Hazel Scott: Café Society
FAIN: TD-266328-19
New York Foundation for the Arts, Inc. (Brooklyn, NY 11201-8301)
Robert S. Levi (Project Director: January 2019 to October 2022)
Development
of a documentary film about the African American musician and broadcast
pioneer Hazel Scott (1920–81).
This is a request for a $75,000 media development grant for Hazel Scott: Café Society, a sixty-minute broadcast documentary film. The program focuses on the life and work of the African-American singer, classical and jazz pianist, stage and film actress, political activist, and broadcast pioneer, Hazel Scott (1920-1981). In a career that spanned four decades, Hazel Scott was an innovative performer whose influence impacted five seminal movements in American culture—classical music, cabaret and musical theater, jazz piano, broadcast television, and Hollywood films. Even now, almost seventy years after her groundbreaking debut as the first African-American to host a network television show, Hazel Scott’s legacy as a broadcast pioneer remains unrivaled but under-celebrated.