Rick Schmidt, filmmaker, author of Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices and Extreme DV , & an essential figure in the modern history of DIY film, has written a novel called Black President. From the publisher's website:
"Rick Schmidt’s prescient political thriller – he wrote the first draft pre-9/11 – is a brilliant historical gallop through half a century of subterfuge, civil rights stand-off, scandal and conspiracy, from the Bay of Pigs to the Twin Towers and beyond. Taking as his starting-point JFK’s well-documented promiscuity, Schmidt opens with the President’s seduction of a devout, married, African-American woman. Within two and a half years of the couple’s single encounter, JFK is assassinated. In a haunting blend of pathos, courage and ambition, and against all conceivable adversity, their son rises from poverty to attain America’s highest office.
Schmidt skillfully weaves together the most important events and prominent figures of US modern history, reinterpreting events with the benefit of hindsight and an in-depth knowledge of the greatest American conspiracy theories. He takes us into Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom, J. Edgar Hoover’s wardrobe and JFK’s cabinet meetings. From here, he leads us into the brutality of assassination – JFK, Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy – and thence to the quagmire of Vietnam.
A stirring and topical must-read.
About the Author:
California-based Rick Schmidt is the writer/director of over twenty independent features. These include the iconoclastic Emerald Cities and Sundance Grand-Prize nominated Morgan’s Cake, released since his feature film debut of A Man, a Woman, and a Killer (co-directed with Wayne Wang, Joy Luck Club, Smoke, etc.). Schmidt’s bestselling guides, Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices and Extreme DV (Penguin Books), are considered classics.
Black President is his first novel."
More at publisher Picnic Publishing's site.
- Sujewa
