It’s unfortunate that we don’t have a Trading Places–type situation where we take drug dealers and hustlers and put them in Hollywood. I think they would charm everybody. A lot of these guys are very charismatic, and they’re brilliant entrepreneurs. They know how to go with their gut; they know how to make quick decisions; they know how to be ruthless. I think they’d do great in Hollywood. I think we’re missing out on a tremendous talent pool that is just made for this place.
In Hollywood, the worst thing you can do is be first. People would much rather be second than be first. In fact, they’d rather pay twice as much to be second. When you come with an original idea, you’re just causing problems. They don’t know how to market it. How much do you spend making an original idea if you’re not sure of the market?
It’s easier if you just make the same movie over and over again. It’s not a racial thing; it’s a genre thing. I’m still scheming to get a proper budget for that science fiction film. I’d love to make an action movie. But I’m pegged as the funny guy. They have no idea how much violence is in me! I can’t wait to blow something up. Please!
The next evolutionary step in black film will occur when black filmmakers, or black film executives or entrepreneurs, put together a bunch of money and start green-lighting movies on their own. Hollywood didn’t wake up and say, hey, we should make black films. The success of movies like She’s Gotta Have It and Hollywood Shuffle inspired them to move into that arena. In the same way, black film as a business won’t be taken seriously until we show and prove that it is a smart business move. We have to do it on our own, and then Hollywood will follow. That’s the nature of how the town works. The money can come from anywhere, but it’s on us. There’s nothing in the nature of the system to make that kind of radical change on its own.
But if someone says investing in the movie business is a crazy thing to do, I can’t say, oh no, it makes sense. It is a crazy thing to do. If someone says, I’d rather do real estate, I go, you know what? I’m doing real estate too. Money you invest in the movie business is money you’re willing to lose and never see again. It’s like Vegas. Don’t bet what you can’t kiss good-bye and never care twice about. Unlike the record business, which has relatively cheap barriers of entry, the film business has very high barriers of entry. And the vertical integration of the movie business in the last ten years makes it foreboding for that kind of wildcatter entrepreneurship.
Today you have people who own movie theaters who also own movie studios who also own the home video chains who also own networks who also own cable stations, so they make a piece of product and they can exploit it at every point on the food chain. They make money no matter what. Look at a company like DreamWorks, which is extremely well financed. Then magazine articles speculate about whether DreamWorks can make it if it’s just a movie studio. Gee whiz! I’m not worried about DreamWorks; they’re clearly doing great. But that’s the kind of financial environment we live in, where it can be very scary for that kind of seat-of-your-pants, roll-of-the-dice investment. That said, scared money don’t make money. And clearly, there’s a huge opportunity waiting for someone to exploit. There is the right business approach to doing that kind of entrepreneurship, where you can win big. I am certain, because I’ve been working on it myself.
There is a lot of cash out here. The trick is to put together the right plan with the right people. And it’s hard to do, because my full-time job is very demanding. I’ve got movie projects, I have television projects; I’m doing lots of things as a creative person. At the same time, I can’t just be a creative person. I have to have my business hat on too—not just in what I do, making sure I make movies that are going to be profitable, but also building an institution. I can’t keep asking permission. So I have to do two things. I just sleep less.
For me, a black film is a film by a black filmmaker. In other words, a film with an all-black cast with a white filmmaker is a white film because it’s defined by a white sensibility. Conversely, my movie Serving Sara, which stars Matthew Perry and Elizabeth Hurley, is a black movie because it’s my view on those characters in that world. I think black folk have some interesting things to say about white people too, and people need to hear it. It’s very healthy.
There are white directors whose work I admire who have made films about a black subject and it’s the worst movie they ever made. Despite the fact that they’re enormously gifted filmmakers, they weren’t the right person for the job. Ironically, it’s easier for a black filmmaker to do a film on a white subject, because we live in the white world all the time. We know your stuff. But it’s rare that the white filmmaker has enough knowledge of black society, of black culture, to successfully make the most out of that film.
The ideal is when films are judged by their content and profitability. Is it a good or a bad movie? That’s all that matters. “Black film” isn’t really even a genre, like horror or romance. Race itself is a social construct. And the more people realize that and just let it go, the healthier we’ll all be. It could take a hundred years. Derek Bell says race will never go away. He may be right.
The success of Halle Berry and Denzel Washington certainly helps black actors, which is great, because ultimately Hollywood is driven by star power. When Halle and Denzel won, we as a people hadn’t felt that good since Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling. Obviously, Denzel had been denied for way, way too long. Julia Roberts said it very well: he should have two or three Oscars by now. And if you look at the month after Halle and Denzel won the Academy Award, you see a very interesting phenomenon. That night, you had three black actors get Oscars—Sidney, Halle, and Denzel. But that same weekend, Blade 2 opened, with Wesley Snipes. Number one, $33 million. Just him on the poster. The following month, every weekend, the number one movie had a black costar. You had Panic Room, with Forest Whitaker costarring with Jodie Foster; High Crimes, with Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd; and Changing Lanes, with Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck.
For the black director, though, the question is, will we get access to these stars who in many cases got their start in black films that we directed? Everyone wants Scorsese and De Niro to work together—oh, that’s a perfect pair; whenever they’re together, magic happens. But unlike white teams, it’s hard for black directors to keep working with black stars, because when that black star becomes successful, the studio executives, the agents who are managing all these people, advise them not to.
This is a town that is driven by fear and insecurity. The town plays on that, and if you’re just getting some real money in your pocket, while your white peers have been getting paid and performing great parts for years, you don’t want to blow it. Maybe you have the enlightened self-interest to say, but this person is going to make the best movie for me. But then you have all these forces around that say, no, that’s not the best choice for you. They tell you that if you have a black director, you’re going to have a smaller production budget, which means you’re not going to get your usual fee and you’re going to have a smaller marketing budget, which means the film is going to fail. You’re going to go backward. It’s not your fault, they tell you; it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s the invisible hand of capitalism at work. So it’s hard for people to take that risk. It’s hard for them to see that this risk is not an act of charity but is the best thing for their career. And it’s hard for them, even if seeing that, to step out there and say, okay, I’m going to bet on this person despite the advice of everyone around me. It’s a very scary thing.
Eddie Murphy did that for me with Boomerang. Samuel L. Jackson did it for me with The Great White Hype. Sam has done it for a lot of people. Whether it’s John Singleton or Kasi Lemmons, Sam’s willingness to support black film is just incredibly laudable. For Denzel to back Antoine Fuqua in Training Day was an amazing thing. Look at the results: a film that got two Academy Award nominations for its two stars, the black and the white star. That’s extraordinary, and it was a great break for Antoine, who did a fantastic job with the visuals a
nd performances in the film.
One great model in some ways is Ang Lee, who did all these wonderful films about the Asian-American experience as an independent in Hollywood. He made a wide variety of films, like The Ice Storm, which is a mesmerizing movie about white suburbanites in Connecticut. And then he came back with the hard-core red, black, and green equivalent movie about Asian culture, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—a movie that makes no intellectual or cultural compromise and still took in $120 million in the United States alone. So maybe that’s one approach.
So often Hollywood “experts” claim that black films don’t have crossover appeal. It’s ridiculous. What does that mean? Do Merchant Ivory films have crossover appeal? They appeal to a very specific niche audience. The fact is, probably if you look at the profitability, black films make more money than Merchant Ivory films. I’m glad that Merchant Ivory films exist, and I’m glad that “black movies” exist. But let’s take a step back from the phrase “black movies.” What does it mean? In Hollywood, “black” is only used in the negative. Eddie Murphy isn’t considered a black star. He’s just a movie star, the same way Egypt isn’t part of Africa.
So black only counts in the negative. Look at Training Day—black director, black star. Is that a black film? I would argue it is. Definitions of what’s black and what’s not are very convenient for making self-fulfilling prophecies. Usually a film’s profitability is decided when the movie is green-lit, meaning, we’re only going to spend money on these kinds of stars, we’re only going to spend this much on production value—which means that they’re only going to spend so much on marketing. If you only spend $6 million on making the movie, that means you’re probably only going to spend $3 million to $5 million on marketing the movie, so yes, you’re going to end up making $20 million. There are no surprises there. That is a formula. And it’s a profitable formula. But it’s hard to exceed expectations with it.
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 ra
cial 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.
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