Hacker Cinema
Jungle Fever
1991 · Film · 132 min
Directed by Spike Lee
A successful and married black man contemplates having an affair with a white girl from work. He's quite rightly worried that the racial difference would make an already taboo relationship even worse.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Oddly, I found the bios as interesting as the behind the scenes photos (though I enjoyed the full life T-Rex on the wall!)
Jurassic Park came out before Pulp Fiction, and stars Samuel L Jackson:
> Jackson made his indelible mark on film with his portrayal of a crack addict, Gator, in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever." For this searing characterization, Jackson received the first Best Supporting Performance award ever given out by the judges at the Cannes Film Festival. Jackson's versatile career, which includes film, television and stage work began...
Thirty years later, to me, he is indelibly associated with Pulp Fiction. Bios like this are a mark into how people were seen in the past. I's fascinating seeing what an impressive career he had (he was a stage actor, too, which I -- I'm really marking my generation with this whole comment -- only learned reading this) that has been almost erased by the subsequent career trajectory he had.
He was in Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, two of the most talked-about films in urban America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Wikipedia claims that his role in the latter film even drew attention at Cannes, so he wasn’t entirely no-name, even if Pulp Fiction made him a big star.
These are big-break stories, not career-switching stories.
Yuan had been working on online teleconferencing since 1997 and was managing a team of 800 at Cisco when he left 13 years later. He didn't career-switch, he doubled down on his career.
Baszucki graduated from Stanford in computer science in 1985 and had been working on physics simulation software since the late 80s, with Cassel. He sold that simulation startup in 1998 for $20 million. Roblox didn't ship for two years and didn't take off for almost 10 years, by which point Cassel was dead of cancer.
Lee worked in comics at the same company since he was 17 in 1939, had his first writing credit on a Captain America book two years later, and was named interim editor the same year and never left the role. He was considering switching careers out of comics right before writing the Fantastic Four, but he started working in pulp and comic fiction as a teenager and never left.
Samuel L. Jackson graduated from Morehouse in drama and founded a theater in 1972 at 24 years old, and had been a professional stage actor since he was 32; his first feature film role was in the same year. Morgan Freeman was his mentor. "Jungle Fever" was his fourth Spike Lee film; his performance as a crack cocaine addict came after exiting rehab when his heroin addiction turned into a coke addiction.
If you look at this moment 10 years from now, you'd be surprised how early it is for you.
Eric Yuan founded Zoom at the age of 41.
David Baszucki was 41 years old when he created Roblox with cofounder Erik Cassel, who was 36 at the time.
Stan Lee created his first hit comic, "The Fantastic Four," just shy of his 39th birthday, in 1961.
Samuel L. Jackson has been a Hollywood staple for years now, but he'd had only bit parts before landing an award-winning role at age 43 in Spike Lee's film "Jungle Fever" in 1991.
I don't know how many of these examples you need, but all I can say is you can ignore the past. Do what you need to do, have some faith and just look forward.