America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  I’m not going to stop being black and start being famous, because I’m a famous black person. I can walk in someplace and be six different people on any given day. I could be Morgan, I could be Fish, I’ve been Wesley sometimes, I’ve been called everybody, Eddie Murphy, I could be a lot of different people on any given day. So I’m always black and I’m always famous. I’m one of them. There’s no separation there. Sometimes being black and famous allows me to get away with things that other people can’t get away with. If I’m sitting in a restaurant eating and three sisters come to my table and go, oh, we just love you; can we get your autograph? And I go, do I have to put my fork down right now, or are you gonna wait for me to do it later? They go, oh, I’m sorry. It’s like, you got home training, right? I can get away with that. If a white actor does it, he’s arrogant. I don’t have bodyguards and I don’t have any of those things around me, because I’ve been black a long time and I’ve been taking care of myself. I know how to treat people and I know how to back people off me. If you come at me the wrong way, then I look at you like Jules Winnfield or Ordell, and people back away. See, Ordell is really who I am. That’s who I really wanted to be when I was growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was perceived as Ordell. I was that kind of guy. I was that kind of likable but that kind of dangerous.

  I can still be that guy. I’m very used to being that guy from riding the subways late at night in New York, coming from Brooklyn to go back to Harlem from the Billie Holiday Theatre. It still happens on the train. Guys get on the train; they size you up. You’re reading a book. There’s something about people with books, even though people in New York read. But if you’re black and you’re reading a book, you might be soft. So if somebody stops and they look at you, you close the book and you just look back at them and it’s kind of like, oh, all right, I can go back to my book now. Not to mention the fact that there’s an open knife at the side of the book.

  I think it’s significant for the growth of the business that a black actor like me is being cast in race-neutral parts when twenty years ago I wouldn’t have been. It’s significant for young actors who have aspirations to be things other than criminals and drug dealers and victims and whatever rap artist they have to be to get into a film. The things I’ve done and Morgan’s done and Denzel’s done, that Fish has done, that Wesley’s done, everybody’s done, have allowed us to achieve a level of success as other kinds of people. We’ve been successful in roles as doctors, lawyers, teachers, policemen, detectives, spies, monsters— anything that we have been able to portray on-screen in a very realistic way that made audiences say, I believe that, and that brought them into the theaters to see us do it. This has allowed young black actors the opportunity to become different kinds of characters in the cinematic milieu we’re a part of.

  Before, I used to pick up scripts and I was criminal number two and I looked to see what page I died on. We’ve now demonstrated a level of expertise, in terms of the care we give to our characters and in terms of our professionalism—showing up to work on time, knowing our lines, and bringing something to the job beyond the lines and basic characterizations. Through our accomplishments and the expertise we have shown, studios know there is a talent pool out there that wants to be like us, and hopefully, these young actors will take care to do the things we did.

  I choose characters that are interesting, that give me the chance to delve into aspects of myself I haven’t explored and to grab hold of observations I’ve made about people that I’ve always wanted to use and incorporate into a character. Or I find traits that make a character interesting. I read the script and see that well, this character feels this way and therefore he must do this. I make up a lot of things about characters that I bring to the role. Acting is an experiment that allows me to do things Sam doesn’t normally do. That guy can be brave where Sam wouldn’t be brave, or that guy can be angry where Sam would be kind of introspective, or that guy can take a risk where Sam wouldn’t take a risk. Or that guy can kill somebody in the trunk of a car when Sam wouldn’t do it because Sam loves his freedom.

  Luckily for me, when I left Atlanta and got to New York, there was a great pool of actors there. I used to sit around and watch Morgan and watch Adolph Caesar, watch the Robert Christians of the world. What they were doing made me understand there was something deeper to what I wanted to do. I could recite lines and do the right facial expressions. But there was something else there that allowed you to forget you knew them as those individuals, that allowed them to become those characters. And there are kids out there who are still doing those things. I was at the Actors Studio recently, and there are all these bright young faces out there waiting to come into this world we’re in. We were lucky enough to get in the door and create the opportunity for ourselves to do all the things we’ve done. Now these young people are sitting there trying to figure out how to get in there, and they’re going about it in the right way. They’re in acting school. They’re sacrificing a lot of their time to learn stage left, stage right, upstage, downstage, characterizations, dramatic beats here, there, and everywhere. And they’re being usurped by guys who do bad poetry to music, only because people who produce movies want a sound track and an audience that’s already built in to what they’re trying to do. All these rappers are getting the opportunities these kids should be getting, because of economics. And I told the kids, it’s just something you have to overcome.

  There was a time when I was trying to figure out if I needed to get a stand-up comedy routine so I could get discovered. All the comedians were getting all the acting jobs I wanted, so I figured I’d better get funny and then they’ll realize I’m serious. But instead of getting funny, I got lucky. I did Jungle Fever right in the middle of my thoughts about stand-up, when I was about to have somebody write a comedy routine for me, even though I think I have a pretty sharp wit myself.

  Acting is a matter of craft, first and foremost, for me. There was a time when I totally lost sight of this. When I first started, I was in movie theaters all the time, watching movies and wishing I could be on-screen. The ultimate goal of every actor is to be a movie star. You get to that point where it’s the pinnacle. That’s where the money is, that’s where the fame is, and that’s where the work is. But the time came when I realized, okay, I’m getting a little older; maybe I need to focus on getting a TV series. And then when that doesn’t happen you say to yourself, maybe I better get on one of those soaps. At least I’d get paid every week. Then when that doesn’t happen, you say to yourself, what I need is a good national beer commercial—something that gets a residual check coming in regularly.

  But as I continued to work in New York with the Negro Ensemble Company, I ended up in Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, which won the Pulitzer Prize. I was with a great ensemble of people that included Denzel and Adolph Caesar and James Pickins and Brent Jennings, just a wonderful group of people, Eugene Lee and all those guys. And it became about the work. When I left NEC, I went to the Yale Repertory Theater to do August Wilson’s Piano Lesson, which also won a Pulitzer. I was the original Boy Willie in Piano Lesson, produced by Lloyd Richards. I worked with Lloyd for almost the next two years, through Piano Lesson and Two Trains Running. The focus was on the work and the characterizations, to the point that I wasn’t going to movie auditions and I wasn’t going to television auditions; I was just doing these plays and grabbing hold of the work every day. I left there and went back to NEC and did Charles Fuller’s series on African Americans before and after the emancipation of slaves, and it was about the work, the work, the work, the work. I was getting better and better at my characterization, and better at grabbing hold of the keys in the language, at making the language sing for an audience so they would understand what I was saying and be into the characters in another kind of way.

  By the time Jungle Fever happened, in 1991, I had a whole new way of working, through what I’d done onstage and in Coming to America and other films, and I was able to go inside Gator in another
way. Not to mention I had already done all the research for Gator in my personal life. I was focusing on my approach to the work, and on doing the work, and I forgot about being a movie star. Becoming a movie star was just a by-product of all the preparation and things I had done to get there.

  The mechanical things come first, and all the artistic things come later. There is no such thing as a natural. Movie acting is so much easier than theater, only because you don’t have the suspension of belief. The set’s there. Everything’s there. They do close-ups. In the theater, you have to make the person in the back row believe you’re in the Wild West on a blank stage, and it takes a lot of work to do that. It’s body language; it’s vocal inflection; it’s cooperation with the people who are onstage, which is another thing you don’t have to learn to do in movies. You don’t have to learn ensemble play. In film, I’ve worked with actors who constantly ask the director, what size is this? Are we right in here? It’s like, so what are you going to do, change your performance because the cameras are moving closer? And they do. It kind of makes me wonder, hm-mm, what are we doing here?

  I use every take as a rehearsal. I do the same thing over and over and over again. It makes it easier for the editor and easier for the director. It makes it easier for the sound guy. It makes it easier for everybody. I’m used to doing that, because when I got into theater, I was told it was a collaborative effort between us all, even though a theater is a dictatorship. The director runs the ship, but you have to work with that actor over there, and you’ve got to work with the guy in the lighting booth who’s calling the cues. You got to be in the right place so that when the lights come on, the audience can see you. You got to be over here so that when an actor comes out, he can present himself to the audience even though he’s talking to you. There are lots of things that are integral to what you’re doing and that you have to be conscious of in the midst of doing this artistic thing that people claim they get lost in. You can’t really walk around in character all day, because it’s a job. There are certain things you have to do in the midst of that job that don’t allow you to lose yourself in that character, and one of them is hitting your mark. So when people say they get lost in a character, I just say, yeah, yeah. You’re not crafty; you’re lying about what you’re doing.

  There was a time when black actors went into predominantly white institutions, into drama departments where they ended up being spear-bearers and they weren’t going to play Hamlet. There was no way they were going to end up being the lead in Streetcar or be able to do a Chekhov play. We do Othello, you got a shot. So that was that. But there have always been a number of places in New York where you could go and learn stagecraft, ’cause that’s what it is. You have to learn the mechanics of what you’re doing out there. It’s a craft, like everything else. There are certain things you have to learn to do to build a bookcase. You’ve got to know how to use a saw. You’ve got to know how to use a hammer and nails. You got to know how to go stage left, stage right; you got to know how to countercross. You’ve got to know how to listen actively so the audience knows that you’re listening to that person over there and their attention goes that way. There are certain mechanical things you have to be able to do, along with the artistic act of creating a character that’s believable and enjoyable and compelling.

  As the fabric of our society changes in certain ways, the fabric of the cinematic world changes in the same ways. For a very long time, the people that were in power were white men. They tended to hire other white men, and when they saw a story, the people in those stories were white men or specific kinds of white women. As we get younger producers and younger people in the studios, we have a generation, or several generations, of people who have lived in a society where they have black friends. They have Asian friends. They have Hispanic friends who do a wide variety of jobs, who went into a wide variety of vocations. When the studio heads look at a script now, they can see their friend Juan or they can see their friend Kwong or they can see their friend Rashan. So all of a sudden you see a different look in the movies, as they reflect the way this younger generation of producers and studio executives live their lives. And consequently, through the worldwide network of cinema, you meet other top-quality actors from other cultures. Like Chow Yun-Fat. I really admire his work. We communicate all the time through notes, or he’ll send me a poster, I’ll send him a poster; he’ll send me a book, I’ll send him something. He’s the biggest star in Asia. And Jackie Chan. Through that whole evolution, Jackie Chan’s become what he’s become. And there’s Stellen Skarsgard, a huge actor in Sweden; he’s come over here to work. The world of cinema brings us all together. And we’ve started to cast films in a whole other way that reflects the way we live and the pattern of our society. Outside of Spider-Man, all the big action heroes now seem to be ethnic. The new Arnold Schwarzenegger is The Rock, and the new Bruce Willis is about to be Vin Diesel. So we’re doing something right. But it’s difficult to do a film that’s of a serious nature and that does not have guns, sex, and explosions in it if it’s ethnic.

  There are many ways to answer the question whether Hollywood is racist. The direct and honest answer, I guess, is yes, only because Hollywood is anti anything that’s not green. If something doesn’t make money, they don’t want to be bothered with it. Therefore, it’s still difficult to get a movie about Hispanics made; it’s difficult to get a movie about blacks made that doesn’t have to do with hip-hop, drugs, and sex. You can get a black comedy made. Eddie Murphy’s funny, Will Smith is funny, Martin Lawrence is funny. We have huge black comics. But getting a film like Eve’s Bayou made is practically impossible. For five years, nobody knew what that movie was. Like, what is it? It’s a family drama. Yeah, but how do we market that? Nobody wanted to be bothered with it. Or Caveman’s Valentine. What is it? It’s a mystery, a murder mystery. But it’s a black murder mystery. No, there’s white people in it; it just happens that a black person is the lead. So Hollywood is racist in its ideas about what can make money and what won’t make money. They’ll make Asian movies about people who jump across buildings and use swords and swing in trees, like Crouching Tiger, but we can’t sell an Asian family drama. What do we do with that? Or if we’re going to have Asian people in the film, they’ve got to be like the tong, or they’re selling drugs and they got some guns and it’s young gang members. It’s got to be that. And Hollywood is sexist in its ideals about which women are appealing and which women aren’t. It’s a young woman’s game. Women have got to be either real old or real young to be successful. If they’re in the middle, it’s like, what do we do with her? Put her in kids’ movies, you know, with some kids.

  Hollywood can be perceived as racist and sexist, because that’s what audiences have said to them they will pay their money to come see. It’s difficult to break that cycle, because it’s a moneymaking business and it costs money to make films. Hollywood tends to copy things that make lots of money. The first thing they want to know is how many car chases are there and what’s blowing up. They’re over the how-many-people-die thing, because of 9/11. Now it’s like, how many people can we kill and get away with it? We can’t blow up anything right now unless it’s in the right context. We can blow something up over there, and the bad guy can be a guy with a turban. So there’s all kinds of things that go into what people say about Hollywood being racist. There have been times I had to go in a room and convince people I’m the right person for their script and the fact that I’m black will not impact on the script in a negative way. I’ve had to explain that my being black won’t change the dynamics of the interaction; it won’t change the dynamics of the story in terms of my character’s interaction with the other characters. I’ll just happen to be a black guy who’s in that story doing those things.

  I used to think that a person of my skill level should be paid more money to do what I do because there are other people who make more money for doing what they do who aren’t as good. But they still bring more people into the theater, for w
hatever reason. I don’t profess to know the reason, but I do understand the business a lot better now. When somebody’s got a specific amount of box office clout, okay, they get $20 million for the part because they’re going to open big and the movie’s going to make $100 million. All A-list stars are not created equal. If I show up in a place, okay, I’ll get treated a specific kind of way, and that’s very cool. But if Eddie Murphy comes in the door behind me, he’s gonna get treated a little better. If Tom Hanks comes in the door behind him, he’s gonna get treated a little better, and if Will Smith comes in the door behind him, he’s gonna get treated a little better. And then if Tom Cruise comes in, then everybody, fuck, gets kind of pushed to the side. So it works out. This is not the kind of job where you work your way up from the mail room and you may become president. There’s a pecking order. But it’s tied to the box office. It’s not tied to anything else.