Rishi Rajani Image Credit: Courtesy Image “Chang Can Dunk” As CEO of multimedia production company Hillman Grad, Rajani does more than simply produce films. Working with company founder Lena Waithe, projects on his plate go beyond film and television to include music (a record label with Def Jam), publishing, podcasting,…
Hillman Grad
Seven years ago, pioneering film and TV producer Debra Martin Chase was thinking about leaving Hollywood. The first Black woman to ink an overall deal at any studio, she’d produced such genre-defining hits as “The Princess Diaries,” “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.” While getting…
“Chang Can Dunk” doesn’t go the way you’d expect, and that’s a good thing. Here’s a Disney movie about a 5-foot-8-inch Chinese American high school basketball player who bets his rival that he can dunk by the end of the season. He gets his wish about an hour in (that’s…
Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad has much to celebrate in just the first few months of the new year: with two films, “A Thousand and One” and “Kokomo City” winning big at Sundance; the family film “Chang Can Dunk” launching March 10 on Disney+ ; a documentary about Mary Tyler Moore…