TheLoop21.com

By: Michael E. Ross (Add to your loop)
Tue, 04/07/2009 - 00:00

Dev Patel and Freida Pinto star in "Slumdog Millionaire." Photo Credit: Ishika Mohan

It may be the pop cultural equivalent of the chicken and egg debate: Does Hollywood set trends, or is it only a follower? Are movies a cultural forecast or a “breaking news” report of what’s already happened?

The movie awards season that recently ended witnessed a continuation of the international dimension that the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards have been a party to for years. The multiple wins for Slumdog Millionaire, for all practical purposes a joint venture of Hollywood and the Bollywood combine of India, sent the signal that American tastes for the movies are more accommodating than we previously thought.

But the success of Slumdog and the Oscar winners from around the world raises some questions. What will Hollywood’s next focus be? Will the motion-picture industry choose to make better use of an increasingly savvy, ethnically diverse independent film culture right here in the United States?

The tale of Tyler Perry’s Madea franchise is a case in point. Perry’s first Madea film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), made about $5 million (maybe what a big-budget picture would spend for catering) and went on to gross more than $50 million in ticket sales, much of it at U.S. theaters catering to black audiences.

Fast forward four years. Perry’s latest, Madea Goes to Jail, led the movie box office for the weekend of Feb. 22 with $41 million, Perry’s biggest opening yet. It followed on the success of Madea’s Family Reunion (2006), which went on to gross more than $60 million.

The distributor for Tyler Perry Studios films, Lionsgate, had the foresight to see a success before it was a success. What’s curious is why such films and studios are still the exception that proves the rule.

Example: The recent film Medicine for Melancholy, by first-time director Barry Jenkins, is a love story. It's about two black San Franciscans coping with emotional turmoil, identity issues and their own status as minorities in a gentrifying city whose black population is the smallest of any major American metropolis. The film, despite rave reviews and strong buzz from the major film festivals, was never picked up by a major studio.

The results are what you might expect. According to boxofficemojo.com, the film’s domestic box-office receipts through March 19 — after seven weeks in release — are $86,931. It’s now playing in all of four lonely U.S. theaters somewhere near you.

Such dismal returns wouldn’t have happened had Medicine been released with the clout and visibility of a major studio.

A studio like IFC Films, which is distributing Medicine, may well have been Jenkins’ preference. Smaller studios, many of them entrepreneurial both by nature and necessity, can give those films that break with Hollywood formula more attention than major studios. They can then spend more time on the film’s creative dimension than on focus groups and marketing.

But that’s the issue. The rise of Slumdog and other outsider films illustrate how major Hollywood studios need to recognize the potential and the proven impact of black and minority films and filmmakers. They need to think outside the box of test-marketing and predictive behavior — to lead instead of follow.

The current state of the economy would seem to make it a natural thing for notoriously risk-averse Hollywood to gravitate to smaller-budget projects like Medicine for Melancholy and other independent work by blacks and minorities. Such action would give these films a place alongside those released by Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage — maverick indie-mined units of major studios. Not only would Hollywood mine from a bevy of under-examined movie talent; they’d do it in a dramatically cost-effective way, especially compared with the big-budget blockbusters that have to do monster business worldwide just to break even.

Lionsgate had the vision to pick up on Tyler Perry years ago; Both are reaping the dividends of that vision. When will Hollywood make a similar vote of confidence in a tyro like Barry Jenkins? Or Julie Dash, whose Daughters of the Dust is in the National Film Registry, joining a handful of motion pictures defined by the Library of Congress as national treasures? Where’s the studio money for the new, vividly multiracial film Explicit Ills, which studies interconnected lives in modern-day Philadelphia and takes a big-picture look at how inequality crosses racial lines in today’s economy?

Where was the big studio push for Darnell Martin’s acclaimed Cadillac Records, which last year opened and closed nationally in just 35 days? Why did director Gina Prince-Bythewood have to go eight years between making Love and Basketball and releasing The Secret Life of Bees last year?

And where’s Hollywood’s commitment to diversifying the human infrastructure of the industry, employing more black and minority writers, actors and movie professionals — and reaching out to those talented outsiders who’d like to break in?

It’s not enough to pay lip service to motion picture diversity. It’s all about what sells, but it’s hard to sell a movie if there’s no support from Hollywood to even make it. And you can’t sell a movie if there’s no confidence from Hollywood to put it in theaters where people can find it, once it’s released.

Hollywood’s guiding economic principle is Whatever Puts Butts in Theater Seats. It’s time for the industry to discover — again — that, unlike movie studio execs, theater seats don’t discriminate.

Popcorn is an equal opportunity enjoyment.

Michael E. Ross, a frequent contributor to TheLoop21.com, is a West Coast journalist who blogs frequently on politics, pop culture and race matters at Culchavox. He also writes for The Root and PopMatters.

Are black problems different from American problems?

Yes, very much so

Maybe, but most are similar

No, they're the same

I'm not sure