The Hollywood Jim Crow. Maryann Erigha
characters and to increase the behind-the-camera presence of Black creative talent on mainstream films. African Americans also participated in letter-writing campaigns, picket lines, protests, and boycotts to advocate for film-industry jobs on-screen and behind the camera. This activism during the civil rights era orchestrated the entry of Black directors into Hollywood in the post-civil-rights era.
Since the end of the civil rights era, African Americans have gained increased access to directing films at Hollywood studios. With Gordon Parks Sr.’s film adaptation of his novel The Learning Tree, he became the first African American to direct a Hollywood film, for Warner Brothers, in 1969. Yet amid the 1960s era of social-problem films, on-screen fictional advancement far outpaced behind-the-camera working conditions for racial minorities. During the 1970s Blaxploitation era, Melvin Van Peebles directed The Watermelon Man (1970) for Columbia, Gordon Parks Jr. directed Superfly (1972) for Warner Brothers, Ivan Dixon directed Trouble Man (1972) for 20th Century Fox, and Michael Schultz directed Car Wash (1976) for Universal Pictures—to name a few who pioneered entry into Hollywood.
Whereas before the 1960s, there were no Black directors in Hollywood, by the 1980s, African Americans accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of film directors, according to Directors Guild of America membership. Subsequently, the 1980s and 1990s brought about what the film scholar Ed Guerrero calls the “Black Film Boom”—a spike in directing, with Hollywood studios optioning independent works of Black filmmakers for commercial release.40 This group of commercial independent trailblazers included Spike Lee, the writer/director of the 1986 romantic comedy She’s Gotta Have It, about a woman and her three lovers; Robert Townsend, the writer/director of the 1987 satirical comedy Hollywood Shuffle, about stereotyped roles for Black folks in show business; and John Singleton, the writer/director of Boyz N the Hood (1991), about the lives of three young men in South Central Los Angeles.
Black women also gained access to Hollywood film directing, beginning with the Haitian-born Euzhan Palcy, who directed A Dry White Season (1989) for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). Years later, the Miramax film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1993), a coming-of-age story about an adolescent girl in Brooklyn, became the first mainstream film released to theaters that was written and directed by an American-born Black woman, Leslie Harris. In 1994, Darnell Martin’s I Like It like That, for Columbia, became the first Black-female-directed film distributed by a major Hollywood studio. Martin’s entrée into directing was followed by that of other Black female directors. In 1997, for example, Kasi Lemmons wrote and directed Eve’s Bayou, a period drama that followed a mystical Louisiana family during the 1960s. Three years later, Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote and directed the popular sports romance Love and Basketball (2000). By the 2000s, the percentage of Black directors had nearly tripled to between 6 and 8 percent and also included a number of female directors.41 In just a few short decades, Hollywood became more inclusive of Black directors. The pendulum of Hollywood film directing swung from complete exclusion to growing inclusion.
Still, directors and audiences witness an unsteady number of Black movies in theaters. Tyler Perry, known for his Madea comedies and dramas, describes this pattern as waves of Black movies that come and go: “Hollywood always has a wave, and in these waves comes films about people of color. It’s just a wave that happens and once it crests, it goes away. Back in the nineties there were lots of movies about African American people, then I come along for many years and it’s only me out there.”42 Over the years, there has hardly been a strong, uninterrupted output of Black-directed movies in theaters. Rather, there are ebbs and flows, highs and lulls. The media researcher Stacy Smith and colleagues report no meaningful change in the percentage of Black directors of top-grossing films between 2007 and 2013. In fact, only 6.5 percent of the one hundred top-grossing films in 2013 had Black directors: Malcolm D. Lee’s Scary Movie 5 and Best Man Holiday, Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas and Temptation, McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Lee Daniels’s The Butler, and Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen.43
Beyond the sheer inconsistency in the presence of Black directors behind the camera of Hollywood motion pictures, these trends also reflect that when the film industry as a whole takes a hit and the total film output for all studios decreases, racial minorities receive the hardest blows and suffer the most in lack of employment. This harsh reality is consistent with other studies that report that Blacks are the first to be fired from companies when business subsides.44 At any rate, their level of representation throughout the history of Hollywood remains below their 13 percent share of the general U.S. population.
Despite an overall promising increase in African American participation in film directing over the past decades, the problem of racial inequality in the film industry remains a constant fixture in contemporary public discourse and among scholars of film, media, communications, sociology, and economics. Film professionals, content creators, activist groups, critics, and audiences also sense problems amid progress. Accusations of racial inequality and discriminatory treatment still remain prominent, and the subject of racial representation has not departed from the minds and platforms of activists seeking a Hollywood reformation. With no palpable movement toward reaching parity for African Americans in recent years, the industry’s racial disparities impede progress to achieving full equality in cinematic production. However, improving numbers alone cannot alleviate Hollywood’s extensive race problem. The missing piece is taking sustained and persistent action to diversify critical positions of power.
More than Mere Numbers
Though the directing profession still remains largely and disproportionately white, those who believe Hollywood is alleviating its racial woes point to the numerical and symbolic progress as evidence of a commitment to promises made in the spirit of the familiar civil rights rhetoric—that slowly but surely, in the words of the soul singer Sam Cooke, “change gon’ come,” eventually. To a great extent, the vision of change that has been articulated is a change of numbers or demography. The sociologist Herman Gray reports that demography became an essential point of reference following the push for representational parity in media industries. To assess representation and monitor its effectiveness, the salient benchmark became literally counting the number of workers in jobs.45 Scholars and industry professionals turned their focus to the issue of employment and unemployment, to the question of how many workers occupied each space. The central site for contestation and regulation naturally became a numbers game.
Even while representation in the film industry matters a great deal for directors, the interpretation of behind-the-camera representation has focused almost exclusively on a single dimension—numerical representation—and ignored other ways of conceptualizing representation. Calculating numerical representation, studies have assessed the level of inequality or equality primarily on the basis of the percentages of people present or absent. On these terms, the key measure of progress in Hollywood directing is the addition of more directors from underrepresented racial groups behind the camera, while the key obstruction to integration becomes the problem of underrepresentation.
Framing the debate about inclusion into Hollywood solely in binary terms of representation (presence) and underrepresentation (insufficient presence or absence) raises problems. If the primary issue is underrepresentation, then the singular resolution to racial inequality is increased representation. By this standard, true integration would be realized when African Americans and other underrepresented racial groups have reached parity with regard to their proportional representation in the U.S. population. In other words, once the proportion of Black directors of Hollywood movies reaches 13 percent, all inequality would be overcome. However, it is problematic to make a leap to equality from mere parity in numerical representation. Framing the debate as an either/or issue—either presence and inclusion or underrepresentation and exclusion—elides the key problem at hand. Many scholars and observers would agree that demography is a necessary but insufficient factor for adequate representation in cinematic production.
Indeed, Gray problematizes the idea of using diversity as a proxy for inequality. Namely, diversity is a sociocultural goal, while inequality speaks to a multitude of components: a specific history of exclusion, the vicissitudes of protest and unrest, and an ultimate mission of gaining access and equality. The sole reliance on demographic representation and the quest for greater diversity holds dear the assumption that becoming more diverse—achieving social parity via increasing numbers—would alleviate inequality in the film industry,