[music]

Kousha Navidar: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar. I'm filling in for Alison Stewart today. A new docuseries takes viewers on a captivating journey through a century of the Black experience in Hollywood, drawing inspiration from historian Donald Bogle's seminal work of the same name. Let's listen to a clip. [docuseries clip plays]

Justin Simien: "From its very beginnings, Hollywood has been fascinated with Blackness. Not only are we the first subjects in early motion pictures, but we are also the subject of the first blockbusters, early animation and, then, of course, the first talkie."

"In fact, every time Hollywood is looking to reinvent itself or expand its reach, it tends to do so with Black bodies. Consciously or not, Black faces make money, Black culture makes money. But who controls what those faces do and say? And who benefits?"

Kousha Navidar: The docuseries is titled Hollywood Black. The series is split into four parts, explaining how Black people laid the foundation for storytelling, how Black filmmakers looked to celebrate Black culture on screen following the civil rights movement, embracing a new generation of Black filmmakers and megastars in the '90s, and the explosion of Black filmmakers exploring new genres to critical and commercial success.

A review from Variety states the series, "Walks audiences through film history with anecdotes from industry icons, including Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay and Charles Burnett. The series reexamines film history through the lens of the people who've helped shape and, at times, save the business, but who are often given the short end of the stick."

The first two parts of Hollywood Black are streaming on MGM+, and the third part is going to be released this Sunday, August 25th, and director Justin Simien joins us right now to discuss. Justin, hey, welcome to All Of It.

Justin Simien: Hey, how's it going? What an introduction.

Kousha Navidar: Well, thanks so much for coming here. It's a wonderful docuseries and so excited to talk about it. I want to start actually how you start the series yourself, to turn it back on you, because in the beginning of the docuseries, you start off by asking participants, what exactly is a Black film? I wanted to ask you, tell us your personal opinion of what constitutes a Black film.

Justin Simien: I think, ultimately, for me, what constitutes a Black film is a movie that has become useful to Black people in some way. It is a movie that we have used to see ourselves, to advance our political plight, our civil rights, something that's become a cornerstone of our culture in some way. For me, it's about the audience. That partly because Black people, historically and presently, we don't necessarily have the same access to those same instruments of cinema as other people. You can't necessarily say every Black movie was written and directed and is starring only Black people. Such a movie is very, very, very difficult to make today, let alone throughout cinema's history. That's why that definition to me has to fall to the audience.

Kousha Navidar: Ah, yes, and that sense of value, that you're saying value-based of what it brings to the community. I'm thinking about your place in the filmmaking community. You're a filmmaker yourself. What inspired you to want to do this docuseries, and how did your life as a filmmaker inform it?

Justin Simien: It started really organically. It came out of a place of extreme need. I was not in a great place emotionally. I was successful on the outside, but I just kept hitting these invisible walls, and I didn't understand why. I didn't understand why things were difficult or why I was only considered a certain kind of filmmaker. I wasn't understanding why it was so hard to navigate the industry despite working so hard.

I went back, and I started to reread Donald Bogle's Toms, Coons, Bucks, Mammies & Mulattoes, and dig into the history of Black cinema, which frankly, it had a moment where it's becoming in vogue in 2020. The George Floyd protests and all of the pledges to end racism that ended up being short lived. They lasted long enough for certain projects to happen, like the regeneration series at the academy, which was uncovering lots of older Black films. The criterion collection was uncovering and restoring older Black films.

This history was just right there, and I was using it to edify myself and to understand where I stood in history. It really buoyed me personally. The fact that it has become a docuseries is almost incidental to what was happening for me in the beginning, why I was looking to the past and why I was doing this research. That part just snowballed. I'm so grateful because it really took a village to happen.

Kousha Navidar: It sounds like it was very emotionally gratifying for you, almost maybe cathartic is something that I'm hearing. Were you expecting that? It sounds like you were in a pretty tough place when you started down this project. Were you hoping it would buoy you? Was there something surprising--[crosstalk]

Justin Simien: Yes, it was really the James Baldwin quote about, you think your pain is unprecedented in all the world, and then you read. I was like, I think he might be right. Let me read [laughs]. Let me get into this past.

I think what was so surprising for me is I've read some of these things before. I've seen older movies. Of course, I have an understanding about Black people's place in history. I don't think I realized just how foundational the work of Black entertainers was to the actual beginning of cinema. That's something that was never really taught to me or parsed out for me. Then the other thing was looking at people who, on the surface, seem to be in a completely different world than the one that I'm in today.

Right now, there's a book on my desk about Bert Williams, a blackface performer at the turn of the century who had to perform in blackface in order to perform at all and became the biggest entertainer in the country. You would look at him and think like, that has nothing really to do with me, but everything that I was bumping up against this feeling that, like, there were only certain categories or lanes in which I could be considered for certain budget levels, certain restrictions that didn't really make any sense or were never really fully explained.

I could see that all of that actually began there, and that with each work that comes out from a Black artist, we are trying to nudge an inch the lanes that we're allowed in just a little bit further. I'm actually a part of a continuum of an ongoing process that in no way, shape or form is finished. That made me feel a lot better, like I had a place in history.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, that continuum, is long and storied. While I was watching the documentary, I was thinking, how did you decide? There's so much. Right now I said that, and I see you kind of sigh. Can you talk about that a little bit? How did you-- Yes, go ahead.

Justin Simien: Look, it was difficult. I'm not going to lie. I think the first imagining of this series was like eight or ten episodes or something like that. As we begin to navigate the world of documentary television making, you realize, oh, they're not making series like that anymore, unless you're Ken Burns. All right, so we get four episodes. How do we tell the story in four? Okay, well, how do we do it with this amount of time with these budgets? There are some certain practical concerns that have to be looked at first. Then within those constraints, figure out, like, well, how do we make this artistic? How do we make this interesting, and how do we tell like a continuing narrative?

There were lots of fights. There were lots of back and forth, and I mean, fights in a positive, creative way. There's a team of story producers and story editors. We had an excellent showrunner. Her name is Shayla Harris. We had the folks at RadicalMedia who make documentaries all the time. Jeffrey Schwartz, who was a documentary filmmaker that encouraged me forward in this way. We all just sat in rooms and on Zooms and hashed it out.

Also, the other thing that happens in a docuseries, you invite guests to talk about things, and that tends to shape your narrative, too, because you never really know what people are going to show up with, what their reactions are going to be, where their interests are. Yes, it kind of ended up being an interesting thing where the documentary is talking about the history, but then they'll sometimes shift back into my point of view.

For instance, the episode that's going to air this Sunday, which traverses the '90s, among other things. It was interesting because what is notable and what is already in the history books about the '90s and Black cinema is slightly different than my personal experience growing up in the '90s and looking for inspirations of what my personal cinema might be. You can feel that tension in the episode, and that's part of it. I don't think we could really make the claim to be definitive. These are the discussions that this group of people are having about Black cinema today.

Kousha Navidar: I'm so happy that you brought up that idea of your subjects being part of what curated the history that you looked at, because one of the characters that you look at is Oscar Micheaux. We have a clip of Ava DuVernay, the director, discussing Oscar Micheaux's legacy. Let's listen to it.

[clip plays]

Justin Simien: What is that thing that makes you go, I'm not going to stop when you hit a wall?

Ava DuVernay: Oscar Micheaux wasn't tired. He was never tired. He did what every Black entrepreneur does. He did what HBCU says, oh, you're not going to let us into your school? We're going to make our own school. You have no hair products for us? Great. Oscar Micheaux, he showed us how to do it.

Kousha Navidar: Let's talk about Oscar Micheaux for a little bit. What template did he leave behind for Black directors, and what boundaries are Black directors now able to push because of Micheaux and others?

Justin Simien: To be honest with you, Oscar Micheaux, and this is part of why the series. He didn't just leave a blueprint for Black directors. He left a blueprint for any filmmaker, period. Any filmmaker that is in that independent space, that has had to start from nothing, and either crowdsource or figure out how to write a script or any all of those stories, Napoleon Dynamite, Quentin Tarantino. All of that, is part of Oscar Micheaux's legacy, because essentially, faced with a movie like Birth of a Nation and faced with racial violence across the country, a Black man with absolutely no access to the tools of cinema figured out how to go door to door, raise the money, figure out how exactly to make a movie for as little money as possible, and did this over and over and over.

Everything he did has become the blueprint for how you make an independent film, and actually how you make an independent filmmaking career. Beyond that, he also created, essentially, an alternate Hollywood that we don't even think about today. So many of those films have been lost. Some of those films were never really properly restored in the first place, or talked about in the histories, but there was an alternate Black independent cinema up until about World War II, where you could go and you could watch Black movies in every possible genre. We had our own star system. It's really quite incredible what he was able to do outside of the Hollywood system.

Right now, as all of us Hollywood folks are facing AI and all kinds of extinction level events of companies consolidating and things just not getting made or greenlit anymore, this is a profound inspiration, in my opinion, to anybody, that you don't need to constantly be orienting yourself in terms of trying to get into the system. Now, I happen to be in the system. I happen to be using the system as best I can to finance and support the work that I'm doing, but it can't be the Holy Grail. It can't be the only way you view producing media. I think that's really a lesson for today.

Kousha Navidar: Was that lesson a surprise for you? I'm guessing it probably wasn't, because as a person who is making their career in the film industry, you can see the big characters coming up through it. If that wasn't it, was there something else that was really surprising while you were diving into these characters you probably knew of?

Justin Simien: It wasn't a surprise how independent film works, but it was a surprise, because the way that you're taught cinema is that white people invented it, Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, and all that kind of stuff. You hear a little bit in note. Jordan Peele brilliantly makes a whole scene and discussion about the fact that the first motion picture is of a Black man riding a horse. You hear little tidbits like that.

To realize that cinema itself grows out of a tradition called vaudeville, which when we talk about vaudeville, we're talking about American vaudeville, that grew out of minstrelsy, so foundationally, the habit of Americans going to sit for a couple hours for a certain amount of money to be entertained in a certain way. That is established by Black culture. The things that people want to go see.

The first blockbuster is Birth of a Nation, not just because D.W. Griffith is a genius. It's because he had the idea of including minstrelsy in the actual feature film, which people were already used to going to sit down. This was America's first popular culture. When we turn to sound, the first thing we turn to is minstrelsy. We turn to jazz music. We turn to jazz dance styles for the musical phrase. On and on and on it goes.

The industry collapses in the '60s. What brings it back financially? Oh, my God, Blaxploitation. You can make movies for a certain price, appeal to a certain niche audience, and be profitable again. It's over and over and over again. Hollywood has to return to its roots in Black culture. The way I was taught about cinema, and frankly, just the environment that I'm in every day makes you think that as a Black person. I'm actually an outsider trying to get into this thing that was never meant for me.

The gag for me truly was that this is our thing. This was always our thing. This feeling of not belonging that I think so many of us feel in these spaces is nonsense. That was the big aha for me. This was my land, too.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, absolutely. I want to get into that feeling, especially with how it looks for the future. We got to take a quick break, though. We're talking to Justin Simien, the filmmaker. The Hollywood Black is the docuseries we're talking about. It's streaming on MGM+. New episodes are on Sundays. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, talk a little bit more about the history, about the docuseries, and about the future. Stay with us.

[music]

This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, and we are talking about Hollywood Black. It's a docuseries that's streaming on MGM+ now. New episodes are on Sundays. We're here with the creator, Justin Simien. We talked before the break about a little bit of the history of Black representation in cinema, it being the foundation of cinema in many ways. I wanted to talk a bit more about the docuseries itself, Justin, because at its essence, it's a docuseries about cinema. How did you approach the visual storytelling aspect of the docuseries to complement the historical things we learned?

Justin Simien: Well, it's so funny. It was out of necessity. We had a limited time frame, and we had a limited budget, and it became clear that the first thought that you have, okay, let's go to people's homes. Let's go to certain locations. Let's light them up. Let's get a taste of what-- We couldn't do that. It just was not possible. The only way to create a look that made sense across the interviews is if we stuck everybody in this kind of Black cinematic void. Frankly, I was like, well, oh, gosh, how we're going to make that cool. Then it jived with some of the things we were already talking about, specifically this idea that cinema has to fade in from black and fade out to black.

The cinematic void as a location was kind of interesting to me. James Adolphus, our amazing director of photography, who is a phenomenal documentary filmmaker in his own right, he actually made the docuseries Being Mary Jane. We came up with this look. Okay, well, we are going to keep the environments uniformed. Everyone is going to be appearing in the cinematic void, but we are going to light them differently. We are going to light them with different styles from different cinematic eras, and we are going to use the tools that are available to really say something and use them artistically. That was like a big part of why the show looks the way it does.

Kousha Navidar: It's out of necessity, not to lean too hard on asking me show we were talking about before, but you work with the hand that you've got to make the best product you can.

Justin Simien: Absolutely. There's this illusion, I think, around all cinema, but certainly when it comes to Black things or things that are on the margins, queer cinema, cinema made by female directors, et cetera, that we're these artists who are just plucking these choices out of the universe, and, like, this is our vision. Sure, there's a vision, but especially when we're talking about documentaries, about topics that are not popcorn and are not moneymakers, not that necessarily documentaries are ever thought of as moneymakers, but we're just not a true crime series. You know what I mean?

Kousha Navidar: Sure.

Justin Simien: It's not just about like some popular culture topic. Yes, your vision has to meet the reality at a certain point, and that's how you get things made.

Kousha Navidar: Vision meeting reality is interesting. In the docuseries, you also discuss how Black filmmakers have made films about some of the difficult aspects of Black life, but it's not always met with a welcoming response from Black audience members. For example, The Color Purple, which is discussed in this series. I also want to listen to a clip about that topic. This is Issa Rae talking about the complicated feelings she has about films like The Color Purple and 12 Years a Slave.

[clip plays]

Justin Simien: Issa, can we talk The Color Purple?

Issa Rae: Do we have to?

[movie clip plays]

The Color Purple is depressing. In theory, it's beautiful, but I don't want to watch it again in the same way that I didn't want to watch 12 Years a Slave again, in the same way that, you know, like, I don't.

[movie clip plays]

Celie: "Until you do right by me, everything you think about is gonna crumble."

Kousha Navidar: Justin, what do you make of that when you were listening to Issa say, do we have to talk about that? Have you experienced that yourself, or was that--[crosstalk]

Justin Simien: Of course. I love it. All of my work is dialectic. I hate getting on a soapbox. I get it, because my career starts with something called Dear White People.

Kousha Navidar: Right.

[laughter]

Justin Simien: Even that movie evades having a singular idea about what even the title of that movie means. The point is that we are not a monolith. We have many different experiences. We are an audience just like any group of audiences. We are complicated, and we have different reaction to this thing. Some people really love The Color Purple. Some people really loathe it.

Some people, and by the way, this is crazy, but I love The Wiz. This is a very controversial topic, though, within the Black community. Not everybody loves The Wiz. Some people really, really hate The Wiz, and hate how much people love The Wiz and vice versa. We fight about these things. I think that that's actually an important part of the story.

For me, it's important to include-- I think there's also this interesting aspect about Black cinema, that there are certain topics that a Black filmmaker or a Black story is expected to hit. You're supposed to talk about the past traumatic American narrative of Black people. You're supposed to have biopics. There are certain things that you have to hit over and over and over again. I think what you hear, Issa, her exasperation is about, is about kind of being hit with the same kinds of stories. Not so much like, I don't want to ever, like, those movies don't get to be made, but what about this other wealth of experience that isn't being made into movies the same way it is for other communities? I think all of that helps tell the story.

Kousha Navidar: Do you think it's moving in that direction? Do you think that the archetype that you're talking about is as ingrained, those expectations are as ingrained? Or do you see that kind of, you mentioned fighting for an inch to push out your borders. Do you feel like that's happening?

Justin Simien: It expands and it contracts all the time? We are definitely in a state of contraction right now. I can tell you that right now from this side of things, looking at what's being greenlit, looking at what's getting passed on, looking at gigantic stars not being enough to convince certain entities to move forward on projects. We're definitely in a state of contraction. It has to do with how expensive it is to make this stuff, but also the fact that we really do have very intense gatekeeping when it comes to media production at this level, mass media production, movies, and TV shows.

The people that are making those decisions are scared. Their numbers are dwindling. They have to do right by their shareholders and groups of people that have nothing to do with the creative process. It looks up sometimes and looks down sometimes.

Kousha Navidar: Right now, you're saying a lot of tailwinds. Like, it is--

Justin Simien: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Kousha Navidar: How do you see Black filmmakers exploring new genres and forms of storytelling as a result of that? What excites you about it or maybe not excites you, but what worries you? Talk about it.

Justin Simien: Well, my favorite quote is from the series is Reggie Hudlin, who is quoting Melvin Van Peebles, who told him that, for Black people, crisis is opportunity in work clothes. It's actually like when Dear White People happened in 2013, we were in the same exact situation. We had Obama in office, which was great, but it also meant that, like, talking about racism overtly was not in vogue. Because the white people who ran everything were like, "Racism is over. We all voted for a Black President. What's your problem?"

Something like, Dear White People had to kind of go around the corner and out the door to make it into a popular culture. That movie was not made in a traditional way, and it just so happened that streaming was opening up for the first time and gave us opportunities to do a series out of that movie, but that was all because we were in unprecedented times, and the traditional models were never going to work for that story.

Right now, you have cinema tools in the hands of just about anybody with a phone. I know that's kind of become a cliché, but I really love TikTok. I mean, all of it. It is like a film school that I never had as a kid. Seeing people actually grapple with these tools and how to tell stories visually with no resources whatsoever except for their own creativity and ingenuity, that actually is what it's all about. I'm so excited to see the new kinds of stories and storytellers that come from people just having more access to these tools.

I don't know what it's necessarily going to look like, but I know that the demand from audiences and that sort of will to create that so many artists have and need to express ourselves is so great. We're going to find other ways to get our stories out there. We always do.

Kousha Navidar: That sounds like a message you might hope folks walk away with from watching these docuseries as well, because it resonates with a lot of what you say in there.

Justin Simien: Absolutely. So many times, like when I'm in a panel or something, or at a Q&A, and it's somebody who is aspiring to be a filmmaker or a storyteller in some capacity, the subtext of the question is almost always like, I'm not good enough as I am and I don't know enough right now. What do I need to learn? Who do I need to talk to? Who do I need to bolster up what I'm trying to do?

My lesson to those folks and to myself all the time and to anyone watching the series is that, like, help is great. You can always learn more, you can always have better resources, but you probably have what you need right now to tell a story or to tell the story that you're trying to tell. It's actually your thinking that this isn't yours, and these processes and making move that stuff doesn't belong to you that you have to sort of get in inside of a club or something in order to get going, and you don't.

I didn't have an agent or a manager when I started making Dear White People. Those things came after that movie came out. I didn't get into any film festivals with that screenplay. I did not get into a lot of special programs. I didn't get those things, but what I needed was the will to make that by hook or by crook. For some reason, the ADHD and the depression and all of it, it just combined to where I was able to like click in and lock in pre-therapy and pre-psychiatry to get that thing made, but that's what it took. It took a will. It took a decision.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. We'll have to put a pin in it there. Justin Simien is the director of a new four-part docuseries, Hollywood Black. It's streaming now on MGM+. You can check out the first two episodes now, and the third part will be released this Sunday, August 25th. Justin, thanks so much for hanging out with us.

Justin Simien: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

 

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