Synopsis

The Gilded Six Bits was Zora Neale Hurston’s first published work. It came six years before her breakthrough novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. "All that glitters ain't gold" is the moral of this story of marriage and fidelity. Set in rural Virginia in 1933, it is a story of lost trust, which examines everyday temptation, and the lure of a better life as potential bumps in the road toward domestic happiness. A husband, a wife, and an outsider set the scene for The Gilded Six Bits. Chad Coleman stars as the husband Joe Banks, T’Keyah Crystal Keymah plays the wife Missie May Banks, and Wendell Pierce is the outsider Otis D. Slemmons.

Director

Booker T. Mattison received his Master of Fine Arts in film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in May of 1999. His experience includes producing, writing, directing and editing for film, television, and radio. His last film, the award-winning Exit 13 has screened at the Director’s Guild of America and the Black American Cinema Society in Hollywood, the urbanworld film festival in New York City, the Regensberger film festival in Germany, and the televison show Sanostra in Madrid, Spain.

Mattison has received the prestigious Warner Brothers Pictures Production Award, and the Spike Lee Fellowship. He has served as a producer at Metropolitan Media Inc., a script consultant at The Writer’s Workshop, and edited videos for Vanity Fair Magazine and JP Morgan & Company. This year he started Concepts Unlimited and their first music video for the group Metabolics has aired on Black Entertainment Television, and MTV Europe.

He is featured in the September issue of Vibe magazine and will be the first filmmaker to bring the work of Zora Neale Hurston to the big screen with his adaptation of The Gilded Six Bits. It stars T’Keyah Crystal Keymah (Cosby, In Living Color), Wendell Pierce (Bulworth, Waiting to Exhale), Novella Nelson (Mama Flora’s Family, A Perfect Murder) and will feature the music of Showtime at the Apollo’s Ray Chew.