MAZYWOOD

by Tananarive Due ‧ RELEASE DATE: tomorrow Simply stated, this feels perilously close to a career triumph for its author. In the summer of 1926, a lonely little girl with monster talent and monster ambition submits a wish for her very own BFF and ends up with a…well, take a wild guess. The movies are literally in Hollywood screenwriter/producer Johnny Washington’s DNA as the grandson of Mazelle Washington, a legendary Black actress from the 1920s to the ’40s, who, as with such comparably gifted peers as Hattie McDaniel, was consigned to playing comedic servant roles during the studio system’s golden age, which coincided with the beginning of the steep, too-slow decline of racially segregated Jim Crow America. Johnny, who’s been fighting his own uphill battles with racially blinkered studio mavens in today’s presumably more enlightened era, has inherited the frayed but cozy remnants of Bear Creek Lodge, a ski resort near Northern California’s Mount Shasta, which Mazelle owned and operated as a 1950s getaway spot for Black celebrities like Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., who, despite their star power, were shunned from similar establishments. Despite his fraught relationship with Maz...