If black people could green-light films—$100-million romantic films with two black leads—a lot of the problems stemming from race could be solved. There are so many intelligent black people that haven’t had a chance to showcase their work, be they writers, actors, producers, or directors. We are the most diverse group of people on earth. We’re storytellers from all over the world. It’s about who we are in our entirety, not just about black people in America. We have black people from Africa, black people from the islands, black people from South America. We have black people mixed with Chinese coming over from Jamaica, but they’re still black. They have a whole other recipe for soul food to share with us.
The creation of a black studio would make room for black voices everywhere. It will take finding the right person—someone who is educated, has leadership qualities, isn’t racist, and knows how to deal with all types of people. I don’t think it’s a matter of having a black studio for only black people, where nobody white can work. That would be just as bad as what we have right now. We need to find a way to coexist in this society with equal amounts of respect and the same levels of opportunity.
Short of having a black studio as a point of embarkation, black actors can begin to change the system by saying no to really bad films. I know people have bills to pay. I know we have families to feed. A lot of us help our parents. I understand all that. But to be a responsible player in this business, you have to say no and hope that God blesses you with a big yes the next time around. If enough of us refuse to work in bad films, we might eventually be offered better-quality films.
There are those few people who are chosen to lead the crusade at certain moments, and they pass on the baton to the next person. But there’s always a juncture in that relay where it’s like, okay, stop; you’re done right now. We’re going to take over from here because we don’t want to lose our jobs. And when I say “we,” I’m talking about white people. The people who green-light the movies. I’m not prejudiced against white folks; I don’t have a problem. But I’m speaking the truth about the system.
Black people generate enormous amounts of money for the American economy. The crux of the matter, when it comes to sports, entertainment, and music, is that we bring the culture to America. There’s no longer pop music versus R&B music. We are R&B and we are pop. We are everything. We have crossed over. And it has crossed over to us. That’s what it boils down to, because our culture has been stolen from us and modified to be sort of the American culture, but it really has always been ours.
Being used in the Hollywood system is different if you’re black than if you’re white. In the last five years, I’d say, this industry has changed tremendously. You have the hip-hop world and you have the world of show business, or rather the world of Hollywood actors. And now we are all one thing. We are all commodities to white Hollywood. They know that if they put a rap star in the lead of a film, they’re going to get not just that rap audience, but also the sales on the sound track. I’m not knocking the rapper who can act. What I don’t like is the system. I don’t like the way it’s designed, because it’s no longer about how talented you are, what you’ve done, or how you’ve proven yourself.
What happens here to people is profound. I’ve had a successful career and I’m thankful for it. But it wasn’t easy getting there. The good thing about taking time off and stepping away is that I’ve been able to see clearly. When you’re in it, you can go around in the same cycle and just be there and be there and be there, and grow only a little as an artist. Then one day you look up and you go, God, I was used all these years, and I haven’t even reached my potential.
You’ve got to really believe in yourself and be able to cool yourself out and re-create yourself and come back stronger and better. You have to be centered. Otherwise, you can end up feeling like you’ve put in all that work and you have nothing. I try to continue to do the things that are good for me and the things I truly believe in. And then you go, well, damn, there’s five other girls that haven’t done half as much work as I’ve done, but we’re all being considered for the same part because we’re interchangeable. Oh yeah, Nia Long, she does great work. But if we hired X over here, we don’t have to pay her quite as much and then we’re also not putting Nia Long on a pedestal. She’s still fair game; she’s in the pool. And guess what. I’m not in the pool. I’m sitting on the side of the pool and I’m waiting till I find the right thing.
In 1997, I starred with Larenz Tate in Love Jones, a film I thought was ahead of its time. To me, it represented the artistic, bohemian, in many ways European culture of black love. It portrayed very educated, sophisticated black folk that we don’t always get a chance to see on-screen. I think that if Love Jones had come out now, with more advertising and more merchandising behind it—the same big hoopla they give other mainstream love stories—we would not have disappointed anyone. The studio tried to rerelease it when they realized how great the sound track was.
What happens with a film like Love Jones is the studio executives go, okay, this is a great script, a love story; we’re going to take a chance on this one. We’re going to make it as low-budget as we possibly can, and we’re going to put it out there and step back and hope that it sticks. But not only did Love Jones stick, it did great numbers. Had it been given better distribution, it would have been a bigger success. But when they do these films, they give us 50 percent of the distribution they’re going to give When Harry Met Sally. It’s almost as if the studio heads are setting us up for failure but giving us just enough success so we want more.
The reason Whoopi Goldberg has been able to break through lots of barriers is that she’s beyond color. Whoopi is Whoopi. I can’t imagine there ever being another Whoopi. I did my second film with her, Made in America, in 1993. They were torn between me and Thandy Newton, the black English-woman who was in Beloved. We’re both good actresses, but Thandy looks more mulatto, so it seemed more believable that she and Ted Danson would have had a more mulatto-looking daughter. They hired Thandy, but she couldn’t get rid of her British accent. So in the end I got the role, thanks to Reuben Cannon, the film’s amazing black casting director.
I am here because God put me here; put this passion in my heart to do good work. If I’m just one of the torch throwers, then let it be. I’d love to be super superfamous and have projects coming to me left and right, but there are very few people who get those opportunities. I would love to be one of them, but if I’m not, I’m okay with it. We have to continue to lift each other up and be there for each other and support one another and really try. Even if we don’t agree with the choices that we make, we are black people. We have to give each other love and not be so critical and not tear each other down and not be envious, even though this industry is set up for people to act that way.
I love what I do so much when it’s good. I love what happens between “Action!” and “Cut!” They can put the political side of Hollywood on a ship and send it so far out of here that I never see it again.
Right now I think the key for me is to just be still, continue to read, continue to try to find things I like. For the first time in my life, I can do whatever I want. I get to lie in bed all day if I want to. I took the time to have my child and be with my family and focus in on what’s important to me. I allowed myself the space and the distance from the business to get a better perspective on things, and I don’t want to rush it.
I’ve always been the type of person to hibernate and then come back out. I’m not the type of person who’s always visible. I don’t want to be the flavor of the week. That’s what happens to a lot of girls in Hollywood. They might get a couple of good hits and then it’s over. In this business, as with any other, the only way to get higher pay or more recognition is to take the next step in a logical sequence; to work hard to get to that next place.
My girlfriends and I have often discussed the fact that as black people, we are not raised and trained for success. We are raised and trained to know how to survive.
So we’re coming from a place of, how can I get in here and make this work for myself? How can I get my hustle on? This isn’t all bad, because it means we can overcome obstacles—and we have proven throughout history that we can prevail. But at the same time, when we have our first small success, the first thing we do is go buy a car and nice clothes. You walk down the street in L.A. and everyone’s about their hair, their nails, their clothes, what kind of car they drive. If you’re not careful, you can get caught up in that.
I love like nice things. I’m the first person to admit it. But I’ve made preparations for my future, for my retirement, for my son’s education. My purpose is to make sure my son is inspired to reach a higher level of success. I’ll be happy with that. I want my son to realize that he can do whatever he wants to do but you have to be smart during the process. You can’t just go and spend all your money. The parents of white kids always have a stash for their kids. And they pull it out right when that child is either getting married or graduating from college. So it gives them a head start with life.
If my son says to me someday, Mama, I’ve decided to be a movie actor, I’m going to say, God bless you, babe, but you know what, you’re going to college first. I didn’t have a chance to finish school. I want to finish school; it’s one of the things I most want to do. I want my son to have that, because everybody has the right to have an education. And college teaches you how to socialize with people. It’s like life, but in a small, isolated community. There’s a lot to be said for that.
Education gives you confidence, and we need that, especially for our black men. I think black men have had a hard road. My son is only eighteen months old, and every night we read and he speaks and understands Spanish. I’m trying to do the right thing. When he was still an infant, I took him to Trinidad. That’s where my roots are, on the islands. Many of my relatives are getting old, and I wanted them to meet my son. He was too little to really know what was going on, but I just felt like he was blessed, like he had the kiss and we could go on again.
I hope someday to be a producer. You have much more power behind the camera than in front of it. But I’m happy with the sequence of events that has led me to where I am today. I couldn’t have planned my career any better. For now, I’m working with writers, trying to find roles I believe in. And once I find a script I’m passionate about, I will capitalize on the relationships I’ve already established and get the movie made. I just recently finished my first screenplay, called Purple, with my writing partner Avery Williams. Look out. Here I come.
DON CHEADLE
Excellence
Movie casting is about “timing and opportunity,” actor-writer Don Cheadle told me. It’s about “who at the studio level holds the stick at the time and what are they willing to risk, because it’s always a risk . . . I would like to see people instead of trying to make one movie for $100 million that makes upwards of $100 mil, make ten movies each for $10 mil that each make upwards of $10 mil,” he said. “That way, you can still have some sort of content. If we give people the content, they will go see the movie.”
The status of black movies and black actors in America is a microcosm of the country as a whole. The people who run the studios are predominantly not women and predominantly not black, or anything other than white. Most of the stories they connect to, and most of the ideas they can understand, are not from a perspective that is other than where they come from.
The definition of racism, for me anyway, keeps moving and changing. In a general sense, everyone in this country is a victim of racism—white, black, Chinese, whoever. While the effects may be more subtle for some than for others, I don’t think it’s any less hurtful, culturally, for people not to know about each other than it is for some of us to be cut out of something. Obviously, what goes on in Hollywood casting is different from the kind of racism we had at the country’s inception. We’re talking about an institutionalized ideology now. Today there’s a pervasive attitude that black movies don’t sell. I know people who have tried to set up independent movies with overseas financing. Often what we hear over here is that black movies don’t perform overseas. But I also know that when producers go into their meetings and they have a briefcase and they have four movies, they don’t even pitch the black movie. A producer who’s nonblack told me that. He told me that when they go in these rooms with German bankers and French bankers and Italian investors, they don’t even get into discussing how the black movie can sell. So then they come back and the numbers support the view that black movies don’t sell. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People don’t want to take risks on movies they don’t think are going to make money. They need everything to be a home run. Everything. There’s this idea now of vertical integration, where they want the sound track, they want the video, the cups, the T-shirt. They want to saturate every market. It’s basic greed.
I heard a very successful producer—on the $100-million level—say to a director on a film I was doing, see, the difference between you and me is, you want to make good movies that make $100 million, and I just want to make movies that make $100 million—and I’m going to be here longer than you! That’s the prevailing philosophy. Get paid. Make the money.
Nothing sells itself. And if you’re already thinking, well, it’s not going to sell because the last black movie that you didn’t try to push didn’t sell, then you’re not going to be behind it trying to push it. Everybody wants to do Spider-Man now. Everybody wants to produce in the rearview mirror. Nobody really wants to take a chance.
Now we come to the real crux of moviemaking, which is how to sell a movie. Again, we’re talking about people who are for the most part not black, not representative of anything other than white males or white females, and who are instructed to target the demographic of fourteen- to thirty-five-year-olds.
If I spent $40 million on something, I would want to see a return. I can’t get mad at people not wanting to spend $40 million on a movie that’s not going to make a return. But I’d back it up even further in time. I’d say that America’s huge conglomerates sprung out of companies whose profit base traces all the way back to the slave-based economy that established this nation’s prosperity. So if we were talking about equality of opportunity, or even reciprocity—if we were talking about the way America really looks, rather than the way movies look—then there would be more work for black actors, directors, and producers in Hollywood, and for others of color as well.
Of course, there are myriad reasons why one actor doesn’t get a certain part. If we believe union numbers, there are many more white actors who don’t get parts than black actors. If I get turned down for a part, I can’t attribute it solely to the fact that I’m black. But it’s obvious that I am, so I’m sure that’s always a factor in any thought process about whether I get hired. If they put me in a lead in a big-budget movie, they’re most likely going to have to get me a white costar. It’s got to be a buddy film, unless it’s Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Where they have a huge audience from their first film, they gamble on putting those two together and getting box office results.
I don’t think that Hollywood is as color-struck for men as for women. It’s very hard for black actresses. Dark-skinned actresses don’t fit the classic beauty standard, so they’re often overlooked. Light-skinned actresses are too light to be thought of as black, but they’re not quite white. It’s even harder for an Asian woman than it is for a black woman to be a movie star; it’s difficult for most Americans to name even one. It’s hard for women, period.
In terms of who has the power to green-light a movie, there are still no black executives who are running a studio and who therefore have their hands on the checkbook. And I know of only a couple of women who can write the checks. Now, if Will Smith or Denzel Washington or Eddie Murphy wants to do your film, you have the clout to go to those people who write the checks and it becomes a negotiation whether your film will get made, depending on the size of the budget, the genre, and ot
her factors. Granted, there are only about five or six white actors who have the same kind of clout. So does racism play a part in that? You have to look at it in a more comprehensive sense. Sure, there’s some progress in that three black actors have a level of say that’s new. But when blackness does become green, it’s comedies and black and white buddy films that get done, not a broader range of genre.
I think the two areas where racism is most apparent in Hollywood are opportunity and timing. White actors are subject to cultural stereotypes, but to a lesser degree than black actors. Historically, the stereotypes that have characterized blacks in this country and, by extension, black actors and actresses, have been far more limiting and unacceptable. As a corollary, good white actors have the luxury of being able to fail—or being in a movie that fails to make money—and still get hired for many more films with budgets higher than the one for the film that just tanked. That’s not the case for many black actors. But again, it depends. If you were to be in a huge blockbuster and it was perceived that you were the main reason for its success, you’d probably get a few more at bats—black or white. As far as timing goes, it’s approaching close to a century since the beginning of film in this country and it’s only in the past few years that moviegoers have had the chance to become familiar with a handful of leading black actors whose films aren’t spaced apart by years. It’s timing and opportunity—who at the studio level holds the stick at the time and what are they willing to risk, because it’s always a risk.
I guess that whether there’s such a thing as a “raceless” role in Hollywood depends on your understanding of the word. My role as Cash in Family Man could be viewed as one of those roles if you were to look purely at how the character needed to function in the story. But Brett Ratner, the director, decided to inform the part with my race. The fact that Cash comes in the store and the guy automatically assumes he’s pulling a scam, instead of thinking that his lotto ticket could be real, was based purely on the racist element. I did Luke Graham in Mission to Mars, and that character could have been any color. Yet, unless we progress very far from where we are now, a big issue would be made of the fact that the first person to go to Mars is a black man.
America Behind the Color Line Page 39