Cut to Black: Ernest Leif Boyd, Assistant Picture Editor

For each day in the month of February, the Committee will be highlighting African-American members, both past and present, and their accomplishments. We look forward to showing the contributions and influences African-Americans have had on the industry.

Name: Ernest Leif Boyd

What is your job? Assistant Picture Editor

List the credits you’re most proud of. “Manchurian Candidate” (it was my first feature)

What are you working on right now? Respect

Who and what are your influences and/or mentors? Carol Littleton, John Carter, Terilyn Shropshire, Paul Millspaugh

What books are you reading, shows are you watching and/or movies you’re excited about? Milan Kundera’s, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”

What would be your superhero name? The Thin Man

What are your Black History Month memories, and what cultural or historical impacts have they had on your life? Whether it had to do with sports, politics, music, etc, in my family and in the schools I attended, black history was rarely not a topic of conversation. Black history month lasted all year.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given? Not quite advice, but more a way to live: Always get the back of the oppressed and exploited.

If you could time travel, when would you go and why? Not too far back.

What’s a little known fact about you? What are your hidden (or not so hidden) talents? Had I not found film I would have been an environmental scientist.

What would be your dream project to work on? An unforgivably Duboisian project on Reconstruction