Shaping the Future of African American Film

Monica White Ndounou

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813562551
• eBook ISBN: 9780813573120
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff.  But what if the money itself is color-coded?  What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns?  This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case.  In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films.How does history come into it?  Hollywood’s reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films.  So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century.  Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral.  Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions as Bamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history.By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations—and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.

Part One

Finding Freedom on Stage and Screen

I look at theater that is produced in some of the regional theaters and theater that is produced on that circuit as two different things. We shouldn’t try to make them be the same things.

—Kenny Leon, director of three August Wilson Broadway productions, 2007

1

The Plantation Lives!

I’m constantly looking for good material, but most of what’s out there is not good because most screenwriters are only reading other screenplays. They need to read books—they need to read real writing—and they need to read more stage plays.

—Alfre Woodard, 2004

Academy Award–nominated actress Alfre Woodard’s suggestion to look beyond screenplays as a source for good material offers a useful although precarious intervention in the future development of African American film due to the critical interrelation between theatrical and cinematic production. Plays with predominantly white casts and their cinematic companions examined in this chapter illuminate the specific challenges of adapting African American drama for the screen.

Exemplary of commercial theater, Broadway mirrors Hollywood in casting, narrative, and reliance on the bottom line. Tracking economic data according to source texts exposes greater frequency of adaptation and higher gross receipts of productions with predominantly white casts as compared to those with predominantly black casts. In my research, I found no African American stage plays adapted for film that exceeded $50 million in gross receipts until Tyler Perry’s cinematic adaptation of his urban circuit plays. Musicals are an exception, however. Musicals are big business on Broadway and were especially prominent in Hollywood’s studio era. Hollywood adaptations of musicals have made a resurgence since 2000, proving that the genre remains economically viable. For example, in 2006 the film adaptation of Dreamgirls had gross receipts of $103 million domestically and $51 million internationally, eclipsing its production budget of $72.5 million. However, musicals are less significant to this study because the majority of cinematic stage adaptations since the 1980s are of plays.1

This chapter focuses on the broad influence of productions with predominantly white casts on the development of African American drama onstage and onscreen. In the current Hollywood scheme, black people tend to occupy the role of actors and actresses playing marginal characters in original films and cinematic adaptations. Identifying critical sites of freedom and empowerment that counteract plantation ideology embedded in the narratives and permeating the industry provides the context necessary to fully appreciate the interventions recommended in the remaining chapters of this book.

The historical marginalization, dehumanization, and erasure of U.S. Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, other nonwhite minorities, and blacks in mainstream white American theater and film have been the norm with the same basic results. A master narrative that reinforces white supremacy tends to operate within a standard narrative pattern that dominates the entertainment industry. This pattern presents in three parts and will no doubt be familiar to readers. The first part introduces the characters, goals, and conflicts. The second part is the turning point where dialogue, setting, or some other visual or sound techniques indicates important change. The last part is resolution.2 This master narrative, with its literary roots, typically focuses on white male heroes with people of color and women in marginal supporting or minor roles.3 In the master narrative, black people tend to appear as an Africanist presence. Toni Morrison defines this as metaphorical representations of blackness in imagery, characterization, language, and sounds, and various aspects of expression and existence.4 Repeated use of classical Hollywood’s technical elements and patterns of employing the Africanist presence has shaped audience expectations that affect reception of African American films, especially those that break the aesthetic contract.5

The Birth of a Nation (1915), an adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s anti-black novels The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), helped establish the rules that were already gaining momentum in theater and short films, such as adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). As Ed Guerrero explains, Hollywood’s plantation genre is the quintessential master narrative spanning approximately sixty years, from 1915 through the mid-1970s. It significantly contributed to the creation and ideological functions of black representations, narratives, and images, now overdetermined by Hollywood’s profit-making strategies.6 While the plantation may not often be the visual setting of films produced since the 1980s, the ideology is insidiously embedded in casting and recurring narrative patterns. This affects the development of black film, especially African American film, in various ways.

As Hollywood established itself, blacks also established strategies of resistance, exemplifying the power of performance as well as the need for more empowering roles behind the scenes. Performative indigenization in various forms was the primary line of defense for black performers. Another strategy employed by black performers and audiences is the oppositional gaze, which bell hooks refers to as a critical gaze that looks to document resistance and struggle for agency.7 These strategies exemplify a limited yet significant creole perspective, a more empowering approach to seeing and articulating black experience in Hollywood and American theater.

Hollywood’s enduring resemblance to a plantation economy does not have to necessarily limit the possibilities of horizontal integration for developing African American film. However, it is important to acknowledge the impediments. A comparative analysis of the actual events that inspired the cinematic adaptations of A Few Good Men (1992), Convicts (1991), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) exemplifies the potency of the master narrative and plantation ideology in different time periods and across media. Heavy reliance on established precedent and established profit-generating strategies mutually reinforce race ideology, undermining the potential for black theater and film to develop through casting, narrative form, and content, as well as marketing and distribution.

Plantation Matters

The untapped potential of black Americans’ historical contributions to American theater and film becomes evident in their literal and figurative treatment on stage and screen as well as behind the scenes. Unmarked whiteness in addition to patterns of interracial interaction further reinforce racial hierarchies, making these plays dubious models for developing African American film. Normalized representations of whiteness are depicted in cinematic adaptations of plays such as Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Extremities (1986), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Frankie and Johnny (1991), Convicts (1991), The Closer (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), A Bronx Tale (1993), and The Cemetery Club (1993). Collectively, these works represent the most frequently produced narrative conventions and casting patterns in Hollywood and on Broadway. The lack of evolved representations of African Americans as individuals with emancipated consciousness, especially in their interactions with whites, in theater and film is symptomatic of the broader issue of plantation politics plaguing the development of African American characters and films past and present.

In many towns until the 1920s, films were shown in the same venues as plays, often an actual or designated opera house.8 Since these films tended to use literature, stage plays, and theatrical performance as source texts, it is not surprising that they took on the same ideology and representation of blacks as the source texts. Treatment of African Americans in theatrical performances and narratives coincides with films produced by whites such as inventor and filmmaker Thomas Edison and William Selig, a former minstrel show manager. Selig produced Who Said Watermelon (1900), Something Good—Negro Kiss (1900), Prizefight in Coontown (1902), and Wooing and Wedding a Coon (1907), all of which reinforced derogatory representations of black people.9 Although film scholar Thomas Cripps describes Edison’s films leading up to this period as “‘relatively benign, vaguely anthropological shorts,’” political scientist and film scholar Cedric J. Robinson disagrees: “While it is true that some of Edison’s racial vignettes were entitled A Morning Bath (1896), Colored Troops Disembarking (1898), . . . many more bore titles such as The Pickaninny Dance (1894), Watermelon Contest (1896), Sambo and Aunt Jemima: Comedians, and Spook Minstrels (all of the latter series produced between 1897 and 1904). Moreover, none of Edison’s films, not even those which were reportorial, appeared to suggest the existence of black men like Lewis H. Latimer.” Latimer worked with Alexander Graham Bell as a draftsman, improving Bell’s patent design for the telephone.10 Plays and films that follow established precedent continue to benefit from and carry out this limited and inaccurate representation of blacks in spite of alternatives.

Inspired by actual events that lend them authenticity, contemporary films such as Driving Miss Daisy, Convicts, and A Few Good Men share other features with their predecessors. Early racial melodramas are variations of the master narrative. They typically depict a battle between good and evil, between white Americans and African Americans, linking suffering to citizenship.11 The Birth of a Nation focuses on two white families, northern and southern, on opposing sides in the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln is prominently featured throughout the film, which depicts his assassination. Blacks appear as the requisite mammies, toms, coons, mulattoes, and bucks, significant only in relation to the white families. Loosely based on the life of Josiah Henson, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is about a long-suffering black slave named Uncle Tom, his fellow slaves, and their slave owners. This nostalgic representation of the loyal black slave still feeds contemporary racial hierarchies. Diversifying the cast or focus does not automatically counteract the melodrama’s master narrative. Both heavily adapted works cite actual events and rely on the Africanist presence to reassert the power and definition of whiteness. They helped to establish how interracial interaction on stage and screen would be depicted going forward, especially in historical dramas as discussed in chapter 4.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped introduce the Africanist presence through stereotypes, including the mammy, the tragic mulatto, and Uncle Tom, which were then recycled and reinforced through works such as The Birth of a Nation, which also incorporates the image of the black brute. These films represent a long-standing tradition of American literature, theater, and film, becoming more racially coded and normalized over time. The plantation lives on in noticeable patterns of form and content in some of the most economically viable narratives in more recent films. Films such as Convicts, Driving Miss Daisy, and A Few Good Men draw inspiration from Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s narrative content, characterizations, and interracial interactions.

“Tom Shows,” multiple and frequent staging of Stowe’s novel, were “the most widely produced play in the history of the United States, and despite the longevity of contemporary musicals, has yet to be surpassed.”12 Based on the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, which sold 300,000 copies in its first year,13 this racial stage melodrama incorporated the novel’s pathos and abolitionist sentiment, clearly delineating the abolitionist position as “good” and the institution of slavery as “evil.” It appears to have a progressive ideology, much like Driving Miss Daisy, Convicts, and A Few Good Men, but is structurally reinforced by white hegemony. Tom shows combine blackface, music, and minstrelsy to produce a spectacle with profitable results. The two most prominent versions of the play opened in 1852. George Aiken’s version, which is considered the standard, closed on May 13, 1854, after 325 performances. The H. J. Conway version, which was the most popular, was created for the Boston Museum. Thereafter P. T. Barnum mounted a New York production, which directly competed with the Aiken adaptation. Tom show elements and their popularity continue to influence structure, content, and production patterns of stage plays adapted into films, particularly by excluding or marginalizing blacks.

Each film version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin paralleled critical developments in filmmaking technology, economics, and racial politics. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted to film twice in 1903, 1910, 1913, and once each in 1914, 1918, and 1927. Every aforementioned version was made by white producers. The 1903 version was directed by Edwin S. Porter and was also one of the first full-length films (10–14 minutes at the time). In this version, white actors played the major black characters in blackface with black actors as extras.14 J. Stuart Blackton’s version, adapted by Eugene Mullin in 1910, represents “the first time an American film company released a dramatic film in three reels.” It was also re-released in 1927.15 Yet it is the offscreen circumstances of Harry A. Pollard’s 1927 film adaptation that demonstrate how deeply embedded racial ideologies influence filmmaking. Charles S. Gilpin, a black actor best known for originating the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, was to take the role of Uncle Tom. According to some reports, Gilpin engaged in heated debates with the director regarding the film and portrayal of Uncle Tom. As a protest, he returned to his job as an elevator operator rather than play a lucrative screen role that he felt would malign his people.16 Other reports say the studio fired Gilpin due to concerns about “his aggressive reading of Tom and, according to gossip, to his drinking.”17 Regardless, production went ahead without Gilpin. Does a progressive ideology decrease the likelihood that producers question racist potential in production and reception of their films? This example suggests just that.

After originating the title role in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in 1920, Gilpin went on to reprise the role in 1926. Black audiences remained divided over whether the play and performance improved representations of blackness. The actor’s performative indigenization, also exemplified in his off-set attempts to avoid undermining the potential of black film, subjects, and worldviews, proved unable to fulfill the expectations of the audience’s oppositional gaze. It is unrealistic to expect a single play, film, or actor’s performance to completely repair or reverse the damage of early films such as The Birth of a Nation and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However, Gilpin’s resistance against the master narrative perfectly exemplifies the historical double bind that the institutional framework creates for black people in Hollywood and on Broadway. American theater and film have relied on black subject matter and performers to innovate at critical historical moments, yet black subject matter and performers are frequently marginalized in the industry and the narratives.

Early Examples of the Paradox of Success

The rise of melodrama, evolving technology, and the emergence of the star system coincide with the rise of the Africanist presence in theater and film. As a result, traditional practices of adaptation and horizontal integration strengthened the bond between media, reinforcing plantation ideology within narratives and industry practices that coincide with...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Color of Hollywood—Black, White, or Green?
• Part One: Finding Freedom on Stage and Screen
• Part Two: Black Pathology Sells [Books and Films]?
• Part Three: It’s Not Just Business: Color-Coded Economics and Original Films
• Appendix: Ulmer Ratings of Selected Actors
• Notes
• Selected Filmography
• Index
• About the Author