Oscar winning actor Forest Whitaker has announced plans to direct and star in a film based on the life of New Orleans jazz legend Louis Armstrong. The biopic, titled “What a Wonderful World” is scheduled to begin shooting in Louisiana in the summer. Entertainment industry magazine Variety reports that the film will be the first bigscreen project authorized by the Armstrong estate. Oscar Cohen, executive of the Armstrong estate and the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, will be a co-producer and is granting filmmakers exclusive access to personal letters and other material within the family estate.
Whitaker won the Best Actor Oscar in 2007 for his role as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.” He has directed four films, including “Hope Floats” and “First Daughter.” Armstrong will be the second jazz legend Whitaker brings to life on the big screen; he portrayed saxophonist and bebop pioneer Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s 1988 film “Bird.”
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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