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‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out
Julie Dash, Matty Rich, Darnell Martin, Ernest dikkerson, Leslie Harris and Theodore Witcher on a boom that went bust, and what’s different now.
July 3, 2019
For the first time in a long time, things seemed to be changing in Hollywood. Black filmmakers were making inroads where their white counterparts had long been parked, bringing with them an array of perspectives and experiences seldom recognized by mainstream American production companies. The bad old days — of blackface and white saviors, of “colorblind” studio executives and all-white Oscar nominees — grew, for a while, hazy and remote, suddenly incongruous with the diverse new landscape.
“Just about every studio in town has a project in development with a black director … or wants to,” read an article in this newspaper, headlined “In Hollywood, Black Is In.”
It wasn’t 2019, but 1990, more than two decades before #OscarsSoWhite and the industry’s continuing reckoning over the representation of African-Americans in front of and behind the camera. Then as now, a string of hit movies by black directors — Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” the Hudlin brothers’ “House Party,” John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood” and Mario Van Peebles’s “New Jack City” — inspired optimism that Hollywood, despite overwhelmingly white executive leadership, had awakened to the moral and financial benefits of empowering minority artists.
Speaking for a 1991 story titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” — from a New York Times Magazine issue that featured the aforementioned black filmmakers on its cover — the director Charles Lane was one of many who foresaw permanent change: “The Berlin Wall, having been pulled down, will not be re-erected.”
But as the decade wore on, a wall was re-erected, black filmmakers now say, and many of the same people who had been held up as the faces of a changing industry watched as their careers ground slowly to a halt.
“I was told that I was in director’s jail,” said Matty Rich, whose emotionally incendiary 1991 debut film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Major film studios hailed him as a prodigy. But he’s made only one other film since — in 1994.
Darnell Martin, whose vibrant 1994 romantic comedy “I Like It Like That” was the first studio-produced film to be directed by an African-American woman (it won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best first feature), said she was later blacklisted in the industry for speaking out against racism and misogyny.
“You think, ‘It’s O.K. — you’re like every other filmmaker,’ but then you realize, ‘No,’” she said. “It’s like they set us up to fail — all they wanted was to be able to pat themselves on the back like they did something.”
The New York Times recently convened a discussion with six directors who were part of a wave of young black talent that surged 30 years ago this month — beginning with the success of “Do the Right Thing” in July 1989 — only to come crashing down, as Hollywood in the 1990s and 2000s reconstituted itself around films with white directors and white casts.
Along with Rich and Martin, taking part in the teleconference were Julie Dash, director of “Daughters of the Dust” (1991); Leslie Harris, director of “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” (1993); Ernest dikkerson, director of “Juice” (1992); and Theodore Witcher, director of “Love Jones” (1997).
Many of the participants had never before talked to one another, reflecting a commonly reported feeling of isolation. But the experiences they shared — of barely disguised prejudice, of being marginalized by executives who feigned interest in their work, of lacking a safety net that seemed to buoy their white peers — fit into a kind of mosaic. It depicts a system that failed to sustain a generation of its minority talent, and stands as a challenge to those who would seek reform.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
(BELOW IN NEXT POST)
Julie Dash, Matty Rich, Darnell Martin, Ernest dikkerson, Leslie Harris and Theodore Witcher on a boom that went bust, and what’s different now.
July 3, 2019
For the first time in a long time, things seemed to be changing in Hollywood. Black filmmakers were making inroads where their white counterparts had long been parked, bringing with them an array of perspectives and experiences seldom recognized by mainstream American production companies. The bad old days — of blackface and white saviors, of “colorblind” studio executives and all-white Oscar nominees — grew, for a while, hazy and remote, suddenly incongruous with the diverse new landscape.
“Just about every studio in town has a project in development with a black director … or wants to,” read an article in this newspaper, headlined “In Hollywood, Black Is In.”
It wasn’t 2019, but 1990, more than two decades before #OscarsSoWhite and the industry’s continuing reckoning over the representation of African-Americans in front of and behind the camera. Then as now, a string of hit movies by black directors — Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” the Hudlin brothers’ “House Party,” John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood” and Mario Van Peebles’s “New Jack City” — inspired optimism that Hollywood, despite overwhelmingly white executive leadership, had awakened to the moral and financial benefits of empowering minority artists.
Speaking for a 1991 story titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” — from a New York Times Magazine issue that featured the aforementioned black filmmakers on its cover — the director Charles Lane was one of many who foresaw permanent change: “The Berlin Wall, having been pulled down, will not be re-erected.”
But as the decade wore on, a wall was re-erected, black filmmakers now say, and many of the same people who had been held up as the faces of a changing industry watched as their careers ground slowly to a halt.
“I was told that I was in director’s jail,” said Matty Rich, whose emotionally incendiary 1991 debut film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Major film studios hailed him as a prodigy. But he’s made only one other film since — in 1994.
Darnell Martin, whose vibrant 1994 romantic comedy “I Like It Like That” was the first studio-produced film to be directed by an African-American woman (it won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best first feature), said she was later blacklisted in the industry for speaking out against racism and misogyny.
“You think, ‘It’s O.K. — you’re like every other filmmaker,’ but then you realize, ‘No,’” she said. “It’s like they set us up to fail — all they wanted was to be able to pat themselves on the back like they did something.”
The New York Times recently convened a discussion with six directors who were part of a wave of young black talent that surged 30 years ago this month — beginning with the success of “Do the Right Thing” in July 1989 — only to come crashing down, as Hollywood in the 1990s and 2000s reconstituted itself around films with white directors and white casts.
Along with Rich and Martin, taking part in the teleconference were Julie Dash, director of “Daughters of the Dust” (1991); Leslie Harris, director of “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” (1993); Ernest dikkerson, director of “Juice” (1992); and Theodore Witcher, director of “Love Jones” (1997).
Many of the participants had never before talked to one another, reflecting a commonly reported feeling of isolation. But the experiences they shared — of barely disguised prejudice, of being marginalized by executives who feigned interest in their work, of lacking a safety net that seemed to buoy their white peers — fit into a kind of mosaic. It depicts a system that failed to sustain a generation of its minority talent, and stands as a challenge to those who would seek reform.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
(BELOW IN NEXT POST)
