Upon This Studio, I Will Build My Church

RJ
RJ
Nov 1 · 4 min read
Ernest Dickerson, directing.

I have an invested interest in seeing black cinema thrive. I LOVE movies. More than any other medium, a good movie is my preference. Films have an amazing opportunity to let black filmmakers make films that are on par artistically with music. Hollywood has to get the fuck out of its own way. A biopic about Harriet Tubman should be complex and supported with the proper resources to create a film worthy of her. I’m not mad at black filmmakers that have to exist in a structure that stifles their artistic reach. I’m (as of this moment) not mad at Kasi Lemmons. She (and many other filmmakers) are doing what they have to do to get a PIECE of our story made. If you honestly pressed Kasi on her making a film on Harriet Tubman with a black man as the main antagonist and no white people dying, I think she’ll likely acknowledge that that wasn’t a call she got to make (I honestly can’t imagine a black director making such a call, it had to be the studio or someone over Kasi). I think of the movie “Ma”, Octavia Spencer had to know that was a shit script, but her talent shined through in spite of. She is a three-time Academy Award-nominated actress, there should be a flood of film opportunities presented to her, and there aren’t. LeBron James had to fight for her to get equal pay. Viola still has to fight; despite the success of “Fences”, Denzel hasn’t been able to bring more of August Wilson’s plays to theaters. Look at how our best and brightest get treated. I know our talent is limitless and has yet to be explored. Some of the all-time greatest films are about the mob and Italian gang life(Godfather I & II, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, The Sopranos) while black stories (our slave narratives, biopics, etc.) are just a dime a dozen. In each of those subgenres, you would have a hard time compiling 10 truly great films from each. The lack of great content isn’t a reflection on our skill set, either. It’s a reflection of our lack of opportunity.

Think of all the noteworthy filmmakers and how all of them got their start funding themselves at great cost. Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, John Singleton, Rudy Ray Moore, Melvin Van Peebles, and many, many, more. It is infuriating that we are the creators of culture, creators of some of the greatest art the world has ever seen and YET has such limited access to one of the greatest mediums in art, films. we have displayed our incomparable ability in literature, you think we couldn’t write scripts?! We have shown an eye for the visual arts in forms such as painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, music video, crafts, and architecture, you think we couldn’t do filmmaking?! We have the fucking stories! All our icons could be worthy of a biopic. The greatest art comes from communities who are the most marginalized. We have stories of trying, failing, loss and redemption. All these identities that exist within our blackness. We have the exploration of poverty, being successful while being black, the stories of our grandmothers trying to hold us all together in one house, stories about the Great Migration, stories about our churches, our families, our heartbreaks, all have yet to be properly explored on screen. Hollywood had the SAME MUTHAFUCKA PLAY JAMES BROWN, JACKIE ROBINSON, AND THURGOOD MARSHALL. We CLEARLY aren’t getting to tell our own stories. If we were in control of our stories AT MINIMUM we would know that Thurgood Marshall was light skin and that was an integral part of his identity. Think about how mid the biopics of the last few years have been from Notorious, All Eyez on Me, Race, Mandela, The Express, The Green Book and the list goes on. Eventually, all our best stories will be told with the same intellectually shallow effort that we currently have in our public schools that allow the enslaved to be called unpaid laborers. It took the 1619 project to connect the dots about how slavery built this country. Imagine if that amount of information and attention to detail went into our films about these exact same subject matters. I don’t know what Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele and Ava DuVernay have to go through to make the wonderful films that they do, but I wish more black filmmakers were given the necessary resources, time and investment to tell our stories. The way Marvel supported Ryan Coogler is something that we need. And this can be mutually beneficial for Hollywood too. I’m not saying they need to give us a $30M budget every time out, but support the writers and the authentic stories they want to tell. I felt so frustrated seeing the original direction of Harriet being changed from an honest, unflinching portrayal of Harriet to this punchless disingenuous “superhero” film. Black people are gifted at telling it like it is, if only Hollywood would just let US tell it.

RJ

Written by

RJ

I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail. 👻:troubledman0

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