Maybe it’s perfect that Anthony Hemingway comes from television. After all, when you’re directing a TV show you’re just a guest – there were other directors before you, there will be others after you, and the true vision for the series comes from a show runner, not you. I imagine that will be very similar to the experience he has in his feature directorial debut, toiling under the gaze of George Lucas on Red Tails.
This is a film that Lucas has been yapping about for decades, and now it’s actually happening, albeit not with him officially in the director’s chair. I hope that it’s a good movie, because it’s a tale worth telling, that of the Tuskegee Airmen, World War II pilots who overcame the military’s hardwired racism to become the first black fighter jockeys. It’s an important moment in American history, and as much shit as I’m willing to give Lucas, he deserves lots of props for working so hard to bring it to the screen (no offense to Laurence Fishburne’s previous movie about them).
Hemingway’s TV career includes The Wire and Battlestar Galactica, so he’s not unfamiliar with quality (although directing CSI might make you think otherwise). It would be nice if Lucas and Rick McCallum, aka The Mouth of Lucas, would step aside and let Hemingway just make a movie the way he sees fit, but since there was a casting director on the film before there was a director, it’s obvious Hemingway will be a gun for hire.