America Behind the Color Line (36 page)

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.

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 and 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.