ebogjonson.com

July 07, 1998

HEADLINE: SHAFTED

BYLINE: GARY DAUPHIN

The first clue that you've entered the land of the black formula picture is usually the title. Booty Call, How To Be a Player, I Got the Hook-Up, Phat Beach, and BAPS don't have the punch of Black Godfather, Hell Up in Harlem, or Foxy Brown, but they serve a similar function, signifying that the pictures will feature young black folks and urban spaces, will crack a lot of dirty jokes, and will be accompanied by the so-called slammin' r&b and hip-hop soundtrack. Those pieces of the marketing puzzle are so well laid out that companies like Miramax and New Line have taken to turning out black-oriented comedies with an ease that would make the masters at American International Pictures proud.

The other given about the new type of picture being directed at black audiences (call them post-gangster romances, or maybe bupploitation) though, is that they almost invariably stink. (The exceptions include gems like F. Gary Gray's Friday and Set It Off.) From the dizzying technical ineptitude of a cartoonish ghetto farce like I Got the Hook-Up to the bizarre, almost willful lack of humor of the Jada Pinkett Smith vehicle Woo, to the aggressively crass and genuinely mean-spirited sexual politics of How To Be a Player and A Thin Line Between Love and Hate, these are films with next to nothing to redeem them except the feeling that some black person somewhere got a check, a movieland analog to the ''It's still legal'' defense offered by tobacco lobbyists. Produced cheaply enough that even modest box-office and video afterlife add up to a profit, these pictures make sense for the studios the way teen-sex flicks or low-budget horror films do. But in an industry still slow to support black filmmaking that can't be summed up in a catchy title, BAPs and '90s players sometimes seem to be the only game in town, much the way pimps, ho's, and dealers out to make their last big score ruled certain screens in the '70s.

The bulk of these pictures have been urban romantic comedies, the slapsticky, R-rated sexual misadventures of a new black leisure class. Detailing the trials of folk in love and lust was once a slightly serious or at least glamorous endeavor--from Mahogany to She's Gotta Have It--but today's view of fast and cheap black romance owes more to Porky's with a little of The Mack tossed in for street cred. The unholy love child of male-centered early-'90s gangster flicks and the ''ain't got/can't get a man'' keen of the post--Waiting To Exhale moment, the new bupploitation offers images of a well-earned but contextless middle class.

The central narrative question isn't how black people make a living but what they do with their cell-phone-equipped free time. Progress of a sort, except that players here aren't anywhere near the realistic representatives of the not-so-new black middle class you'll find in films like Love Jones, Hav Plenty, or even more-conventional genre winners like Soul Food. Instead, you find dick-and money-hungry skeezers and obsessive-compulsive cocksmen whose sexual appetites and prowess would put Dolemite to shame, only without the deep-frying grease of the '70s' unique cultural moment. Women get fucked in all the expected ways. We had the aging nutcase whose sanity is being drowned out by the loud ticking of her biological clock in A Thin Line Between Love and Hate, and virgin/whore dichotomies aplenty in Booty Call, where the limp leading good girl is never complete without the superfreaky best friend. And since every pimp needs his ho's, there are the endless, tightly skirted extras that round out every party or club scene: Stripper #2, Gold Digger #5, Freak #6.

Black men of course are the oily superdicks they've always been, but if the new black formula picture offers a new spin to the likes of Superfly's Priest, it's in the appearance of the awkward, big-eyed, but gainfully employed nerd, the sort out of which Tommy Davidson seems to be making a career. These men aren't drug dealers or pimps, but they're another kind of assault, tarred with the same sticky yuk brush that once mired black actors in bumbling stereotypes from Amos and Andy to Steppin' Fetchit.

In the books of the white-owned and -run companies that develop and/or distribute these pictures, the numbers tell a curious story. Since white audiences tend not to cross over and buy tickets to black films, $20-30 million is the most that film executives expect from these comedies. That number suggests to Hollywood that spending the time and money to do a black picture right, the way, for example, even the most ridiculously familiar $60 million action flick is handled, just doesn't make financial sense. Unfortunately, the new $1-$2 million blaxploitation flicks have reinforced that logic. Except for wholesale failures like Phat Beach or BAPS, pictures like Thin Line ($34 million cumulative box office for New Line), Booty Call ($23 million for Sony), and Hook-Up ($10 million and climbing for Miramax's Dimension Films) exist in a double comfort zone for white-run studios and distributors, offering steady, dual-stream box-office and soundtrack returns on little financial or creative risk.

Paul Hall, producer of John Singleton's Higher Learning and the upcoming Frankie Lymon biopic Why Do Fools Fall in Love?, sees these films as just the tale of the box-office tape. ''Hollywood's a business,'' he says, ''and studios are making certain types of movies for young, urban audiences the way they make action films for a particular demographic.'' Hall isn't interested in remaking any pimp movies, but he doesn't think that we're entering a new '70s-style era. ''I don't agree with labeling films 'exploitation' or 'blaxploitation' just because the audience is young and black. The people who are making these films are part of the industry in ways that African Americans working during the '70s weren't."

Bridget D. Davis, who oversees the development and acquisition of films at Babyface's Edmonds Entertainment (producers of Soul Food and Hav Plenty), also sees the current trend toward low-budget comedies in a business context. ''We've been very careful in choosing what we put out there. But there isn't a conspiracy. This industry is in constant flux, and what works today will not work tomorrow.''

Even a legendary polemicist like Spike Lee says he's ''not against black people making a living,'' so the question boils down to the more abstract problem of values, how people work and how that work reflects their ideas about how the world is and how it could be. For Christopher Cherot, whose Hav Plenty mines its humor from the contradictions of black success and prosperity, values are the key to making good black movies. ''I just want to tell stories,'' says Cherot, ''but a lot of people are dishonest about why they want to be in this business. I know plenty of guys who either want to make films so they can hang out with Halle Berry or who want to make films to save the race. You're going to make bad movies if you worry too much about either.''

Quality aside, everyone knows which way the numbers are pointing, especially filmmakers trying to make that first film. Says Kay Shaw, an African American producer and distributor who's worked on indies like Daughters of the Dust and The Keeper, ''Things remind me of the period soon after Boyz in the Hood, when younger filmmakers were bringing me gang picture after gang picture. Now they all want to do romantic comedies, Booty this and Player that. The younger filmmakers often think, 'If I can just get my foot in the door, I'll be able to make the kind of films I really care about later.' The problem is that there very often isn't a later.''