This isn’t the generation that came out of the 1960s, all new, where everybody who was black discovered themselves. The sixties were the first time people were, oh yeah, I’m not Negro, I’m Black, and I’m proud to be Black. They made it hip, like, oh wow, you proud to be Black? Oh wow, that’s kind of hip; I’ll go with it. But it’s not about being hip to know your culture; that’s just the way you have to be. And I think that this generation kind of turns a blind eye to that. So it’s much easier for a film that is right in and of the contemporary, like Baby Boy or Boyz N the Hood, to succeed. People can see those films and just walk along, look across the street and say, yeah, I can identify with what I saw in that movie, personally as well as culturally. They don’t want to identify with what happened seventy-five or eighty years ago because they don’t think that that’s a part of their lives. But it is.
I had the benefits of coming along after Spike made a career for himself, after Gordon Parks did what he did, after Eddie Murphy made $3 billion or $4 billion for the Hollywood studios. I’ve had the benefit of all of these successful black people coming before, so that I could come right out of school and a month later at age twenty-two be shooting my first movie, Boyz N the Hood. I’m so happy that I went to USC. I was so young in the sense that I was having to try to prove myself as to why as a young black man I had a right to say what I had to say, and what stories I had to say, in the context of all these people who weren’t black giving me a look that said, why are you here, even though they weren’t saying it out loud. And my attitude was because none of my stories have been told, and my people come up with everything hip that goes on in this country anyway. So that was my attitude.
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 pe
ople 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
Reggie Rock Bythewood began his career in the theater as an actor before going on to write, produce, and direct. But he is energized by a new role, he told me. “I never saw myself as a businessman before. Shame on me!”
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.
America Behind the Color Line Page 41
