Justin Simien is out to show Black creativity has always been integral to Hollywood's success
Director, writer and producer Justin Simien, who a decade ago crashed through the Hollywood gates with his Sundance-winning film “Dear White People,” doesn’t approach his four-part MGM+ documentary series, “Hollywood Black,” from the perspective of Hollywood letting Black talent in. Instead, he emphasizes how Black talent or at least the concept of Blackness has been a part of Hollywood from day one.
“From its very beginnings, Hollywood has been fascinated with Blackness,” Simien says in the first episode. “Not only are we the first subjects in early motion pictures, but we are also the subject of the first blockbusters, early animation and, of course, the first talkie.”
The Houston native, who takes his cues from iconic Black Hollywood historian Donald Bogle’s 2019 book of the same name, told NBC News that the series is personally meaningful — it is what he, himself, needed.
“So many times in my career, I reached for a documentary about our experience in film, and there just wasn’t one there,” he said. “And sometime around 2020, I was having a dark night of the soul moment in Hollywood. I was successful on the outside. I sold my second feature. I was in the third season of my show based on my first feature. And it just hurt. It just hurt every day to do what I love, and I didn’t understand why it was difficult in ways that were hard to articulate,” said Simien, who recently directed the feature film “The Haunted Mansion.”
The director said he first turned to Bogle’s other seminal work, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks,” a book he had read in high school.“But it hit different,” he said, “and I realized that the focus was more on the actors in that book, what they were going through, and it just felt like my present-day experience. I could see how my experience was a continuum.”
Curating a collection of films for the Criterion Channel, which spotlights classic and contemporary movies from around the world, during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests also helped spur him to action.
“I just started to get angry about the filmmakers that I had never really heard of before. I had heard the name Oscar Micheaux, but we never sat down and watched one of his movies in film school. It was never really explained to me how the reaction to ‘Birth of a Nation’ is actually what began the independent film movement as we understand it. And that independent film movement was Black,” he said.
“Birth of a Nation,” the epic 1915 film about the Civil War and Reconstruction, glorifies white supremacy and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan over the course of three hours. Micheaux’s rediscovered counter, the 1920 drama “Within Our Gates,” depicts contemporary Black people emerging from slavery, striving to uplift their race as they navigate racial segregation and violence.
Getting “Hollywood Black” made wasn’t easy, but actor and producer Forest Whitaker and his Significant Productions stepped in and got it on MGM+, which is also home to Whitaker’s acclaimed series “Godfather of Harlem” and his latest drama, “Emperor of Ocean Park.”
In “Hollywood Black,” Simien, engages in conversation with some representatives of Black Hollywood: directors Ryan Coogler and Gina Prince-Bythewood; actors LaKeith Stanfield and Gabrielle Union; showrunners Issa Rae and Lena Waithe; Lena Horne’s granddaughter Jenny Lumet, Whitaker himself, among others.
Simien even introduces some of them to films he’s discovered, like William Greaves’ experimental 1968 film “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” and vaudeville star Bert Williams’ 1913 film “Lime Kiln Field Day,” in which he appears in blackface, something common at the time, even for Black performers.
The series features the range of work from Black filmmakers today, from major blockbusters like Coogler’s “Black Panther” to Ava Duvernay’s poignant historical film “Selma” and Barry Jenkins’ 2008 indie debut, “Medicine for Melancholy.” The series dives into older titles such as Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” and the work of individual auteurs as Spike Lee and John Singleton, while also discussing the impact of stars such as Richard Pryor, Dorothy Dandridge and Pam Grier. Film experts, including Bogle himself and Black Film Archive creator and curator Maya Cade weigh in, too. There’s a surprising re-evaluation of Tyler Perry, whom Simien criticized heavily in both iterations of “Dear White People,” with producer Stephanie Allain and film critic Elvis Mitchell reflecting on when they first saw his work.
The broader connections between the past and present are seemingly endless. There’s the link between “Lemonade” and “Formation” by Beyoncé and Julie Dash’s classic 1991 film “Daughters of the Dust”; the similarities between Hollywood’s embrace of 1970’s Blaxploitation and 1990s’ “Hood Film” eras. The industry’s repeated co-optation and abandonment of Black-cast films and their creators is also explored.
And the incorporation of Black queer filmmakers and cinema in the overall series goes beyond checking the Black LGBTQ box for brownie points.
“I wish we could have done even more,” Simien said. “But obviously, as a queer filmmaker, it was super important for me to include Marlon Riggs (“Tongues Untied”; “Black Is…Black Ain’t”), Cheryl Dunye (“Watermelon Woman”) and Patrik-Ian Polk (“Punks,” “Noah’s Arc”), a few others, and myself.”
Simien said he knows the series could have been twice as long, given the richness of Black film history, but he credits the series’ showrunner Shayla Harris’s direction (“The Trials of Muhammad Ali,”) for guiding “Hollywood Black” through his own lens.
“I think centering it around my point of view says, ‘OK, this is a piece of it, but there are so many more pieces to hopefully come together in this creative story. It’s going to take a lot of point of views on this,’” he said.
“Hollywood Black” airs Sundays on MGM+ through September 1.
For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
