Overview of the Book
Central to understanding the Hollywood Jim Crow is discovering how film-industry workers create, reinforce, and reproduce racial patterns of difference over time. Undertaking an institutional analysis of race in the film industry, this book examines the plight of Black directors and their movies, highlighting the places that Black movies and directors occupy in Hollywood cinema and how other racial groups are treated in relation to their plight. The chapters that follow examine the quotidian practices and effects of racial inequality in the film industry, rituals that confine the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities.
Chapter 1 outlines various facets of representation—symbolic, numeric, civic, and hierarchical—that are important in cultural and cinematic production. Cinematic images are disseminated globally, carrying symbols of progress that hold value for underrepresented groups. Numeric representation embodies the quest for increased proportional representation via employment opportunities for workers from racially marginalized groups. Civic representation demands cultural citizenship and belonging in a nation’s popular cultural artifacts. This chapter also gives an overview of Black directors’ representation in Hollywood and considers concerns beyond numeric, civic, and symbolic representation. Racial hierarchies in cinema dictate what kinds of movies directors take on and where their career paths lead. Looking at hierarchies of representation provides a useful metric for grasping how racial divisions characterize labor in Hollywood and what steps can be taken toward achieving racial equality.
The next chapters detail the repressive institutional race politics that structures directors’ work in Hollywood. Each chapter is devoted to unfolding the multiple layers of the Hollywood Jim Crow: assumption of racial difference, marginalization, segregation, and stigmatization. The chapters disentangle (1) how Hollywood insiders create and rationalize racial inequality using cultural and economic frames, (2) how racial hierarchy penetrates the careers of directors and the production of movies, and (3) how racial inequality shapes the identity, self-presentation, and character of group progress.
Chapter 2 illustrates how Hollywood executives and insiders label Black films and directors unbankable at the box office, suggesting risk and uncertainty around their potential for profit, especially at the foreign box office. Ironically, the assumption that “Black is unbankable” goes against the conventional logic of creative industries that “all hits are flukes” and that “nobody knows” what creative products will succeed or fail.21 Armed with the “unbankable” mythology, Hollywood decision-makers devalue Black films and directors, for example, by attaching smaller budgets to Black-cast movies and attaching larger budgets to racially mixed and white-cast movies. Although films overperform and challenge the “unbankable” myth, perceptions that Black directors and films are unbankable trap them into limited trajectories. Overall, African Americans are employed and contained on the basis of this pretext of limitations on Black movies and directors.
Chapters 3 and 4 further highlight institutional efforts to disadvantage Black directors, through marginalization and segregation. Chapter 3 illustrates the ghettoization of Black directors outside of big-budget and major-studio distribution. Movies in these areas generally have white stories, ideologies, casts, actors, and directors.22 Some directors, such as Tyler Perry, do manage to find success directing a number of films. Still, they are usually limited to small or medium budgets due to their tendency to direct Black-cast films, which are undervalued in Hollywood. Even when directors such as Tim Story and Antoine Fuqua direct films with white or racially mixed casts, they still encounter racial ceilings, never approaching the level of whites’ inclusion. In contrast, studio executives give white directors the leeway to leap from small-budget projects to big-budget projects (or even to receive big budgets at the onset of their careers in cinema). However, this same leap of faith is rarely, if ever, granted to Black directors, due to their ghettoization in Hollywood. Moreover, white directors experience the privilege of bigger budgets when directing Black-cast movies compared to the budgets that Black directors of Black-cast movies receive. What is more, the fact that Black-directed movies typically get little to no distribution in foreign markets further exacerbates their marginality in the film industry.
Besides existing disparities between opportunities and resources for Black and white directors, gender also shapes women’s and men’s experiences in different ways. In the eyes of Hollywood decision-makers, race and gender doubly impact Black women’s perceived capabilities. Their representation is limited to only a sporadic presence behind the camera. The career trajectories of the few who have found some modicum of success give voice to the understudied population of Black women who work on major studio productions and to the constraints that hinder their advancement.
Segregation in genres, as discussed in chapter 4, is yet another factor that contributes to incomplete integration and distance from the inner circles of Hollywood. For Black directors, integration happens only in some areas of work and not others. In contemporary Hollywood films, Black directors are overrepresented in the music genre. Meanwhile, the music genre locates Black directors in literal and figurative genre ghettos. Many music-genre films are situated in urban ghettos and center on themes about violence, poverty, and drugs. Music-genre films also record the smallest average production budgets compared to other genres such as sci-fi, action, and comedy. Black directors are sparsely included in financially lucrative areas of directing, for instance, on sci-fi movies or on tent-pole franchise films—movies that are of substantial importance to the operation of the film industry and to the career success of individual directors. Even when African Americans have similar qualifications to or in some cases more experience than white directors, they rarely direct these commercially lucrative motion pictures. When they do direct franchise movies, they more often are hired on less popular films with comparatively small budgets. Distance from high-status positions that are central to Hollywood film production ultimately undermines the commercial success of Black directors and their movies. Underrepresentation on tent-pole franchise movies prevents them from achieving a level of commercial success that would make it difficult for studio executives to refuse their demands for more financial resources to create popular cinema.
Chapter 5 considers how the Hollywood Jim Crow shapes the presence of Blackness in popular cinema. To a large extent, the act of labeling Black unbankable resembles the attempt to paint a picture of a “Negro Problem,” which the pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois detailed in his early writings. Hollywood insiders conjure up a stigma around Blackness and suggest that Blackness in movies is in need of reform. Reacting to the “unbankable” judgment, some directors face pressures to transcend race and to neutralize Blackness in their movies or in conversations about their movies. To avoid the negative consequences that result when studio executives label a movie as a “Black film,” they implement multiple strategies: attracting crossover stars, adding white characters to casts, featuring multiracial casts and postracial themes, or referring to films as “universal.” Directors endeavoring to integrate into Hollywood encounter unique obstacles. Testimonies from directors reveal that as they plunge deeper into the core of Hollywood—making films with big budgets at major studios—they are increasingly discouraged from making films with Black casts or themes. Hence, the typical Black Hollywood director’s oeuvre