Put that shit on replay!

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″This year marks the 25th year anniversary of The Five Heartbeats. I know time flies! I’m still only 17! It seems like it was yesterday, but time goes by so fast. This year celebrations are happening around the country to honor the film: The Writers Guild of America will host a special screening in February in Los Angeles and top radio syndicated morning DJ Tom Joyner will have a special screening of the film during his annual Fantastic Voyage Cruise, April 23 – May 1, 2016, as it travels through the Caribbean, myself and some of the cast will be on the cruise to talk about the film.

So, now let me tell you what I’ve been working on to honor the 25thanniversary of the film. I’ve been working on a documentary about how I made the film. It was my second film as a new filmmaker and none of the studios wanted to make it. The struggle and journey to make the film is almost as exciting as the film itself. So, this documentary will give you a no-holds-barred look into my creative process. I share the real deal on what it took to really make The Five Heartbeats, that now millions consider an American Classic.

She was one of the most famous performers in the country, a recording star, a Hollywood actress and a nightclub sensation. But in the late 1950s, Lena Horne still struggled to find property owners in Manhattan who were willing to sell co-ops or condominiums to African-Americans, even very wealthy ones. So how exactly did she snare the penthouse apartment, featured in this photograph, at 300 West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? With the help of a good friend, Harry Belafonte. 

Back in 1958, Mr. Belafonte, who was the first recording artist to sell more than a million LPs, was turned away from one Manhattan apartment after another. And he was furious. So he sent his publicist, who was white, to rent a four-bedroom apartment in the building at 300 West End Avenue. His publicist passed on the paperwork, and Mr. Belafonte signed the one-year lease in his own name. Within hours of moving in, Mr. Belafonte said, the building’s manager “became aware that he had a Negro as a tenant.” The building’s owner asked him to leave. 

Mr. Belafonte refused. Instead, he bought the building, using dummy real estate companies to cloak his identity. Some tenants who had been renting there bought their apartments and some of Mr. Belafonte’s friends moved in, too. “Lena Horne got the penthouse,” said Mr. Belafonte, who described the real estate deal in his memoir, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance.” By Dec. 17, 1964, when this photograph was taken by our photographer, Sam Falk, Ms. Horne and her husband, Lennie Hayton, a white composer and conductor, were comfortably settled in. She was hanging Christmas decorations that day as she prepared for the debut of her television show, “Lena.”

Previously titled “Maya Angelou: The People’s Poet,” the film’s new title comes from “And Still I Rise,” Angelou’s third volume of poetry, published by Random House in 1978.