America Behind the Color Line (41 page)

They would call me on campus a black supremacist because I would play NWA and Public Enemy in the middle of the campus and everybody would look at me crazy, but I enjoyed that energy, like, yeah, what the fuck are you looking at? Whatever. Excuse my French. I think that the fallacy that a lot of people, black or otherwise, make within American culture is to try to be American. If you’re here and you’re doing something productive, then you’re part of the American dream. What is being American? Being American is you being American. It’s the Egyptian guy that has the laundry. It’s the Jewish guy up the street that runs the deli. All of that is American. It’s the dude who runs the barbecue joint. That’s American. It’s so funny that it took me a long time to come to that conclusion, but I always was on that path. That’s okay. If I’m admired and I understand myself culturally, and I understand where I’m from and I appreciate where I’m from, I can also appreciate and understand where other people are from without giving up myself, because that adds to me and I add to them. And a lot of people don’t really get that, man.

Hollywood is racist, but America is racist. Hollywood is an institution. Let’s put it this way. Corporate America is white-male-dominated. So anyone who might be female, or any other ethnicity or group besides white males, will all fall to the wayside unless you can make the machine continue to function and be well oiled and continue to grow. Unless you can make the machine grow and continue to function, then you’re a cog in the machine. That holds for the film industry or any other industry. If you’re not in this thing and you can’t draw people and make people want to pay money to see your creative endeavors, then it’s not the industry for you. That’s how it works. Straight up. For studio heads it’s like, my job’s on the line, so we don’t want to really like this movie because we don’t think it’s going to make any money. That happens for black people as well as anybody else in this business on a regular basis. It’s the nature of the industry.

I think it’s all about you making money at the box office, rather than a matter of race. I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in if my films weren’t profitable. Every film that I make pretty much has been profitable. The bottom line is the difference between a film that is a commercial film—that can be shown in two thousand or three thousand theaters—and a film that is only going to get a limited amount of people who are going to go see it. That’s how Hollywood is ruled.

Not all of my films have opened at two thousand theaters. Some of them opened at nine hundred theaters, fifteen hundred, two thousand, but they make millions and millions of dollars. So 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.

In this sense, Hollywood’s not any different for black people than for anybody else. It’s a level playing field. I see this phenomenon now where there are more young black directors working than ever before, doing different types of films. You hire a young black man to direct a film, you get a much different vision than you would with Joe Blow from the Valley, who grew up with nothing but white people. It’s hip-hop culture, and black culture fuels all pop culture, so the people that are in and of black culture, if they have their sense of the pulse and the rhythm of what is hip and what is pop culture, they’ll always prosper. All the way down to the beginnings of syncopated music, blacks have always been on the cusp of what is hip and cool in this country, and Hollywood is no different.

If I had gone to film school for four years and never got a movie made, okay. But I’m not that kind of person. 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.

I think this is the beginning of a great business period for blacks in Hollywood, ’cause in terms of artistic sensibility, there are black people making films, working behind the camera, directing, whatever. Still, black filmmakers are doing themselves more of a disservice than anything else because most of the films being made are just big commercial comedies. There’s not enough people coming in saying, hey, we got to do this for the people. There’s not enough of them. But you got to find a way to do it so the film has not necessarily got a message, ’cause as soon as you declare a message, people lose interest. You have to have a film that has a passion for the subject matter, and the political import has to be buried in. And the only way I can get that message out to other black film-makers is by making films I want to make, like
Baby Boy
or
Rosewood
or
2 Fast 2 Furious
.

I was there the night Halle Berry and Denzel Washington got Academy Awards and Sidney Poitier was honored for a lifetime of achievement. This means that something has changed. It doesn’t mean that Hollywood is just automatically going to change all the way over and be totally different. White America still has a problem with black sexuality as a whole, for one thing. It’s like a fascination and a revulsion at the same time. That duality of attitude kept sexual innuendo down in
Shaft
—kept sexual content out—and on the other hand, that fascination got Halle her Oscar. Hollywood wants to appeal to the widest possible demographic. So they say, it can’t offend anybody. We don’t want to offend this group or that group, and that kind of homogenizes a lot of the product that gets out when it’s done on a big-budget basis.

But I’ll tell you one thing, that you’re going to see change in terms of the modern films coming up, and I always talk about this. Most commercial films in Hollywood now are not all lily-white movies. They’re multiethnic films. When they make a lot of money, $200 million, $300 million, they’re multi-ethnic now. In
Rush Hour,
you had Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. In
The Fast and the Furious,
you had Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, and all these different types of people within one film. I think that American films are becoming more American, for the very reason that the American studios want to appeal to the widest possible demographic; they want to get everybody to come to the movies. And to do that, you increasingly have to have a mixture of people within every film, ’cause that means you’re hitting all the different demographics within one piece.

Behind the camera is a whole other thing. You have a few people directing, but you don’t have a lot of other people who realize that Hollywood is like a steel town. There’s work in all disciplines, from sound to camera to just even clerical positions. People always say, I want to be an actor, I want to be an actor, I want to be a director. They’re thinking about the glitz and the glamour and the stars in their eyes and the shine and everything. They don’t realize that the nuts-and-bolts people always work.

When people in the industry say they won’t green-light black films because they won’t do well abroad, they’re talking about a film that is all black and is a drama and has no action element in it. Is
Rush Hour
a black film? Chris Tucker is one of the leads. Is an Eddie Murphy movie a black film? Is any movie with Denzel Washington a black film? Yes, they are. What makes them different is that in each one of those films there’s different cultural elements. They may have a black star, but there’s all types of different cultural elements, which makes it a trip. It’s so subjective as to what is a black film and what isn’t a black film. To me, a black film is a film that is made by black people and that has an all-black cast in it. But that is becoming more and more of a hard prospect to get done, because when you do a film that just has a black cast in it, then basically you’re targeting it just toward a black audience. And black folks are fickle. One week they’ll like something and then the next week they’re like, well, I’ll see it on the bootleg or I’ll steal a copy.

Boyz N the Hood
crossed over, but that was at a certain time, in which hiphop culture was coming into prominence within pop culture even more. Black people discovered
Boyz N the Hood,
but then a whole other audience discovered it, because it was a window on a world they hadn’t seen. And now they’ve seen that world. They hear it in the music, and they see it in every rip-off of
Boyz N the Hood
. So I always say that you have to change. You have to change and evolve, especially within the entertainment industry.

Black people can green-light a film now. You don’t have to make a movie for $60 million. You can make a movie for nothing. You can get your camcorder and your best friends can act in it. You can edit it off on a Cut Pro and you can make it for your rent money. I think black people will be able to green-light Hollywood studio big-time stuff in our lifetime. It’s possible. But by that time, it won’t even matter.

I think the audience is ready for a black love story, for passion on the screen, with Denzel Washington and Halle Berry as the leads, but I think it’d be a limited amount of people that would see it, depending on the subject matter. It could be a profitable film, though I don’t know just how profitable. If they would just fall in love and they were like yadda, yadda, yadda, with the dinner scenes and the romance and everything, then I don’t know how many people would go see it. But if they were falling in love and going in the car and shooting at the bad guys and then they hop on a spaceship and everything, then it would probably make a lot of money. Tom Cruise and Halle Berry, the same film, whatever the plot, would bring in twice as much money. Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, same film, even more money. But Tom Cruise and Halle Berry with the dinner scene, the yadda, yadda, yadda, no cars, no spaceship, you ain’t making no money. Denzel finds his own rhythm and what he wants to do and what he doesn’t want to do. He has his own way. He’s manufactured the way that he wants to appear. Whether he gets the girl or makes love to the girl might be a decision he’s made personally.

The pressure from people in the black community to make a film that helps our people is amusing, ’cause I walk on the street and people tell me, hey, you need to make movies, man, let me tell you what movie you need to make. You need to make a movie about Cleopatra and whoever Cleopatra was with at that time, not Anthony, not the Roman dude; no, he needs to be a black man. Cleopatra and a black man; that’s the kind of movie you need to make. And I’m like, oh, man, you know, okay. No, but you really need to do it, and I got the script in my car. I hear that all the time. I do lectures on this, and I always talk about what is known as the oral tradition of African storytelling. Everyone has in their family an uncle, an aunt, a grandfather, a grandmother who can weave a story, who can weave a verbal yarn that can make you laugh, make you cry, that’s steeped in history, and that goes all the way back to Africa.

But 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. 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.

There’s the idea that a black studio will solve all our problems. But you know what? It’s not true. If you gave anybody black, no matter who—even me—$500 million and said, okay, you can make any movies you want to make, a slate of movies, ten movies, they would have the same dilemma that each corporate conglomerate has with any other films. And that dilemma is the question whether or not each project they’re doing has the potential to make a profit.

It’s not my responsibility professionally to change society, but personally, I aspire to greatness, and it’s something that I deal with all the time, the question of whether or not the personal aspirations I have for the material far exceed what the audience wants. That’s something I’ve been dealing with ever since I was twenty years old—questions like, am I preaching too much? Am I trying to say too much? Sometimes I don’t want to say anything. Sometimes I just want to make a movie and be like John Huston. You know, this movie takes me to Africa, this movie takes me to Europe, this movie takes me to New York, and I can party, whatever. I want to do that. I don’t want the crutch of being the black kid that makes movies. I want to just make movies and be a maverick filmmaker, in that I say what I want to do and I do it, not because this is what I should be doing.

Let’s imagine the NAACP says, John, you have a social responsibility to our people, uplift the race. To which I’d give them the finger. I’d be like, no, I don’t. I have a responsibility to tell it like it is and make people on an individual basis make the decisions for themselves. And even then I have a moral responsibility to entertain, because if I don’t entertain, my kids don’t go to private school next week. But I don’t want to do anything that will glorify violent acts—that will glorify negative social activities, like, yeah, it’s cool to shoot heroin. I’m not about that personally at all, and I wouldn’t be about that professionally at all.

REGGIE BYTHEWOOD
Action

I did a lot of acting as a kid. I thought I wanted to be an actor, and I went to the High School of Performing Arts in New York. But every time I pursued something I wanted, I realized there was a different goal to pursue. So after acting the goal became writing, then producing, and then directing.

When I began working in the film industry, I had a strong perception that as African-American filmmakers we’ve got to change the world. We have to use this industry, I thought, to open doors and change perspectives across the world about who we are and what we’re about. I call it the Film Rights Movement. But I’ve revised my own perspective; now I say, what
I’m
about, not what
we’re
about. We’re as diverse as any other people. If some other black filmmaker wants to make people laugh at any cost to make a lot of money, that’s on them. I’m not going to dis anybody for their source of inspiration. What inspires me is the desire to reveal our diversity and to tell stories that bust through the stereotypes.

The first screenplay I wrote that got made was
Get on the Bus,
and I loved it. It wasn’t a situation where we could pitch to the studio, hey, we want to make this movie dealing with experiences in the Million Man March. When I went to the Million Man March in October of 1995, I had no idea I’d be writing a film about it. But it turned out to be a unique experience, and very educational, in terms of taking control of your destiny as an artist. We raised money—fifteen African-American men—and I put in every dime I had and we made the film. It cost about two and a quarter million, so it was very reasonable. Everybody got their money back and made money. It was a great experience and a great thing to have as my introduction as a screenwriter.

I tried to make the story very human. It could have been all about the politics of the march, but it was about love and devotion and loyalty and the passing of time and fraternity. I think a lot of people are tired of political stories, both white people and African. Even political stories need to be told in a better, more compelling way. The challenge I find, though, is going to the Hollywood system and getting different stories made.

Prior to
Get on the Bus,
back in my acting days, I had a small role in 1984 in
The Brother from Another Planet,
kind of a slave narrative in science fiction. I sat down with John Sayles, and he said that what he did at the time was write screenplays, then take that money and make the film he wanted to make. I was like, cool, and it always stuck with me. So I eagerly invested in
Get on the Bus
. It was empowering to put money into the film and even more empowering to see the film get made and get my money back.

We had a similar situation with
Dancing in September
. We raised a million dollars and made an independent film. Then we sold it to HBO and made more than twice the money we spent. Everybody made better money than they would have made on Wall Street. What I learned was that an independent film is great because essentially you are making the film you want to make. The problem is that at the end of the day you’re shopping it around. You’re back to Hollywood, saying, okay, I didn’t ask you for the money to hire my cast and write the film and direct the film, but now I have to ask you to distribute the film. I was glad I had gone through trying to make sure everybody got their money back and made money, but it was challenging, man, it was a very hard process to go door-to-door-to-door-to-door seeing who would give me distribution. That was the process that really made me say, oh, now I get it! It’s about being the studio.

There is a point of view in the Hollywood system that you have to tell stories that black people can relate to, but the people who are making the decisions on what stories black people relate to are not black. So, for example, in many ways it’s a lot easier to sell a derogatory or stereotypical gangster story and have a bunch of brothers with forty-ounce bottles of beer in their hands and carrying guns. It’s a lot easier to get that pushed through. It’s easier to get a political or civil rights story told on the air or in the movie theaters than to say, there’s something else; there are different experiences. That’s the real challenge.

As challenging as it’s been, and as frustrating as it’s been, I think one of the blessings of the situation is that it motivates me to try to just push through and make these things happen. A recent experience provides a good example. 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. 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. This is a predominant point of view in Hollywood, and it’s interesting that there’s a perception of Hollywood that it’s one of the more liberal places in the country, that they’re progressive and wide open and all these sorts of myths. Hollywood has really become more and more co-optive.

So the executive goes through my script and says, black face, black face, black face, and he wants me to rewrite the script and put more white faces in. Initially, I had presented the script and people really felt strongly about it, and we attracted a lot of talent. It was very high-budget for what you would call a black film, but not high-budget for an action film. It got to be $25 million, then $30 million, because they wanted it bigger. And I’m telling my wife, man, they’re really digging this script; they want to put more money in it. Then it gets to be around $35 million and I’m saying, okay, cool. I’ll make a big-ass action film.

So then you get in the room and 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. My career could really use that sort of boost—to do a big action film like that. It would have been only the second film that I directed, and one of the few times a black director had directed two white leads. From some people’s point of view, I would have made history if I had directed a film with two white leads. To some people, it even would have been a great civil rights victory for African Americans. But not from my point of view.

I have a need that stands outside of my career, and that need is to have a cause bigger than myself. What would be a victory, for me, is for this to be an action film with two African-American leads. Don’t make it black; don’t make it anything. Make it what it is. Make it an action film. And let’s make this film hot. Let’s make it all the things we want an action film to be. The film I’m talking about has a lot a substance as well. But the film they were talking about felt wrong. It felt like I would be saying, I agree with you; this is the way it has to work. And I don’t think that’s the way it has to work.

So I’m sitting there and they go, essentially, Reggie, we’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that we’re gonna give you $30 million. The bad news is that your black film is now a white film! And I said no. That wasn’t the film I was going to make. I said to the studio heads, you already took away my motivation for why I wanted to do this specific project. 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.

People who know me well are aware it’s not a big deal for me to say no. Many times I’ve said, I’m not going to do this or I’m not going to do that. Some people who don’t know me say, wow, you said
that
to the studio! But really what I’m trying to get to is a place where I can say, hey, man, I’ve got to maintain my integrity in this situation and still get the film made.

It’s important to understand that from their point of view, the studio heads are not being racist. From their point of view, they are operating within a Hollywood formula, and a script either works or doesn’t work within that formula. I’m operating from the point of view that I want to change the formula. Five, six years ago, there would have been a shouting match. I’ve had my share of those in these rooms. But basically what I said was, that’s not what I want to do. I was very up-front and told them, while we were all in the room, what motivated me to do this film. So what we did is we just sat there for a while and nothing was going to happen, and it was like they sort of passed on the project. I think the way it went was, it was a Friday that I had the meeting; the Academy Awards came on the following Monday, and Denzel won and Halle won, and the next day they passed on the project. They said no.

So it wasn’t happening, but what they did allow was for me to take the project and shop it elsewhere. We went throughout Hollywood, and everybody had the same point of view. Everybody wanted us to make it white. And we said, you know what, the Hollywood formula is that this is not a safe investment to make, a film starring African Americans for this amount of money. So instead of saying let’s make it white, we said, okay, let’s take it upon ourselves to make it for half the money. We started telling people we could make this movie for $15 million. Then people were interested, and we were like, how are we going to make it for fifteen?

We started figuring it out and 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. We got an amazing crew and put together an amazing cast, and then presented everything we had put together in the four weeks.

A lot of people knew the history of the project. And when you’re going into a meeting and you have a crew that you’ve hired, you start feeling obligated. You want to make sure everybody here has a job. One of the people I had hired pulled me aside and said, Reggie, do me a favor. You know I’m here to protect your vision, and I appreciate what you’ve done and what you can do in this project. That’s why I’m here. Don’t walk into that room if you can’t walk out and say no. Now, this is from a sister that needed a job.

We’re heading out—myself and the other producers—to do our presentation for the studio, and everybody in the production office just stops and claps for us. The night before, everyone stayed up till two a.m. helping us pull some things together, and nobody was getting overtime. It wasn’t just about keeping a job. They wouldn’t have done it—they told me this—if they didn’t believe in what we were doing.

I think the presentation we gave exceeded everyone’s expectations. We did more than was required because we didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to say no. So if they do say no, it’s not based on our merit. Creatively, the film was tight, and it has a clear and specific vision. We have the top crew people assembled and we’re paying them hardly any money. This is low-budget, and these are people that do big, big films.

Everyone sent us off with a round of applause and we went out there and did the presentation. I think we did a great job. When we came back to the office, everyone clapped again. All along, they validated our commitment to maintaining our integrity.

It would be attractive to be hot, to be the man, the guy. And really, if that was my agenda, I would have gone an easier route; this is not the only film that was offered to me. What I need to be able to do is make a successful film the way I want to make it, let the studio make a profit, then go to the business community and say, here it is.

I don’t know how much a $15-million film is going to have to make for me to have a command of the marketplace, or how compelling it needs to be so people will say, Reggie, we trust your vision; here’s the money to make more films. I don’t know if it’s $100 million, which would be great, or really what that number has to be. At the end of the day, the money is not going in my pocket. First off I have to make a good film, one that I can be proud of; and second, the film has to be marketable. I have to be clear on this. I want to be able to say, hey, I did it—not just that I made a film that was marketable, but that I held on to my vision. I want to be able to say I made a film with African-American leads and it’s marketable.

If I am successful, it won’t just be that the film made $100 million, $200 million. If I’m successful, some other filmmakers are going to be like, man, Reggie did it, so I’m holding on to my vision too. They did it, so why can’t I do the same thing?
That
’ll make me the man!

It hasn’t happened yet. People sort of know who I am. Some people think I’m crazy, and some people are cool. It’s not like I go up in a room and I’m jumping on people’s desks and cursing them out. I’m a professional; I know what it’s about. I don’t think I’m known as a troublemaker—maybe not till this documentary comes out anyway. And if I am, so be it. I’ve certainly had my share of arguments with people, but I think, if anything, people know that nine times out of ten I work harder than the next guy. It would be a lot easier in many ways to chase the money, because the money’s out there and it’s attainable, and all you have to do is follow the formula they set up and there it is. But everything has sort of been frustrating. Everything that’s made me ask myself why I bother is the same thing that makes me get up the next day twice as motivated.

We have more black A-list actors right now than we’ve had in the hundred years of Hollywood history put together. And I’ve got many of them for this film—people that have been nominated for Academy Awards. So I’m saying to the studio, what’s up? I got ’em! And for like no money, but just because they get it; they know what it’s about. These are people that don’t need to do this film; they don’t need to help me out. But they want to do it.