America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  REGINALD HUDLIN

  Independent Means

  Director, producer, and writer Reginald Hudlin told me that “there’s no one approach, clearly, to how the next level of change is going to happen in Hollywood . . . 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.”

  Before I came on the scene, my brother, Warrington Hudlin, had made independent films that were aesthetically and financially separate from Hollywood. So I knew there were alternatives besides working within the belly of the beast. Not only did he make films, he addressed the problem from an institutional level with an organization he founded called the Black Filmmaker Foundation. For ten years he had been supporting independent film, before it was even called independent film, back when it was underground cinema. He and the BFF would literally drive around from borough to borough in the Bronx or Staten Island or wherever and throw up a sheet on a brick wall and just show a movie. So you would have these kids or adults in the neighborhood who would suddenly be seeing black films by black filmmakers for the first time in their life. That kind of grassroots work got bigger every year and helped create an environment for people like Spike Lee and myself to finally gain entrée—to gather the resources, the funding from grant organizations, and so on, to put together our early films.

  I look at Sweet Sweetback’s Badassssss Song, in 1971, as sort of the atomic bomb that signaled the start of the modern black film movement. And from that explosion, there were shock waves going in two different directions. The most obvious direction was the blaxploitation era in Hollywood—films like Shaft, Superfly, and The Legend of Nigger Charley. But then you had another movement happening underneath. You had Warrington Hudlin, Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash—all these independent filmmakers, East Coast, West Coast—and they were all making really amazing films. The general public wasn’t seeing these films, but they were important; they were creating a canon of their own.

  Then the two strains crossed in 1986 with She’s Gotta Have It. That was the pivotal crossover film, where the underground broke above ground. What was important about that film was that it was made outside of Hollywood and it made a lot of money. So Hollywood said, wait a minute. This is a movie that didn’t cost a lot and that made a lot of money, and we could never make anything like that. The profit motive then demanded that these folks had to deal with black filmmakers. Sweet Sweetback had the same effect in the seventies, but they had successfully pimped that movement into extinction. They no longer hired the directors; instead, they only worked with two or three black stars. But now there was a new style of filmmaking that white filmmakers couldn’t reproduce. So Hollywood goes, we have to buy these guys. Suddenly, there was opportunity in Hollywood. And I got one of those opportunities.

  When She’s Gotta Have It came out, I had graduated from college, where I had done a short film called House Party. It was my senior thesis, a twenty-minute short, and it’s essentially the same premise as the feature, just kind of shrunk down. I had done a couple of other short independent films. I had done all kinds of jobs: I had taught at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee; I had worked in advertising; any job that would give me access to equipment so I could keep making small independent films. Then She’s Gotta Have It came out, and it was, we’re on!

  I remember very clearly a party at Nelson George’s house around that time. Nelson George has been the hub of black culture since the 1980s, whether it was black music, black film, or black comedy. For example, Nelson gave Spike the money needed to get his movie out of the lab when he didn’t have enough money to finish it and Du Art was just going to throw the negative onto the street. Nelson went to the ATM, pulled out a bunch of money, and gave Spike a list of names of other guys, like the musician Mtume, and said, here are some other people who may give you money too. So Nelson George was a very, very pivotal character.

  Nelson was also hanging out at this time with Russell Simmons at the Disco Fever in the South Bronx, at the beginning of hip-hop. A few years after that, Chris Rock contacted Nelson and said, I want to write a script but I really don’t know how; would you help me? So all these movements were happening through Nelson. Nelson George is like Alain Locke in the Harlem Renaissance. Even today, he’s still tracking the cutting edge of black pop culture.

  So there was a party at Nelson’s apartment in Brooklyn. Spike was there with this script—it was the Otis Redding story—and he said, I met with the studio, and I don’t want to do it, but I told them about you, Reggie. You should give them a call. I said, yes! “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” I’m with it! I’ve got no problems with it. Now, Russell Simmons was at the same party. Russell was getting ready to do Tougher Than Leather, the second Run-D.M.C. movie, and I was sweating Russell to direct Tougher Than Leather. He was saying, no, no, no, my partner’s going to direct it; I’m sorry. Now, I’m sure that Russell was looking at me, a Harvard-educated guy, not from New York, and thinking I couldn’t have any real understanding of hip-hop. At the time, New York was hip-hop. There wasn’t even a West Coast scene, let alone a midwestern guy like Nelly to point to . . . so I didn’t look like the man for the job.

  I called the studio about the Otis Redding job on Sunday. I couldn’t wait till Monday. When I finally reached them, they go, oh no, we’re not going to do the Otis Redding story. We want to do a movie with Janet Jackson and The Time. Now I’m really hyped. Sign me up! We did a deal for that and I wrote a script—my first professional script, so I was being paid to learn. The movie ended up not getting made, but it was okay, because I got paid enough money from that job to buy my own computer.

  Back in those days, a computer was an expensive item—you could buy a car or you could buy a computer. I figured, if I buy the computer, it’s an investment that will make more money because I can use it to write. And since the Janet Jackson/The Time movie had fallen apart, I decided to write a movie that I could make independently. So I wrote a feature-length version of the House Party script.

  I thought I could make the movie in the She’s Gotta Have It $300,000 range. You do it for whatever you can do it for. You beg, borrow, and steal. I had done that for the past ten years making short movies, so I was used to begging. I ain’t too proud to beg.

  Then I got a call from New Line Cinema. A black executive there, a junior executive, had heard about my short film and about my brother’s work with the Black Filmmaker Foundation. We went in, pitched the movie, and they said yes. It was an extraordinary thing. Suddenly there was this huge opportunity. And we went off and made House Party for $2.5 million. The movie grossed $27 million domestically, not to mention international sales, three sequels, and other ancillaries.

  Even more than any of Spike Lee’s films—though Spike Lee really kicked the door open—what House Party said to Hollywood was, you can make a black coming-of-age genre movie like Risky Business, American Graffiti, or Animal House. The studio executives said, great! We get that!

  House Party is based on my experiences growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois. I grew up in the ghet-to. If you go back and look at House Party today, it’s like, wow, that’s a very progressive film, compared to the kind of nihilism you see in a lot of hip-hop today. It’s actually a movie about safe sex. That was the original impulse behind it. But it only reveals itself two-thirds or three-quarters into the movie, when Kid’s alone with the girl and says, I don’t have a condom, and they choose not to have sex. At that point, you don’t think, oh, so that’s the driving premise behind the story. You’re having so much fun that you take it in as part of a movie that’s entertaining.

  The success of House Party meant a green light for New Jack City. That was the domino effect. Every black movie had to hit, because the success of one movie meant the green-lighting of another movie.

  After House Party debuted at Sundance, we won two awards, and th
ey added extra screenings; it was a huge success, and I literally had offers from every studio in town. We signed a deal and developed a bunch of projects, but the project I ended up doing next wasn’t the movie I had planned on making. I planned on making a big science fiction epic, because my role model was George Lucas. The same way he made American Graffiti, I made House Party. His next film after American Graffiti was Star Wars. So I’m on the George Lucas plan! We presented our big sci-fi movie, and the studio was like, whoa! This is expensive. This is going to cost $30 million. We’ll only spend $15 million because it won’t make any money foreign.

  We asked if we could shop the foreign rights for $15 million, and the studio said, sure. Forty-eight hours later, we had a foreign partner who would put up the $15 million. Then the studio said, we’re not going to give away the foreign; this could be a hit!

  Then we get a call from Eddie Murphy, who says, boy, that House Party was really funny. We should make a movie together. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d ever work with Eddie Murphy, because even though Eddie and I are the same age, he was on TV when I was a little kid. I don’t understand that to this day. Why did he always seem grown even when I was little?

  So there I am in a meeting with Eddie, and we’re throwing ideas back and forth. A while later, he called and said, okay, I’ve got the script; this is the movie we’re gonna do. He sent over the script for Boomerang, and I thought, great. This is exactly what people want to see. It’s a fun romantic comedy, no different from His Girl Friday or a Rock Hudson/Doris Day movie.

  Boomerang gave people a chance to see a new side of Eddie, and that was sort of my master plan. Eddie is such an amazing personality, and he was clearly bored with doing Axel Foley over and over again. His success from Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs. had put him in a box where he was playing variations of the same character. When you’re around him, you see not only the broadness of his range but the depth of his talent, and suddenly you get intimidated, like, oh my God, how can we get the entire iceberg on-screen, because we’re only seeing a small piece of what he is. I wanted to build on what people love about him but expand what he can do on-screen. That way, he could have the kinds of choices that Tom Hanks has. I don’t see anything that Eddie can’t do, but you have to bring the public along with that notion movie by movie. So with Boomerang came an opportunity for Eddie to expand, to change.

  We had a budget of $40 million for Boomerang. That’s the joy of having one of the world’s biggest movie stars as the lead. We got to have everyone we wanted in the cast. I remember one of the producers was like, hmmmm, this Martin Lawrence, this David Alan Grier, you think these guys are the guys? I said, yes, yes, I’m absolutely certain these are the guys. There were a lot of questions about Halle Berry, about Robin Givens, Chris Rock, all these people. And I said, one day people will look back and not believe that all these people were in the same movie. And they went, ahhh, you’re trippin’ on some black stuff now. Not those exact words, of course. But it went on to be a real milestone film. We made $130 million worldwide.

  House Party and Boomerang are both beloved films, but for black people, Boomerang is the favorite, because it is our first aspirational film. It’s a movie that says you can have it all. Most films about middle-class black people work on the proposition that you can be successful and corny or you can be poor and hip. But most people I know don’t have to make that choice at all. We have no problem going from Bach to James Brown to Eric B. and Rakim. So let’s have a movie about me and my friends. And that’s what people wanted to see. People were really happy to see the full range of black lifestyles on-screen.

  Now, if you make black people that happy, then white people are going to be incredibly shocked. They said, this is not like Good Times. This isn’t like The Jeffersons. What the hell are you doing here? What the hell are you saying here? There were a lot of interesting reviews. Hollywood Reporter said, this is like a science fiction view of black life. I didn’t think I was making a political movie. I was thinking, I’m making a fun movie, and later on I’ll make my own Battle of Algiers. Little did I know that Boomerang was the most revolutionary film I could make. I showed black people who weren’t spending their lives reacting to white people. They were completely comfortable and happy, not walking about complaining about the white man. They have a self-contained black world in the film, and white people were offstage. I think it shocked and offended the studio executives on levels they did not understand. Turns out some white people would rather be despised than ignored.

  But it didn’t shock the general audience. While it was not one of Eddie’s biggest movies, it was still very successful, especially given the bold new direction for Eddie. The movie had enormous crossover appeal. It continues to be an incredibly successful rental. We’re getting ready to come out with a deluxe DVD with commentary and extra scenes.

  I’d love to make five more movies like Boomerang. But when you try to make that kind of movie in Hollywood, they don’t want to make it. They go, there’s no market for that, or you can make it, but for $6 million. And you say, look. I’m not trying to make a movie that’s going to gross $20 million. I’m trying to make a movie that’s going to make $100 million, so you need to put resources behind me. And you know what? I’m not a first-time film-maker. You need to pay me what my white counterparts get. And they go, well, but it’s just one of those black movies, and to them it doesn’t make a difference whether you’re a first-time filmmaker or you’ve been making movies for ten years, because they don’t understand the subtle nuances in how you show that culture.

  I make movies for a living, which is something very few people on the planet get a chance to do. On top of that, I get to make the movies I want to make. Even in a privileged class, I’m in an especially privileged position. So when I say that of course I’ve experienced racism in Hollywood, I say that within the context of a very comfortable life. Not that my comfort negates the inequities I’ve experienced, but I realize that others before me have suffered police dogs and fire hoses to afford me my success.

  I guess the most tangible way of measuring racism is if you are denied opportunities because of your race. Am I given the same opportunities as my white peers? If you measure it by that standard, then, yes, I have encountered prejudice—less racism, more prejudice. It’s unfortunate that the word “prejudice” has kind of gone out of style, because it’s such a really good, specific word.

  Racism is the old-fashioned Klansman: “I hate you niggers!” That’s just cornball. That kind of old-fashioned racism is slowly being wiped out in this country. There will always be pockets of ignorance, whether in Boston or down South. Those people are those people. But prejudice means you don’t necessarily hate black people. You may have black friends. You may have no particular feeling one way or the other toward the ethnic group as a whole. But when it comes to having two people interviewing for a job, and they’re both equally unqualified, let’s just say—which is more likely the case, particularly in Hollywood—and you say, which unqualified person do I hire? If you go, I’ve just got a feeling about this guy, ’cause I’m going with my gut, well, that refers to comfort level. And lots of times what makes up your consciousness of comfort falls back on things that aren’t necessarily grounded in reality. That’s where prejudice kicks in.

  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. On the one hand, you have to hang out with these agents and drink and go whitewater 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, 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.

  To top it all off, to get “into” Hollywood, you usually take a free job. You take an internship. You work in a mail room at a talent agency. So you’re graduating from a very expensive school, you’ve got all these loans, maybe you have a law degree, and you’re going to start in a mail room? Your mama and daddy are going, what? What? I don’t think so.

  Other ethnicities in Hollywood had the option of assimilating into Wasp culture. That’s part of the whole appeal of California to the American imagination. What America represents to the rest of the world is what Los Angeles is to America. It’s a place where you can remake yourself and make dreams come true. But black people don’t have the racial mobility that comes from getting a nose job, a name change, and passing—although many have tried. We’ve got to plant our flag where we stand and make it work.