Creativity Quote by Cab Calloway

Cab Calloway is doing two things at once here: protecting the sanctity of live performance and quietly policing the boundary between Black artistry and the white-controlled machinery of Hollywood. He starts with what sounds like a technical complaint - opera is hard to photograph - but it’s really a cultural diagnosis. Film can’t just “capture” opera; it has to translate it. That translation is where power sits: who gets cast, who gets to shape tone, whose bodies and voices are considered “cinematic.”

The blunt verdict, “they messed up on it,” lands like bandstand talk, not academic critique. Calloway doesn’t litigate aesthetics; he calls out a failure of presence: “It just wasn’t there.” That vagueness is strategic. It implies a missing spirit, a missing authenticity, a missing lived-in understanding of the material. Given the likely context - the troubled screen history around Porgy and Bess and the Gershwin estate’s long reluctance to authorize adaptations - his sympathy for “taking it away” reads less like deference and more like solidarity: if the industry can’t treat the work (and the people who originated it) with care, shut the gates.

Then comes the real indictment: “if they had gotten the original company.” That’s not nostalgia; it’s an argument about authorship. The “original company” isn’t interchangeable labor. It’s the work’s proof of concept, its credibility, its emotional wiring. Calloway is naming what adaptations often erase: the performers who made the thing real in the first place.