BBC2's recent three part series Black Hollywood:'They've Gotta Have Us' told a timely, overdue if anything, story of how the experience of black actors and film makers, both in Hollywood and elsewhere in the US and the UK, has changed in the last eighty years or so, how much progress has been made, and how far we still have to go. It was often a little uneven, in that it didn't follow a strict chronological line, but it was always fascinating, regularly enlightening, and often very moving. As you may well have hoped it also had a great soundtrack with music provided, along the way, by Public Enemy, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Ray Charles, and, er, Irene Cara.
The standard of the talking heads was equally impressive. We heard from Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding Jr, Nelson George, Barry Jenkins, John Boyega, Don Cheadle (whose quote "the colour they really care most about is green" was an absolute standout), Lil Rel Howery, John Singleton, Will.i.am, and David Oyelowo.
If, Whoopi Goldberg and Amma Asante aside, the women included were less famous than the men then that's more of a reflection of the patriarchy than any suggestion that people like Carmen Ejogo, Kasi Lemmons, Destiny Ekaragha, Gina Prince-Bythewood, or Nathalie Emmanuel are in any way less talented. In fact while this show aimed to expose racial bias in the industry it also, eventually - and we'll come to that, managed to do an equally good job in readdressing gender imbalance.
We start with that notorious Oscar night when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly announced La La Land as best picture winner only to witness a sea of high ranking functionaries storm the stage to tell them there'd been a big mistake and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight was the right, and worthy, winner. It's interspersed with footage of other, recent, black Oscar winners:- Lupita Nyong'o and Mahershala Ali, if not Forest Whitaker, Jamie Foxx, Halle Berry, or Viola Davis.
The journey that artist and photographer (and here writer and narrator) Simon Frederick takes us on is one that shows us the film industry arrived at that point from the era in Hollywood when black actors would be resigned to playing maids, butlers, and farmhands or offering comedic support. Or, worse, being denied jobs at all as white actors blacked up to play black roles!
Of course, the racism of the southern states had a lot to do with how films were made. Lena Horne was a perfectly good actor but she was often only filmed singing in nightclubs so that those scenes could be cut out for southern audiences. When Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for best supporting actress (Gone with the Wind, 1939) she was the only black person in the entire auditorium.
Despite her impassioned speech she took flak from some of the black community who felt she was pandering to black stereotypes. I'm not black and I wasn't alive at the time so I can only relay that fact and not pass comment on it. What, clearly, was not right was that Harry Belafonte was not permitted, by law, to kiss his white co-star on screen, despite being the romantic lead.
Belafonte generously praises said co-star Joan Fontaine (Island in the Sun, 1957) and explains how he had to improvise. Instead of kissing Fontaine he managed to make the opening up of a coconut as sexual as he possibly could without putting his dick in it. Belafonte and Fontaine would then both drink from the same part of the coconut, ensuring that if their lips could not touch each other they would at least touch the same place. Belafonte describes it as an 'orgasm'. He may be ninety-one years old but he's clearly still horny.
Belafonte and Sidney Poitier (also 91 years old) were determined not to perpetuate black stereotypes and both went on to have huge success and massively influential careers. Earl Cameron, who at 101 and still going has a whole decade on Belafonte and Poitier, was the first black actor to appear in a British film (Pool of London, 1951) and, like in Island in the Sun, there was no kissing in his romance either. He speaks of suffering A LOT of racism.
1954's Carmen Jones was permitted a bit more leeway by dint of having an all black cast. The male and female leads were Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge who, and you can't blame him, Otto Preminger (the director) was madly in love with. So much so that he wanted to present her in a different way. Elements of the male gaze for sure, but also a recognition that black women were not restricted to subservient roles. There's no denying the footage of Belafonte and Dandridge kissing is very sexy.
As it was a black film, and thus assumed not a serious money spinner, it was shot in just ten days - but it went on to be a huge success. If To Sir, with Love (1967) is the film we most associate Sidney Poitier these days, it was his role as a stranger in Arizona in 1963's Lilies of the Field that won him an Oscar, the first African-American to scoop the gong for best actor. It was also a film in which his race was, quite unusually for the time, not mentioned once.
Poitier felt the burden of representation weighing heavily on his shoulders in an industry that was learning how to appreciate black actors but, perhaps, not too many of them. Twenty-one years later, in 1984, Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story was seen as that year's black film and, because of this, cast member Robert Townsend found that he wasn't getting any other work.
Wanting to do more than one film a year, Townsend took it into his own hands and directed and produced his own Hollywood Shuffle (which came out in '87). A film in which he satirised the film industry's way of stereotyping black people. Some of it is very funny. Some of it is very much of its time. You really need to see it.
What can't be denied is that it got its point across, even if it was in a fairly crude and blunt way. Where Townsend had pushed at the door, Spike Lee had kicked it down with his breakthrough movie, 1986's She Gotta Have It which he directed, produced, wrote, and even starred in. This was hip-hop movie making but with one foot in the tradition of auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Don't go thinking it was in black'n'white because Spike couldn't afford colour. That was a direct hat tip to Rumblefish and Raging Bull.
School Daze (1988) drilled down even further into black eternal politics (black hair, varying degrees of skin tone etc;) and, in doing so, made it patently clear that these were not black films made for a white audience but black films made, primarily at least, for a black audience.
Spike was on a roll and although I have problems with Islam (as well as all other Abrahamic 'faiths') there's no doubting that Malcolm X (1992) was a massive film. I remember rave reviews on Johnny Vaughan's Moviewatch at the time. Warner Brothers denied Lee deep funding and chose to push Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven instead when the two films were released, proving that even this hugely successful black film maker was being told, indirectly, not to get ideas above his station.
My favourite Spike Lee joint is 1989's Do The Right Thing, a film that looks at how a society can love black culture (Prince and Eddie Murphy were enormous megastars at the time) but still discriminate against ordinary black people. This powerful look at the cognitive dissonance that enables both everyday, and violent, racism inspired John Singleton, then in his very early twenties, to make Boyz n the Hood.
With Mario Van Peebles' New Jack City coming out the same year ('91) as Boyz n the Hood and Juice (Ernest R.Dickerson) following in '92 hip-hop culture appeared to have presaged a new dawn of black film makers making films about the lives of black people starring black actors. But there was still criticism.
Most fleetingly, perhaps, of the 'raptors', the rapper-actors (Tupac, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah) who appeared in these films. But Ice Cube was arguably a bigger star than the likes of Cuba Gooding Jr and Wesley Snipes at the time and he brought audiences to the theatre, audiences who left fully aware of who Cuba Gooding Jr was. He used his fame to shine a light on these actors who would then go on to become very big stars.
Possibly more concerning were the tendency of these films to focus on guns, gangsters, and the ghetto. That's a criticism you could lay bare at the movie industry in any era but here it felt particularly sharp as the films being made were placing a lot of emphasis on toxic masculinity and the lack of fathers (or father figures) in black society. Hollywood was making the kind of films they thought would sell but, in doing so, they may be (let's be honest, they were) guilty of painting an inaccurate picture of the black experience.
You can trace a route back from these hip-hop films to the blaxploitation movies of the seventies. Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972) were both directed by black directors (Gordon Parks and his son, Gordon Parks Jr) but soon white directors saw the commercial potential of the blaxploitation movies and started taking over.
Jack Hill got away with it in 1974's Foxy Brown but other directors either weren't so sympathetic or simply had a poor understanding of the black lived experience. There was also the question of how interested foreign markets were in buying films that featured predominately characters of colour. As recently as 2004's Ray (the Ray Charles biopic), the film's director Taylor Hackford was still skewering this untruthful trope.
Whoopi Goldberg takes a different tack, suggesting that the NAACP become too idealistic when it came to the idea of a white man, Steven Spielberg, directing a black film, The Color Purple (1982). Goldberg credits Spielberg with using his huge influence to give exposure and a platform to so many black actors.
Within two years Eddie Murphy's stand up show at Madison Square Garden, Eddie Murphy:Raw, was given a theatrical release, leather glove'n'all. But it was, perhaps, Denzel Washington who took it to the next level. Denzel smashed through the colour walls by asking his agent to send him everything that Harrison Ford turns down. With the double intention of getting bigger roles and getting parts that weren't race specific.
When Hollywood executives started seeing that Washington could 'open' a box office hit, work started streaming in for other black actors. Cuba Gooding Jr reappeared with Jerry Maguire and Laurence Fishburne's career went stratospheric with The Matrix. Will Smith topped them all with a series of huge, for the most part quite lightweight, smashes like Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997), and Wild Wild West (1999).
In Britain sadly, the road to fame and acclaim for black actors was still as tricky as ever to negotiate. At times it must have felt near to impossible. So it was understandable that many sought work in America even if some American actors, Samuel L Jackson most vocally, felt they were taking jobs that could have gone to an American. Nativism, it'd be called if Trump had said something similar. Jackson claimed that British actors like David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King in Selma (2014)), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out (2017)), and Star Wars' John Boyega were being chosen because they were cheaper.
I've no idea if this is true or not but it seems a low blow. Many of the Brit actors had come up through Femi Oguns' east London agency and had trod the theatrical boards before moving into cinema. They'd paid their dues and they'd earned their right to be on the biggest stage. They were being blocked a breakthrough in British cinema so they, quite understandably, went to the States.
In the USA the racism is so upfront you can see it, and if you can see it you can counter it. In the UK the racism is much subtler, more insidious, and often it is denied - making it much harder to fight against. If it was bad for the male black actors, then the women had it even worse. Their stories were still, for the most part, not being told on screen.
Shola Lynch talks of her difficulties in getting Chisholm '72:Unbought and Unbossed (2004), a documentary about a black Brooklyn woman's bid for the presidency, made and the fact that both the film and the remarkable story behind it are still relatively unknown simply illustrates just how true it is that women's stories often remain undocumented.
It has to be said that films like Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) and Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997) aren't super well known, at least not in mainstream circles, even if the latter was the most financially successful independent film of its year. 1989 was the first time ever that a black woman directed a Hollywood movie. Euzhan Palcy coaxed Marlon Brando out of retirement for A Dry White Season set in Apartheid era South Africa.
Data on Eve's Bayou proved that about 50% of its audience was white but, still, a decade later, Destiny Ekaragha was having to spend the first twenty minutes of each development meeting explaining that black people in (south east) London aren't all gangsters and sometimes do ordinary things like go down the shops and extraordinary things like fall in love.
In making the period drama Belle in 2013, Amma Asante was able to prove that black directors could tell different stories, ones they'd previously not been expected to tell, yet still John Boyega's face was shrunk down, almost to invisibility, on the posters for Star Wars. The Fast and the Furious proved to be something of an unlikely game changer. The global nature of the franchise meant that they weren't trying to hide black faces in their films but to promote them. They wanted inclusion.
So people of colour were, finally, better represented on the screen but what about behind the camera? We've heard, already, how few black directors, producers, and cinematographers there are, and we've listed some of the honourable exceptions, but it does look like things, eventually, gradually, are starting to change.
There was the huge success of Jordan Peele's Get Out, one of the biggest grossing horror films of all time, there was that Oscar for Moonlight, and soon we'll have Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, a film attracting rave reviews across the board. But, still, no black film maker has ever won the Academy Award for best director so there is, quite obviously, a long way to go.
Not that you'd necessarily know that when you see the huge crowds coming out to see Black Panther. An absolute megasmash that continues to break box office records. It's the highest grossing film of the year in the US, the highest grossing solo superhero film worldwide, and ninth highest grossing film ever in the world. For the shame, I still haven't seen it.
Black Hollywood:'They've Gotta Have Us' made me want to see it - and many other films too. The series sometimes jumps around a bit, meaning it's occasionally hard to place films like Amistad (1997), Stir Crazy (1980), Doubt (2008, Viola Davis's performance, even in excerpt form, nearly had me in tears), and Attack the Block (2011, filmed partly on the Aylesbury Estate in Elephant & Castle, and even the television series Fame (1982-1987) into a strict chronology. But that's not necessarily to its detriment. Not when the quality of documentary making, the list of films up for discussion, and the articulacy and star power of the guests is so high
I'm not totally sure I really needed to see the weird animated account of John Boyega's meeting with JJ Abrams but clips of films hitherto unknown to me like Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Secret Life of Bees (2008) and John Berry's Claudine (1974) made this series an absolute joy to watch and has seriously lengthened my already lengthy 'films to see list'
I once had a racist tv. If a black face came on in close up it started to make a weird, humming, noise as if in protest. Of course, the television didn't mean to be racist but it still got replaced by one that wasn't. The racism inherent in the movie industry often was intended, or simply unacknowledged, but like that faulty television it's being replaced by something that works better for all concerned. Because a society that accepts racism as part and parcel of life is, while undoubtedly being worse for those that suffer that racism, a society that makes less interesting art, less interesting films, and everyone is the poorer for that.
"You can cage the singer but not the song" - Harry Belafonte.
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