America Behind the Color Line (37 page)

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.

About once a year I have a get-together at my house of all the black directors in Hollywood—no agenda, no spouses, no hangers-on, no documentation; just us. It usually goes from seven in the evening to four in the morning because once we’re together, all these issues come out, and people who didn’t know each other, or didn’t like someone else’s films, suddenly get to know each other as people and go, oh wow. You’re really cool. It’s a very healthy, exciting thing. The nature of directing is that you kind of have built these camps around yourself and you don’t necessarily talk to one another. So again, whether it’s a Black Filmmaker Foundation event or just an informal gathering at your home, finally you have situations where folks get together and talk.

Berry Gordy transformed the music industry, made movies, and made extraordinary breakthroughs in so many fields. While our generation has achieved a lot, what we’re doing is coming
up
to what Berry Gordy did. I don’t feel that we’ve doubled his lead. Quincy Jones is another great example. You look at Quincy Jones’s career, as an artist, as a humanitarian, as a businessperson. It’s unbelievable what he has achieved in his life. Or go back further, to Adam Clayton Powell, who was an extraordinary minister, legislator, and civil rights leader. One of the many great things he did was help start the National Endowment for the Arts. Many black filmmakers, including myself, have gotten their money from the NEA. He helped make my career possible. I look at the achievements of the previous generations and realize I’m just messing around. I need to step up my game.

I want race to disappear as a barrier, as a stigma, but I want to retain all the flavor that race and culture confer. Look at Italian culture in America. Whether it’s their cuisine or the Mafia or
Moonstruck,
people love the unique ethnic flavor of Italian-American culture. But at the same time, there are no barriers to Italian-American advancement in any aspect of American life.

Black Americans have the unique legacy of slavery. Even when we finally started making some money by the turn of the century, they bombed us. I’m speaking of Rosewood, Oklahoma, East St. Louis, and other places in our history where incredible crimes have been committed against us. That is the tragic hidden history of African Americans. Every time black folks really did get successful, there was a vicious backlash. So it takes a generation, as with the old slave revolts, to forget the horror of what happened last time and get up the heart to go for it again.

Black folk have so much history we’ve got to cover. But the problem is that the black audience won’t see period black films, because for them, anything in the past is literally pain. There’s nothing back there that has any kind of positive association. That explains why
Beloved
and
Rosewood
didn’t do better. Now, the kind of period film that black folks did go see?
The Legend of Nigger Charlie.
Why? Guaranteed foot to ass in
The Legend of Nigger Charlie
. For every crack of the whip, there are two white people getting their ass whooped. You have to
promise
the black audience that you will get pay-back twenty times over for them to go see a movie like that. People work hard all week, then go to the movies to escape all that for two hours. What do they want to go see? They catch a beat down all week; they don’t want to pay to see a beat down there too. They want to be shown how to whoop somebody’s ass. They want blueprints for living. You’ve got to show people how to win, how to overcome. It’s not like they don’t want to deal with real issues. They just want to be entertained too. That’s what I’ve tried to do with my career. How do I embed the message enough so no matter how entertaining you make it, the message is still there?

There’s only been one great movie about slavery—
Spartacus
. And until we as black people make our own
Spartacus
, that subject won’t succeed. I want to do it. The question is, who is going to finance it? This is why we have to stop asking permission in Hollywood. Hollywood makes decisions based on precedent. Most executives don’t have any actual black friends, so they make decisions based on black product they’ve seen. This is why you keep seeing variations of
The Jeffersons
and
Good Times
—because that’s what they know. If we’re not going to get black executives in decision-making positions, we at least need to get better black shows on TV so that the white executives who will be making decisions will grow up watching these new shows and have better taste.

The New South, so to speak, is international. In the 1950s, it was thought that a black actor would not be acceptable down South. So you had movies like
Ski Party,
where you’ve got Frankie Avalon at the ski lodge, and then the door opens and James Brown comes in, does his thing, and slides out, and the door closes and the movie starts again. They did it that way so they could take that movie down South and they could cut James Brown out and it wouldn’t affect the plot.

No one thinks like that today. Instead they will say, your movie won’t sell overseas; they won’t buy it in Germany; all the Japanese hate black folk. Again, it’s the bogeyman of the international market. For years, up-and-coming black artists in the music industry, like Jimi Hendrix, have gone overseas, become famous, then come back to America. 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. 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.

There’s a studio executive who gave me a great story. Disney used to distribute its films through Warner Brothers International. Then Disney decided to start its own international division. The last film under the old deal was
Sister Act,
and the people at Warner Brothers International said, there is just no way we can sell this film internationally. Disney’s new international division, the Buena Vista people, were like, come on; this was a big hit in America. Oh, no, no, there’s no market for that internationally; you can’t sell that film, the Warner people said. So the Buena Vista people said, fine. Instead of it being the last film in your deal, we’ll make it the first movie that we put out.

The Buena Vista people believed in
Sister Act,
and it was a huge hit internationally because they were not closed to the idea that a movie like this could sell internationally. That’s what I mean. I’m not speaking in a blue-sky way. The fact is, historically speaking, the idea that black films won’t sell internationally is ridiculous. It’s disproved all the time. And the fact that people hang on to notions like that, even though there is clear evidence to the contrary, is where prejudice comes in. That’s where the institutional racism of Hollywood comes in, because that notion runs counter to the facts.

There’s no one approach, clearly, to how the next level of change is going to happen in Hollywood. I think the important thing to remember is that the reason we had big change in Hollywood is that we went outside of the system, and we always have to support efforts outside of the system because that’s what spurs quantum leaps.

But the institutional autonomy I’m suggesting doesn’t necessarily mean turning away from all the advantages Hollywood has to offer. I think there are ways you can work with the system but still have a far greater degree of autonomy than we currently have in Hollywood—for example, the way George Lucas makes movies essentially independently. He’s the world’s biggest independent filmmaker. He takes that product through the studio system and takes advantage of everything good about it, but is free to make the movie he wants to make. So George Lucas is still my hero.

When you test a movie, you break it into quadrants. You’ve got older men, older women, younger men, younger women, blacks, whites, “other ethnicities.” So you can divide a film’s audience up a lot of different ways, beyond simply black or white. Male or female is as important a distinction as race. Older/ younger is as big a distinction as race, sometimes bigger. What is happening in Hollywood is they are realizing that young people today have grown up without an Elvis, and that’s a big, big deal. Until the hip-hop era, there was always a white interpreter of black musical culture, whether it was Benny Goodman, Elvis Presley, or Led Zeppelin. People “got” black culture, but they got it through a white interpreter. But with hip-hop, if you go to an Ice Cube concert, the audience is 50 or 60 percent white. If you go to see Snoop, there are all these white kids who know every line. Yes, Eminem’s a big star, but Eminem isn’t their only source of black culture. And Eminem is only cool because he’s with Dr. Dre. For Eminem to have the proper credibility, Dr. Dre has to cosign him, even among white kids. White kids want their funk uncut in this generation. They have no problem going to see a movie with a black star, whether it is Denzel or Method Man. Even in Hollywood you have junior executives who get that. Not a lot of them. But over time there’s a slow attrition of the old guard, and in ten years today’s junior executives will be running things.

This is the hip-hop era, just as the 1920s were the swing era, or the eighties were the disco era. The negative side of the hip-hop era we’re in is that the subject matter of most hip-hop lyrics right now slides back and forth between shallow materialism and utter nihilism, and neither of those two ideas is anything to build on.

There is a confusion between Afrocentricity and ghettocentricity, which is very unhealthy for black culture. Gangsterism is okay, kinda; it’s just a stand-in for machismo and raw dog capitalism for these kids. But when you have gangsterism and it always ends with some kind of spectacular death, that’s like, come on; you can’t even dream about winning? Kids traded
The Godfather
for
Scarface
. And when your role model goes from Michael Corleone to Tony Montana, that’s a problem. Michael Corleone wiped out his family to preserve it, but Tony Montana just got shot up. And that’s what kids are into. Tony Montana. And Tony Montana’s not a winner. He’s a loser.

Until we get off that plateau and move toward other subject matter and get people to thinking about other things, we really can’t move forward. But when hip-hop got bought out by the music industry, it quickly stagnated. So there needs to be a deeper social shift to move the art in hip-hop to the next level.

Too many kids don’t get that there’s a bigger win out there. But I understand how that kind of gangsterism thing comes about. These kids are Reagan’s children. They are the product of budget cuts, diminished opportunities, and the glorification of wealth. When you cut funding to schools so you don’t have school music programs, and kids don’t learn how to play instruments but they still want to make music, what do they do? They take a turntable and go er-uher-uh, screw this disco beat—I’m going to manipulate it. I’m going to take the part I like about the record and I’m going to change it; I’m going to put my own words on top of it. That is black invention at work—the same invention that took the saxophone and said, we’re not going to play a polka with it,
umpah-pah-pah,
we’re going to go,
bee-boo-o-o-o-o-op!

These kids did that and then some—they made a turntable an instrument. They made an instrument where there isn’t an instrument, like steel drums. It’s black genius again, hallelujah, doing its own thing when resources are taken away.

At the same time that this innovation in music occurred, there was an explosion of crack in the marketplace. There are a lot of reasons why there’s all this crack readily available; some of it, I think, has to do with the U.S. government. And these kids are going, gee whiz, you mean after all that marching, after all that integration, we still aren’t equal? We still aren’t having the same opportunities? Then what’s the point? What’s the point of getting that college degree? What’s the point of all that? Because things still aren’t fair. So if it’s just a money game, if it’s just about Ivan Boesky “greed is good,” then fine. I’m going to be about greed is good too. I’m going to make a lot of money selling drugs. And that’s what they did. They just followed popular American trends, in the ways that were available to them. Now, was it the smart play? No. Because when you sell crack, there are higher sentences for that than there are for selling cocaine, but if you steal from Wall Street, you won’t go to jail at all. They’re stealing in the wrong way from the wrong people in the wrong places. But I understand.

The dream really did die in the sixties. When they killed Malcolm, Martin, and the Kennedys, the idea of systemic change went away. People’s hearts didn’t shrink. People still want to make things better, and they make tremendous efforts with charity, whether it’s Big Brother programs or donating to 9/11 or other things. People still want to give. But the idea that you can change the fundamental unfairness of the world has gone away, and I think that’s really tragic, because if you can’t even dream that things can get better, then things definitely won’t get better. So we have to be willing to at least imagine it.