They Shoot Black Movies...Don't They?
| Monday, 30 January 2012 09:59 |
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They Shoot Black Movies...Don't They?
(The Realization of a Hustlerz Ambition)
By Barry Michael Cooper
At
the dawn of the Black Hollywood Renaissance of the '90s, the sodality
of filmmakers like Spike Lee, The Hudlin Brothers, Bill Duke, Stan
Lathan, John Singleton, The Hughes Brothers, George Jackson, Doug
McHenry, Mario Van Peebles, Robert Townsend, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Kevin
Hooks, Fred "Fab Five Freddy" Braithwaite, Charles Stone, III, Nelson
George and this writer, to name a few, felt like the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. We--like Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt at the height of
their artistic revolt in the U.K. during the late 1800s--were cinematic
reformers, rejecting the cartoonish mythos of African American
life, as depicted in the Black Exploitation flicks of the 1970s. In the
1990's we were Dr. Martin Luther King, we were Malcolm X, we were
Gordon Parks, we were Melvin Van Peebles. We were insatiable American Dreamers,
like Oscar Michaeux; albeit with limos, first-class, transcontinental
transport, five-star luxury hotels and cuisine,
Armani-Brioni-Versace-Zegna-Valentino-Ferragamo gear, expanding bank
accounts, and cell phones. We had Been To The Mountaintop and had G.P.S.'d that noble glide-path while tracking the Realization of a Negro's Ambition, guided by the voice from an ancestral control tower which intoned, By Any Means Necessary.
We just knew The Dream would last forever.
Twenty
years later Spike Lee--one of the most talented and prolific directors
this country has produced in the 20th Century--can't get a green light
for the sequel to Inside Man, despite the fact that the
original film grossed nearly $200 million dollars worldwide. Twenty
years later, two supremely talented actresses--Viola Davis and Octavia
Spencer--are given Oscar nods for their portrayals of wise but
weathered Mississippi domestics in a highly praised film titled The Help.
Twenty years many black filmmakers (including myself) haven't had a movie financed by a major studio in over twenty years.
Twenty
years later and America has its first African American President of
the United States, seeking re-election for a second term at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue.
Twenty
years later, African American filmmakers navigate a course that is
slightly sticky, smelly, and saggy, the aftermath of an exploding Dream deferred by Hollywood's Grand Illusion of Inclusion.
Twenty years later, is this the way it's supposed to be?
Twenty
years ago, it was a heady time in Hollywood for a young black
screenwriter like me. To be honest, it was unbelievable, and it's
almost like it never happened at all. Sitting in meetings along with
the late, great film producer George Jackson (and his partner Doug
McHenry) at Warner Brothers in Burbank, California, was nothing short
of surreal. Months earlier, George Jackson--who read my May 1986 Spin Magazine cover story on the Baltimore "Yo Boy" drug
gang culture while changing planes in Denver--hired me away from the
loading dock of the Hecht Company department store in Baltimore, to
write the script of a movie that became the Rosetta Stone for modern urban culture; 1991's New Jack City. As the first black screenwriter in history to have two films--Sugar Hill and Above the Rim--released
not only in the same year (1994), but 30 days apart from each other, I
felt weightless in Hollywood's zero-gravity of glitz, fraudulent
gravitas, and artifice.
As Biz Markie once said (describing the ego-toxic euphoria dispensed by the laughing gas known as The Vapors), "Damn it feels good to have people up on it..."
The
success story of African-Americans in Hollywood in the 1990s, was the
result of a cultural harvest planted a century earlier, by Oscar
Michaeux, the African American filmmaker who changed the game, at the
beginning of the Twentieth Century. Born on 2 January 1884 in
Murphysboro, Ill., Michaeux was the son of a former slave from
Kentucky. Using funds he saved up from shining shoes in a white barber
shop in Chicago, and work as a Pullman porter and a homesteader in the
Southwest, Micheaux channeled his love for communication as a
journalist (for the Chicago Defender), a novelist, and then a director. His first two films, The Homesteader (adapted from his novel, The Conquest) and Within Our Gates (which many observers at the time felt was Michaeux's answer to D.W. Griffiths anathematical racist epic, Birth of a Nation),
not only blew the explosive depiction of African-Americans as nannies,
coons, and sambos to anthropological smithereens, it defined black
folk as human beings who wanted to be accorded the same dignity and
rights as their white counterparts. Oscar Micheaux's films were pointed
at the dead center/critical mass of Jim Crow's diseased heart of
darkness, which made him more than just a courageous and acclaimed
filmmaker, and his movies more than just entertainment. Micheaux's work
was also a political statement.
And
maybe, the decade-long dearth of African American films in recent
years, is Hollywood's political statement to Black Americans. Maybe
it's Hollywood's way of saying, Listen, my niggas; you got a black President, stop yer yappin'!! You overcame!
Do you know how many unreported suicides and heart attacks took place
in the Deep South (and the Northwest, too) among the offspring of
Klansman and racial hate mongers, the night of 4 November 2008? Do you
know how many good 'ol boys woke up, thinking they were having a
nightmare about some darkie winning the White House...only to wake up
and find out that a darkie was really gonna be in the White House?!
Don't you see how those white Congressmen and Senators look at Obama
when he's up on the podium giving the State of the Union Address to the
entire world! The entire f---ing world! This is a guy who should be
driving them to the airport, not sitting in the motherf---ing Oval
Office! But he is, so please, cut us some slack. We're not
green-lighting anymore black films right now; and especially films
directed, written by, or produced by Blacks. With your boy Obama as
President, now we have a pass to go back to the past, back to this nation's comfort zone, and you all can't say a damn thing about it! You had a ten-year run! You had your day! Be happy!
I
remember moderating a panel on Hip Hop at Howard University back in
2009, the day before President Obama's Inauguration. It was part of an
all day conference titled Refresh Everything, and it was
sponsored by Spike Lee, Pepsi, and Howard University. I had an
illustrious panel of guests: Sean "Diddy" Combs, Queen Latifah,
Ludacris and his manager Chaka Zulu, noted lawyer and entertainment
executive L. Londell McMillan, and MC Lyte. It was a spirited
conversation, and my Hip Hop panel got a lot of attention; all 1508
seats in Howard's beautiful Cramton Auditorium were filled, and people
were standing in the aisles.
A few days later, I remember emailing my thanks to Spike--the both of us basking in the radiantly historic glow of a Black President of the United States of America--and me thinking that now...in 2009...with a President Barack Hussein Obama, that Hollywood was going to be wide open for us. Wide open!
What a difference three years can make.
Last week, the critics at the Sundance Film Festival did their best to tweet and feather Spike Lee and his film Red Hook (written by Lee's talented collaborator James McBride, and financed by Lee himself). Red Hook--a
controversial coming-of-age story about a young black teen and his
life-altering summer vacation in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects--seemed to
make critics uneasy. Many critics at the Sundance screening condemned
Lee's film outright, as opposed to taking the time to discuss with
their readers, what elements of the film made them squirm. Which is
what real critics are supposed to do.
Last week, two of The Help's
stars--the gifted Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer--were given
well-deserved Oscar nominations for playing maids during the heat of
civil rights unrest. Hollywood insists on rewinding those anachronistic ghost clocks of Mississippi,
as long as the timekeepers are sympathetic white characters who
retrofit the story from their sanitized and patronizing, p.o.v.
Last
week, I had an interesting conversation with a well-known and
visionary television producer--who is also white--who told me in no
uncertain terms, "Barry, I don't have to tell you, the era of the
'hood movie, is pretty much over. The executives at the studios won't
even take a meeting on that genre any more. Black films are having are
hard time finding a home at the studios. If its not a big bucks sequel,
or something that fits into their formula of huge box office, it's not
going to get a green light. Which also includes small and really good
films by white directors, too. It's a new day in Hollywood."
So are African American filmmakers still writing and shooting great Black films? Of course: Spike Lee just did it with Red Hook, Dee Rees did it with Pariah, and there will be more films like that to follow. True, Tyler Perry, the Hughes Brothers and John Singleton are creating incredible, viable, big budget studio films. But if it means that other African-American filmmakers have to go back to the grind of digging their own wallets--She's Gotta Have It and Hollywood Shuffle-style--and making it happen with a Canon 5D camera with a bare bones crew, then so be it.
There is a gorgeous freedom of expression with that kind of cinema,
and most assuredly, there is a growing audience in the millions (and a
potential global audience in the hundreds of millions or even billions)
who want view their work. And that growing audience is responsible for
the emergence of streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon
Prime Videos, and Vudu, which in a few years--GOD Willing--may make
cable television obsolete.
However, Hollywood is not completely out of the 'hood film bidness. Imagine
if you will, some of those same bright-eyed number and career
crunching studio execs, who publicly claim they are true blue
Democrats--but surreptitiously vote crimson red G.O.P.--orchestrating attack ads portraying President Obama as a Harvard-educated Nino Brown and the White House as his very own New Jack City? A menace to their polite society; a "Nino Obama" who pushes their great country into the crack house of oblivion. Hyperbole,
you say? Perhaps. But if I'm not mistaken, Newt "The Notorious
N.E.W.T." Gingrich recently labeled (or is it libeled?) President Obama as the "Food Stamp President."
Those of us--no matter what race, social stratum, religion, or whoever we are--who want four more seasons of That Virtuous Brother Doing His Thing in the West Wing (And Trying To Make It Work For Everyone),
need to show up at polls in droves (just like last time, with lines
around the block), just to make sure that the GOP's post-mod minstrel
show they are putting into production at this very moment, doesn't get
that green light.
Be sure to order Barry Michael Cooper's debut anthology of street journalism from the 1980s (and more current essays), titled "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young,"
which is now available on Kindle/Amazon. Don't have a Kindle? No
problem; Amazon has a free app available for download, to read "Hooked
On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," on your PC,
Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Click here to go to the Amazon site.
[Source: Hooked on the American Dream] |
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