#her name is Diana Robinson and she’s a time traveler :D | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

the-master-cylinder · 4 years

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SUMMARY The story centers on Diana “Sugar” Hill (Bey), a photographer in Houston whose boyfriend, nightclub owner Langston (Larry D. Johnson), has been killed by mob boss Morgan (Robert Quarry) and his men when he refused to sell the club to Morgan. Sugar seeks the help of a former voodoo queen named Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully) to take revenge on Morgan and his thugs. Mama summons the voodoo lord of the dead, Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), who enlists his army of zombies to destroy the men who killed Langston and now want the club. Investigating the killings is Sugar’s former boyfriend, police Lt. Valentine (Richard Lawson).

DEVELOPMENT/PRODUCTION The film, budgeted at $350,000, was shot on location in Houston at such locations as the Heights branch of the Houston Public Library (a historical landmark), used in the film as a “Voodoo Institute”. Sugar Hill was the last film Quarry did for AIP, after a run that included the Count Yorga movies. Also appearing in the film was Cully, who played Mama Jefferson on the TV show The Jeffersons. Charles P. Robinson, known for his role as Mac Robinson on NBC’s Night Court, portrayed the character of Fabulous. Hank Edds created the makeup effects for the zombies in the film.

Actress Marki Bey “researched her part among various voodoo cults in and around the L.A. environs; thereby acquiring the proper authoritative menace to make her role as a voodoo high priestess believable.”

Rumor has it that the afro-style hairdo worn by the character Diana Hill during the zombie attack sequences was because Marki Bey didn’t look “black enough” while wearing her hair flat and relaxed.

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Actor Don Pedro Colley also did extensive research in the voodoo practices from Haiti for his role as Baron Samedi. According to Colley, “This character was based more or less on the actual voodoo character that comes from Haiti…Papa Legre, who is all powerful, all omnipotent. Throughout the voodoo culture Papa Legre is the one single heavyweight dude.”

I’m supposed to be playing a voodoo god rising from the grave with an army of zombies. So I said, “Well, let me go back into my old theater bag of tricks here and do what I’m supposed to do. Let me do a lot of research.’ So I got several books from the library. One was written by two anthropologists that had studied voodoo religions around the world and another was written by a practitioner of voodoo from Haiti. This character was based more or less on the actual voodoo character that comes from Haiti. The Haitian characters name is Papa Legre, who is all powerful, all omnipotent. Throughout the voodoo culture Papa Legre is the one single heavyweight dude. My character’s name was Baron Samedi. It went through how the rituals of voodoo work. For those who believe in it, things can actually happen, good or bad. A woman hates her old man so she goes through a voodoo priestess who puts a hex on him and he ends up dying of a horrible disease or a heart attack or a car crash. By filling a glass with alcohol and burning chicken feathers and spiders and lighting incense and doing chants on a daily basis. The two scientists related voodoo rituals to others rituals that take place in other religions, such as the Catholic religion, the burning of the incense, the drinking of the blood, the wafer, the bread of God. These are rituals that are really taken right out of voodoo rituals. And relating the singing from the Baptist or Episcopalian or Presbyterian religions, even the Muslims and the Sikhs, all of the rituals all had a basis in the early African voodoo tribal religion that came west from the tribes of Africa when the slaves were brought. So I said, ‘I’ve now got all this information. I’m going to make Baron Samedi scary, boy is he going to be scary.””

Robert Quarry reflects on making “Sugar Hill”. The producer and the director Paul Maslansky were both white, and, of course, it was an all-black movie. They had a black actor set for the part, but they got rid of him, and Sam sent me in to take the part. So I walked in as ‘Mr. Whitey’ to play the head of the Mafia in Houston, which is where they shot it. I didn’t give a shit. They paid me. And during the shoot, my rich white friends in Houston wouldn’t call me because they thought I’d bring somebody black to lunch with me. The racism was that subtle. And, of course, they hired so many blacks for the movie, and here I was saying things like ‘nigger’ and ‘jig’ and ‘jungle bunny.’ The extras who weren’t actors were going to kill me because they thought I was a big racist. But I won them over eventually. And we all laughed so hard. I’d tell them all on the set, ‘Okay, easy fellas, get ready because I’m going to say the ‘n’ word again.” One of the locations was this mansion that looked like it had been abandoned for a hundred years. It even had an elevator in it. It had been abandoned for ten or fifteen years. The place was full of cobwebs and dust, it was really quite neat. The only thing I objected to is, here I am starring in this movie and I’m being treated like a peon. Here they are paying me 750 dollars a week and I’m starring in this bloody mess. Union law states that when the performers travel, they travel first class and they stay in a first class hotel and when they work on the set they have a first class dressing room. In Houston, I didn’t have any dressing room. It was like 95% humidity. It was 95 degrees every day. They were talking about having me stand behind a car in the street to change clothes. Forget it! So I went out and rented a forty foot motor home and I drove it to the set and the producer went bugo, he went off – ‘You can’t do that! You can’t drive that here! We have to put a union driver on that. We have to pay the union drivers a thousand a week and…’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. Are you telling me that a driver of my motor home makes more money a week than I do and I’m starring in this piece of shit!?” I said, ‘I’m going to keep this until you provide me with a dressing room and in the mean time I’m calling the union and letting them know exactly what you people are doing down here.’ That’s what they did at American International. They exploited everybody.

The performers playing the zombies in Sugar Hill wore ping pong balls cut in half over their eyes, creating the cartoonish, yet eerie effect. Other sources say the eyes were created with broken-off spoon halves.

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SCORE/SOUNDTRACK

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Supernatural Voodoo Woman Written by Dino Fekaris & Nick Zesses Sung by The Originals

CAST/CREW Directed Paul Maslansky

Produced Elliot Schick

Written Tim Kelly

Marki Bey as Diana Hill Robert Quarry as Morgan Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi Betty Anne Rees as Celeste Richard Lawson as Valentine Zara Cully as Mama Maitresse Charles P. Robinson as Fabulous Larry D. Johnson as Langston Rick Hagood as Tank Watson Ed Geldart as O’Brien Albert J. Baker as George Raymond E. Simpson, III as King Thomas C. Carroll as Baker Big Walter Price as Preacher

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Fangoria#64 Psychotronic Video#31 Psychotronic Video#33 TCM

Sugar Hill (1974) Retrospective SUMMARY The story centers on Diana "Sugar" Hill (Bey), a photographer in Houston whose boyfriend, nightclub owner Langston (Larry D.

#70sFilms #AIP

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newstfionline · 7 years

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‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death

By Sam Knight, The Guardian, 17 March 2017

Excerpts of long article

In the plans that exist for the death of the Queen--and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC--most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone friends to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public.

There will be bulletins from the palace--not many, but enough. “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, accompanied by symptoms which cause much anxiety,” announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victoria’s physician, two days before her death in 1901. “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine--enough to kill him twice over--in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

Her eyes will be closed and Charles will be king. His siblings will kiss his hands. The first official to deal with the news will be Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, a former diplomat who was given a second knighthood in 2014, in part for planning her succession.

Geidt will contact the prime minister. The last time a British monarch died, 65 years ago, the demise of George VI was conveyed in a code word, “Hyde Park Corner”, to Buckingham Palace, to prevent switchboard operators from finding out. For Elizabeth II, the plan for what happens next is known as “London Bridge.” The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say “London Bridge is down” on secure lines. From the Foreign Office’s Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed location in the capital, the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has served as a symbolic figurehead--a face familiar in the untidy drawings of a billion schoolchildren--since the dawn of the atomic age.

For a time, she will be gone without our knowing it. The information will travel like the compressional wave ahead of an earthquake, detectable only by special equipment. Governors general, ambassadors and prime ministers will learn first. Cupboards will be opened in search of black armbands, three-and-a-quarter inches wide, to be worn on the left arm.

The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30am. The BBC did not broadcast the news until 11.15am, almost four hours later. When Princess Diana died at 4am local time at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris on 31 August 1997, journalists accompanying the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, on a visit to the Philippines knew within 15 minutes. For many years the BBC was told about royal deaths first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the empire has gone now. When the Queen dies, the announcement will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the rest of the world’s media simultaneously. At the same instant, a footman in mourning clothes will emerge from a door at Buckingham Palace, cross the dull pink gravel and pin a black-edged notice to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single page, showing the same text on a dark background.

Screens will glow. There will be tweets. At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated--a cold war-era alarm designed to withstand an attack on the nation’s infrastructure. Rats, which is also sometimes referred to as “royal about to snuff it”, is a near mythical part of the intricate architecture of ritual and rehearsals for the death of major royal personalities that the BBC has maintained since the 1930s. Most staff have only ever seen it work in tests; many have never seen it work at all. “Whenever there is a strange noise in the newsroom, someone always asks, ‘Is that the Rats?’ Because we don’t know what it sounds like,” one regional reporter told me.

All news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. The Times is said to have 11 days of coverage ready to go. At Sky News and ITN, which for years rehearsed the death of the Queen substituting the name “Mrs Robinson”, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to speak exclusively on those channels. “I am going to be sitting outside the doors of the Abbey on a hugely enlarged trestle table commentating to 300 million Americans about this,” one told me.

For people stuck in traffic, there will only be the subtlest of indications, at first, that something is going on. Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every station, down to hospital radio, has prepared music lists made up of “Mood 2” (sad) or “Mood 1” (saddest) songs to reach for in times of sudden mourning. “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

These well-laid plans have not always helped. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the obit lights didn’t come on because someone failed to push the button down properly.

There will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. Networks will merge.

The main reason for rehearsals is to have words that are roughly approximate to the moment. “It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement,” said John Snagge, the BBC presenter who informed the world of the death of George VI. (The news was repeated seven times, every 15 minutes, and then the BBC went silent for five hours). According to one former head of BBC news, a very similar set of words will be used for the Queen. The rehearsals for her are different to the other members of the family, he explained. People become upset, and contemplate the unthinkable oddness of her absence. “She is the only monarch that most of us have ever known,” he said. The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were.

When people think of a contemporary royal death in Britain, they think, inescapably, of Diana. The passing of the Queen will be monumental by comparison. It may not be as nakedly emotional, but its reach will be wider, and its implications more dramatic. “It will be quite fundamental,” as one former courtier told me.

The death of a British monarch, and the accession of a new head of state, is a ritual that is passing out of living memory: three of the Queen’s last four prime ministers were born after she came to the throne. When she dies, both houses of parliament will be recalled, people will go home from work early, and aircraft pilots will announce the news to their passengers. In the nine days that follow (in London Bridge planning documents, these are known as “D-day”, “D+1” and so on) there will be ritual proclamations, a four-nation tour by the new king, and a diplomatic assembling in London not seen since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.

More overwhelming than any of this, though, there will be an almighty psychological reckoning for the kingdom that she leaves behind. The Queen is Britain’s last living link with our former greatness--the nation’s id, its problematic self-regard--which is still defined by our victory in the second world war. One leading historian, who like most people I interviewed for this article declined to be named, stressed that the farewell for this country’s longest-serving monarch will be magnificent. “Oh, she will get everything,” he said. “We were all told that the funeral of Churchill was the requiem for Britain as a great power. But actually it will really be over when she goes.”

Unlike the US presidency, say, monarchies allow huge passages of time--a century, in some cases--to become entwined with an individual. The second Elizabethan age is likely to be remembered as a reign of uninterrupted national decline, and even, if she lives long enough and Scotland departs the union, as one of disintegration. Life and politics at the end of her rule will be unrecognisable from their grandeur and innocence at its beginning. “We don’t blame her for it,” Philip Ziegler, the historian and royal biographer, told me. “We have declined with her, so to speak.”

The Queen is approaching the end of her reign at a time of maximum disquiet about Britain’s place in the world, at a moment when internal political tensions are close to breaking her kingdom apart. Her death will also release its own destabilising forces: in the accession of Queen Camilla; in the optics of a new king who is already an old man; and in the future of the Commonwealth, an invention largely of her making. (The Queen’s title of “Head of the Commonwealth” is not hereditary.) Australia’s prime minister and leader of the opposition both want the country to become a republic.

Coping with the way these events fall is the next great challenge of the House of Windsor, the last European royal family to practise coronations and to persist--with the complicity of a willing public--in the magic of the whole enterprise. That is why the planning for the Queen’s death and its ceremonial aftermath is so extensive. Succession is part of the job. Queen Victoria had written down the contents of her coffin by 1875. The Queen Mother’s funeral was rehearsed for 22 years. Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, prepared a winter and a summer menu for his funeral lunch. London Bridge is the Queen’s exit plan. “It’s history,” as one of her courtiers said. It will be 10 days of sorrow and spectacle in which, rather like the dazzling mirror of the monarchy itself, we will revel in who we were and avoid the question of what we have become.

For a long time, the art of royal spectacle was for other, weaker peoples: Italians, Russians, and Habsburgs. British ritual occasions were a mess. At the funeral of Princess Charlotte, in 1817, the undertakers were drunk. Ten years later, St George’s Chapel was so cold during the burial of the Duke of York that George Canning, the foreign secretary, contracted rheumatic fever and the bishop of London died. “We never saw so motley, so rude, so ill-managed a body of persons,” reported the Times on the funeral of George IV, in 1830. Victoria’s coronation a few years later was nothing to write home about. The clergy got lost in the words; the singing was awful; and the royal jewellers made the coronation ring for the wrong finger. “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial,” the Marquess of Salisbury wrote in 1860. “In England the case is exactly the reverse.”

#Britain #London Bridge is down #Queen Elizabeth's death

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