Katt Williams has never been one to wait for permission. Today, Oct. 20, his first memoir hits shelves, and he’s using the moment to talk up an even bigger swing: his own film studio just across the Georgia line.
The Book
Nine Lives, No Wives, and 69 Concubines is out now from Gallery Books/13A at Simon & Schuster. It runs 336 pages and comes with a foreword from Shaquille O’Neal. According to the publisher, Katt starts with leaving home at 13 and stepping away from his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. From there he hitchhikes to Florida, works odd jobs, and finally finds his way onto a small comedy club stage.
The book also gets into how he paid for his own tours and kept ownership of his work, along with his life as a father, his faith and his legal battles. When he announced the release, Katt called it “the story of a superhero without powers,” Revolt reported. That’s very on brand.
The Studio
The book tour has a business plan riding shotgun. In a recent USA TODAY interview highlighted by theGrio, Katt said Hollywood boxes Black filmmakers into a much narrower range of stories than everyone else gets. He’s not interested in just griping about it, either. “Nobody needs a complainer, even if they’re correct,” he said.
His answer is Kemet Movie Works, which is turning the former Fort McClellan Army post in Anniston, Alabama, into a production hub. Birmingham’s WVTM 13 reports that the site includes two sound stages built for virtual production, CGI and immersive sets. Katt has also partnered with Miles College, an HBCU in the Birmingham area, to teach students AI and augmented-reality film production.
Katt has said that seeing Tyler Perry turn a former military base into Tyler Perry Studios showed him what was possible. Perry’s lot, of course, is still pumping out projects like The Gospel of Christmas with Tank and Fantasia. Katt also credits the Chitlin Circuit, the network of Southern venues that launched legends like James Brown, as inspiration.
Why it matters: Black ownership of where the stories get made, and not just who stars in them, is how the culture gets more control over its own narrative. And with Atlanta already the Southeast’s production capital, a second Black-owned studio a short drive away could mean more jobs and more pipelines for our creatives.
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Sources: Simon & Schuster, theGrio, Revolt, WVTM 13
