Background
The film deals with the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, the co-founding member of the Crips street gang, principally his life in the streets and his life in prison. It also shows some of the work he did while incarcerated to help decrease gang violence in the world. The film was shot in 2003 while Williams was still imprisoned. On December 13, 2005, Williams was executed by lethal injection in California.
After its debut at The Sundance Film Festival, the film was released in January 2004 via the FX cable network on television and went on to become a successful venture for the network. The film was nominated for 19 different awards and won 11 of them. Among the awards the film was nominated for include American Cinema Editors, Black Reel Awards, Golden Globes, NAACP Image Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, MovieGuide, Satellite Award, Screen Actors Guild, and Writers Guild of America.
Shot in 38 days during July and August 2003, all of the filming took place in Toronto (except for one full day in South Central Los Angeles and one 1/2 day of exteriors in San Francisco). The Toronto water treatment plant was used as a double for the exterior of San Quentin State Prison. Production was almost shut down when Michael Mann refused to release Jamie Foxx from his rehearsal schedule on Collateral. But Foxx, who had met with Stanley Williams for many hours at San Quentin convinced Mann to give him a 3 week window. Jamie's performance was shot over only 3 six day shooting weeks in Toronto. During that period, Toronto suffered a massive city wide blackout, and the production only had power from its backup generators. Jamie Foxx's dialogue coach during the shoot was a former inmate of San Quentin.
Read more about this topic: Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story
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“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)