You may know him from Holiday Heart, The Five Heartbeats or even the ’90s sitcom The Parenthood, but now Robert Townsend is back with his latest project, In The Hive, now available on DVD. A true story about boys growing up at a North Carolina School called The Hive, Townsend uses an all-star cast including Loretta Devine, Vivica A. Fox, newcomer Jonathan McDaniel and the late Michael Clark Duncan to tell a memorable account of happenings at this NC school. So if you’re looking for a genuinely good film to watch by yourself, with the crew or the family, check out Robert Townsend’s top five reasons to purchase the In The Hive DVD.
1. True Southern Story
[The movie’s] based on a real school in North Carolina called The Hive, and it’s run by a woman named Vivian Saunders. So [the film shows] real things that happen at the school, so all the situations happened but we amplified…the writer of the piece is Cheryl L. West, and she directed Holiday Heart. She’s a powerful writer. My friend…helped fund the school in North Carolina and he was the first one to say, “Hey Robert, why don’t you go down to North Coralina and take a look at this school. I think there’s a movie. I went down and I interviewed everybody—we were gonna make a web series out of it initially—and then I was like, Maybe this is a movie. But Ray Ramsey was the guy that had a vision, and said, “Make a movie out of this.”