America Behind the Color Line (35 page)

I was flying one day from Bora-Bora and I stood in the wrong line, and finally somebody was screaming at me and searching me and terrorizing me. Then it was an African-American officer who just said, you come here, and he did his duty with dignity, with gentleness. He asked me the same horrible questions, but he was kind; he was not screaming. And when I drove out of the airport, I said, this is a man who represented his country without anger, who did his job well. I called the airport and found out who he was, and I went to see his kids and his family and we became friends. It was just a gesture; it’s only a personal story. But it’s contact.

Will blacks be executive film producers in our lifetime? Will we see peace in the Middle East in our lifetime? I hope; I really hope. Would I have thought that Denzel Washington and Halle Berry would be standing there and we would be cheering for them? Would I ever think that Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman would not win almost
because
they’re white? I believe that we are on the right path. In 1991, I received a humanitarian of the year award. The Scud missiles were flying, and I remember two people came to sing “Hava Nagila” for me, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte together, and the whole place was rocking. It was a very moving evening. I couldn’t believe that all these white guys are gonna sing with Sidney Poitier and Harry Bela-fonte. And I was thinking about Marvin Davis and the Carousel of Hope Ball, which raises money for childhood diabetes; they’re honoring Sidney Poitier this year, and Halle Berry will present the award to him. I think a lot is possible in our lifetime. It’s not like we’re surrounded by wholesome people who never did anything to get in the club; it’s not like white people came with a suit and tie and stood in line and didn’t step on anybody. So blacks will be part of the club soon. There’s no question.

It is very important that Denzel and Halle, two black people, won the Academy Award in 2002. Never in a million years, when we say we need some A-list names, would the name Halle Berry have come in the same breath as Julia Roberts. Never would you have heard, Halle Berry’s a star. And now she’s a superstar, and the superstars transcend any kind of designation.

Audiences are changing their views now, with several black superstars on the A-list. People didn’t go to see them much before. We have to make money, and we’re only going to put these people in roles if they draw in the crowds. If they don’t draw in the crowds, you have to face it: it’s business. That’s when I’m going to use the word “black.” When a black man and a white man—or a black man and a white woman—when black and white are having a good time, like in
Lethal Weapon
or
Trading Places,
everybody loves those movies. Everybody. It’s big. If the movie is fun, it’s also very interesting culture-wise and language-wise if you have a white guy with a black neighbor, the
Meet the Parents
type thing. It’s not only about De Niro and Ben Stiller; you can do it in any configuration. So I think the audiences, as time goes by, from
Lethal Weapon
to
Trading Places
to all those Martin Lawrence movies, to Will Smith, will be more and more open to these movies.

What are people actually looking for in movies? They’re looking for five basic emotions. It’s sadness or laughter or fear or compassion or a mix, or to be dazzled with fireworks. The easiest thing to do is with the guy or girl next door. In the minds of the moviegoers, the guy or the girl next door is blond and blue-eyed. They are definitely not Mexican; they’re definitely not African American; they don’t have accents. They’re kind of cheerleaders, all-American. So when you give me a screenplay with a black actor, say
Independence Day
with Will Smith, I think, hmmm, should we do it? I think, well, are there enough fireworks and it’s not da-da-da so people won’t think it’s only about a black guy?

So, yes, there are issues of race in films. But it’s not because people are bad or good. It’s because there is not the deep-rooted kind of work done to open the world, to open the consumer. The problem is educating the consumer. If they want to buy black and black and red and yellow, sure, we have it. There was a time when the consumer wouldn’t even go to see Lena Horne at the Cotton Club.

How do we educate the consumer? That’s a good question, and an important question. I think that maybe if Richard Gere feels he has responsibility for the Dalai Lama, maybe we should feel that we have also some responsibility, because we are all very wealthy, fortunate, privileged people, and we should think, yes, it’s important to help the sick and the elderly and the deceased, but it’s also very important to help the healthy and the living and the future and the kids. Maybe we should have a fund, a low percentage of our profits, to encourage filmmakers to make movies that don’t have racial barriers or to solve business issues connected to racial problems. If I could find a couple of people to work with me, I would go for that. It would be a good thing to do. Let’s fund some of these movies, and let’s show that we can make money and do well with them.

I think Hollywood itself is a bunch of cowards about fighting things like anti-Semitism or antiblack racism. I think Hollywood has this righteous thing about honoring people every five minutes to raise money. Everyone has his charity or her charity, and I don’t think they get their hands dirty in any issues. When they come into an event and take a stand, I don’t see anybody sustaining or staying with a cause when the cameras are not on and nobody heard that you did a good thing. I don’t see anybody giving something anonymously that would never be found out so that you could say anonymously, yeah, she gave. I think they’re not my kind of people. I don’t socialize much here. People here love gaining the respect of all of our friends. Everybody comes to nice events, from Michael Jackson to Liza Minnelli, da-da-da. That’s good, but we have to do more than that. I mean, really, really.

I can’t change the system, myself alone, no. If there was a place, a way to do something about it, yes, absolutely, I would be part of it, because I come from a place where Jews and Palestinians are shooting and killing one another and I want that to end. I want people to eventually be happy neighbors. I feel as sad as anyone does about this. It makes me think—and I’m not being sarcastic— maybe with all these organizations for helping people with different illnesses, from AIDS to multiple sclerosis to depression, there could be a charity to help whites and blacks to work and socialize together. Why not?

We get more right than wrong, so we stay in business. I want to challenge the idea that to stay in business, you can’t challenge the formula. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. You go under the radar. You give them
Six Degrees of Separation,
you give them
Free Willy, Made in America,
something challenging like
Tigerland
or
Mambo Kings,
something outside the box like
Out of Sight
. And you yoke them together. So either the theater has to take them, or your partners are heavyweights enough to forgive you for losing money from time to time because it balances; the bottom line is cool. It’s from the periphery that you can start to change. That’s where I’m talking about that fund for independents. I wish I could start it. I’d like to say to a director, your next job is a love story and it’s the next Halle Berry and the next Denzel. The butler is white. And the profit is green.

REGINALD HUDLIN
Independent Means

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 they 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.