Remembering Eric Bauza, and the doc Once Upon a Time in Harlem

Get ready for a blockbuster holiday season with the Arts Club Theatre Company. Tickets are on sale now and moving fast. Don't miss the return of Buddy the Elf and his syrup-fueled adventures, the dazzling stagecraft of A Wonderhead's Christmas Carol, and those delightful crooners, the Gingerbread Men. The Arts Club is also thrilled to premiere the all-new Elvis Christmas Comeback Special. Get the best seats for your holiday favorites today, or bundle all four and save with a choose-your-own-subscription package. The best time to buy is now at artsclub.com. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Alameen Abdul-Mahmood, and this is Commotion. Earlier this week, we lost one of the best animated voice actors of our generation. Eric Bauza was a kid from Scarborough, Ontario, who became the modern voice of iconic characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. If you watch Coyote vs. Acme, Eric did so well. So many of the voices, you couldn't have made that movie without him. His family shared the news this past Sunday that Eric died at the age of 46. And all week long, friends, colleagues, and fans within Canada's Filipino community have been celebrating his legacy. Yesterday, I spoke with three people with different connections to Eric Bauza's art. Animation historian Jerry Beck, voice actor Bryn McCauley, who was a friend of Eric's, and Romero Candido, who was an Eric Bauza fan. Here's that conversation. All of you, welcome to the show. Hey, hey. Listen, I want to start, before we get anywhere, you know, deeper into this conversation, by just saying that this is personal, and this is close. And so I just want to say that, you know, Eric was so young and so incredibly talented. I can imagine this has been so hard, the unexpected passing. So I just want to say sorry for your loss, everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. I just wanted you to know, I was with Eric Saturday. Oh, wow. You so recently saw him. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was on a panel that I did, an animation conference, the Lightbox Conference. And packed house. It was with several other animation people. And Eric, it was about comedy. Eric, I asked everybody in advance to bring a clip or tell me a clip, and I'll have it ready there, that you think represents, you know, like a height of cartoon comedy. He picked his favorite scene from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And he, for some reason, thought I wouldn't have the clip. So he brought the script from the cartoon and was going to read it. And then started reading it. And then I said, well, I've got the clip. And I said, wait a minute. So I quickly put it on, put the sound down low, and had Eric reading it. It was unbelievable. A live reading. Wow. He was in top shape. This panel was recorded. And my group that is going to prepare, the video, and we'll put it online. Oh, wow. He was in great shape that day. Yeah. We were all beyond in shock if you didn't see him that day. But those of us who saw him that day, we thought the next day it was a hoax. Yeah. That he was, you know, that it was somebody hacked his web page. Because you had just so seen him, and he was so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alive and vibrant. Wow. And so you got his last performance. Yeah. The beautiful thing is you literally got his last performance, and it was done live and captured for everybody. So, wow. I'm so eager to see that. That sounds like a truly incredible. We'll have that out. Also, I'm glad that you had the wisdom to say, we'll turn down the sound. Eric, you take it from here. You know, you do that. That's what I do. Do the thing on stage. Yeah. I really can't wait to see that. But also, sorry for your loss, everyone. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to do this. Ramey, I'll start with you on this. Briefly, how does Eric Bowser go from being a Filipino kid from Scarborough to becoming the voice behind all of these iconic characters? Well, I didn't know him personally, but I knew him, and I knew his story, and I knew who he was. And it's kind of like the big aspirational Filipino Rocky story. He started, he grew up in Scarborough, Centennial, went to Centennial, went to Sheridan, took an intern job at an animation studio in Los Angeles. And, you know, not everybody knew that he could, could entertain people with voice impersonation. So he was down there, he was drawing, he was a PA, you know, he was a, he was a grinder. It's like Filipino thing. He was a grinder. He, he went and he did all the jobs and eventually he landed a job. I think his first voice work was Stimpy, like, like right in the deep end. And he, he, he did one of the most iconic voices. And when you look at his, and then, you know, opportunity, relationship, opportunity, relationship, you look at his IMDb, there's like 400 credits. This man was prolific and, you know, for, for all of us, to see one of our own go off and conquer that world was so inspiring. So yes, from Scarborough, all the way to Bugs Bunny, what a loss for us all. Romero, when you say a Filipino Rocky story, that's just, one of my favorites. That's one of my favorite descriptions of anything. So thank you for putting it in that particular context. That is lovely. We are here to celebrate Eric, Eric Bowser's legacy as a voice actor. So let's do exactly that. But here's Eric Bowser. He's talking about the legendary voice actor, Mel Blanc, and all the characters that he brought to life and also his approach to bringing those same characters to life. We can't start without citing the great Mel Blanc, who was the, the creator of these, I'm not going to say voices, but these personalities. We're now entering, I think maybe the 90th year. With these characters, they, we know them like we know our grandparents really. And Mel Blanc was the, the one-stop shop for, for, for Bugs Bunny, right? You mentioned Bugs. He's got that nasally buck tooth, Brooklyn Bronx type voice. And Van Daffy, which oddly enough, if you're a nerd, like you said, but even bigger nerd like me, you'll know that he was actually doing Sylvester's voice. And then they kind of pitched it and sped it up. So, you know, Sylvester, that big floppy cat with the big red nose, who's always trying to eat Tweety Bird. There is something genuinely extraordinary about watching Eric Bowser make all those, all those voices. I like watching his face transform as he does all those things. That's Eric Bowser doing the voices of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Sylvester, the cat and Tweety Bird. Bryn, I've, I've had a chance to meet Eric a couple of times. I was interviewed by him for that, for Stay Tuned, which is a documentary that, that was made for, for CBC. And like, there's something extraordinary about walking in the room and he is going to find the laugh out of you and he's going to dry it out. He's had this incredible ability. You were, I was watching your faces. You were, we were watching that clip and that was, that was hard for you. That was, that's Eric, your friend. And so I could, I just wanted to give you a moment to reflect on what that was like for you to watch. I've actually been avoiding videos of Eric because of this exact reaction, this exact feeling. It just, it's just, it's really overwhelming. I miss my friend. And it's also just, you know, it's like the combination of sadness and joy because you watch that and your face just lights up. And like you said, you know, you experienced seeing him do those voices and Eric would do that for everybody. You know, we'd be shopping at Trader Joe's in, in, in Los Angeles and he'd just be lighting up the people working at the cash. He, he, he had this incredible gift and he shared it with, you know, everyone. Yeah. And that's what was like so extraordinary about Eric. I would, you know, one would understand if you were a voice actor and you're like, I'm not going to do my work voice outside of work. And that did not strike me as the Eric thing. You know, Eric would, he just was like at any point if it was the thing that was going to make somebody laugh in that moment, he was going to be the thing that he would end up doing. So yeah, it's just, it really was just lovely to just watch that clip there. Jerry, you're, you're an animation historian. You work, we also, we work with Eric becoming the voice of all of these legendary characters. That's a thing that's like, that's a dream for so many voice actors, you know, what do you think it was about Eric's voice in particular that made him the guy who could do that job? Well, you know, I think Eric somehow by fate, you know, ended up with Mel Blanc's vocal cords. And I, I don't think he denied that. He could do every voice. Naturally he can even do Mel Blanc himself talking, not as a character. The you know, you know, he was a, he was a fan like me. I got along with him as everybody did, but I got along with him particularly because he was a, he was a film buff. He was a cartoon buff. He was, he cared about these characters as much as I did, but he loved them. He, he said in interviews, I think it was a little bit, he said it right there. You know, people would say, what's it like doing Bugs Bunny? And he'd say, I'm not doing Bugs Bunny. I'm doing Mel Blanc, you know, you know, the, the characters, he's, he's just the current caretaker of the characters. That's what he would say. And he knew, he knew what he also knew how lucky he was to have lucked into the situation that he was. He was an artist. was an animator that's how he got into the field he did the voices on the side right uh people realized how good he was and he got the opportunity to do it on mike i mean he never took that for granted right and he he always gave back he was a fan like we are uh that's i guess that's what i'll say about that uh bren let me ask you in terms of uh eric's talent which was so immediately sort of august like when did when did it when did it first catch your attention they're like oh this guy he's got it whatever it is he's got it the legend of eric bowser began for me in 2016 he was on a canadian tv show called atomic puppet and he was working with my friend julie sipe and she was like do you know this guy eric bowser he's playing eight characters on this show atomic puppet like who's eric bowser wow because he is obviously you know he represents scarborough so hard but he has been in los angeles for a really long time so most of us toronto voice actors have not had the immense pleasure of working in a booth with eric bowser so he that was the first time i heard his name and then and then he was in space jam with lebron in 2021 and then everyone knew everything about him and i was just fixated on his instagram and watching all his interviews and he became my hero because what eric can do is so extraordinary as a voice match artist and then you know it kind of made it it kind of clarified for me like oh that's the height that's the top of the top right you know yeah the notion that you could do one or two of the iconic characters is enough right the notion that you could do all of them that's next level like there's not been somebody who can do something like that and and to return back to the frame that you gave us earlier romeo like the idea of a of a scarborough filipino rocky like that is like to to go all the way to the height of the accomplishment in the field that you're in and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good talk to me romeo about what it felt like to sort of watch because you were saying that he holds a very special place in the in the canadian sort of filipino community what was it like to have someone from the community represent um the the highest level of achievement in something as iconic as looney tunes listen i know commotion always brings me in to talk about filipinos and i don't claim all the filipinos just because you're filipino doesn't mean i'm gonna claim you but we you know you're not claiming every filipino but no no no i'm not gonna but you know with with eric i i claim him so hard you know what i mean the thing is um because he's like a nerd like us like he like his references are like retro like us like big ups retro kid you know just like um and so for somebody you know like there's this filipino thing where like we're great mimics we're we're great at mimicry that's why we win at karaoke like you have arnel pineda you have our arnel pineda who sung journey so well that he became the lead singer of journey and then you have someone you have someone like eric who is like and it's beyond mimicry and it's beyond impersonation it's embodiment yeah it's embodiment and so like to to see one of our own do bugs bunny and remember when you grew up and you watch bugs bunny eating carrots and it carrots sounded so delicious and then you ate the carrots and then you ate the carrots and then you ate the carrots and it didn't sound as good like i always had these like images of eric and uh in a vocal booth eating lumpia like to make the carrot sounds and just like and just the fact that just the fact that one of ours played one of the most iconic like it doesn't get higher so whenever we see one of our own achieve the highest in a field doesn't matter what field yeah it just it raises the whole culture it expands our whole canon and so with eric doing that from space jam to acme versus coyote to all of the things he just expanded the possibility of what filipinos can do and what we can be also you mentioned retro kid that's the clothing brand that eric bowser co-founded it's basically like a nostalgia clothing brand i tell you it's a relief to me to not have to reach too far back to give you an example of eric bowser just accomplishing something incredible because he did voice most of the characters in the movie and i think it's a really good example of that in coyote versus acme which is a movie that came out earlier this year i just want to play you guys really quickly a clip right now oh my oh heavens you've seen my face don't look at me i'm too beautiful see a bit of lupia at the end of that that was a little bit no you've really you're really giving me that image and actually honestly that is gonna stick with me uh and brynn it is it is hard to hear you know eric doing all these voices and not feel like he must have just been like i don't know i don't know if i'm doing this right i don't know if i'm doing this right i don't know if i'm doing this right i don't know if i'm doing this right i don't know if i'm doing this right i don't know i'm delighting in this like having the most fun doing this thing but it's also like this is a demanding job this is like something that you know like you you're doing so much especially in a movie like that what's one thing like about the way that eric approached the job that most of us maybe take for granted but he did not you think eric would like everyone is saying on this panel eric was channeling eric was channeling mel blank and eric knew every single little idiosyncrasy and i remember when he won his third emmy um for for um playing daffy and bugs um i was like pointing out this like tiny little thing in his performance that was so just like pleasing and he was like that's not me that's mel that's mel you know he wouldn't he would always always give credit to mel blank first anything he any award he wins any credit and any uh admiration he receives he's like first it's first to mel and i think that speaks volumes about him and um like you said about like the technical prowess of eric bowser that he can absorb and and and he can deliver these idiosyncrasies with so much ease and in the right place and and without it being sort of conscious because he is just he's that's that talented of an artist i want to go around the table and just ask each of you something that you'll cherish about eric legacy uh jerry i'll start with you god yeah oh my god i just uh so happy he was able to bring the characters back that's the way i look at it um when mel blank passed many many people auditioned got the role you know uh did a good job i used to watch space jam or whatever and yeah okay that's a pretty good bugs bunny eric i never thought like that it was bugs bunny i never even thought about who's doing the voice it's the characters yeah that's my cherished moment and something we're gonna miss uh romeo what about you well the fact that in one year he released two impossible movies you know acme coyote was not supposed to come out it was supposed to be a tax break for the evil corporation that acme owns um and the fact that he did forgotten island he was a voice in an animated movie based on filipino folklore so he did both he honored the he honored the legacy of all of the great animation that came before him while representing his own culture in the the first widely released filipino animated movie and while his light burned fast and burned um bright and while we lost him too early there's a sense of mission accomplished like you did that you you scaled the highest heights and you were able to create a community along at the same time so for me um that's what i take away no man that's a very lovely takeaway uh brin if i can give you the last word on this what's something that you'll cherish about eric bowser's legacy i hope that i can explain to everyone who never had the immense pleasure of meeting eric that he was not just an extraordinary artist but he was a very very beautiful man and he showed me a lot of the things that i've been able to do in my life and i think that's a really good way to put it i think that's a really great way to do it and i think that's a really good way to do it and i think that's a really good way to do it and i think that's a really good way to do it and i think that's a really good way to do it and i think that's a really good way to do it he encouraged everybody he believed in your dreams he would send you a message out of nowhere to tell you that you were extraordinary and special and he saw people and he saw their gifts and he shared his gift of encouragement with everyone and being loved by eric bowser was it felt like having wings so i cherish him immensely as a friend and a human being i uh i'm really moved by that but also i really appreciate you guys taking the time to be with me and i hope that you guys have a great day taking the time to reflect on eric bowser's legacy um it's you know people say it quite often and maybe they don't necessarily mean it but in this particular case it truly will take an army to replace eric bowser like it's not that is like a one-of-a-kind kind of person and one-of-a-kind kind of artist and so i really appreciate you guys taking the time to do this thanks again for doing for being on the show today thank you thank you that was my conversation with musician and tv showrunner romeo candido and also brin mccauley who's a canadian voice actor based in los angeles and jerry beck who's an animation historian and video producer he was in los angeles eric bowser was the emmy award-winning canadian voice actor behind many modern looney tunes characters this past sunday eric's family released a statement that eric had died suddenly he was 46 years old the la county medical examiner determined the cause of death was hypertensive cardiovascular disease and jerry beck shared that wonderful story at the start of that conversation about eric bowser performing at an animation conference before he died that video will be available on Be up soon at asifa-hollywood.org. You know the Yukon. Its rivers, its land, its wildlife, its communities help guide the decisions that shape them. The Government of Canada is seeking candidates for federal nominations and appointments to Yukon boards and councils. Whether you bring professional expertise, community knowledge, or lived experience, your perspective matters. Help shape Yukon's future. Apply today at Canada.ca slash appointments hyphen north. A message from the Government of Canada. I'm Elamin Abdelmahmoud and this is Commotion. In August of 1972, a dinner party was held at the home of jazz legend Duke Ellington. But this was not a regular dinner party. It was a who's who of black poets and musicians and thinkers, the last living representatives of the Harlem Renaissance. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a new doc that revisits that iconography. The doc is based on interviews filmed during the actual dinner by the late filmmaker William Greaves. Jay Smooth is with us now to talk about this acclaimed documentary. Jay, welcome back to the show, man. Hello, hello. Good to be here. I think maybe let's set the scene by starting by talking about, you know, before we get into the doc, the Harlem Renaissance itself. Why was that such a significant moment in pop culture history? Yeah, so basically starting from the beginning of the 20th century, more or less, there were, and across, the first half of the 20th century, there were millions of black Americans who were moving up to northern U.S. cities to escape the worst of the Jim Crow South. This was known as the Great Migration. And this pretty quickly led to these thriving new black communities in different northern cities, the most vibrant of which, if I may say so myself, was my hometown of Harlem, which by the 1920s had quickly become a home to this kind of creative community that black people had never, black Americans, had never really been able to make. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. We've been in a position to create until now, and that era, starting from maybe 1918 to the mid-30s, just brought this incredible wave of innovation and black arts and culture that laid the foundation for a lot of the culture we still live with today. You take that wave and you put it all in one place in one dinner. So this documentary, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, is based on footage that's shot by filmmaker William Greaves, who organized this dinner at Duke Ellington's home. What inspired Greaves to coordinate all of this in the first place? Yeah, so William Greaves, great filmmaker, grew up in those years of the Harlem Renaissance and spent time around many of these luminaries. And I think over the years, he realized most students of black culture in later years, we know the biggest names from this era, but we know them as these sort of sacred abstractions that we read about in books. And we never got a chance to know them as people. And I think William Greaves wanted future generations to get to know these brilliant black elders. As he did, as these flesh and blood human beings who were all bouncing their complex humanity off of each other to create this wave of art and culture. Yeah, I've seen them actually move through the world. That's a whole other thing. We should remind people, part of the reason why this is incredibly important is we are talking about people who became luminaries in an era when we just didn't have video. Video documentation just did not exist. So if we have this dinner that takes place in 1972, why did it take so long for this doc to be released? Yeah, I think it was just one of those things where William Greaves had all they had hours and hours of footage from different cameras capturing the entire night. And, you know, he they William Greaves and his family, they were continually working with this footage and figuring out what they could do with it in the years and decades. One of those things where it just never quite became a finished product. And then after William Greaves passed, his family continued trying to figure out what to do with it. And at first. At first, they were going to just create an archive where you could see all of the raw footage. But over time, this documentary project just coalesced and came together. And I think it's just came together perfectly as a tribute to William Greaves, as well as all of these luminaries in the film. I was going to ask you, you watched Once Upon a Time in Harlem. How did you how do you feel about the documentary? Man, I loved it so much. I'm so glad that discussing this with commotion compelled me to see it in a theater, which I don't usually do for documentaries. It was so beautiful just to be fully immersed in this time and place with with with with all of these incredible creative minds. And I love how it shows the unsung heroes who were like the social glue of this community, like the librarians from the 135th Street Library, who made that into a gathering space and working space for all these artists and writers. And it's just these people are just so much fun to be around. This generation just has a certain sauce. They're just so elegant and. Charming and irreverent and just beautifully human. This whole generation of elders, I could have hung out with them if it was a 10 hour cut. I would have stayed for every minute of it. Jay, I love the thing that you said about the idea that this generation had so much sauce, you know, because it was something about, you know, not having the video evidence of what that would have looked like and then suddenly getting a chance to sort of sit with it and the gravity of it. And so I want to want to play a moment from this documentary now. And this clip where you're going to hear is two central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Regina Andrews. And Richard B. Moore. And they're explaining why Harlem started to become a hot, hotbed for black culture in the early 1900s. The opportunities for Negro employment developed in New York, I think, more rapidly than other major cities like Chicago, Philadelphia. And it was a mecca for the young person to come to and be almost certain that he could get a job. Many of our successful people came from the West Indies. Many of them came already well educated and became our doctors, our lawyers, our druggists, our creative writer. As a result of the economic development and the political development, there was a ferment which finally brought us the artistic development. A number of people started to come to Harlem because Harlem became known as the mecca of the new Negro. The mecca of the new Negro. That is a moment from the documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Jace, honestly, it's interesting to hear that being put that way and to hear the role the sort of black immigrants played in that movement, particularly because there was this gigantic wave, an influx of immigrants, particularly black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa to the U.S. And that was happening at a time when Canada had immigration policies that made it really hard for black people to immigrate here. And so it just makes me think, man, this could have been here. You know, this could have been. Right here where we live. But instead, it ended up being in Harlem. What other moments in this doc resonated with you personally? Yeah, you know, I was glad they included the moment that you're referencing because, you know, there's quite a bit of sort of ill-intentioned propaganda out there trying to pit black Americans and black immigrants from places like the Caribbean against each other. Yeah. And then sort of divide us and have this antagonistic concept of our role in developing culture together. So I was happy to see this documentary provide a counter to that and show how we were all basically coming together as one, especially in this generation that was the first to really be in a position to grapple with these basic questions of what is black art? What is black expression as opposed to just American art made by black people? How does it connect with Africa and the Caribbean, the diaspora? Yeah. And you see all these different great minds not all agreeing on it and sort of figuring all these things out. So that was something I loved in the film. And I also love the reminders, you know, I've not maybe not love, but value the reminders of how important this community space was because these black people were still living under incredibly dehumanizing racism and oppression. There's a moment where the great musician Yubi Blake talks about how he never extends his hand to shake a white man's hand unless that white man extends his hand first because it was so commonplace for white people to do that. And he just refused to shake a black man's hand. There's a lot of vivid reminders in the film that what made this space in Harlem so valuable was there was a space of our own away from that dehumanization where we could sort of find our voices for the first time. Right. You just thrive among your people and not have to contend with those forces in the same way that you would, you know, if you had to just step outside of Harlem. You know, there's a certain swagger that comes with being from Harlem. And you have embodied it at the start of this conversation. You're like, hey, that's my hometown. I am from Harlem. So you're a Harlemite. You were you're born the year this dinner actually takes place. Where do you see the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance right now? Like not just locally, but in pop culture writ large. I mean, I see it in so many places. And the documentary often really reminded me of the early days of hip hop, which kind of like the Harlem Renaissance. You know, we learn about the Harlem Renaissance as the outgrowth of sorority. Sort of individual geniuses like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. And similarly, we learn about hip hop as the brainchild of these specific founding fathers. And although in both cases, these people played pivotal roles, the documentary really shows how, you know, this kind of cultural evolution, it comes from us coming together collectively in community, you know, just like the original innovations of hip hop came from us needing a gathering place to come together and party. That's why we figured out how to plug the turntables in the lamppost and isolate the break so people could dance to it. And similarly, back in these days, I think the movie just shows so vividly how culture comes from us collectively making space to be in community and sort of figure out who we are together. People like you and I with gray in our beards, we've been heaping praise on this documentary. But I do imagine that there will be younger audiences who might not immediately see why this is a documentary that's irrelevant to them. What do you say to those people? I mean, I think one of the most beautiful things about this documentary is it takes this history that will often feel kind of dry and sort of like eating your vegetables. And distant, you know? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It brings home the immediacy of this history and also just how much fun it is to be around. These are really brilliant, charming, funny, raucous people who you would just love to be around. You know, if this was a podcast or like one of those creator houses that influencers have nowadays, this would be the creator house I would want to be at. You know, you won't feel like you're eating your vegetables when you watch. You'll want to soak it up. The Harlem Renaissance as a creator house is just a great analogy. I think we should, I want to see exactly that version of the story told. I should say, like, we are having this conversation. After, after you can see everything came out, you know, the Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder documentary. And the thing about that is it's kind of like sparked this brand new interest in how documentaries should be seen, right? It's a really fascinating moment for the documentary format. We're having a lot of conversation, but like what a documentary can do. Where do you see Once Upon a Time in Harlem fitting into that conversation? Yeah, it is an interesting time for the medium. You know, I think you have a lot of attention coming from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. You know, I think you have a lot of attention coming from Nathan Fielder and Nathan Fielder. You know, I think you have a lot of attention coming from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheimer's doc. And I'm a big fan of Nathan Fielder, but his work is always in this kind of uncanny valley where part of the formula is that you're always questioning what's real and how much Nathan Fielder is sort of portraying the Nathan Fielder character. So I feel like that that's one extreme where you're taking the most liberties. And then on the other hand, you have like one of my favorite documentarians, Frederick Wiseman, who really tried to be as hands off as possible and just let the footage bring you into that time and space without him editorializing at all. But of course, that's always impossible. As long as there's an editor, it's a story being told by the edits you make. And I think this documentary, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, lands in a great place of sort of capturing this moment in time with these people and crafting a story out of it that feels really true to these people and, you know, the life that they led and the things that they did. I love the realness of it, like how, the women in the room have to kind of push sometimes for their voice to be heard and for their contributions to be centered like this. There's so many layers of the humanity and the brilliance that come together in a way that I think shows the best of what this kind of documentary can be. Jay, man, it's always good to have you. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. My pleasure. Really appreciate you. Jay Smooth is a veteran hip hop broadcaster and culture critic based in New York. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is currently screening in select theaters across the country. Do keep tuned. We'll be right back. Checking those listings, though, because those theaters continue to be updated. My name is Elamin Abdelmahmoud. This show is called Commotion. We'll see you soon.