In "Hollywood Black," a four-part docuseries streaming on MGM+, director Justin Simien chronicles the vast and untold history of the Black experience in Hollywood. Inspired by historian Donald Bogle's book by the same title, the series unearths parts of film history that don't get taught in film school, and puts into historical, cultural, and societal contexts those performers (Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy) and films ("Do the Right Thing," "Shaft") that did break through to the mainstream. When Simien was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he talked about how he was inspired to make the series by his own recent discovery of films, filmmakers, and rich periods of Black cinema that he was previously unaware of and wasn't taught in film school.
