Looks like Spike Lee has signed on to direct the movie:

Rest in peace with love and soulpower.

Ford's getting a lot more coverage than James. Fox has been live all night and CNN was live till bout 2 in the morning.

Granted Ford died bout 6 pm on the West Coast so the feeds were still live. I wonder what the coverage would have been if James Hadn't died on Christmas when most everyone was on holiday.

lazycrockett said:

well ummmmm Gerald Ford was the effin President and James Brown was a guy who sang and danced pretty decent

NY1 just had a little segment about today's viewing & the reporter was at the Apollo--the reporter said the first people started lining up at midnight!! I was thinking about maybe going--but I don't get off work until 5:30--I'm afraid the line is going to be insanely long....


[Edited 12/28/06 6:35am]

NY1 just had a little segment about today's viewing]

magnificentpentatonic said:

Unfortunately we can't. When a thread is made a sticky, it automatically gets that icon. I tried to edit the thread myself to change it, but there's no option that I could find to change the icon.

Tom said:

Isn't it as simple as un-stickying it? Won't the thumbs up icon dissappear automatically then?

it might sound crass but I ran out yesterday and bought the Startime box set. I've been looking at that thing ever since it came out and I always put in back on the shelf.

Shame it took James's death to make me buy it.

serpan99 said:

nope. it's also featured on the front page, hence the thumbs-up icon.

December 28, 2006
Apollo Pays Tribute to James Brown
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Harlem’s farewell to James Brown commenced shortly after noon today as a white hearse escorted by a police car pulled up in front of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s House of Justice on West 145th Street and Mr. Brown’s coffin was transferred into a white carriage drawn by two white Percheron horses with feather plumes on their heads.

A crowd that had been waiting since before 9:30 a.m. surrounded the glass-sided carriage and began the 30-block walk down Malcolm X Boulevard toward the Apollo Theater on 125th Street.

Walking behind the carriage was Mr. Sharpton, along with friends, fans and colleagues of Mr. Brown.

Today, from 1 to 8 p.m., the body of Mr. Brown, who died of congestive heart failure on Monday morning, will lie in repose onstage at the Apollo on West 125th Street. Overnight, the line for the free public viewing, for which no tickets are being sold and no reservations taken, began to form around midnight.

A crowd of several hundred people, most of them African-American, had gathered at the Apollo by noon today.

The mood was jovial. Music by Mr. Brown blared out of stores. Many people clutched his pictures. “We’re sending him out in style,” said Nellie Williams, 58, who was on vacation from Greer, S. C. “I want to show my last respects for his last show in New York.”

It will almost undoubtedly be the largest-scale event ever at the Apollo, which on a full night holds about 1,500.

“We have no idea how many people to expect — hundreds of thousands, I’m sure,” Billy Mitchell, the Apollo’s manager of group sales, said on Wednesday. “We’re getting calls from Delaware, from Washington, D.C. Some people are flying in.”

All of which is appropriate, according to Mr. Mitchell, a small-framed man who cut a dashing figure in rectangular glasses and a double-breasted suit. He was holding forth in the Apollo’s period-piece of a lobby, with its etched-crystal chandeliers, a carpet of burgundy and gold medallions, and a concave popcorn-finish ceiling.

“I used to work as the Apollo’s errand boy as a teenager, and back in the ’60s, James Brown — Mr. James Brown, I should say — was always the most popular,” Mr. Mitchell said.

“My friend, they had a line going east on 125th, then up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard to 126th Street,” he recalled. “Then you had another line — these lines were four deep, mind you, none of this single-file stuff — going west on 125th up Frederick Douglass Boulevard and around the back of the place on 126th. This was for every James Brown performance, and back then he and his band did five shows a day, six shows a week. These guys worked.”

One need not have taken a poetry tutorial with Langston Hughes to appreciate the symbolism of these days immediately following Mr. Brown’s death: the hardest-working man in show biz, who was still touring this year at age 73, on the receiving end of three official memorial ceremonies, at three different sites, over three days.

On Friday, a private funeral for family and close friends will take place at a church near his hometown, Augusta, Ga. And on Saturday, there will be a service open to the public at the James Brown Arena in Augusta, which seats 8,500.

To the uninitiated, the Apollo did not appear on Wednesday to be bracing for chaos. “We have a staff of about 120, 130 that works here on a show night, and we’re going to be all hands on deck, and proudly, too,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I expect people will be very respectful. I don’t think there’ll be pushing or shoving.”

Still, Tyree McWhorter, a security guard at the Apollo, envisioned a long day. “I don’t see how they’re going to have everybody out by 8 p.m.,” he said. “Most people will wait as long as they have to until they get to see him, for the fact that it’s James Brown. People got respect for him.”

An elderly woman in an ankle-length down-filled coat and a beige woolen beret began walking past Mr. McWhorter, toward the back of the theater, but he took a wide sideways step that placed him squarely in her path. “May I help you?” he said.

“I’m here to see the body,” she said.

“That’s tomorrow, 1 o’clock.”

A pained expression came over the woman’s face. “If I don’t come back, please tell James Brown I’m sorry,” she said. Mr. McWhorter said he would try.

In fact, she was hardly the only visitor to the theater with hopes of an early peek, although Mr. Brown’s body, according to an Apollo spokeswoman, was still in Augusta, along with Mr. Sharpton, who was to escort it to New York this morning.

Freddie Floyd, a 33-year-old hotel concierge who was visiting New York City from Houston — and for the first time in his life — made an entrance with his aunt, Hallie Senette. Mr. Floyd said that he and his aunt were already in New York when they learned of Mr. Brown’s death, “but this will make our trip historic. To me, James Brown is the transition of R & B into mainstream.”

At Amy Ruth’s, a restaurant on West 116th Street, DeAnte Wilson, the headwaiter, said that customers and workers had been discussing Mr. Brown’s legacy. He said Mr. Brown’s music made a profound mark on African-American culture, with its message of black empowerment. “His lyrics expressed what we were thinking, but didn’t want to say,” Mr. Wilson said.

Back on 125th Street, Olivio DuBois said he planned to attend the viewing. “He was about respect for himself and his people,” said Mr. DuBois, who described himself as a great grandnephew of W. E. B. DuBois, the scholar and civil rights activist. Of Mr. Brown’s 1968 song “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” he said: “That was it right there. He didn’t really need to say any more.”

Inside the Apollo, the dissonant banging of a rehearsing rock ’n’ roll drummer could be heard. Not for a second had anybody considered postponing Wednesday’s Amateur Night competition to prepare for Mr. Brown’s memorial, an employee said.

“Putting on events is what we do, after all,” said Florence Wiley, the theater’s director of marketing and communications.

Cecil Dozier, a middle-aged man in a ski parka and Timberland boots, came into the theater to ask about the viewing schedule.

“Even if I lived way across town, I’d be here,” he said. “When I was 5 years old my oldest brother took me to a concert in Jacksonville, Fla. I saw him many times.

“Once, I took a lady friend who had a boyfriend at the time. She later became my wife,” Mr. Dozier continued. He recalled Mr. Brown’s playing the hit “Please Please Please” at that show.

“I remember all that drama, the sight of him bending down on one knee and having the cloth draped over him, then throwing it off as he kept on singing,” he said. “That explained the love he had for his woman. He didn’t want her to go.”

Manny Fernandez and Carla Baranauckas contributed reporting.