“Dating back to the beginning of Hollywood, Black films were always seen as lesser-than projects. I wanted to correct that and do something that honors all of these films,” said journalist Len Webb. “And since I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided: I want to watch every Black film ever made. And I knew if I was going to do something like that, I wanted to make it constructive. So I said, let’s do a podcast.”
In 2016, he teamed up with fellow journalist Vincent Williams and launched The Micheaux Mission, named for Oscar Micheaux, one of the earliest prominent Black filmmakers who spent much of his career in Chicago. “There’s a vacuum of Black voices in film criticism,” said Williams, “and I love the fact that Len’s first instinct was not to sit and complain about it. He said, let’s do something.”
The pair’s latest podcast installment, premiering March 6, is called "The Class of 1989" and it takes an in-depth look at six pivotal films: from “Driving Miss Daisy” (which won the Oscar for best picture) to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (no best picture nomination) to the Denzel Washington Civil War epic “Glory” to Eddie Murphy’s 1930s-set crime dramedy “Harlem Nights” to the contemporary high school drama “Lean on Me” to the lesser known South African apartheid drama “A Dry White Season.”
