My mom used to get involved with the Black Panther activities in Los Angeles. For me it was more about how to view my consciousness on these issues with a biblical framework.
The cool thing is, I was a little nervous about how they were going to handle Black Panther in his own movie, but then when I saw 'Civil War' and just the perfect way they handled him in that movie, it made me even more excited about a Black Panther film.
My 'Black Panther' run really wasn't about Black Panther. It was about Ross. It was about exploding myths about black superheroes, black characters, and black people, targeted specifically at a white, male-dominated retailer base.
I don't live in Los Angeles. I work in Los Angeles, and even that - I audition in Los Angeles; I very rarely film in Los Angeles. I don't hang out with producers on my off-hours, so I don't even know what that world is like.
Los Angeles has been great to me, and I have a home there, and I'm so lucky I get to do what I do for a living. But I did not go down to Los Angeles really even with the intention of staying.
I am proud to be in Los Angeles. I have a lot of fans that love me here. When you talk about the Meccas of boxing - Las Vegas, New York - now you have to talk about Los Angeles.
We've got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there's a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it's always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.
Since I have spent many years of my life living in Los Angeles, and since I'm also in the music business, I know that much more is talked about in Los Angeles than ever really occurs.
I love Los Angeles, and I've secretly always wanted to do a song about Los Angeles, but it's a hard thing to pull off.
When I was little, I asked my mom to move us to Los Angeles and get me an agent. She would say, 'Stop it. Go play in the dirt.'
I had come from Los Angeles - I had been there a partner of Gruen Associates, a large Los Angeles firm - and when the possibility of becoming a dean at Yale came, it was a very appropriate moment in my life. I was interested in a number of issues that I could not pursue while in a firm like Gruen's.
Those issues are biblical issues: to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to stand up for the oppressed. I contend that if the evangelical community became more biblical, everything would change.
You can get stuff done in New York that you can't in Los Angeles. If you wanted to get some milk and get your shoes repaired and drop something off at the dry cleaner, that's an all-day adventure in Los Angeles. In New York, you can bang that out in half an hour.
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.
I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.
The 'Black Panther' series was never really about the Black Panther at all. The State Department guy, Everett K. Ross, was the series protagonist, so politics was simply a logical part of the character's tool set.
Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop. I believe that what we're developing in Denver is in no appreciable way different than what we're doing in Los Angeles - did in Los Angeles and are still doing. But I think we have developed the Los Angeles model of city-building, and I think it is unfortunate.