New DVD from Danny Hoch: "Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop"

Letters from Michael Skolnik and Danny Hoch

Letter from executive producer, Michael Skolnik

Hello Family, Friends and Fans...

As many of you know, my first film I ever worked on was as co-Executive Producer for Danny Hoch's Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop. This is a film I love dearly and think is an incredible piece of work. Unfortunately, due to many issues, the film was never properly released. After getting hundreds of requests for the film from Danny's fans, I decided not to wait around anymore for that dream distributor to make an offer. Recently, I obtained right to distribute the film myself. I know a lot of you are thinking, Michael, you are no distributor. I am not, you are right, but I have so much respect for this film that it kills me that we have not been able to share this film with the world. It is finally available on DVD for the world to see.

I am manufacturing a very small run of DVDs that we are selling exclusively through our website, www.jhhthefilm.com or www.amazon.com As we have very little resources for marketing, we hope that the word of mouth can spread and we can do it the old fashion way...by the people, for the people.

As I have dug into my pockets to make this happen (and you know my pockets ain't that deep), I am sorry to say that I cannot send anyone a free copy...so SUPPORT!

We need your help and we appreciate your help. Hit the message boards, chat lines, phone lines, debate rooms and spread the word....This film was amazing to be a part of and it is a truly special movie! You will not be dissapointed and if you are I will refund your $.

Much respect,

Michael Skolnik
Executive Producer

THE FILM IS ONLY AVAILABLE ONLINE, SO DON'T WAIT AND HOPE YOU ARE GONNA SEE IT IN BLOCKBUSTER...CAUSE YOU AIN'T.

Letter from Danny Hoch

Peace All,

I've got some exciting news to share amidst all the craziness happening these days. After much hardship, unnecessary legal battles and exasperation, my film "JAILS, HOSPITALS & HIP-HOP" shot on location in New York, Los Angeles & Havana is NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD! The few of you who have seen it during its brief appearance in theaters, know that what issues the film addresses, such as U.S. militarism, police brutality, racism, the prison industry, media collusion, etc.; none of these situations have ended, in fact they have only worsened.

As we are all working in our individual and collective ways for peace and justice in this world, I ask that you please support this film in its complete form, by purchasing it, and urging your friends, colleagues and comrades to purchase it and share it with as many people as possible. Many professors and teachers in High Schools and Universities have requested it, so have several community based organizations, Hip-Hop youth groups, and of course the Office Of Homeland Security already has it. I hope they enjoy it too.

I promise that none of the money you spend on this film will go to any corporation (except maybe amazon.com- depending on how you purchase it), as the film is being distributed independently by the brave executive producer who has fought tirelessly to get this film out, and continues to produce media projects that challenge, provoke, educate and broadcast the realities of the voiceless.

Many of you who have asked me about this film over the past few years have received a reply of hopeless uncertainty as myself and the film have struggled through...well, a lot. It's taken me this long to tell you anything definitive, and that is: THE FILM IS OUT Y'ALL!

Please support it however you can. We have very limited marketing resources and we need everyone to spread the word that the film is out!

In sincerest thanks and nuff solidarity in these challenging times,

Danny Hoch

TO BUY THE FILM GO TO: www.jhhthefilm.com

Danny Hoch, an actor/playwright whose one-man show "Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop" has toured the country and will be released as a feature-length film in the spring of 2001.An earlier one-man show, "Some People" was produced as an HBO special.

"Best Of The Fest at the New York International Latino Film Festival, and Urbanworld Film Festival Award Winner, Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop: The Filmā is on a guerilla-style tour in 2001, sneaking into your city the way hip-hop snuk up on America."

Check the film's website www.takeovertour.com for more information. Check www.dannyhoch.com for more information on Danny.

Danny Hoch on performing "Some People" at the "Mixed Blood Theater," Minneapolis

Danny Hoch: I was in Minneapolis at a place called the Mixed Blood Theater [his eyes go wide]. Their mission statement was like half of Martin Luther King's dream speech. It was all about multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity. And I noticed--one couldn't help but notice--that the theater was right next door to three huge project buildings that were each at least 25 stories.... And I'd say 3/4 of the people in these projects are Black and half the Black people in these projects were Ethiopian immigrants. I thought, "This is so fucking great."

So the second night I go to the box office and they had sold 13 tickets. I said, "Don't you ever have young people from next door, like intern for you?" And she said, "Oh no, no! They cause trouble." And I said, "Well, have they ever gone to see something here?" And she said, "Oh no, no, no." And I said, "Well, did you ever invite them? There's 7 or 10 thousand people living in these buildings next door and they've never been here? How long have you been here?" "Thirteen years." Right?! So I say, "I get comps, right?"

I go across the street to the basketball court in the projects and there's like 50 kids playing basketball. All of them are Black. They all got their pants sagging and their hats turned back. And I go, "Hey, I don't mean to break up your game and shit but there's this guy performing across the street, and, yo, oh my god, this guy is so funny, he plays these characters, he plays this woman, yo, this shit is so funny. He was on HBO too." They're like, "HBO, yo, word? Oh shit." So I said, "You should go see him." They said, "Well how much are tickets?" I said, "Tickets are $12, but I'll get you comps."

So they came. And they all sat in the back. And who was sitting in the front but my 13 trusty white progressive Minneapolis types in their 20s or 30s. You can't knock em--I mean they come to my shows and they support, and they're good people.

And I'm doing my show, and you know my show is very difficult linguistically, right. Well, I didn't realize that half these kids were first generation immigrants--they had just come from Ethiopia --- so they hadn't even mastered "standard" English, let alone all this language that I was talking on stage, with the Puerto Rican Brooklyn accent, and the Bronx Dominican accent, and you know, the Queens Jewish accent--it was like forget it÷and Trinidadian DJ, the Jamaican guy.

So not only are they having a different cultural response, cuz they're from Ethiopia--so they're getting up and responding to my characters, talking to my characters--which I'm totally thrilled about because to me this is what theater is, right. But they're translating for each other! Like the ones that understand English are translating for the other ones that don't. Because it's so important that they understand what I'm saying. To me, because language is my fucking love, I am in heaven, this is the greatest show I ever did in my life.

What are my trusty white progressive people doing in front? They're turning around and going "Shhhh, Shhh." They're telling them to shut up! So then the kids are getting upset, "Don't tell me to shut up, man," right? And the white people are like, "You don't know how to act in a theater." So eventually this fight breaks out between one of the white guys and one of the Ethiopian kids and they take it out in the lobby. I kept going with the show.

So by the end of the show all the kids have left. I get off stage and there are all my 13 trusties waiting for me, right, with their arms folded... And I swear to you, I'm quoting to you what that one guy said to me. He said, "They were infringing on my theatrical experience." And I said, "What makes it your theatrical experience and not theirs?" And this guy was all leftist and shit with his little fucking plaid retro shirt with a little button on it, and his dyed hair and nose ring and shit.... I said, "You are at the Mixed Blood Theater. Do you live in these buildings here?" "No." "These people live in these buildings and they have never been invited in, and they already are feeling alienated to begin with.You have your way of behaving in a theater --"

So, they started arguing with me, but some of them were supporting me, and some of them were arguing with each other. And then I left them. But then I thought, you know what, this is what theater is for. Theater is to provoke discussion, to have people argue with each other. Why should you go to a theater and leave feeling good about yourself and that's it? I'm sure the kids had a lot to talk about too. I just wish they woulda came back. I feel really bad, that that's how they were like pushed out...

So now wherever I go, if I have at least a day to walk around, I find some kids and get them on the list and they come in.

CJ: What you do is part of what I would call a culture of resistance. And I'm wondering how you see it and if you see this kind of art growing?

Danny Hoch: I think it's been growing.... I think that my generation is unique in that I know a vast amount of people who are my age who, all through our childhood, and through our 20s, did not and do not feel that we will make it to the next year--either because of reasons of Armageddon, or we're gonna get murdered, or the government is gonna come kill us, or drugs or whatever. Like when I was 16 I never believed I would live to be 17. When I was 18 I never thought I would see 20. Now I'm 27 and I don't know whether I'll reach 28. So, I think a lot of people in our generation, even if we succeed and do well, we are not going to stop resisting.

CJ: Why not?

DH: Because these past 20 years have been so brutal, I think that for the next 20 we will not be able to just sit back and let things happen.

CJ: Do you think your art helps people change the world?

DH: I know it's what I'm supposed to do in my life. And I've seen all generations, colors and genders moved by what I do.... They were moved to do something, their minds were opened. I could touch the possibility for change in these people, particularly in jail. So, yes I do, I feel that it's amazingly powerful, it's threateningly powerful, theater is. And I'm just trying to be part of that power. I'm trying to achieve theater. ... There's an urgency to it, and to me theater must have urgency because we're in urgent times.

--excerpts from an interview with Connie Julian, originally published in the Revolutionary Worker, November 1998

Danny Hoch's official BIO

For more on Danny, go to DannyHoch.com.

DANNY HOCH is a globally acclaimed actor, writer and solo performer. His three solo shows Pot Melting, Some People, and Jails, Hospitals, Hip-Hop have toured over 50 cities to sold out houses, and have won awards including 2 OBIES, Edinburgh Fringe First Award, NEA Fellowship, Sundance Writers Fellowship, 1998 CalArts/Alpert Award In Theatre, 1999 Tennessee Williams Fellowship. Most recently, Mr. Hoch is the recipient of a 2000-2001 fellowship from the New School's Vera List Center for Art & Politics.

Mr. Hoch has also written and acted for television and several films including HBO's Subway Stories, Terrence Malick's Thin Red Line, Fox Searchlight's Whiteboyz, and New Line's Prison Song. Danny Hoch's Some People was made into a highly acclaimed HBO special, and was nominated for a Cable Ace Award. His writings on race, class and hip-hop have appeared in The Village Voice, New York Times, Harper's, New Theater Review, The Nation, American Theatre, and various books: Out Of Character , Extreme Exposure, Laughing In The Dark, and Creating Your Own Monologue. Mr. Hoch's book Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop and Some People is on its second printing by Villard Books/Random House.

Mr. Hoch produced the first New York City Hip-Hop Theater Festival this past June at Performance Space 122, bringing together a variety of Hip-Hop generation plays and performances together from all over the country, and asserting Hip-Hop's importance in the arts outside the realm of music. The festival included Sarah Jones' Surface Transit, Liza Colon Zayas' Sistah Supreme, Hip-Hop Theatre Junction's Rhyme Deferred and Will Power's The Meeting. Jails... was also the first off-Broadway production in New York City whose advertising money was spent on Hip-Hop Street Teams and youth ticket subsidies, instead of New York Times Ads.

He is a founding board member of the Active Element Foundation, which builds relationships between grassroots youth activists, professionals, donors and artists through grantmaking, technical assistance and hip-hop culture. Recently Active Element Foundation funded a thirteen-state Environmental Justice Youth Initiative, the Rap-The-Vote Campaign, and ten youth-led, hip-hop related organizations that campaigned against Proposition 21 in California.

The highly anticipated socio-political film Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, an unprecedented mix of live jail solo performance combined with on-location fully dressed scenes, will be released in 2001. Currently, Danny Hoch can be seen in some bizarre cameos in Spike Lee's Bamboozled and Darnell Martin's Prison Song, both being released by New Line Cinema. Currently Danny Hoch is writing two plays and two screenplays, which range in subject matter from the business of youth incarceration, to the clashes of culture in urban America.

His 2001 activities also include: teaching a course on writing for political performance at the Writers For The Americas Conference in Cuba alongside Junot Diaz, Martin Espada, Maria Irene Fornes; producing and curating the 2nd NYC Hip-Hop Theatre Festival and organizing a colloquium on hip-hop and theatre. Having been a cultural liaison to Cuba in both theatre and hip-hop for several years, Danny Hoch is organizing a Hip-Hop Exchange with the island of Cuba in 2001, where rappers, b-boys, graffiti artists, d-jays and hip-hop activists from the U.S. will visit Havana to meet with Cuba's most prominent Hip-Hop artists and scholars, followed up by a trip to NY by Cuban Hip-Hoppers and scholars to participate in a conference on Hip-Hop Activism and Hip-Hop in Politics at the New School for Social Research.

Mr. Hoch spent five years bringing conflict-resolution-through-drama to adolescents in NYC's jails and alternative high schools with the Creative Arts Team; developing, performing in, and facilitating interactive improvisational theatre workshops about AIDS, prejudice, violence and substance abuse in over 100 Alternative High Schools, including Houses Of Detention (Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan), Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, Rikers Island(ARDC C-74, GMDC C-73, Island Academy C-76, R.M. Singer Center).

One of the first artists to bridge Hip-Hop and Theatre, Danny has been called "the voice of a new generation" in theatre and film, having publicly turned down several lucrative roles in Hollywood because of their overt or covert racism, industry policies, corporate injustices or plain old wackness. Danny Hoch donated his plays Clinic Con Class for the Pieces Of The Quilt AIDS Theatre Project, Magic Theater, San Francisco 1996; and his play Against The Wall for Mumia 911/Public Theater NYC 1999. In 1995, Danny accompanied Yolanda King, Arn Chorn, Judith Thompson, Migdalia Cruz and Lawrence Sacharow on a round-the-world trip interviewing youth survivors of war, to write a play entitled Children Of War, based on children's healing from war and violence in Cambodia, Tibet, Bosnia and the Urban US2E.

Danny Hoch

"Inside the Culture of Resistance"-- a series of conversations with artists videotaped in front of a live audience.

Other interviews in the series include:
Reg e. Gaines
Oscar Brown Jr.
David Riker
Willie Perdomo
Culture Clash
Universes

The interview was done at PS 122 in New York City and was conducted by Steven Sapp, who is a playwright/actor and director of the theater/poetry ensemble Universes

A transcript from the Artists Network's "Inside the Culture of Resistance" interview with Danny will be on this site soon. A 17-minute edited videotape of excerpts from this interview is available from the Artists Network.

For info, write rnrarts@hotmail.com