America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  Not every scene in a movie lends itself to exploring the issue of race. For one thing, as a writer, you sometimes start to factor something into a script and then the story goes left, and it’s like you have a whole other movie. I think there are roles, more and more, where the person’s race unfortunately doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their function in the film. The issue of race per se is not a talking point in mainstream movies. You might want to write race into a person’s role in the film, but mainstream moviemaking really is not about art or consciousness-raising. It’s about generating money.

  There’s got to be a story. The need for a good story supersedes issues of race, white or black. That’s just a fact for everyone who pays to see a movie. From three years of age or younger, that’s what you get turned on by. Once upon a time, this happened. Oh! Then what? There was intrigue, oh, then he succeeded, oh, then he failed. Oh, oh, then he did this and that. That’s a story, and we can follow that. We don’t want to hear, “Now I’m going to give you a lesson for thirty or forty-five minutes and then I’ll give you five minutes of entertainment.”

  I think Carl Franklin put it best. We were doing an interview for a BBC program and he said, this is still about dreams and illusions and fantasies: “In my dreams, I’m slayin’ all the dragons. I’m the one who’s rescuing everybody. The hero looks like me.” Dig that. We’re all at the center of our own stories and imagined epics.

  And when it comes to casting, it’s hard to get the right people, because good movies are about craft, art form, and storytelling. A good movie—and good isn’t always successful—but a good movie needs to ring true with the fantasy that moviegoers bring to the experience.

  Acting isn’t bricklaying. If you have a skill for laying bricks, you can do it no matter what you look like—if they hire you. You can plumb a brick and put it on the mortar, and then boom, do it. When it comes to casting, you can’t just say, you have to hire these five black people or these four Asian women, because not everybody can do it. Not everybody is right for every role. It’s not as simple as saying, we need more numbers of blacks or Asians. Yes, we do need more numbers, but if the stories aren’t intriguing, engaging, and entertaining, and if it doesn’t hold together as a whole, then just sticking a bunch of people in a product that’s ultimately not going to be that good doesn’t help either. In fact, it does just the opposite.

  It’s possible for black actors and directors to sometimes cover for individual shortcomings by blaming racism. It’s an easy crutch for black actors and directors to rest on because it’s there. It’s not like we made it up; racism is a real, tangible thing. But you can’t always pinpoint it as the reason why something doesn’t get made, or why something’s bad or something doesn’t get supported. A lot of so-called black movies are junk. But so what? Most movies are not very good; most pieces of art are not very good; most CEOs of companies are not very good. That’s why, when they are very good, they’re exemplary, and we go, oh my God. They’re lauded, because mediocrity is what’s rampant. Excellence is rare.

  Everybody in Hollywood needs to hire a no-man. Everybody in life needs a no-woman or a no-man—somebody who will sit there and when you go, yeah, they go, no, do it over again. It has to be someone you can’t fire—someone you can’t get rid of. You have to have your no-man.

  As for the role that the writer might play in changing the racial balance in Hollywood, I’m also experiencing now how the writer is low man on the totem pole. They treat writers like garbage out here. There are going to be ten more of them on the script anyway. Unless you’re one of the A-list writers who has some sort of control, and who they have some sort of reverence for, you’re just there to get the first couple of drafts done and then they’re going to change everything and your words don’t mean anything to them anyway. It’s very difficult once you get to a position where a movie is being made and they have to cast people and they have to think about how they’re going to sell this thing. I don’t know any writers who write into their script, “He holds up a can of Pepsi toward the camera and takes a drink.” The scripts are just the templates—loose blueprints—and I see them get gutted very quickly.

  The power, in my opinion, lies with the producers—the handful of guys who run Hollywood. The writers put their best foot forward; they write the best script they can. They can people it with whoever they want to people it with, all shades. Once it gets to actually casting the thing, then it becomes about “Who is available?” “Do they open a movie?” “How can we market this?” You green-light from what you know, and from the experience at the box office. And all of those things together don’t equal more black movies or more roles in films for black actors.

  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. That way, you can still have some sort of content. If we give people the content, they will go see the movie. I don’t think people go to see bad movies because they want to see bad movies. It’s the dirty water, clean water analogy. People want something to go see, so they’ll go see that movie that maybe ain’t that good and they’ll justify it and make it make sense, and if they get laid at the end of the night, then hey, that was a good night. But if people were to see movies that are interesting and thought-provoking and engaging and that aren’t just popcorn and fluff, I think they’d appreciate it.

  JOHN SINGLETON

  Living in the Community

  Director, writer, producer, and actor John Singleton says that his new film, 2 Fast 2 Furious, is a whole new thing. It’s all about making money at the box office, he told me. “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.”

  I call myself the first black film brat because I was able to come out of school saying, I’m not going to let you guys have this script because you people make bad movies all the time and I’m going to do it myself. If you don’t want to make it, I’m going to make it myself. They were like, oh wow, oh wow, he must have something. And I did Boyz N the Hood. It made $60 million and it was made for nothing, for $6 million. With the success of that, I was able to do all these other films and was able to not have to kowtow or ask for anything. I was like, this is the way it’s going to be, boom, boom, boom. But that could not have happened five or ten years previous to me doing Boyz N the Hood. If it wasn’t for Spike Lee coming up and making a name and making successful films, or Eddie Murphy coming up making films that were wildly successful—films that made billions of dollars—I wouldn’t have been in the position I was in. They kept the machine going. That’s what all this is about, is keeping that machine going. And once you come out of favor, no matter who you are, you’re out of here.

  There’s plenty of people that get in this business that come from different cultural backgrounds and that want to change. They don’t realize what’s special about themselves culturally that they can bring to the medium of film. If you realize what’s special about you culturally, you can channel that into your films in a commercial way that makes everybody want to see it. Even if there are white characters in it, it’s not much different; that’s the thing. But a lot of people say, well, what does Hollywood want? What do they want? Well, who the hell is “they,” you know? There is no “they.”

  Everybody talks about the five guys who run Hollywood. Well there are about five guys that run Hollywood, but they really don’t. They’re running scared anyway, about the next two films that come out. They could be out of here tomorrow. Those five guys that run Hollywood could be five new guys six months from now. It changes just like that. The whole business is about new blood; it’s about new, new, new. Oh yeah, that’s cool, you made us $200 million las
t week; what you got now? Oh yeah, you did? You made a movie that made $100 million? So can you do it again? Show me the money. That’s what it’s about.

  I don’t want to sound like I’m some conservative or whatever, ’cause I’m not. I ain’t no Clarence Thomas. But I go on the old adage my grandmother said, that if you’re black, you’ve got to be three, four, five, six times better than anybody else in what you do. Ten times better. There was a time in which you were ten times better at anything you did and the response was, we don’t care. It didn’t matter. You were a ten-times-better basketball player, and we still ain’t going to let you play in the NBA. Now you’re ten times better in your subject and you can excel in this country.

  I knew—not to sound high horse or whatever—that I was the best writer in my class at the University of Southern California, and I knew that whatever I wrote was going to get made. I wrote Boyz N the Hood, and I said in the class, I deserve an A for this and I don’t need to come to class, ’cause I did my senior thesis and this movie’s going to get made. The teacher gave me an A, and I made the movie within a year. You have to have the attitude, but you have to be able to put the work in to back it up. My saying is that the black man in this country has no power, whether financially or anything else in America, but all the black man has in this country, if he can keep his balls, is his ego. But you have to have the know-how and you have to have the patience to be able to back that up with hard work. If Muhammad Ali said he was going to knock somebody out, he knocked them out. He would call the round. If you are about something, whatever discipline it is, whether or not it’s filmmaking, whether or not it’s literature, whatever is your thing, you have to be able to do the work and the blood, sweat, and tears, be able to back it up, be the best you could. That’s a lifelong lesson. It’s like that whole thing where the guy gets a new toy and says, I want to play with it, but he doesn’t sit back and follow the instructions to put it together. I think there’s a whole lot of people that are living their lives like that. They’re not sitting down and following the instructions.

  In my business, to get a movie made, you have to be able to have it on the page, but you have to be able also to verbally tell it and excite the people who are in a position to say, hey, we need to give him $20 million or $60 million to do this. And you got to be able to tell it in less than two minutes. You got to be able to say it in two sentences and then get somebody hot to do your movie. I won’t say I’ve mastered doing this, but throughout the years I’ve been able to get down to like, hey, this is what this movie is about, and hey, if you want to do it, cool, and if you don’t, somebody else is going to want to do it. You have to make it just so that the person, they have to think twice, you know, wow, they feel left out if they don’t do it. You know, this whole thing is about what’s hip. It’s like you’re hip one minute and you’re square and L7 the next. That’s what it is. It’s like, give me something new. It’s that attention-deficit society. You got to be new and you got to be fresh. We make Hollywood what it is and we feed it, and it feeds upon us, and that’s how it works. So much money is at stake that it’s a corporate decision what gets made, and so a lot of the big features suck.

  After ten years of doing different types of movies, trying to establish myself with some type of respect as a filmmaker, I figured I want to do some films just for fun. Not every movie has to be serious or topical, ’cause it’s much more difficult to get a film like Rosewood made than a popcorn movie that everyone in the world is going to see. If I continue to just try to make films like Rosewood, I wouldn’t make any movies, ’cause those kinds of films are not necessarily commercial. But they’re important and need to be made, so I have to use two sides of my brain as a filmmaker. I have to entertain as well as do things that I’m interested in. Financially, Rosewood didn’t do well at all, but it was probably one of the films I’m most respected for.

  I’ve been directing just twelve years and I’m going into my seventh film. I started directing when I was twenty-two years old, and I’m thirty-four, so I’m a veteran at a young age still. I’m cool now. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this for the next twenty or thirty years. My second career, I want to be a photographer, follow in the steps of Mr. Gordon Parks.

  As a filmmaker I’ve helped people to escape, but I’ve put harsh reality in people’s faces too, as a function of entertainment, with films like Boyz N the Hood and Rosewood. I love movies, man; I just love movies. In the sense that I’m going to try to do just basically fun films for the moment, 2 Fast 2 Furious signals a dramatic shift in my career. If I find something that I’m really passionate about that says something, then I’ll go ahead and shoot it. But I grew up going to movies as an escape, and I’m a big comic book fan, so it’s important for me to try to do some things that are really close to my heart, that don’t necessarily have to be based in reality.

  There’s a moment during the first race in Fast and Furious that’s just an adrenaline rush. They’re going at 140 miles an hour on a straightaway. In

  2 Fast 2 Furious, we don’t use cars just as cars. We use them like spaceships almost. Every kid wants to be Luke Skywalker in a spaceship, but it’s more accessible to get like a Celica with some hot rims, not with knots, and to be able to drive that fast, man. The way they shot the cars in this movie, they made street racing even more sexy to the kids. This is a genre of filmmaking that has been seen over and over and over again and that Fast and Furious put a new spin on. My mantra is, I don’t want to do anything from Fast and Furious that the audience will know in 2 Fast 2 Furious. It’s a brand-new spin, a whole new thing. Fast and Furious was drag racing straightforward. We have twists, we have turns; you’ve got gravity to contend with, with cars hitting turns at 80 miles an hour and fishtailing. Thank God for computers. We can do all the amazing stuff we want. Still, what I’m going to rely on in the film are the basic cinematic elements of editing and the juxtaposition of certain shots to create speed and to create different levels of tension.

  Every Friday and Saturday night, we screen new movies—art films, commercial films, everything. Posters of some of my favorite films are up on the wall in my little screening room. Like Sanjuro, a film by Akira Kurosawa starring Toshiro Mifune. And of course, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, directed by Sergio Leone. I have the Italian-issue poster. One film real close to my heart is François Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows (Les Quatre Cent Coups). This film is very significant for me. It was one of the films that influenced Boyz N the Hood, and it was one of the first films of the French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague. A lot of what I’ve done can be seen as having a foundation in the French New Wave movement. All these French film directors, from François Truffaut to Claude Chabrol to Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and later Louis Malle and others, were critical of the kind of conventional, formulaic movies that had come out of the French studio system in the 1940s and 1950s. They revolted against that system. They wanted to have more control, to be innovative and authentic. They carried lightweight cameras that gave them lots more flexibility in the way that scenes were shot. And even though they challenged the stereotypes of Hollywood films, they knew you have to tell a story to hold the audience.

  The stories these directors told through their films often had autobiographical elements, had personal meaning for them, just as Boyz N the Hood, for instance, does for me. And the ideas of the French existentialist movement that had a huge impact on them are a part of my philosophy as well—individuals exercising their free will to make choices and taking responsibility for their own actions and behaviors. The way we talk about and analyze and theorize about film today owes a lot to the French New Wave directors. They gave film a new theoretical framework, gave us a way to talk about film.

  The Four Hundred Blows is one of the first big films of the French New Wave, and it’s always been close to my heart. I likened my life to François Truffaut’s, because he used to say that the cinema kept him from delinquency. Movies became his passion, and they kept him from being
a criminal, and the same thing is true for me. Movies were my escape from the environment in my neighborhood in South Central L.A. If I had problems with school, with kids or in the streets or whatever, I’d go running to the theater and I could just escape. Mentally, I could just go to another plane; I could visit other people’s lives. And look where I am now.

  I can make pretty much any film that I want now. Almost any film. There’s a few subject matters that would be more difficult than others to get made. I do want to make something on the African slave trade and on slave revolts, as well as just that period of time, but I want to do it in my way. Many people have come along and done it and the films haven’t made any money, so it’s going to be more difficult for me to get something like that done. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to do it anyway.

  A number of factors explain why black people didn’t come to see Rosewood in the same way that they came to see Boyz N the Hood. I think that African Americans on the whole do not actively think about how history affects them in a contemporary way. There are a lot of different people who for whatever reasons are successful in American society and who continue to be knowledgeable of their history, whether they’re Chinese immigrants, whether they’re Italian immigrants, Irish, whatever. African Americans didn’t have the benefit of making a choice to come here. We were brought here, and now they say that if you actively know your history, then you can feel empowered. You can draw power from that.