Jerry Louis Jones

Arkansas native Jerry Louis Jones was an actor, screenwriter, and playwright best known for his collaboration with fellow Arkansan Rudy Ray Moore  on the 1975 film  Dolemite . He also had roles in films  and television shows like  M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, The Human Tornado, Disco Godfather, The Brady Bunch, Mission: Impossible, The Doris Day Show, and The Odd Couple. Image Credit:   www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net Jerry Louis Jones was born on February 16, 1927, in Varner, Arkansas, to Marie and Louis (Lewis) Jones, a Pine Bluff railroad worker. When Jones was young, his parents divorced. His father remarried in 1941. Eventually, Jones moved to Chicago with his mother. While in Chicago, Jones became a radio DJ and ran the Talent Scout Nightclub, which was visited by “players, pimps, and prostitutes.” Jones later quit the nightclub business and enrolled in the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute in Chicago to pursue an acting career full-time. At Goodman, Jones performed in artistic works from William Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams. He also wrote his first play, Heel and Sole, about civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.  Jones then moved to New York City, where he met James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, but he quickly returned to Chicago to continue his work in the theater.  In the late 1960s, Jones moved to Los Angeles, California. This move paid off when he began appearing in television shows like The Brady Bunch , Mission: Impossible , The Doris Day Show , and The Odd Couple  in the 1970s. Nonetheless, Jones’s most well-known parts come from his movie roles. In 1970, he appeared as a man whose Jeep was stolen in Robert Altman’s war comedy M*A*S*H . In 1973, he appeared in another Altman classic, The Long Goodbye, where he played Detective Green and shared the screen with Elliott Gould, an American actor who went on to star in modern classics like the Ocean’s Eleven  trilogy films,  Friends,  and The Lincoln Lawyer.  Jones went on to meet Rudy Ray Moore, a raunchy, animated comedian who was also born in Arkansas during the same year. Jones’ most well-known work came from his and Moore’s 1975 film Dolemite. Jones not only wrote the film’s screenplay but he played Lieutenant Blakey, one of Dolemite’s allies. Dolemite was a box office success, earning 12 million dollars, more than recouping its $100,000 budget. As the most significant credit during his film career, Jones stated that the Chicago premiere of the movie was “the most exciting moment of my life.” He also wrote the screenplay and acted in Moore’s The Human Tornado in 1976. In 2002, he also appeared alongside Moore in the Dolemite  sequel, The Dolemite Explosion.  His other acting credits include The Disco Godfather(1979), The Bill Cosby Show, Watermelon Man (1970), Top of the Heap (1972), Hit Man (1972), Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law (1971), Here’s Lucy, Hit! (1973), The Slams (1973), Tender Mercies (1983), Hill Street Blues, The Party Animal (1984), Walking the Edge (1985), Living the Blues (1986), and All of Us. In the 1980s and 1990s, though Jones’s film work slowed down, he wrote several plays, including Girl, I Knew He Was a Dog When He Barked in His Sleep , Queen of the Blues  (a tribute to Dinah Washington), and the musical The Chicago Club Rumboogie  (2006). In Rumboogie , Jones included a part based on the policeman Sylvester Washington, better known as “Two Gun Pete,” who got his nickname for carrying two pistols to take down criminals. In 1988, Jones had written a book about Two Gun Pete.  Jones was married and divorced at least once and had four children: daughters, Gloria “Duchess” Gunn, Mia Miller, and Judith Jones Brown (who died in 2010), and a son, Stephan B. Turner, who became an actor. Turner, like his father, attended the Goodman School of Drama. He stated that his father was his “first reference point for acting,” who “convinced me that I could do something out of the ordinary with my life.” Turner started acting in Chicago and later founded the Gate Theater Group in Thailand.  In 2019, Craig Brewer’s film Dolemite Is My Name  premiered, starring Eddie Murphy and featuring Keegan-Michael Key as Jones. The movie was a critical success, though Jones’s daughter, Gloria Gunn, the family’s spokesperson, was taken aback by the fact that the filmmakers never consulted the family about her father and his role in the creation of Dolemite . On November 18, 2012, Jones died in Los Angeles, California. He was later cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the Pacific. Sources:  www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net - Jerry Louis Jones (1927–2012) https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com - ‘Everybody has taken advantage’ www.tvguide.com - Jerry Jones - Credits Written by: Ninfa O. Barnard