{"id":924,"date":"2006-03-08T17:54:39","date_gmt":"2006-03-08T21:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2006\/03\/08\/gordon-parks-obituary\/"},"modified":"2006-03-08T17:54:39","modified_gmt":"2006-03-08T21:54:39","slug":"gordon-parks-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2006\/03\/08\/gordon-parks-obituary\/","title":{"rendered":"Gordon Parks, 1912-2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/03\/08\/arts\/design\/08parks.html?ex=1299474000&amp;en=67800dc9bbbfe4df&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">Gordon Parks died yesterday<\/a> at the age of 93. Not only as the author of a book on &#8217;70s Hollywood, but simply as a lover of great film, I was familiar with Parks&#8217;s movies, but they were only one facet of his amazing talent. He was a photographer, a novelist, a memoirist, a magazine editor, a composer&#8230;just about whatever he needed to be to express himself from moment to moment.<\/p>\n<p>After the early cinematic successes of <i>The Learning Tree<\/i> and <i>Shaft<\/i>, Parks ended his big-screen directing career in 1976 after <i>Leadbelly<\/i>, starring Roger E. Mosley as blues pioneer Heddy Ledbetter, flopped with critics and audiences alike. I tried very hard to track down a copy of the film, which doesn&#8217;t appear to be available in any video formats, as I was researching my book; I suspect that in many ways it would counter the much more widely-known <i>Bound for Glory<\/i> biopic of Woody Guthrie and that, like many commercial &#8220;failures&#8221; from that era, it would have much to offer us upon a second viewing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gordon Parks died yesterday at the age of 93. Not only as the author of a book on &#8217;70s Hollywood, but simply as a lover of great film, I was familiar with Parks&#8217;s movies, but they were only one facet of his amazing talent. He was a photographer, a novelist, a memoirist, a magazine editor, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}