Anthony Major Archives | �鶹ԭ�� News

�鶹ԭ�� Film Professor Plays Huge Role in African-American Cinema Past and Future

Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:04:09 +0000

Anthony Major, an associate professor of film at �鶹ԭ��, has spent more than four decades creating films that depict slices of the African-American experience in the United States.

As an actor, producer, director, documentary filmmaker and professor, Major has worked with well-known actors such as Brad Pitt, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Redd Foxx of Sanford and Son fame.

Today he is finishing up a full-length documentary about the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Travyon Martin in Sanford, Florida. An early cut of the film won the Grand Jury Prize, Award at the Orlando Urban Film Festival last year.

But perhaps his most important contribution since arriving at �鶹ԭ�� in 1995 has been the impact he’s had on Hollywood. Some of his students have graduated and now are actors, producers, directors and talent agents in the film and theatre industry. One even has her own popular YouTube show shot in Australia.

The secret to his success?

“Help them learn to think and to network,” Major says from his office in the . “Nothing is given in this business. You have to look for opportunities and hustle. It works. We’ve got several �鶹ԭ�� graduates living their dream because they are smart and they work hard.”

They include:

Production assistants who have worked on Grey’s Anatomy and Modern Family

A talent agent

TV producers and feature film directors

Actors who have worked on Broadway and off-Broadway, in movies and in commercials

A reality TV star in Australia

It takes talent, passion, hard work and help, Major says. He knows first-hand how important it is to network and have someone mentor you in order to succeed.

Through the years he worked with and met people such as Harry Belafonte, Dolly Parton, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Mulligan, Alan J. Pakula and James Earl Jones on a variety of projects from the stage to the big screen. Each individual taught him something and most helped him connect with the right folks for the next step in his career.

To help his students make those connections, he helps arrange invitations to the Director’s Guild of America Awards for pending graduates and recent alumni.

Earlier this month, Hailey Winslow ’08, a radio-television alumna, met Major and several other �鶹ԭ�� alumni at the awards.

“Here we were with some of Hollywood’s top people and there’s a table of �鶹ԭ�� students,” Winslow says. “We spent a couple of hours after the awards with (director and screenwriter) Peter Farrelly. That’s just amazing and that’s because of Professor Major.”

Winslow, now an actress, had one acting class with Major, but he has become a lifelong mentor and friend.

“Professor Major has taught me life skills that I use every day,” she says. “I hear his voice in my head all the time. I’m so grateful to him. He’s not just a professor. He goes ways beyond that. �鶹ԭ�� students are so lucky to be able to learn from him.”

Winslow stars alongside her Goldendoodle, Sadie, in Outback & Under, a 12-episode adventure travel show that explores Australia. They wrangle crocodiles, dive with sharks, cuddle venomous snakes and meet a lot of crazy characters along their journey through the land Down Under.

Benjamin Michel ’11, a filmmaker and producer based in San Francisco, also calls Major instrumental in his career.

“He gave me real world advice that helped me be a better film director and overall artist,” Michel says. “And his wisdom has really been a gift.”

Michel took Major’s Black Cinema class in 2009 and would often talk about his goals. Since arriving in California he’s filming or making documentaries about the experiences of African-Americans, Latinos and the homeless. Several of those documentaries have aired on KQED, an award-winning public television station in San Francisco.

�鶹ԭ�� theatre grad Lisa Chu ’01 also credits Major with much of her success. She’s an assistant director in Hollywood and has worked on a range of television and feature films including The Big Bang Theory, Westworld and The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.

“He started me on my career path to become a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Assistant Director,” Chu says. She met him while a freshman in a general education theater class. “I’ve been a DGA AD for over 15 years and counting. I would not be who I am without Anthony Major. My life has been blessed with him as a dedicated inspiring educator, a colleague and a truly great friend. He is simply amazing.”

Major’s personal contributions to the local arts scene have not gone unnoticed either. The Black History Committee of Orange County honored Major with its 2010 Excellence in Education Award. The high school he attended, The Booker Performing Arts High School in Sarasota, renamed its rehearsal hall in his honor. He also served as the program director for the Zora Neale Hurston Institute for Documentary Studies for several years.

Central Floridians may also recognize him from his work as director of “A Vote, A Voice,” produced for Florida Sen. Geraldine Thompson. Or perhaps from his teaching, acting and directing in the �鶹ԭ�� Conservatory Theatre and his work with Seminole State College Theatre.

His favorite projects are those that tell an American story from an underrepresented community’s point of view. It gives those communities a voice, he said. And he hopes the students he helps continue to help tell their stories.

“It’s good to see them succeed,” he says.

Solving a Historical Puzzle with 5,000 Pieces

Emon Reiser — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 15:47:42 +0000

With more than 5,000 historic items dating back to the 18th century, �鶹ԭ��’s Carol Mundy Collection tells the story of the African-American experience through books, pamphlets, newspapers, posters, photographs and other rare ephemera. The collection, which is kept in the and displayed on the fifth floor of the , has been the life’s work of one woman who pieced together her future with artifacts from the past.

It began with a centuries-old slip of paper. Browsing through a shabby book section in a Florida thrift store, Carol Mundy picked up a 1901 edition of The Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination. As she carefully flipped through the tattered pages, she found a yellow letter wrapped in wax paper slipped into its spine. Its date: 1870.

The letter was addressed to the 10th Calvary Regiment or “Buffalo Soldiers,” one of the few segregated units in the U.S. Army at the time. Mundy, whose mother was an antique collector, immediately saw the value in the historic piece. The find would start a 25-year occupation.

Thanks to her job with Delta airlines that required frequent travel around the U.S., Mundy, with her daughter in tow, would rent a car in between her 10-hour shifts and search for Salvation Army stores and yard sales. Eventually, the hunt would extend to her personal time and vacations, too, much to her friends’ dismay. “For years my friends didn’t want to travel with me,” she says.

For every piece found, Mundy would research the history behind it and record it carefully. And she has gone to great lengths to document her collection. “I have called Portugal about the Middle Passage, I have called Temple University, I have called Canada to learn how to archive,” she says. “… Pay is not necessary, I just want the history to be told correctly.”

But no matter how much time or space it took up in her home, Mundy never saw her collection as a burden, but instead as her purpose in life. “It’s a legacy for my children and grandchildren that I was given to do on this earth,” she says.

Today, Mundy has entire storage units filled African-American artifacts, but many of her best pieces can be found at the �鶹ԭ�� Library. Now part of the university’s special collections and archives, Mundy’s featured relics include film reels of Billie Holiday performing with Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, poll tax receipts, plantation inventories with slaves listed below the livestock and newspapers headlining speeches from Abraham Lincoln.

�鶹ԭ�� Library archivist Barack (Suphi) Ogreten said the collection came to �鶹ԭ�� in 2009 and the university special collections department is still working on processing all of Mundy’s finds. He anticipates that the finding aid — an electronic guide that will chronicle all of the items and their history, in addition to a short biography of Mundy — will be available in late 2014 or sometime in 2015.

Once the collection is processed, Ogreten said all documents will be available for the �鶹ԭ�� community to be used for academic research in the special collection’s reading room in the library.

“Her collection means a lot to the university, because it has a lot of local Central Florida and statewide historical artifacts and information,” said Africana Studies Program Director Anthony Major.

With both local and national ties, Mundy’s civil rights collection is the one she admires most. Many pieces highlight Florida’s struggle to integrate. “One of the [pieces] in the civil rights collection is about St. Augustine and how they were trying to integrate the beaches,” Mundy said. “That was one of the hardest battles.”

While some of her collection is now part of the university, she continues to show her pieces of history to schools, Boys and Girls Clubs and is in contact with the Smithsonian Museum to have her collection shown there.

“My ultimate goal was to share it,” Mundy said. “You get addicted to history.”

When Spike Lee Was On Campus

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:16:06 +0000

In his speech titled, “America Through My Lens”, Spike Lee spoke in the Student Union at �鶹ԭ�� in 2005 to help commemorate the legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which led to the desegregation of public schools.