America Behind the Color Line (31 page)

“I think their racism is totally unconscious,” Nia continued. “I understand the machine. I understand that it might make more sense to put Cameron Diaz in a part for
Charlie’s Angels.
I think with the mind of a producer. All I ask as an artist is that we be given a chance, not as a favor or a mercy meeting or on account of a guilty conscience, but just so the game is fair.”

Who can disagree with Nia Long that actors should be judged only on talent and that factors such as race or color should be irrelevant? But will that ever be the case? I went to Venice Beach to meet Don Cheadle. Many say he is the most talented and versatile black actor to emerge since Samuel Jackson.

“Do you think that black actors and directors sometimes use race as a cover, as an excuse? Or are they right when they say the place is racist?” I asked him.

“If we were talking about equality of opportunity, or even reciprocity—if we were talking about the way America really looks, rather than the way movies look—then there would be more work for black actors, directors, and producers in Hollywood, and for others of color as well,” said Cheadle. “Of course, there are myriad reasons why one actor doesn’t get a certain part. If we believe union numbers, there are many more white actors who don’t get parts than black actors. If I get turned down for a part, I can’t attribute it solely to the fact that I’m black. But it’s obvious that I am, so I’m sure that’s always a factor in any thought process about whether I get hired.”

“But does it help when politics enter? When the NAACP comes in?” I asked.

“Acting isn’t bricklaying,” he replied. “If you have a skill for laying bricks, you can do it no matter what you look like—if they hire you . . . When it comes to casting, you can’t just say, you have to hire these five black people or these four Asian women, because not everybody can do it . . . Yes, we do need more numbers, but if the stories aren’t intriguing, engaging, and entertaining, and if it doesn’t hold together as a whole, then just sticking a bunch of people in a product that’s ultimately not going to be that good doesn’t help either. In fact, it does just the opposite . . . Most movies are not very good; most pieces of art are not very good; most CEOs of companies are not very good. That’s why, when they
are
very good, they’re exemplary, and we go, oh my God. They’re lauded because mediocrity is what’s rampant. Excellence is rare.”

Behind the energy and sunny optimism of Los Angeles is a hard-bitten, take-no-prisoners ruthlessness. Compared to the perils of being an actor, the life of a professor is a piece of cake. Actors can be picked up or dropped on a whim, and their success is continually dependent on fickle audiences. Talk about constant heartburn! For all of the appeal of the camera and the glamorous life of successful actors, the power to effect long-term change in Hollywood lies behind the camera. If we can’t green-light films yet, when will we be able to? How much influence
do
black people have behind the scenes?

One person who has blazed so many trails for African Americans in the music and film industries is my dear friend Quincy Jones. Quincy arrived in Hollywood as a well-respected musician, composer, and arranger. He was the first black person to compose scores for films. Since then, he’s built a powerful empire embracing film, TV, and music. No black person has more power than Quincy Jones. He’s building a marvelous home in Bel Air. Although he’s recovering from a shoulder surgery, he’s as animated and as sharp as ever. Despite his success, Quincy vividly recalls a time when black people in Hollywood were as rare as rain in Southern California.

“Quincy, what was Hollywood like in the sixties when you started making films?”

“Well, you know it’s usually precedent. If you don’t see too many black composers, people assume there are no black composers. At the time, the spawning ground for composers was Universal Pictures. They didn’t even have blacks in the kitchen. I’m serious! We’re talking about the early 1960s.”

“If we came back in a time machine, fifty years from now, how will Hollywood have changed? Will we be green-lighting? Will we be studio executives?”

“I think all that’s going to happen. The young kids always ask me what I recommend, and I say, want more! Dream more! Don’t get hung up on this little jive lame dream down here. Get a big one! And if you get halfway there, you’re still okay! But make the dream big.”

Quincy has been smart enough to analyze the system and talented enough to master it. He’s a role model for a whole new generation of black artists. But is it still harder to realize your ambitions—all things being equal—if you are black? Does race still matter the way it did when Quincy arrived in Hollywood in the early sixties?

Reginald Hudlin is the director of two of the most profitable black films in the history of Hollywood—
House Party
and
Boomerang
. He is also a keen analyst of Hollywood’s racial politics today.

“There are no black people who can green-light,” I began. “When’s that going to change?”

“The studio system—the permanent government of Hollywood, the agents, the managers, the studio executives—is a hard business for black folk to break into, because the skill set that is required to do that is very complicated,” said Reggie. “On the one hand, you have to hang out with these agents and drink and go white-water rafting and do all this kind of assimilationist activity, where you have to feel sincerely comfortable in that mix. At the same time, you have to have a level of aggressiveness that is required to make it in the business, period. Black or white, you have to be a shit starter, a driving personality. And that kind of aggressive personality, when executed by a black person, can be very scary and intimidating to white people. But without that, you’re not going to make it.

“As if balancing those two weren’t enough,” he continued, “you’d better be on top of the current trends and personalities in black culture, because your white bosses expect you to have all that down cold. But if you have all this assimilationist skill with whites, then you aren’t necessarily listening to the new Wu-Tang record. And the black cultural landscape is so vast! You’ve got to have the kind of bohemian black thing covered; you’ve got to have the ghetto black thing covered; and stay up on all the white stuff that all your white colleagues know. So balancing those three things is really, really hard.”

“If it’s about color, is it green?” I asked.

“Usually a film’s profitability is decided when the movie is green-lit, meaning, we’re only going to spend money on these kinds of stars, we’re only going to spend this much on production value—which means that they’re only going to spend so much on marketing . . . If you look at the top ten most successful films of all time, they tend to be science fiction films like
Star Wars
or
Titanic,
where they had a big production budget. It bears repeating: scared money don’t make money. So until black filmmakers have access to that kind of production budget, it’s gonna be tough to rack up those kinds of numbers.”

“Hollywood is quoted as saying that black films don’t have crossover appeal,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“Let’s take a step back from the phrase ‘black movies,’” Reggie answered. “What does it mean? In Hollywood, ‘black’ is only used in the negative. Eddie Murphy isn’t considered a black star. He’s just a movie star, the same way Egypt isn’t part of Africa. So black only counts in the negative. Look at
Training Day
—black director, black star. Is that a black film? I would argue it is.”

“What about the idea, entrenched in Hollywood, that black movies don’t sell overseas?” I asked.

“Today hip-hop rules in Japan, Germany, and Sweden. So the idea that they’re buying all this black culture in every other medium overseas, but somehow in films it won’t work, is absurd. The cultural gatekeepers are the problem. The distributors, the marketers on the international level, do not know how to take this product and sell it to these particular markets.

“A lot of times it’s not about racism at all,” Reggie continued. “It’s laziness, because when you have a new product and a new idea, someone’s got to come up with a new marketing plan. Now, they’ve got four marketing plans. So when you come up with something else, they’ve got to come up with a new plan. That means they’ve got to work late. They may have to skip lunch. Nobody wants to work late and skip lunch. I’m not saying everything’s some evil racial plot with people rubbing their hands together. Sometimes it’s just people who are lazy, who don’t want to do anything they’re not accustomed to doing.”

I love the color and rhythms of Crenshaw; for me, this is the soul of Los Angeles. It’s a haven for black musicians, artists, and filmmakers who want to remain in touch with their roots. Crenshaw is also the neighborhood that director John Singleton depicted in
Boyz N the Hood,
one of the most profitable black-themed films in the history of Hollywood. Despite his phenomenal success, Singleton still lives in nearby Baldwin Hills and keeps his office there. He shot
Boyz N the Hood
for $6 million. Twelve years later, he makes films with budgets ten times that.

I wanted to ask John how he manages to strike a balance between a desire for commercial success and maintaining his integrity—in other words, how he makes a profit while keeping it real. “You’ve broken through the glass ceiling,” I said to him. “You can make any film you want. How does it work?”

“I always say that if you make a film that is even moderately successful, it allows you to make another film, and if you make a film that is wildly successful, that means you’ll be able to make three other movies.”

“Where are you in that food chain?” I queried.

“I’ve been directing just twelve years and I’m going into my seventh film. I started directing when I was twenty-two years old, and I’m thirty-four, so I’m a veteran at a young age still. I’m cool now . . . For me, it’s been a level playing field. I would say differently if I could have any type of personal dissatisfaction with opportunities that have been made for me. But I can’t say that. And I haven’t had to kiss nobody’s pale ass to do it . . .

“This business is not about just expressing yourself and your culture and everything, and then hey, you know, we’ll throw $30 million to the wind,” he said. “All that stuff about personal feelings and getting culture out and being able to say something, you have to sneak that into your movie. I don’t go into somebody’s office and say, I want to make this movie ’cause I really want black folks to know this. I don’t go in there and say all that BS. I go in there and say, hey, this is what it is—people will want to go see this movie because of this and this, and this is what they’re feeling, and this is what’s going on on the street. Believe me, this is going to sell 700,000 copies on DVD and video and it’ll only be made for this amount, and I think it’ll turn a profit of about $50 million. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about all that other stuff. It
is
about all that other stuff, but you can’t come on like that.”

Like all Hollywood players, John certainly stays busy. As I was departing, he had already started to plot storyboards for his next movie,
2 Fast 2 Furious
. I wonder if John or Reggie Hudlin will continue to move up Hollywood’s food chain and eventually be eligible to green-light?

Before I leave Hollywood, there is another director I want to meet. Neither a megastar nor a power broker, he’s one of many talented young filmmakers working for their big break.

His name is Reggie Rock Bythewood, and he is in the midst of a struggle with the studios that speaks volumes about race.

“I was sitting in a room with the head of a studio, on a project that I had assembled a superlative cast for—amazing African-American actors whom a lot of people know,” he explained. “These are people who are willing to be in a film that I put together, and an executive went through it and said, but here’s a black face, here’s a black face, here’s a black face, here’s a black face. The frustration on his part was that there were not more white faces in the film.”

“Does he want you to rewrite it and put more white faces in it?” I asked. “It’s basically, ‘Reggie, don’t take this personally, but to make this film, we have to make the lead white.’ And I didn’t take it personally, because I’ve been prepped. My entire career has prepared me to understand that that’s how it works a lot.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no. That wasn’t the film I was going to make . . . My motivation was I’m gonna do a movie where you’re not going to hear the word ‘nigger’; you’re not going to have people running around with guns; you’re not going to see brothers with bottles of forties in their hand. This is going to be a hot film. But make it white? Well, go ahead, then. But that’s not why I’m here . . . We got set up at Fox Searchlight Pictures. Ironically, this will be one of their biggest films, if we do it. They gave us four weeks to put the film together.”

Can commercial success still be equated with the number of black faces on-screen? When will a film be just a film—not pigeonholed as “black” or “Hispanic” or even “white”? When will scripts be peopled with the best actors, their color or complexion incidental or irrelevant?

The growing number of smart, sophisticated black actors and directors is bringing this day much closer. Scene by scene, film by film, they are changing the industry from the inside, using the only language Hollywood seems to understand—box office success. But even they would admit that we still have a very long way to go.

Because of these pioneers, I have no doubt there will one day soon be a black studio executive with the power to green-light a film. I am confident of that. But will he or she force Hollywood’s old habits about race to change? Or be seduced by the lure of all the glitter and keep things essentially the way they are? I wonder . . .

CHRIS TUCKER
Different Stories

I was the youngest of six children. My mother, Mary Tucker, is a missionary at a church. She’s been a missionary all her life, helping people. My father, Norris Tucker, has a cleaning business. I’ve always been a business-minded person, because I watched my father run his own business, and before coming to California, I only worked for my father. That was it; I never had another job in my life before I went out to L.A. and started doin’ comedy.

I was just a kid with a dream and a vision. I loved entertainment. I loved movies. I used to go see all the old movies with my daddy—like
Stir Crazy
with Richard Pryor. On the weekend my daddy would take us one of two places. We’d either go to the high school football game and go to McDonald’s afterwards, or we’d go to the movies and then get some pizza.

We always saw the black movies. Every Eddie Murphy movie, every Richard Pryor movie, every black movie, we’d go see. I would sit in the movie theater and be fascinated and just feel so good. I used to look at the screen and say, I’m gonna do that one day—I’m gonna be up on that screen. I used to go home and sleep and dream about being in movies. So from a young age, I had a passion for entertainment and movies.

People know what’s funny. When I’m in a movie, I’m a comedian before anything else. I know people, all people, and I make sure I can relate to everybody. I thought about this throughout my career. I said, I don’t want to be a comedian that just gears toward black people or just gears toward white people. I want to be a universal comedian. I want to take my comedy and make it broad so everybody’ll laugh and I’ll never be just in a box. I thought about it when I was young. And to this day I say, when I do a movie, I want everybody to be able to enjoy it. I don’t know how I do it, but it’s part of my consciousness when I work.

I like a lot of comedians. Eddie Murphy is a genius. He can just laugh and be funny. One of my favorite movies is
48 Hrs.
’cause he was real; he didn’t do slapstick. That’s my whole thing. I never wanted to be slapstick. Eddie Murphy wasn’t slapstick; he was just straight funny. He was naturally funny, and that’s what I always wanted to be. I modeled myself a lot watching Eddie Murphy, just the way he did it. You could feel that he was real. You thought you’d go out of the movies and he’d be standin’ right there.

When you make films in Hollywood, you experience everything. I prepared myself for it and I maneuvered around it. Whatever you do, there’s gonna always be somebody who don’t like you or somebody saying you ain’t good enough, or we want to do this or we want to use you for that. My whole thing is, try not to get caught into it. If you spend too much time in it, that means they got you. My thing is to just maneuver right around and step right over whatever it is and keep going, because you’re gonna experience a little bit of everything, whatever you do, and not just in Hollywood.

You have to separate this entertainment business from your real life, because if you don’t have your life right, and if you’re not together, then it’s gonna be real difficult to be creative and to make that creativity go over into movies. I knew from the start that when you get successful, when you get famous, you sometimes get unfocused. A lot of new people come into your life, a lot of big decisions. My thing was, okay, I knew it was gonna happen, so let me prepare myself for it. Let me separate myself so I can keep my creativity, so I can keep fresh ideas, keep my vision, keep renewing myself. So I live out of town, outside the star system. If you soak yourself all over in the Hollywood thing, then you just do whatever, because you listen to everybody. Especially because I’m younger, I knew I had to do something to keep myself focused.

I gotta thank God for my parents, because I’ve always been around spiritual people. My mother’s very spiritual, and my father is very spiritual. My spirituality comes from my upbringing, and from Atlanta, Georgia. It comes from being raised in the church. Even though I was sleeping in the church half the time when I was young, it’s still there in some way. It’s a part of me, just who I am. I’ve met a lot of people in my life who come to me because I could tell them something, because I’ve been raised a certain way and can say, when times get hard, get on your knees and pray. I think before anything— before church and everything—you’ve gotta be spiritual and have a relationship with God. The higher you go, you’re gonna have more decisions and bigger decisions to make.

What motivates me is people. I think that’s why I know people, and I know what makes them tick. I know what makes them laugh, I know what makes them chuckle, and I love people. That’s my thing, my shtick. I study a person in a minute. When I go to the movies, I don’t watch the movie. I look to the side. I watch people and see what makes them laugh and what bores them. When they’re bored, I say, well, I know I ain’t gonna ever do that! And when they start laughing, I say, I can do that; I could take that to another level when I do a movie. I watch people, I listen to people, and then I just do it. People are my thing.

If I look at something and I know it ain’t cool, because of the way my mama and daddy raised me, it hurts me more than I think it hurts other people, ’cause people just want to see me do movies. They’re just like, do a movie! Do a movie! Do a movie! But I gotta think about the little kids—about all kids, ’cause I got little white kids come up to me, and Chinese kids, everybody comes up to me, and they’re my fans, and I don’t want to mislead them, no matter what. I don’t think a movie is that important compared to these kids. I think movies are good. I love them. They’re fun and they’re entertaining. But I want to do something that’s gonna motivate, and maybe even change people’s lives. My expectations are big. I want to go to the next level. I don’t just want to make movies. I want to do movies that change people’s lives— movies that affect even my life, learning and traveling around the world. I’m always excited about the next thing I’m gonna do. Lots of times I don’t know what the next thing is, and that’s the good thing about it. That’s the point of being alive: don’t know.

The movie companies have seen what works, so they keep doing it. What people gotta realize is—and I understand it, and it’s fine—movie companies want to make a lot of money. People gotta understand, the studio heads can get fired. Any day! If they make a wrong move—make two, three bad moves—they’re fired. Then they gotta go to another studio, or if that don’t happen, they might not have work. So they’re saying, okay, what works? If Chris Tucker opens big, get Chris Tucker. And they offer me anything, a movie doin’ anything. They just want to know it’s gonna open, it’s gonna make money, and they’re gonna look good on the balance sheets. And then there they go; they keep their job. They’re fighting for their job, and we’re fighting for our job.

Seriously, I definitely see myself as having a particular responsibility for black people out there. I’ve got a responsibility and I’m real hard on myself, harder than anybody. We are blessed here in America, but that brings a lot of responsibility. If you’re blessed, you have to help others. That’s why we’re put here on this earth—to help others, not just to be well off and not help others and say, that’s not my problem. It is our problem, if that’s our brothers and sisters. If we know about it, then we need to do what we can to help. Going to Africa changed my life, and it motivated me, ’cause it’s more than just doing movies—more than just going to get an award. It’s people.

When I went to South Africa, that was special, but nothing like my trip to Ethiopia and Uganda, because I saw real Africa! Especially Ethiopia, because it was spiritual ground, the home of ancient history. The Ethiopian people claim descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and Menelik was the Ethiopian son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. There were originally lots of Jewish people in Ethiopia, then Muslims and Christians. The Bible was written there, or close by, and I’m like, whoa! That’s like big, you know.

People looked up to me in Ethiopia like I never dreamed of. They thought I was Menelik comin’ back home or something. The people I met are very spiritual, and they have dignity. Everybody there is royal—royal people. Be broke on the street, still royal! When I was in Ethiopia, they treated me like royalty, so I think I got some Ethiopian in me. I think it’s my Ethiopian eyes. It was like, we just loving you all, keep doin’ what you’re doin’! And I felt that, ’cause in America we can get a little materialistic sometimes because we’re a rich country, and that happens. In Ethiopia you could see that they were a loving people, but there was a lot of poverty. Fortunately, there isn’t that level of poverty here in America. But the Ethiopians are just nice people, and they don’t care too much about all that stuff. They care about other stuff because they have to live life, survive it. They’re not materialistic people, ’cause there ain’t too much material over there! It changed my life, seeing it.

They’ve watched my movies out there, and mostly all of them said, I love you, Chris Tucker—with passion. In America most people come up and say, you funny, man, you funny! Rarely somebody says, I love you. Everybody in Ethiopia, that’s just a natural thing—I love you. I love you, Chris Tucker. And I was like, man, these people are just nice, beautiful people, and the movie means the world to them; my coming there meant the world to them. It really affected me, ’cause they couldn’t care less about me being a star; they just appreciated the fact that I was over there.

I was invited to go to Ethiopia and Uganda by Bono, who’s a big activist on poverty and AIDS in Africa. We met in D.C. through a mutual friend. He said he was setting up a special trip with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to look at poverty and AIDS in Ethiopia and Uganda and help publicize these problems to kids and grown-ups in America so more can be done to help. And I said to him, I would love to go when you get it set up.

So I went with the treasury secretary and Bono and a couple of college students. We toured villages; we went to people’s homes and to hospitals where kids were being treated for AIDS and to orphanages with little babies left behind when their parents died of AIDS. We traveled in motorcades everywhere. We visited a lot of schools and we visited places where they were producing coffee, cotton, sugar, and other things they grow for export and for themselves. Paul O’Neill wanted to see what was making the economy so bad and why they weren’t capitalizing off their natural resources.

We saw a lot of bad stuff, a lot of sad stuff that I’ll never forget, a lot of deep stuff. It changed my life, because it showed me not to take nothing for granted. I’ve seen a total difference from America. I’ve seen poverty at its worst, but I also saw a beautiful country. I saw beautiful people. Traveling to Africa let me get another outlook on life, another perspective. Everything ain’t just glitz and glamour, and we take a lot for granted, like water and other basics.

I don’t know that we’re on the verge of great things happening for black people in Hollywood, though I’d like it to be so. For people who make it big, the paychecks keep getting bigger. And there’s a broader audience now for black people in Hollywood. But Hollywood is still a tight niche. You flip in through the door to get a movie, and then getting a hit movie is like trying to get into heaven. Even to this day, I see movies that I would’ve liked to get. I sort of wonder, why didn’t I hear about that? Maybe it just wasn’t right for me; they didn’t think about li’l old me. You gotta be faster and quicker and maneuver better, I guess, ’cause it’s real narrow. That’s why there’s only a few black comedians you can name, a few black actresses you can name. You can name a few white actors at the top who are really making a whole bunch of money, really doing good. It’s just tight, tight, tight, so you gotta be the best at what you do, and you gotta know exactly what you want to do.

It’s hard for everyone but it’s harder if you’re black, ’cause there aren’t that many good movies being offered. There’s a lot of creative black stories out there, but it’s hard to get to the studios. It’s hard for the studios too ’cause they have to decide, is this gonna make money? That’s a great story, but it’s kind of sad, they’ll say. But it’s a true story, and it’s uplifting and it’s powerful. Well, yeah, we don’t know, it might not make money. So it never gets done. And we never see it; the actors never see it. I put myself on the other side, on both sides. I’d like to be in a position where somebody could bring me a script and if it’s good and I can do it, I would get it done, or take it to the studios and get it done. But it’s hard.

We depend too much on the studios to bring us what we want. We’ve gotta start opening doors; we gotta open them for ourselves. But to begin with, you gotta get through a narrow door. Some of the black women here in Hollywood say that if you’re black and female, you gotta look like Halle Berry to get a good part, but black men can be dark or have medium brown skin or be light-complexioned and still get a part. They’re right! Hollywood likes certain looks and they only go with what works. But my thing is, people give Hollywood too much credit. Hollywood and the movie studios are made up of businessmen. There’s a couple of creative people up top, and you have a lot of creative studio-head people. People who want to make it here have gotta understand, Hollywood is looking for
us
to be creative and for us to open those doors and to break through. We have to bring more ideas to the studios, or do it independent to get it out there, because we just can’t look to the studios to produce projects for different-type people. The studios go with what works. People around the world like Halle Berry. She works. But we gotta stop depending on the studios.