It’s been a while now since the press has hauled out its flags for the arrival of a new African-American cinema–almost three years, for example, since the covers of Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times Magazine almost simultaneously heralded the coming of the Black Pack (friends Eddie Murphy, Robert Townsend, Arsenio Hall, Keenen Ivory Wayans and Paul Mooney).
The emergence of a vibrant black cinema has been both an inevitability and a recurring item on our national wish list. In bad times, the so-called boom, forever sighted just around the corner, provides a very conspicuous counterargument (or fantasy) of black progress.
Boom, nonetheless, is the word of the day. This year will see the release of 19 feature films by black directors, more than in the entire last decade. How hard is the industry pushing it? A month out of the University of Southern California’s Filmic Writing Program, John Singleton, now 23, had a budget of $6 million to make “Boyz N the Hood,” a coming-of-age drama set in south-central Los Angeles (due out July 12), and a contract to make more films. “Right now,” said one agent, “every studio wants their own Spike.”
As the industry seems to have run low on ideas (or maybe you haven’t seen “Hudson Hawk”), Hollywood suddenly has a pocket of black writers and directors with stories that have never been told, and finalIy a chance to tell them. “What we are seeing with black filmmakers today, that we haven’t had in Hollywood before,” says Duke University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., “is artists addressing social problems on the one hand, while addressing the depths of African-American culture on the other. They are taking the veil off of African-American cultural processes.”
For the industry, the promise is healthy profits for meager outlays. For AfricanAmerican audiences, who make up a disproportionate 23 percent of the moviegoing public, the boom means a chance finally to see faces from their worlds on screen. And for the directors, it means tapping into an unprecedented matrix of pressures and energies: political, economic, creative, all pushing in different directions. Combine these with the inexperience of most of the hands, and you’ve got a wildly mixed bag. The boom is ecstatically original, it’s corny, it breaks stereotypes and plays to them. Above all, as a young esthetic just learning to walk, it’s dangerously overhyped. It’s Hollywood at its most deliciously volatile: a nut of brilliant press releases and mostly mediocre movies that might evolve into greatness, or disappear entirely.
At their best–and that means bits and pieces of each–the films really do draw patches of a world that’s never been on screen before. According to Singleton, who called in three L.A. gang members to consult on fashions and dialogue, the strategy is to “stay as culturally specific as possible, and everyone else will appreciate it for the realism.” In “Boyz N the Hood,” when one character fires a bullet at close range into the already helpless body of his enemy, the soundtrack registers the familiar explosion of the gunshot and then, in the quiet night air, the puny metallic ring of the spent cap falling on the pavement. This detail, a haunting death knell, is part of the vocabulary of young urban blacks–the slang for firing a weapon is “capping,” or “busting caps.” But in a medium obsessed with guns, this sound is new. It is in such details that the new films shine.
The broad strokes, though, are more dicey. Singleton says his film is for “young black men,” and that its aim is to “entertain as well as inform. The politics have to be strong.” This is a fierce motivation for any filmmaker, and “Boyz N the Hood” bristles with Singleton’s sense of purpose. But it’s also a heavy responsibility for a green 23-year-old: to be good and medicinal and commercially successful. Life rarely works like that, particularly on the first try. “Boyz N the Hood,” Mario Van Peebles’s “New Jack City,” Joseph Vasquez’s “Hangin’ With the Homeboys” and 19-year-old Matty Rich’s “Straight Out of Brooklyn” all lay on the politics with a shovel. Sometimes the artlessness is affecting; sometimes you could cry for the death of art.
Bill Duke, 47, who directed “A Rage in Harlem” after a successful career in television, calls this predicament being “between a rock and a hard place. The responsibility is placed on your head that you don’t ask for, and that no other filmmaker has to deal with.” When the original script of “A Rage in Harlem” included a raucously comic sex scene–“The bed breaks down, he knocks over lamps, he and Imabelle crash through a window”–Duke saw this as perpetuating a stereotype of black animal sexuality, and had it changed. “If I make a film with certain images of black people, then we pay for that.” Stereotyping remains a particularly charged issue. The blaxploitation boom of the ’70s, a free-for-all of stereotypes that quickly degenerated from “Shaft” to “Scream, Blacula, Scream,” was largely carried by white directors trying to cash in on a market; this was what they thought worked. For black directors working under a studio management that is still nearly all white, this tension still grates. Mario Van Peebles, whose “New Jack City” has grossed more than $44 million, now wants to shop his father’s steamy script, “Obsession,” about two young, middle-class black lovers. He says, “One studio guy asked if we could put the characters on crack and move it to Compton … [Another] said, ‘Could you put in some hip-hop and make it into a musical?’ These people just don’t get it.”
In this cross-fire of passions, when a film fails, fingers point in all directions. In 1990, Charles Burnett, a MacArthur fellow and veteran independent filmmaker, released “To Sleep With Anger,” a well-reviewed, genrestretching drama with Danny Glover. The film vanished with hardly a trace. The black directors blamed the studio’s white marketeers; the studio blamed the subject matter; Matty Rich said he didn’t like the title. When “A Rage in Harlem” and Robert Townsend’s “The Five Heartbeats,” both adult in tone, performed poorly this spring, these films raised fears that African-American audiences wouldn’t turn out for grownup movies, thus trapping an esthetic in adolescence. Nelson George, a journalist who co-wrote the screenplay for Kevin Hooks’s upcoming “Go Natalie,” wrote recently of feeling constrained by his “race’s cultural tunnel vision,” and of the general temptation to make a screenplay “less PC because today’s new jack culture is often incorrect.” And other directors, wary of the way the ’70s boom died, fear that Hollywood might drop them as quickly as it embraced them.
“If you get more black films that don’t make money,” says Ernest Dickerson, who directed the drama “Juice” (scheduled for a fall release) after years as Spike Lee’s cinematographer, “then we’ll be in trouble.” But Charles Lane, who directed Disney’s $16 million “True Identity” after winning a Prix du Publique Award at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival for his black-and-white “Sidewalk Stories,” doesn’t share the others’ pessimism. “I equate this with the breaking down of the Berlin wall; there is no going back.”
Lane is probably right. But the progress is worth putting into perspective. In 1972, when director Ivan Dixon didn’t like sex-kitten stereo-typing in the script of “Trouble Man,” he called in the NAACP to negotiate a change. In 1991, Bill Duke makes that same alteration on his own. The steps are small. White executives still control the industry; art and politics are still often at odds. As Spike Lee says, black cinema is in its infancy. Rap music still tells these same stories with more heart-stopping elan and humor. For now, the boom remains a bundle of great potential.
