"They Set Us Up To Fail" Black Directors of the 90s Speak Out

July 12, 2019 10:49 AM

If I had a penny for every time I was blacklisted and somebody told me, “You will never work again,” I’d be super, super wealthy. 'The thing they kept saying to me was, “Aren’t you grateful? How come you’re not grateful?” I’m like, “Do you ask your white filmmakers that? I wrote this film, and there was a bidding war, and I gave it to you, and you keep telling me I need to be grateful?”'
posted by xingcat (3 comments total)

I thought this was a great conversation, and a dash of cold water on my sense that "from now on, things will be different!"

I'm sure they thought that in the early 70s, as well as the 90s....
posted by allthinky at 11:09 AM on July 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

I saw Julie Dash present a restored version of Daughters of the Dust last year and after seeing that amazing and unique film, was astounded to find out how little work she's been given in the thirty years since that film.
posted by octothorpe at 12:16 PM on July 12, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm damn near as white as you can get (my Ancestry DNA results had me at 87% English, 14% west coast of France & 11% northern Scandanavian) and I am so utterly bored with white cinema and TV. It's the same stuff over and over, and it's getting so insular even I have difficulty identifying with it. We need different writers and producers to tell different stories. Every time a white director gets another chance to make the same old crap it's a loss to the industry.
posted by krisjohn at 5:03 PM on July 12, 2019 [6 favorites]