America Behind the Color Line (42 page)

If I was the person green-lighting this film, I would tell everybody working on it, roll up your sleeves and market this as an action film. If I hear anybody in the room saying it’s a black film, you’re off the project. It’s an action film. If it’s a weak script, then we have problems. But nobody’s going to say it’s a weak script. If it was weak, we wouldn’t be attracting the people we’re attracting. So you have a good story; you have a clear vision. Don’t be limited by the fact that they are African Americans in these roles.

If a white film doesn’t work, you don’t look at it and say, white films don’t work. You say,
this
film didn’t work. I think the perception, when a black film doesn’t work or when a black TV show doesn’t work, is that black films and black TV shows don’t work. This is a real dilemma. If there’s a belief that black dramas don’t work, then it seems to follow that blacks have to all be in comedic situations.

I don’t buy that. I think that people respond to good work. At the time when
The Cosby Show
came on the air, the sitcom industry was kind of dead; it was really all about dramas at that time.
The Cosby Show
helped revitalize NBC. But if you put another sitcom on the air right now, on NBC, and it failed, they might take the view that black sitcoms don’t work. So they’d be judging the whole from one part. For every black film that they say was not successful, you could find three times as many white films that weren’t successful. White films flop all the time, but we’re not real about that.

The challenge that a lot of African-American filmmakers face—I’m not just speaking for myself—is how to make a film that will be perceived as something that can cross over. There is a perception that if you make a film with people of color in it, particularly with black people, it can’t sell well overseas and it can’t even cross over in this country. It’s interesting, because if you point out that there were two people of color starring in
Rush Hour,
it doesn’t matter, because that’s Chris Tucker, so the perception is that it’s not a black film. But what the perception should be is that if it’s a drama, if it’s an action film, if it’s a comedy, market it as an action film. It doesn’t matter if the leads are people of color; it’s still an action film. But it has to start at the studio level, because if the studio sees it as a film that will not go outside of a black market, they are not going to be able to sell it to other people and say, this is a film that can cross over.

The answer to changing the system really lies on the other side of the table, where the guys who make the decisions sit. I have no interest in complaining anymore. I’m tired of it; I’m tired of hearing people complain. When I was younger and thought I wanted to be an actor, I would audition for stuff that didn’t feel right and I said, man, I need to be a writer; that way I can control my destiny. Then you write stuff you believe in and you say, yeah, this is where it’s at, and then it’s like, no, I’ve got to be a producer, and then I realize I’ve got to be a director, and you know what, that isn’t really where it’s at either.

To make the significant change we need to make, we need to be on the other side of the table running the studio. Otherwise, we are going to continue to be in a position where we are complaining and saying, they won’t do this for us and they won’t do that. So certainly, my motivation now and my goal even in doing this project is to facilitate getting myself to that position. It’s the film rights movement, and it starts with us and it’s gonna end with us.

I sort of got spoiled when I first became a writer, because my first gig was writing for
A Different World
. I loved it prior to getting on the show; it was my favorite series at the time. So I got hired to write in the show. Debbie Allen became producer and director in 1988, and it was a mixed writing staff. You never had to explain to anybody, hey, this is derogatory. People asked for your point of view, like your point of view mattered.

After that, I worked on a short-lived show called
South of Sunset
that nobody saw and that was totally night and day colorwise compared to
A Different World
. Basically, I was the only black writer on the staff, and some of these guys were writing some really offensive stuff for this black character. I was cool to one of the white writers and I’d say, damn, man, every day I got to tell these other guys how offensive this is, and the white writer was sympathetic with me. I’d say to him, I feel like I’m like the black police on the show, man, and I hate that. I just want to be a writer. And he’d say, yeah, yeah. He agreed with me.

The next day we’re all in the writing room and we’re going through the script, and then a totally other writer, like the head writer of the show, turns to me and says, so is that okay with the black police? I was really pissed off by that. But what I decided then and there was I’d rather them look at me that way than look at me as a brother who’s scared to say, hey, that’s not cool.

So I think that with any show I’ve worked on, or any situation I’ve been part of, no one will ever say that I sat back and let things like that slide. I’d rather not have to be in the position of needing to call people on things. But I’ve learned that things are going to change if we are inspired enough to make them change. I’ve learned it through situations like
South of Sunset
, and by waiting to see if the studio executives will green-light my film, and even through people applauding as I was walking out of the room on my way to the presentation.

After Denzel and Halle both won an Academy Award, so many articles were written asking whether things have changed. I think things will change if we determine and demand that they change. Personally, I don’t think they’ll change by us boycotting or picketing studios. We should look to ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. If there is going to be some change, it will be because black filmmakers say, I want more, I want to do better, then go through the system and break down a formula or say, I’m going to start my own system where we can green-light our own films.

Everybody—black and white people—saw
Blade,
with Wesley Snipes, and
Bad Boys
, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But those actors are perceived more as stars than as black. Black audiences stayed away from Carl Franklin’s film
Devil in a Blue Dress
. You can say that maybe that film did not have the right marketing. People didn’t flock to see it, but they flocked to see
Waiting to Exhale,
for whatever reason; and
What’s Love Got to Do with It
was successful. Maybe people don’t want to see pieces on slavery, and maybe kids don’t want to see a film on blacks settling the Great Frontier after the Civil War, if it’s told as a drama. Maybe that’s not the way it should be, but I think action films do better than dramas across the board now. Maybe settling the Great Frontier could be told as an action-drama.

The question is, how do we get from this side of the table to that side? Well, I’m learning. I never saw myself as a businessman before. Shame on me! We’ve been in talks with people and we’re learning. We started from the black community, and in the process met white people in the business community. I don’t have any reservations about who gives us money if they want to get behind this vision and behind a market that’s been under-served. In Hollywood, I go through a few things, like I say. I wrote
Get on the Bus,
I produced
New York Undercover,
and I wrote, directed, and produced
Dancing in September,
and my wife directed
Love and Basketball
and they say, okay, cool. But it’s interesting—we’ve been finding that the business community has been paying a lot more attention to us than the Hollywood community has been.

I think it’s not individual racism; it’s institutional racism, at the level of the production, the green-light people, the people who are making the final decision. That’s where the bottleneck is. I think we’ll open it up eventually; we’ll squeeze through. But what is the incentive for a white studio executive? Why should they have to take that chance, and why would they? The onus is on us. Our job is to make a film as marketable as possible. I can’t come in the door and say, hey, man, I’m Jackie Robinson and you’re Branch Rickey. That’s not what it’s about. We’ve got to go in and say, look, you can make money and this is why, and then hope that they can see beyond their perception.

I guess I’m trying to do for Hollywood, through this film and films like it, what
The Cosby Show
did for sitcoms on TV.
The Cosby Show
was about black people ostensibly, but it was not a black TV show. It was about a father and a mother and their growing children, and that’s why everybody in the world watched it. Bill Cosby did a great job because he is really funny, but it wasn’t a sociological study of the Negro family.

It’s taken me a while to get that paradigm, because the people I admire most are not people in the film industry. My wife and I were in South Africa for our honeymoon, and we saw Nelson Mandela’s home. You look at somebody like that and say, well, he stood up for what he believed in. But he didn’t just stand up for what he believed in, he also succeeded. He became president and helped end apartheid. I’m not saying I want to be locked up for twenty-seven years. But it’s not just about being in
Variety
and making lots of money and being that kind of success; it’s bigger than that. And I believe deep down that the world is not as racist as some studio executives perceive it to be.

If there had been a point of view about
The Cosby Show
that it was just a black series, that only black people would come to it, maybe they would have put it on anyway. They didn’t have UPN at the time, but if the show were just coming on today, it might just be on UPN and only go after a specific audience. Sometimes it’s really hard to see whether we’re making progress. Even prior to
The Cosby Show
there was
Roots
, and I was a kid at that time, but I remember everyone in the world watched
Roots
. At the time, it was like the NBA play-offs were going on. We went to school the next day talking about
Roots
, and when I was a kid, I went to an interracial school. It was predominantly white, and all the kids were talking about
Roots
. That show went beyond specific characters, specific nationalities, to the deeper human emotions. That’s what art does. Just as
Othello
is not about an interracial marriage; it’s about jealousy between two men, and using the woman as a pawn.

We need to be able to tell a good story that goes beyond sociology. And a lot of the onus also has to be on executives who are intelligent enough to know when there’s a good story and when there’s not, and who are willing to be innovative instead of just repeating something that was already successful. But ultimately, it comes back to getting to the other side of the table. And when I’m on the other side, I’m not going to be the guy saying, black face, black face, black face.

I don’t know if everyone has the same agenda that I have, and I don’t know if everybody needs to. Whether or not our agendas are the same, it’s actors like Denzel and Sam Jackson and Chris Tucker and Laurence Fishburne and Will Smith and Halle Berry and Angie Bassett who have been making it possible for people like me to even be in a room to fight for these projects. The biggest contribution that African-American actors can make is to do good work. The biggest contribution African-American audiences can make is to ensure that their good work makes money.

It’s possible to tell stories about black people in a new way, an authentic way, and be profitable. I think that’s what people want. We need to change our frame of reference for who we are. Slavery was a very important part of our history, but I’m tired of being offered slavery projects, and I think people are tired of seeing the gangster thing. The sixties were another highly relevant time in our history, but we’re not supposed to be doing the same thing we did then—because if we are, then what was the point of doing it in the sixties? This is the twenty-first century. We have to move with the times or we’ll get left behind.

We have to be very committed to sitting down on the other side of the table. If we don’t do it and I’m asked about our progress ten years from now, I’ll be saying the same thing, and that’s not cool. We need a black studio to be the Motown of the film industry, and it will come, without a doubt. If the studio heads want to start a black studio and say, hey, Reggie, we want you in there, I’m like, cool, I’m there. But the stand we need to make is to start our own studio. If I figure it out for us, that’s great, and if somebody else figures it out for us, that’s great too, as long as we figure it out.

DARNELL HUNT
The Buddy

Imagine a tourist unfamiliar with American culture deciding to spend just one day learning who the African American people are. He might stop in Los Angeles and divide his time between the American Film Institute and the Museum of Television and Radio, studying blacks in movies and on television from the 1950s to today. Our visitor would receive a very limited view of the people he was trying to understand. There are comedic images—he would find lots of those, from the early days of television straight through to today. He would find images of African Americans that show them as somewhat secondary in terms of status relative to whites, because most of the roles we see, with a few exceptions, are African Americans playing the buddy to the central white character. This is true in all the buddy cop films and in many situation comedies and dramas on television.

Even though African Americans have roles as series regulars, much of the research shows that not all series regulars are equal. More “marquee” series regulars, typically the white ones, garner most of the screen time. And it is these regulars, rather than the others, whose families are represented on television. Lots of African-American characters are presented as atomized, as just being there, again at the pleasure of the white characters, going back as far as the 1965 inaugural season of
I Spy
with Bill Cosby and Robert Culp.

I think our visitor would also find an overrepresentation of black men relative to women. We tend to see black men much more frequently on television than we do black women, and I think the same is true for film. In early periods, we’d find black Americans shown in roles that weren’t exactly considered to be high-status, and people were very concerned about this, going back to the days of
Amos ’n’ Andy
. Even when African Americans were extensively seen in roles as doctors or nurses or in roles of similar status, they weren’t quite equipped to pull it off, and as a result they bumbled and fumbled. And this was at a time when America was moving toward integration.

The main character of Calhoun the Lawyer, for example, in
Amos ’n’ Andy
was not a high-status role. It certainly did not reflect African Americans as they wanted to see themselves, at a time when they were trying to become full-fledged citizens of this country. As time progressed, at least we saw more respectable images, for example in the sixties with shows like
I Spy
and
Julia
. But then the problem was that these characters were completely disconnected from the realities of what was happening with the rest of black America—the turmoil of the sixties, the uprisings and protests. All those goings-on were just completely erased from escapist television.

I think the thing to remember is that television is, and has been really, our major cultural form, even more than film. A lot of work has been done on the creation of the concept of nation around mass media, and television in particular, giving people the sense of participating in the same phenomena at the same time over wide expanses of space. And when television provides these images—particularly when people don’t have face-to-face contact, or when most of what they know is through these images—it plays a major role in shaping the way race relations have unfolded in this country.

A great deal of research, again with respect to mainstreaming, indicates that television views of the world become the views people embrace when they watch lots of television. I don’t think race is immune from that. In fact, I think race probably is more susceptible to that than most other things. So I would think that much of what Americans know, or think they know, about African Americans comes from televised images. In other words, the largest part of society in America, particularly white people—not just foreign visitors—learn who African Americans are by watching them on TV and at the movies.