Harlem, Hollywood
"We travel not for trafficking alone; By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known We take the Golden Road to Samarkand."
Harlem, Hollywood
The Label, Brand, and Production Company of Jordan Walker-Pearlman
Global storytelling allows us to hear one another, to experience other passages of time and enter into a world where we may become more alive with our own spirit and emotions.
From the earliest age Jordan’s formative experience was in two unique worlds and in many ways his storytelling perspective is born out of his desire to bring these worlds together rather than struggle in their apartness. While life’s brevity and challenges bring so much out of our control, subject to the seasons or the will and whims of others, through cinema we can try to briefly touch other human beings, both in an effort to sing to them and hear their song.
When naming his new production company Jordan felt it was time to come home, realizing he is from a place called Harlem, Hollywood.
Paintings by Billy Dee Williams:
1. Portrait of Jordan Walker-Pearlman 2. Portrait of Carmel Boxer
Jordan Walker-Pearlman
Jordan Walker-Pearlman spent his early years dividing time between his Grandmother Adele Walker’s community of Harlem, New York and his co-parent and Uncle Gene Wilder’s community in Los Angeles, California. From this he began early work in both cinema and activism, hence the name of his production company Harlem, Hollywood.
He began making films for Nickelodeon Network as a teenager, then taking time in his twenties to work in human rights. Jordan returned to filmmaking in the late 1990’s with short films for French Television and the Snowboarding Documentary Snow Taxi.
In 2000 Jordan was ranked by the NAACP as one of American Film’s Groundbreaking Directors of the past 25 years for his first full length feature as Director-Writer-Producer The Visit, for which the organization held a special screening at their national convention.
Jordan’s follow up, Constellation, starred Zoe Saldana, Gabrielle Union, Billy Dee Williams, and Hill Harper, among others. It was released worldwide in 2007 and received over 24 award nominations including winning the Urbanworld Festival Audience prize (as did The Visit).
Taking another break from film making to support President Barack Obama’s first and second campaign, Jordan returned to co-found MoJo Global Arts, where he brought in and created the television show Urban Youth Racing School and set up the documentary Shari Lewis with Director Lisa D’Apolito and White Horse Pictures before leaving the company in June 2021 to form his new venture.
Whitehorse is also producing Chris Smith’s documentary on Gene Wilder, in which Jordan is featured and part narrator. Jordan left MoJo in June 2021 to form his new label concentrating on his accelerated work as a film maker and producer.
Jordan recently completed his new narrative feature film as Writer/Director, The Requiem Boogie, in which he also returns to acting. He is in post production on that feature, as well as the documentary The Jazz Griots featuring Ron Carter and Wallace Roney. He is in development on a film about the “Legend In Two Games,” Pee Wee Kirkland, as well as the scripted television show The Jazz Detective. His next film begins production in Spring 2023 in France.
Jordan lives with his wife, screenwriter-producer Elizabeth Hunter (The Fighting Temptations, Jumping The Broom, She’s Gotta Have It, Green Lantern) in Los Angeles and New York. They are producing the Broadway show based on her film The Fighting Temptations together with Paramount Studios.
“To learn the age-old lesson day by day:
It is not in the bright arrival planned,
But in the dreams we dream along the way,
We find the Golden Road to Samarkand.”
*Poetry by James Elroy Flecker