In case you watched “The Six Triple Eight” on Netflix over the vacations (and greater than 23.3 million viewers did, in accordance with the streamer), you would possibly’ve puzzled why the World Struggle II film — in regards to the battalion of 855 Black ladies and ladies of coloration who untangled a three-year backlog of mail (17 million items of it) and dramatically improved morale — is devoted to “the life, service and reminiscence” of leisure mogul Clarence Avant and his spouse, philanthropist Jacqueline Avant.

Their daughter, diplomat-turned-film producer Nicole Avant was the one who introduced the unimaginable untold true story to Tyler Perry’s consideration.

When Nicole was somewhat lady, Jacqueline advised her about Main Charity Adams (portrayed by Kerry Washington), the primary African American girl to turn into an officer within the Ladies’s Military Auxiliary Corps. However Nicole doesn’t bear in mind her mom mentioning that Adams commanded the 6888th Central Postal Listing Battalion (or the Six Triple Eight, as they had been identified) or their heroics throughout World Struggle II. So, when Nicole obtained a sizzle reel from a group of filmmakers trying to carry the story to the massive display, she confirmed her mother the video.

“She mentioned, ‘I’ve advised you in regards to the Six Triple Eight.’ I mentioned, ‘No, you advised me about Charity Adams, however I didn’t find out about 800 ladies,’” Nicole says, laughing as she recounts their playful disagreement.

Jacqueline was thrilled Nicole deliberate to shine a highlight on these heroes. “Her love for historical past is what gave me my love for historical past,” Nicole says of her mom. “Her message to me rising up was: ‘Your job is to take the baton. All people earlier than you — 60 years, 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years — your ‘Thanks’ [to them] is your life. You are taking the baton and make your individual goodness with it.’”

“The Six Triple Eight” was the ultimate venture they mentioned earlier than Jacqueline was killed in a house invasion in December 2021.

After that tragic evening, Clarence moved in with Nicole and her husband, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, dwelling with the couple till his demise in August 2023. Throughout that point, Nicole chronicled her expertise working via the grief within the memoir “Suppose You’ll Be Glad” and she or he concurrently labored on “The Six Triple Eight,” with encouragement from her father each step of the best way. She’d share dailies from the set and, earlier than he died, she confirmed him a reduce of the completed movie.

“It was somewhat bit after midnight and he’s listening to the [end credits] music,” Nicole recollects, saying she joked with Clarence about how the film’s unique observe “The Journey” was written by Diane Warren — aka his “pal who likes to curse.”

“That they had that in frequent,” cracks Sarandos, becoming a member of his spouse for the transient interview at Tyler Perry’s Paley Honors ceremony final month.

“I had a sense it was virtually time for the transition, so we switched locations,” Nicole says gesturing towards her husband, who sat with Clarence as he died. Sarandos wrote about that emotional expertise in a poignant new foreword for the paperback version of “Suppose You’ll Be Glad.” The e-book hit cabinets on Dec. 3, simply hours earlier than Nicole walked the purple carpet for the world premiere of “The Six Triple Eight.”

You may name it coincidence, however Nicole wouldn’t. “I consider in divine timing. I consider in divine order and I stay by it,” she says, noting that the making of the film was marked by a sequence of such concurrences.
For instance, as Avant and Perry approached Washington to star as Main Adams, she’d simply realized of the Six Triple Eight and dressed up like Lena Derriecott King (one of many final dwelling troopers within the battalion) for a social media sequence celebrating Black ladies’s contributions throughout the ages. When Washington pressed publish on that Instagram put up, she didn’t notice an electronic mail for Perry in regards to the “Six Triple Eight” movie was ready in her inbox.

“Every little thing simply got here collectively,” Nicole says of the serendipitous course of. “It was such a full circle second to begin this journey with my mother’s pleasure and finish the journey with my father, figuring out that he at all times stored me going — he’d inform me, ‘It doesn’t matter what, you must persevere. You need to end issues, even when they’re onerous,’ — that’s why this film is further particular.”

For Sarandos, “The Six Triple Eight” is exclusive because it bridges the hole between studio head and partner. From the Netflix perspective, the movie was a marker of the studio’s funding in Perry.

“This can be a totally different degree of labor for Tyler — a special degree of scope and ambition. He has a outstanding physique of labor, however these initiatives actually do stand out,” Sarandos says of “The Six Triple Eight” and its predecessor “A Jazzman’s Blues,” which Perry launched in 2022. “It’s giving him the power to work on an even bigger canvas — which has been one thing I’ve been fairly happy with.”

And on a private notice, he provides, “This movie is an embodiment of that vitality that obtained poured into it. What Clarence and Jackie had been at all times attempting to do was to inform individuals’s tales and ensure these individuals don’t get misplaced to historical past. They instilled that in Nicole.”