No Room At All. A Harold Cromer Story

You have already met Harold Cromer.

You have laughed at his comedic timing — Jerry Lewis admitted on public television that he took it. You have seen Dizzy Gillespie's bent horn; Stump and Stumpy bent it. You have heard the beatbox he taught Doug E. Fresh, on a Harlem street corner, because that is where he happened to be standing.

You have never heard his name.

For seventy years he introduced other people onto stages — Chubby Checker, Aretha Franklin, a young Stevie Wonder — and nobody ever did it for him. At nineteen, his great-granddaughter was told to look him up. She borrowed a camera, flew to New York, and kept filming for the rest of his life.

He left her fifty-two boxes and a century he had documented himself, because no one else was going to.

He asked for one thing: a dinner — the old show-business ritual where a room stops and somebody says out loud what you did.

This film is that room. Help us finish it.