January 16, 1996
Web posted at: 1:00 a.m. EST
From Correspondent Cynthia Tornquist
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Black filmmakers who have focused on the experiences of ghetto youths are now using their cameras to tell stories with wider appeal.
Spike Lee, who recently directed "Clockers," a movie about drugs in the ghetto, said that he's taking a break from making that kind of film. He believes that the ghetto genre is dying and that it's time to cover new territory. "I didn't want to do a film that could be lumped into the black hip- hop-shoot-em-up-gangster-drug movie," Lee says.
New films buck the ghetto trend. "Waiting to Exhale," is about four middle-class black women looking for happiness. And "White Man's Burden," starring John Travolta and Harry Belafonte is set in an America where blacks are the majority. And "Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored" is a drama about rural Southern blacks living in the years when segregation was slowly being dismantled.
But convincing Hollywood to finance black films is as difficult as ever. "The industry does have a lot of racial problems and they do look at black filmmakers as one person," director Allen Hughes says. (119K AIFF sound or 119K WAV sound)
Yet Hollywood has long sought to attract black audiences since the 1970s when black exploitation movies proved lucrative.
There were the films about middle class values such as "To Sir With Love" starring Sidney Poitier. But those films fell out of vogue with the civil rights movement and were replaced with another batch of black exploitation films like "Super Fly" and "Shaft." "It never got a chance to fulfill itself. It got shut out before a lot of talent could really come out of it," actor Fred Williamson says.
However, they did inspire a new generation of black filmmakers. When Hollywood saw the dollar signs come from John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood," $56 million, it was eager to repeat the success with similar films.
But now Hollywood is discovering that a film doesn't need violence to pull in movie goers. "Bad Boys" starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence does have an edge of violence but the promotional emphasis was on the comic appeal.
Actor and director Tim Reid says that the independent realm is where blacks can create their own message. "The idea of being an independent filmmaker is that you don't look for a home, you make a home. So my job is not to let Hollywood define what my home is but to create a home that Hollywood then identifies and says that we must make room for this as well," Reid says. (102K AIFF sound or 102K WAV sound)
Black filmmakers remain optimistic that a new genre of black films, depicting universal themes, will appeal to moviegoers of all colors.
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