In a series of new videos, New Orleans poets craft 21st-century responses to 19th-century poems.
After the Civil War, benevolent associations flourished in New Orleans's Black community, and so did their impact on life in the city.
COVID-19 may have canceled parades for 2021, but it couldn't erase Mardi Gras entirely. Creativity flourished around the Crescent City in the form of a new tradition: house floats.
We spoke with Lance Nichols, whose role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, launched his acting career in major Hollywood films.
Amid the American Civil War, a new civil rights movement was forming in New Orleans—in French.
For years, cinephiles have lamented a lack of originality coming out of Hollywood studios. However, there’s no shortage of stories waiting to be told onscreen, and that’s where we can be of use to studio bosses.
To help us celebrate one of the triumphs of recent Hollywood South creativity, Benh Zeitlin—who directed, co-wrote, and co-scored Beasts of the Southern Wild—answered a few of our questions.
Over the course of the two years after Hurricane Katrina, Rolland Golden roamed the city’s flooded areas, sketching and painting a series of 26 scenes representing the turmoil and devastation of the city during the flood and the stark desolation after the waters receded.
The 1951 film of Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans-set A Streetcar Named Desire won multiple Academy Awards and is considered a landmark of American cinema. To prepare for the August 24, 2020, #NolaMovieNight group re-watch of the film, First Draft returned to local dialect coach and acting teacher Francine Segal for insight into the film’s accents (always of interest to New Orleanians) and acting styles.
To set the stage (as it were) for the August 24 #NolaMovieNight group screening of the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, First Draft reached out to two Tennessee Williams Annual Review principals for insight into the publication and some thoughts on the film’s cultural impact.
