Marlon Riggs

Quick Facts

Full Name	Marlon Riggs
Occupation	Filmmaker
Date Of Birth	Feb 3, 1957(1957-02-03)
Age	67
Date Of Death	1994-04-05
Birthplace	Fort Worth
Country	United States
Birth City	Texas
Horoscope	Aquarius

Marlon Riggs Biography

Marlon Riggs is one of the most popular and richest Filmmaker who was born on February 3, 1957 in Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Riggs was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on the 3rd of February in 1957. He was the son of civilians employed by the military, and was able to spend a lot of his early years traveling. He was a resident of Texas in Texas and Georgia before making the move in West Germany at the age of 11 and his family. He was the child of Jean (mother) and Alvin Riggs (father) and also had a brother named Sascha. In later years, Riggs recalled the ostracism and name-calling he endured in Hephzibah Junior High School in Hephzibah, Georgia. He said that students of both races alike labeled him”a “punk,” a “faggot,” and “Uncle Tom.” He was apprehensive about his place in the high school “I was caught between these two worlds where the whites hated me and the blacks disparaged me. It was so painful.”

The writings of Riggs were published in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in numerous literary and artistic journals like Black American Literature Forum, Art Journal, and High Performance and anthologies like Brother to Brother: Collected Writings of Black Gay Men. The topics of his writings are filmmaking, free speech , control, and critique of homophobia and racism.

Riggs’s documentaries have received much critical acclaim. Riggs received a National Emmy Award in 1987 for Ethnic Notions. Tongues Untied was awarded the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival. The film also received recognition from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Documentary Film Festival, the American Film and Video Festival, and the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. In 1992, Riggs was awarded the Maya Daren Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Additionally, Color Adjustment won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians, the International Documentary Association Outstanding Achievement Award, and a premiere screening the Sundance Film Festival. “Color Adjustment” also garnered a nomination for a national Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Research. Riggs also received the Frameline Award from the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for his film Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret). Moreover, Black is. . . Black Ain’t won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and was praised by the Sundance Film Festival. Riggs also was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the California College for the Arts & Crafts in 1993.

Upon finishing graduate school, Riggs began working on many independent documentary productions in the Bay Area. He assisted documentary directors and producers initially as an assistant editor and later as a post-production supervisor, editor on documentaries about the American arms race, Nicaragua, Central America, sexism, and disability rights. Because of his proficiency in video technology, Riggs was the on-line editor for a video production company, Espresso Productions. In 1987, Riggs was hired as a part-time faculty member at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley to teach documentary filmmaking. He became the youngest tenured professor at Berkeley shortly thereafter.

In the latter half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, the production of Riggs Tongues Untied triggered a national controversy regarding the airing of the film in American public television networks. In addition to his own funds, Riggs had financed the documentary through a grant of $5,000 through the Western States Regional Arts Fund which is a regranting agency that is which is funded with the National Endowment for the Arts an independent federal agency that offers support and financial aid for literary, visual as well as performing arts artists. The film was the subject of a lot of debate due to its depiction males kissing.

Marlon Riggs Net Worth

Marlon Riggs is one of the richest Filmmaker from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Marlon Riggs 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Marlon Troy Riggs (February 3 1957 – April 5 April 5, 1994) was an American filmmaker educator (professor) poet, educator and gay rights advocate. He composed, produced and directed numerous documentary films, such as Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, and Black is… Black isn’t. Riggs produced visually innovative and provocative socially conscious films that explore the both the past and current depictions of sexuality and race in America. This collection of films by Marlon Riggs Collection located in the Stanford University Libraries.

Riggs was a star in Nurnberg American High School, where he played football as well as ran track. He was elected as the president of Nurnberg’s Varsity Club while only a sophomore. Riggs also performed a solo dance interpretation in the school’s talent showcase, which portrayed American slaves’ stories from Africa until their emancipation. From 1973 until 1974, Riggs was an Ansbach student in the American High School’s inaugural session located in Katterbach, Germany. He was elected as the student body president of the military dependents ‘ school. After 1974, Riggs came back to United States to attend college. In his first year Riggs studied history at Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in the year 1978. While attending Harvard, Riggs became conscious that the fact that he was gay made him aware. Since there were no classes that emphasized the study of homosexuality, he contacted the department of history and was granted permission to conduct an independently the study of “male homosexuality in American fiction and poetry”. When he began to study the background of American homophobia and racism, Riggs became interested in sharing his thoughts on these topics through the medium of film.

After working for a local television station in Texas for about a year, he moved to Oakland, California, where he lived for 15 years with his life partner, Jack Vincent. Riggs entered graduate school and received his master’s degree in journalism with a specialization in Documentary film in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley, having co-produced/co-directed with Peter Webster a master’s thesis titled Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues, a half-hour video on the history of blues music in Oakland, California.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Marlon Riggs Dating?

According to our records, Marlon Riggs is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Marlon Riggs’s is not dating anyone.

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News of the film’s airing sparked a national debate about whether or not it is appropriate for the Federal government of the United States to fund artistic creations that offended some. Artists stressed their basic right of free speech, of representation on public airwaves, and vehemently opposed censorship of their art. However, several right-wing United States government policymakers and many conservative watchdog groups were against using taxpayer money to fund what they believed were repulsive artistic works. In the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cited Tongues Untied as an example of how President George H. W. Bush was investing “our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art.” Buchanan released an anti-Bush television advertisement for his campaign using re-edited clips from Tongues United. The ad was quickly removed from television channels after Riggs successfully demonstrated Buchanan’s copyright infringement.

Facts & Trivia

Marlon Ranked on the list of most popular Filmmaker. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Marlon Riggs celebrates birthday on February 3 of every year.

The 1992 documentary Color Adjustment was Riggs’s second film to air on the PBS television series P.O.V. The film Color Adjustment was Riggs’s follow-up to Ethnic Notions, focusing on the representation of African Americans in American television from Amos ‘n’ Andy to the Cosby Show. However, unlike Ethnic Notions, which presents a putative, neutral stance on popular American representations of blacks, Color Adjustment presents a cultural criticism of these images through an African-American perspective on race. The film was produced with Vivian Kleiman, edited by Debbie Hoffmann, and narrated by actress Ruby Dee. It includes an original music score by Mary Watkins. Using contemporary interviews of television actors, directors, producers, and cultural commentators, the documentary conveys personal reflections and academic analyses of such television programs as Good Times and The Cosby Show.