America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

There’s this whole theory about Denzel and Halle and Sidney all receiving awards from the Academy in 2002; it’s like, usher out the old and usher in the new. Fortunately, Denzel did a role that was so different from anything he’d ever done, and he did it so well, that he won an Academy Award for it. It was the best and most compelling performance of the year. I have four criteria for the Academy Award. First, the role is totally different from anything you’ve seen this actor do before. Second, the character is compelling and interesting, frightening even; you talk about the character when you leave the theater. Third, the character is an integral part of the story; the story would not work if this character were not in it. And fourth, you know that the actor poured their heart and soul into it. Denzel did all those things, and that was the best performance of the year. Out of all the women who were nominated, Halle’s performance was a good performance for her. It was something the audience had never seen her do before, and it was compelling and kind of awesome, even shocking in terms of the intensity of what happened on the screen.

  So they were well-deserved awards. But there have been years when other African Americans won Academy Awards. Just because Denzel’s and Halle’s were the two most high profile awards, the year 2002 was viewed as a water-shed when it really wasn’t. It’s what it should be. I look forward to the year when somebody’s going, well, where are the white nominees? The year that all the performances that are nominated are ones by African Americans or Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans. And that can happen. There have been years where we won for sound and for best documentary, best short; we won for all kinds of things, but people don’t recognize those individuals. I know brothers that have two and three Oscars at home, soundmen, and people don’t even know who they are. Getting an Academy Award is important no matter what category you win it in. It’s an event. It means something. It means you’re going to make more money, for sure.

  It also means more black people are gonna get Academy Awards sooner or later, because these guys did it. They have other people behind them that are their protégés. There were young girls sitting at home in Polk City, Iowa, somewhere, looking at Halle Berry, and they ran into the bathroom and picked up their toothbrush and made their Academy Award acceptance speech. I used to do it every year. I used to stand in front of the mirror and thank my mom and my teachers and everybody I knew, and it was great. That’s something to aspire to. The first time my wife and I went to the Academy Awards, we were calling people in Atlanta, people in New York, everybody we had acted with, and telling them, we’re in a limo on our way to the Academy Awards. Make sure you’re watching the red carpet! Check it out! Now it’s like, do we have to go? Oh, man, get dressed at two o’clock, get in the car, you know, argghh. But you still want to do it because it’s a celebration of what we do, and it’s important that young ethnic actors sitting at home see us there, whether we win, whether we present, or whether we’re just in the audience. Because they know we’re an important part of this business; we are recognized as part of it. That’s why we’re there. Because not everybody can go.

  Will Smith and Halle Berry, in a romantic comedy, $100 million—that might happen in our lifetime. Or Denzel. I think Will and Halle would be an event. People would go see that, even Martin Lawrence and Halle Berry, Chris Tucker and Halle, we’re talking about event guys now, $20-million players. Eddie, Will, Chris, Martin, event players, with Halle, yeah, that might happen. Down to Earth, Chris Rock’s 2001 remake of Heaven Can Wait, didn’t work too well, but there’s a romantic comedy out there somewhere. People are starting to remake everything now. I’m sure there could be some interesting ethnic remakes of some of the films we knew and loved from yesteryear that they’re starting to bring back out again. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in the audience that would keep them from identifying with two characters who are falling in love, both of whom are black. In a lot of people’s minds, Halle is just a beautiful girl who happens to be black, and Will is an incredibly funny and handsome, intriguing guy. He’s kind of like Jim Carey. People want to see Will be funny and charming and all the things they fell in love with in Will as the Fresh Prince. They don’t want to see Will bloodied and bulked up and being Ali.

  People know who they want to see. They know what Will Smith they want to see, they know what Harrison Ford they want to see, they know what Eddie Murphy they want to see, they know what Tom Cruise they want to see, they know what Tom Hanks they want to see. With me, part of the game when people come to my movies is seeing how different I’m going to be. But those guys have made a reputation on being a specific thing that audiences bought into. It’s like, hey, I bought into this. I didn’t ask you to change your hair, change your face, do nothing. That other guy, I pay to see him do that, ’cause he’s always doing that to himself, so we’re used to it. But when we come to see Will, we want to see Will Smith’s face. I don’t want to see scars on it. I don’t want to see a different kind of hair. I want to see him being jolly. I want him talking like Will Smith. We want him being that guy we know and love. That’s just a fact.

  I don’t know if we should present our stories differently. I think there are enough skilled writers and enough skilled directors and definitely enough skilled actors that we could effectively tell whatever story we want to tell. It all goes back to who’s willing to put up the money so that these stories can be told effectively. I go back to Eve’s Bayou. We had one budget for it and everybody kept telling us it had to be done at another budget. But people bought into our belief in it, so they did things for less money or as a labor of love. The local people in New Orleans showed up. We didn’t have enough people to fix hair period-style, so we called hairdressers in New Orleans and it was like, well, child, we’d love to come help you. It became a big collaborative effort. You’ve got to be able to do that and be willing to sacrifice in certain ways to get things done, because nobody’s going to give you what you think you deserve to get them done. The people doing it have to believe in what you are doing. You start working too hard, and you run your crew down working overtime. They got to believe as hard as you believe so you can get an independent film done. That’s the only way independent films get done.

  I’ve been on studio pictures that should have ended in December and didn’t end till March and nobody said a word. But you could never do that on an independent film, because when the money runs out, the money’s out. We were begging them for one more day on Eve’s Bayou and they were like, we just can’t do it; we just can’t. Just a day, one day so we can—no, we don’t have it. And the movie did fine. I was just a little country doctor doing his thing. A little country doctor like we all know. The movie is still doing well in the world. In fact, I just got a check for the worldwide sales. There were places that movie never opened. People in London kept waiting for it and waiting for it, and we finally got over there with it. People in Germany were hearing about it, and hearing about it, and they never got it. Now it’s kind of moving into video over there, so they’re getting it. But it did relatively well for the amount of money it was made for. It made the studio’s money back, and people are now sharing in the profits. We all had to say, we’ve got to wait. This is five, six years later and we’re just getting into the money, but some money’s coming.

  The reason our people didn’t go to see Beloved is because it was bad. It’s a hard book to read, although Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer for it. And then your friends tell you, wait a minute, child, don’t go and see that. This is black people saying, I can’t wait to see Beloved, and somebody who’s already seen it goes, well, you know, you might want to wait on the video. And then they’ll call you later: child, you were right about that Beloved. I’m sorry, it was just not an event. We wanted it to be something. I was at the premiere, and it’s difficult to know what to say to the people who were in it. It’s one of those things.

  One more NAACP boycott doesn’t seem like the answer to me. In fact, why don’t the NAACP leave all of us alone? Every time they get involved in
Hollywood, something strange happens. When they were protesting The Color Purple, it was like, what the hell is Steven Spielberg doing directing The Color Purple? All right, and then everybody was like, well, he paid for it, so he can direct it. Then all of a sudden it was like, well, why didn’t nobody from The Color Purple win an Academy Award? Well, number one, you said Steven Spielberg shouldn’t even have been messing with it, so why you talking about that now? Why weren’t there any black people nominated for Academy Awards for The Color Purple? Well, let me see, we had Booty Call in 1996; who you want nominated for Booty Call? Which actor? Who you want? It’s, get over it, leave us alone, let us do our thing.

  We need to produce our own films. Black money is not widely known for going into an artistic endeavor, especially a film. Film’s a crapshoot. Films can be made for varying amounts of money, and there are a lot of black people with a lot of money that won’t invest in a movie but they’ll buy stock that might die tomorrow. You can put that money in a movie and you can get a constant return, because the movie’s going to make X amount of dollars when it goes to video; it’s going to make X amount of dollars when it goes foreign. It’s going to make more money then, depending on who’s in it, because your foreign cachet is an important part of actors getting paid. If you don’t have foreign cachet, it ain’t happening.

  I go to Europe as often as I can, or Asia, so people can see me and see that I’m concerned about my fans and I care about them liking the film I’m in and liking me. They used to say, we can’t cast you because you won’t play in Japan, but that’s not true. I’ve counteracted that. In fact, I was walking down the street with this guy from a studio in Japan and I was asking him about black actors in Japan. He goes, well, they only know Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy, and Will Smith. And as we were walking—it was rush hour—all these people were looking at us and pointing at me and talking to each other. So I asked him, what are they saying? And he’s like, oh, they know you. It just so happened that Die Hard had been out and was the highest-grossing film in Japan that year. It was the highest-grossing film worldwide. People knew who I was. People in Paris were camped outside the hotel. It’s crazy. I was like, oh, okay, so I’m getting somewhere with this.

  We need to own our own theaters in addition to producing our own films. The more theaters we own, the sooner we can have our own distribution chain. So when you can’t get in that distributor thing that goes on out there and you’ve got nowhere to play your movie, we would have our own network of theaters. I learned when Star Wars was about to come out how many screens there are in America. You always think in terms of maybe 10,000 or 12,000 theaters. But there’s more cities than that, and you find out there’s over 35,000 screens. So you look and you say, with Spider-Man and Star Wars on most of the screens, how many are left? They’ve got all the screens. It’s a matter of us having that kind of network, so when we do make small films that we want to distribute to a specific group of people or to a wider audience, we’re able to do it. Caveman’s Valentine was never in more than fifty theaters because they didn’t know what to do with it. And Spike Lee was never able to compete with the big films. Do the Right Thing and Fever and all the Spike Lee films could never be number one at the box office because they were never in enough theaters to compete with the big films that were out at the time. The big films always have the highest per-screen average. That translates to only so many screens that could show Spike’s films, so people had to line up and wait to see them. All kinds of things dictate how much money a film makes: the length of the film, how many screens it’s on, how many times you can play it during the day, how many prints you have out there, and the advertising budget so people are aware of that particular film.

  I’m sure I can do what I’m doing for a long time. It’s not like digging ditches. I don’t need my back that much. I can act in a wheelchair. I can act until I drop over. I started late, and maybe that’s part of the reason I tend to work a lot. I wish I could have been doing this when I was twenty years old, but hey, I had to do what I had to do to get here, and I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. I think it’s great that some people are going to have forty-year careers—not a lot, but some people start out at twenty. I’ve had a twenty- to thirty-year career, and I’m closing in on a hundred movies. So I’m doing okay. I also know that I need to work so the people around me can take care of themselves and their responsibilities. I care about them and their families. I haven’t changed in that way, because I care about people. I want to be able to produce films for friends of mine who haven’t had the opportunity to be seen in the way I’ve been seen. They’re good at what they do, and they deserve an opportunity to be seen by a greater public.

  I continue to try to find things that allow me to grow as an actor and as a person. I’m not as political as I used to be. I don’t espouse my political positions to the masses or even to people who listen to me. I do still feel very responsible to a lot of people, especially people who are around me and who work with me. I know I make an enormous amount of money that allows me not to work in ways that most people do, but the people I love and care about, who do things for me, work like normal people. So when people say to me, why do you work all the time, well, I work because I have a work ethic. I grew up in a house full of people that went to work every day, and they had two weeks of vacation a year, maybe, and that’s how I know people go to work. And when I was doing theater, that’s how I worked. I was rehearsing a play, doing a play, and auditioning for a play all the time. People who work for me can go work for other people when I’m not working, but I’d rather have them around me because I enjoy their company, and hopefully they enjoy mine.

  My tastes in certain things have changed. I still like fried chicken and turnip greens, but I like caviar too. I know what a blini is now; it’s a little buckwheat pancake served with smoked salmon or sour cream and caviar. I still like to dress well. My mom taught me how to take care of my clothes when I was growing up. I tend to wear fine clothes now, finer clothes, and I take care of them. When I get tired of them, I give them to my friends; they like them too. But I like to think of myself as the same guy. I have the same friends I had when I was jumping the turnstile in New York because I couldn’t afford to ride the subway to get to work. We pooled our money and bought one sandwich or four glazed papaya hot dogs. I still have those same friends. I play golf with those guys. I take care of their kids and they take care of mine, and we get together and eat and talk and ride together. We are the same group of people who were actors together in New York and who just happened to relocate out here.

  When I go back to New York, I still hook up with those same people. I still tend to gravitate to Narcotics Anonymous meetings uptown, because that’s where I got clean and that’s where I found out I was not what I used to refer to as chronically unique. That’s where I found out there were people who had bigger addictive habits than I did, who were in worse-off condition than I was, who did things I would never dream of doing, and who made me believe that I never had to use again and that I could still be a human being and have fun in my life. I tend to go back to those places and recharge my battery when I’m in New York. It helps me make sure my feet are still on the ground, and that what people there said is real, about being able to stay clean and have a life after what you thought you were doing when you were using was having a good time and having a life. When I got there, I had no time in the program clean, and they had ten years. Now they have twenty-two years and I have twelve, so it means a lot to me to be able to go back in there and see those people and know that they’re taking care of themselves the way I’m taking care of myself.

  ARNON MILCHAN

  Changing Minds, Breaking Even

  “It could be there is an assumption that Hollywood is closed to the black community,” producer Arnon Milchan said to me, “and the assumption could be wrong. Maybe the club door is closed, but not by conspiracy. Maybe it’s by disassociation socially . . . unless you get into that room, you
don’t have access. But if we hang out, we talk, and if we talk, we do business.”

  In a good company—one that stays alive—maybe three out of ten films are profitable, maybe three or four break even, and three or four lose money. That’s what you need to stay alive and build. If you have a better track record than that, better than three out of ten, you’re a genius for a day. And if you have less, you’re dead. It’s almost impossible to really be profitable. It’s like real estate. You have to build and build. You have to recycle whatever you make into your next movie, and the production keeps growing up and up and up.

  Let’s say you want to do an art movie. If you also own Star Wars or Spider-Man, you can get the right theaters. You can say to the theater owners, if you want Star Wars you have to also accommodate this movie. You have to do a kind of trade-off with the guys who own the theaters. Otherwise, you can have a great movie and then sit there and wait for word of mouth to advertise it. And you can get wiped out in two weeks.

  Of the white actors in Hollywood, there are a few guys and a couple of girls—probably five or six actors—that are on the A-list, if we define that as anyone who makes over $10 million on a film: Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Russell Crowe, Cameron Diaz, and Julia Roberts. Certain actors or actresses have become highly bankable not only because they are stars, but because their choices of what to do, when they take their $20 million, are smart commercially. Tom Hanks will put himself in what looks like a risky thing—he would do Philadelphia, or he would do Apollo, and he’s great, but he’s the guy next door. He’s very smart about how he picks his roles and marries them with a director—with the right director. Julia Roberts is very smart. If you call smart being a star. Some people don’t care. Brad Pitt doesn’t care. He wants to do what he wants to do, and he tries not to be a star. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is looking for challenges. Among the black superstars, I think Denzel Washington is not looking for the easy way. With some of his choices, like the last one, he won the Academy Award. Denzel is in a position where he can take almost anything he wants. He turned me down a few times.