BET Exec Plans 1st Black-Owned Movie Studio

Robert Johnson, owner and founder of the Black Entertainment Television cable network, said Friday that he expects to launch the nation’s first African American-owned movie studio by the end of the year.

Johnson, whose BET Holdings is one of the most successful black-owned enterprises in the country, plans to produce black-themed movies for release in theaters as well as made-for-TV films for his cable network.

Initially, the studio will aim to produce at least three low-budget theatrical movies per year, with the first reaching the public in 2000, and 10 television films annually starting in 1999, Johnson said in an interview. The studio will start with a capital investment of $100 million, he said.

“This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the 52-year-old Washington entrepreneur said, speaking by phone from an annual retreat of business leaders in Sun Valley, Idaho, hosted by Wall Street investor Herbert Allen. “I’m convinced the talent is out there to do it, both behind and in front of the camera. We can find good, passionate scripts, and I’m convinced we can make them.”

While Hollywood’s black community praised the initiative as a step in the right direction, Johnson’s modest financial commitment could limit the impact of his second attempt to create a studio. The feature films will have small budgets of about $3 million each, with similar budgets for marketing and advertising, and the television movies will have even more modest budgets.

At those budgets, Johnson would have difficulty competing for talent against the major studios, which spend more than $75 million, on average, per film release. While Johnson said the films will be released in high-volume urban multiplexes, some sources speculated that he is mainly interested in feeding his cable channel.

Johnson’s proposed BET Studios would be minuscule compared with the 1995 launch of DreamWorks SKG, with $2.7 billion in capital, by industry titans Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. But symbolically it is of great significance, representing a key step toward financial and creative independence for the growing and increasingly affluent African American entertainment community.

A black-owned studio would fulfill a long-held dream of African American producers, directors and actors, who have frequently complained that the white-dominated studio system does not understand their cultural context or the demands of their audience.

Johnson’s is not the only effort underway. At least one other venture is being considered by some of Hollywood’s major black players, according to Stephen Barnes, an entertainment lawyer whose clients include Chris Rock, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Keenen Ivory Wayans. That project, which he said is being studied by investors, would be more “akin to a black DreamWorks.”

Barnes said a firm announcement on the second project is still months away.