Donald Bogle - Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers

I grew up living behind a Los Angeles landmark, the Century Drive-In theater. At night, Id watch the images on two giant screens. Without hearing any sound, I could see horror movies, action films, and my favorites, Blaxploitation movies right outside my bedroom window. Images of Ron ONeal running in platform shoes and Pam Grier kicking ass and looking sexy occupied my young mind. I think that marked the beginning of my lifelong movie odyssey to see as many films as I could and to figure out the way that directors, writers, and actors told stories on screen. Because I was most affected by the black movies, I asked myself how those black people got on screen? Who put them there? Even then, my struggle was to make the fantasy of filmmaking become my reality.

Later, when I was a film student at the University of Southern California, I would glean everything I could about the history of blacks in cinema. As I began to watch the older pre-World War II movies and then the post-war black films that ran into the 60s and 70s, I noticed a significant change in the way African Americans were depicted. I could sense that in the early films, black actors were told by white filmmakers to smile broadly or to pop their eyes wider in this shot or that one. Those films were created for mainstream audiences; hence the various stereotyped racial tropes. The grinning, bug-eyed cartoonish images were there to make white folks feel comfortable. A lot of pure talent was twisted and distorted. But I also noticed other films in which black performers gave more nuanced, often moving performers, such as Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington as the black mother and her light-skinned daughter who are torn apart because of race in the original version of Imitation of Life. I also was impressed by the great Paul Robeson in the 1933 Emperor Jones. Here was a proud, defiant, strong, even arrogant black man determined to call the shots in his life, to be a master of his own destiny. Later, with the dramatic ascent of Sidney Poitier as a powerful actor in 1950s films like No Way Out and Blackboard Jungle, black Hollywood began to evolve. Watching the smoldering and sexually charged heat and passion of Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones, I know now that Dandridges strong screen presence was a revolutionary precursor to Halle Berrys Oscar winning performance in Monsters Ball.

At USC, my knowledge of movies that had come before, good and bad, was something that fortified me for my future as a filmmaker. I also had the benefit of entering college after having just seen Shes Gotta Have It. I was knocked out by it. And when I met its director, Spike Lee, I had the feeling I could be a part of a revolution, a new wave of African American filmmaking.

Reading Hollywood Black, Im carried back to my sense of discovery of black movie history, and looking through the pictures in this book, I am reminded of my emotions as I watched the films for the first time. Those emotions and images are indelible: Richard Roundtree in Shaft walking through Harlem head high, owning the street with his stroll; Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield running to each other in Sounder; Richard Pryor in all his comic genius in Which Way Is Up; or Eddie Murphy with his cool swagger in Beverly Hills Cop. I recall the emotional surge I felt when seeing Do the Right Thing, a seminal film that pushed me as a film student to write the screenplay for Boyz N the Hood. I also remember the well in my heart at seeing the movie version of my childhood comic book hero, Black Panther.

John Singleton on the set of Boyz N the Hood.

This book brings all that back to me, and Ive been all the more enlightened by the great historical links between black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux and Noble Johnson in the silent era to those bold dudes of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Gordon Parks, Sr., and Melvin Van Peebles right up to filmmakers like myself and into the new millennium. It also shows the links between actors as diverse as Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, and so many others. I found this book to be an enjoyable, insightful reflection of how, despite tremendous obstacles, black film artists triumphed in showing their humanity and their brilliance to the world.

Donald Bogles Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers encapsulates the historical essence of the black movie-going experience in this country, and Im proud to be a part of it. This is an invaluable book that moviegoers have been waiting for and will treasure.

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night.

F or blacks in American movies, its been a long, sometimes turbulent, and often rocky journey throughout the twentieth century, into the twenty-first. Foremost, it is a journey that, surprisingly, is often unknown and rarely explored. Some moviegoers mistakenly assume that African Americans first worked in films sometime in the 1950s, with the emergence of such Eisenhower-age stars as Sidney Poitier and the often-neglected Dorothy Dandridge. Others also mistakenly believe that black filmmakers did not arrive on the scene until Spike Lee in the mid-1980s orfor those with deeper knowledgein the 1970s, with such bold and daring directors as Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks Sr. and such well-known movies as