would put this show next to anything."
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Luke Cage is set apart from its predecessor series Daredevil and Jessica Jones in Hell's Kitchen, for a specific reason. Harlem, in its golden age, fostered revolutionary artists Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Armstrong, while simultaneously giving birth to infamous gangsters like Dutch Schultz, Bumpy Johnson and Frank Lucas. Coker purposefully embedded that juxtaposition of beauty and crime, into the DNA of Luke Cage (and sometimes even within the same character).
"You're setting [the show] in a real place, so you can also use the history of that locale and have that affect the superhero narrative...It's not just using Harlem as a backdrop," Coker says. "When you're in Harlem and you're walking around these streets and these places -- there's so much history in this place. We wanted to acknowledge it in this universe because it's Marvel, but at the same time it's New York, and it's Harlem -- which has always been, to a certain extent, the capital of African-American culture. It's a political history. It's a cultural history, but it's also a criminal history."
Harlem's historical context is expressed in various ways throughout the series. The opening credits feature a street sign for Malcolm X Blvd, the alternative name for Harlem's main thoroughfare Lennox Blvd, where a lot of the show was filmed. Black historical figures like Jackie Robinson are also name-checked within the show. It's important to note that these revolutionaries aren't the usual names like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks who made their marks on history with peaceful resistance, and thus became the mainstream face of the Civil Rights Movement. Coker uses Luke Cage to shine a light on black heroes you may have missed in your history books, such as Crispus Attucks.
The new Luke Cage trailer is here and it's mad exciting
Months before NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick became a constant headline for exercising his First Amendment right in protesting the national anthem, Coker crafted a monologue for Luke Cage to educate the masses on one of the first black men to give his life for American rights. In episode 2, Luke delivers the stirring speech about Attucks, the man widely considered to be the first person to die in the Revolutionary War after he taunted patrolling British soldiers during the Boston Massacre in 1770.
"I wanted to talk about the first person to die for a revolution and what that meant, and what he sacrificed. When you look at what happened, [Attucks] could have very easily 'laid in the cut,' as Luke says. He stepped up," Coker explains. "We used Crispus Attucks for that because half of these kids haven't even heard of Crispus Attucks. It's really the power of music, and of entertainment, of film and television. You get to tell stories and history that people have not really thought about in a long time."
Coker also uses music to frame the context of Luke Cage, giving the show its own "pulse," and helping to bring the original comic-book tale out of the 70s and ground it in modern times. Coker spent his pre-TV writing career as music journalist, profiling prolific artists like Wu-Tang Clan and the Notorious B.I.G. He used his musical connections to recruit A Tribe Called Quest DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammed and composer Adrian Younge to score the show, which features tracks (and sometimes live performances) from the likes of Faith Evans, Method Man and The Delfonics. Again, the music isn't just to make the show sound cool but to serve as a metaphor for the messages the series contains.
Go inside the music of Marvel's Luke Cage
"That was kind of the goal, to give the show a pulse. Music is really such an important part of the African-American experience. Rather than show hip-hop, I wanted the show to be hip-hop," Coker says. "It comes from the elements or [the music] answers to something. Old soul as well as blues, gospel and then funk -- it was as much about making the fabric of the show come from the entire fabric of black music, but then again having these hip-hop moments of well... I wanted to prove that there was also a complexity in the stories in the feel of hip-hop in addition to the comic books. If you combine both, you have something that is interesting and in some ways profound."
While Luke Cage offers an unadulterated look at the modern black experience with no white point of entry (a la Taylor Schilling's Piper Champan on Orange Is the New Black), the show uses its expert storytelling and comic-book mold to remain inclusive all prospective audience members, no matter their skin tone.
"You could take these general motifs and you could set this within in these culture and find its own equivalent, but because I'm black and these characters are black it's the opportunity to tell the kind of black story that we haven't really seen on television," Coker says. "We can do it in a way where there's a certain level of sophistication. I was lucky that both Netflix and Marvel thought this was important...that they wanted the complexity. They wanted to take risks. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to really try and do something that was both beyond the genre and also deeply apart of it."
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In fact, Coker is adamant that while the show focuses on black narratives, it was built for a wide audience to feel included, whether or not they relate directly to the characters' specific experiences or not.
"I don't really want the show to have the mantle of this is the black side of Marvel, as if only black people can enjoy this. I think this show, if anything, is inclusively black," he says. "Yes, this is a hip-hop show, but it's not done at the expense of alienating anyone who didn't sign up for this experience."
Most importantly, Coker wants everyone who tunes in to watch for the fun of the show. After all, peel away the music, the context and the conversation and you're left with a superhero, and that's really what we came for.
Yes! Rosario Dawson is returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Luke Cage
"A lot of the press is talking about the politics and the N-word, but what's going to surprise people is how fun and vibrant the show is. It's one of these things that you see it and you want to watch it again," he says. "I am just so thankful that Netflix and Marvel had enough belief in me and what we were doing to let us tell this story in this way."
We are too, Cheo.
All episode of Luke Cage will be available for streaming on Netflix beginning Friday, Sept. 30
http://www.tvguide.com/news/luke-cage-season-1-preview-cheo-hodari-coker-interview/
If you ask Marvel's Luke Cage showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker to describe his next installment of the Netflix Marvel Cinematic Universe, he'd say it's a standard western motif, entrenched in hip-hop tradition and wrapped in a superhero cape.
If you ask critics what that means, they'll tell you that Luke Cage is profoundly culturally relevant, tapping into the heart of the black American experience at a time when racial tension seems to be at a boiling point.
The 13-episode first season continues the story of Luke Cage (Mike Colter), the bulletproof man first introduced in Marvel's Jessica Jones last year, after he retreats to Harlem. Luke arrives just in time to see the neighborhood starting to be engulfed by its own nefarious crime underbelly masked as "The New Harlem Renaissance." It's clear why a bulletproof black man feels especially relevant today, but Luke Cage elevates the illustration of the American black experience by integrating history and music into the complex storytelling. At the same time, the show invites its audience into the nuanced conversations currently happening within the black community, from the definition of progress and whether people of color can actually get ahead in this country to the propriety of using the N-word.
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"Honestly, the fact of the matter is, within hip-hop, within the black community, there's always been a very complex relationship with that word," Coker says of the dichotomy of the characters within Luke Cage who use the word - primarily the gangsters trying to take over, and those who disagree with it - Luke and City Councilwoman Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard).
"When you use the word, it's not casual. As far as I was concerned, any time this inappropriate word was used it was used in an appropriate fashion. It wasn't just used for the sake of using it. There's an element of it, that yes, it should be uncomfortable, but at the same time this is not a show for kids," Coker continues. "I've heard that word with deep love and I've also heard it used with abject hatred. The complexity of that word also has a certain history. To shy away from it would have ultimately stunted the expression of the show. Was Marvel and Netflix ultimately comfortable with that? Probably not, but I am. So if there's any flack for it, I'll deal with it."
Those character-dividing lines remain the same for the debate about how Harlem's progress should be made. Harlem's apparent underworld king (and also Mariah's cousin) Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali) has a cynical perspective that minorities can't truly become successful in America without getting their hands dirty. Meanwhile, Mariah is attempting to revitalize the city in a legitimate way - despite the fact she's accepting funding from her cousin's dirty business. Then there's Luke, who defines himself by a more black and white sense of right and wrong.
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"The fact of the matter is, there are plenty of politicians who basically say, 'Look, as long as I have my votes and I have my money, I'm good. I'll clean up enough to keep me elected, but in terms of real change? Whatever. That's just something we sell voters. Then you have people in the criminal world who want legitimacy, but at the same time, they're not going to get the same economic push or charge that they get from being illegal," Coker says.
The warring philosophies not only set up the antagonistic relationships that drive the show's plot, but reflect the complex and often contradicting history of Harlem itself. The neighborhood serves as its own character within the Luke Cage narrative, and grounds the comic-book story in a vivid, urban reality. Coker took pains to create Luke's world with the proper historical context and an expertly crafted musical backdrop because he realized very early on that to make Luke Cage believable his characters would have to live in a world that felt like the same one his viewers live in.
"With the cast that we had, we had to build a realistic, palpable place because it gave them the ability to say, 'Okay, I can really do some serious acting here.' At the same time, they can also serve the themes of comic books which also come from a very real place at well," Coker says. "Sometimes when people do these comic book adaptations, it's almost as if they aren't taking it seriously, like, 'Oh, it's a comic book so we can't go here.'...I want to have this [show] live in a world where we can compete with any drama in all of television. I would put this show next to anything."
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Luke Cage is set apart from its predecessor series Daredevil and Jessica Jones in Hell's Kitchen, for a specific reason. Harlem, in its golden age, fostered revolutionary artists Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Armstrong, while simultaneously giving birth to infamous gangsters like Dutch Schultz, Bumpy Johnson and Frank Lucas. Coker purposefully embedded that juxtaposition of beauty and crime, into the DNA of Luke Cage (and sometimes even within the same character).
"You're setting [the show] in a real place, so you can also use the history of that locale and have that affect the superhero narrative...It's not just using Harlem as a backdrop," Coker says. "When you're in Harlem and you're walking around these streets and these places -- there's so much history in this place. We wanted to acknowledge it in this universe because it's Marvel, but at the same time it's New York, and it's Harlem -- which has always been, to a certain extent, the capital of African-American culture. It's a political history. It's a cultural history, but it's also a criminal history."
Harlem's historical context is expressed in various ways throughout the series. The opening credits feature a street sign for Malcolm X Blvd, the alternative name for Harlem's main thoroughfare Lennox Blvd, where a lot of the show was filmed. Black historical figures like Jackie Robinson are also name-checked within the show. It's important to note that these revolutionaries aren't the usual names like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks who made their marks on history with peaceful resistance, and thus became the mainstream face of the Civil Rights Movement. Coker uses Luke Cage to shine a light on black heroes you may have missed in your history books, such as Crispus Attucks.
The new Luke Cage trailer is here and it's mad exciting
Months before NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick became a constant headline for exercising his First Amendment right in protesting the national anthem, Coker crafted a monologue for Luke Cage to educate the masses on one of the first black men to give his life for American rights. In episode 2, Luke delivers the stirring speech about Attucks, the man widely considered to be the first person to die in the Revolutionary War after he taunted patrolling British soldiers during the Boston Massacre in 1770.
"I wanted to talk about the first person to die for a revolution and what that meant, and what he sacrificed. When you look at what happened, [Attucks] could have very easily 'laid in the cut,' as Luke says. He stepped up," Coker explains. "We used Crispus Attucks for that because half of these kids haven't even heard of Crispus Attucks. It's really the power of music, and of entertainment, of film and television. You get to tell stories and history that people have not really thought about in a long time."
Coker also uses music to frame the context of Luke Cage, giving the show its own "pulse," and helping to bring the original comic-book tale out of the 70s and ground it in modern times. Coker spent his pre-TV writing career as music journalist, profiling prolific artists like Wu-Tang Clan and the Notorious B.I.G. He used his musical connections to recruit A Tribe Called Quest DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammed and composer Adrian Younge to score the show, which features tracks (and sometimes live performances) from the likes of Faith Evans, Method Man and The Delfonics. Again, the music isn't just to make the show sound cool but to serve as a metaphor for the messages the series contains.
Go inside the music of Marvel's Luke Cage
"That was kind of the goal, to give the show a pulse. Music is really such an important part of the African-American experience. Rather than show hip-hop, I wanted the show to be hip-hop," Coker says. "It comes from the elements or [the music] answers to something. Old soul as well as blues, gospel and then funk -- it was as much about making the fabric of the show come from the entire fabric of black music, but then again having these hip-hop moments of well... I wanted to prove that there was also a complexity in the stories in the feel of hip-hop in addition to the comic books. If you combine both, you have something that is interesting and in some ways profound."
While Luke Cage offers an unadulterated look at the modern black experience with no white point of entry (a la Taylor Schilling's Piper Champan on Orange Is the New Black), the show uses its expert storytelling and comic-book mold to remain inclusive all prospective audience members, no matter their skin tone.
"You could take these general motifs and you could set this within in these culture and find its own equivalent, but because I'm black and these characters are black it's the opportunity to tell the kind of black story that we haven't really seen on television," Coker says. "We can do it in a way where there's a certain level of sophistication. I was lucky that both Netflix and Marvel thought this was important...that they wanted the complexity. They wanted to take risks. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to really try and do something that was both beyond the genre and also deeply apart of it."
Daredevil is getting a third season from Netflix and Marvel
In fact, Coker is adamant that while the show focuses on black narratives, it was built for a wide audience to feel included, whether or not they relate directly to the characters' specific experiences or not.
"I don't really want the show to have the mantle of this is the black side of Marvel, as if only black people can enjoy this. I think this show, if anything, is inclusively black," he says. "Yes, this is a hip-hop show, but it's not done at the expense of alienating anyone who didn't sign up for this experience."
Most importantly, Coker wants everyone who tunes in to watch for the fun of the show. After all, peel away the music, the context and the conversation and you're left with a superhero, and that's really what we came for.
Yes! Rosario Dawson is returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Luke Cage
"A lot of the press is talking about the politics and the N-word, but what's going to surprise people is how fun and vibrant the show is. It's one of these things that you see it and you want to watch it again," he says. "I am just so thankful that Netflix and Marvel had enough belief in me and what we were doing to let us tell this story in this way."
We are too, Cheo.
All episode of Luke Cage will be available for streaming on Netflix beginning Friday, Sept. 30
http://www.tvguide.com/news/luke-cage-season-1-preview-cheo-hodari-coker-interview/
I agree. I am tired of dealing with kids and playground shit imitating adult use of ignorance. Fuck man can we move on to something new....
.....
Dream those dreams
then man-up and woman-up and live those dreams,
because a life without dreams is black and white,
and the universe flows in technicolor and surround-sound.
Blaow!”
- Reggie Ossé.
Throwbump
