Heading Mainstream

It started in 1995 with the film version of Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale,” starring Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett, a surprise hit that has spawned a small but consistently popular genre of films that have everything to do with being African American and nothing to do with race relations.

Aimed squarely at an African American middle-class audience, recent comedy-dramas such as “The Best Man,” “Soul Food,” “The Wood” and the documentary performance film “The Original Kings of Comedy” were all modestly budgeted and successful at the box office, testifying to a hunger among African Americans for seeing themselves portrayed on screen in something other than tense racial dramas or knockabout farces.

The latest addition to this canon is “Kingdom Come,” starring Whoopi Goldberg, LL Cool J, Jada Pinkett Smith and Vivica A. Fox, a comedic take on a dysfunctional family coping with the death of one of its members. Fox Searchlight Pictures is hoping “Kingdom Come,” made for a modest $7 million, catches on with the same audience that turned “Soul Food” into a moderate crossover success.

Though these films have arrived infrequently, “Kingdom Come,” which opened Wednesday, is being released just on the heels of the recent comedy-drama “The Brothers,” which grossed $10 million in its debut weekend and has grossed more than $23 million in three weeks.

If “Kingdom Come” follows that trajectory--or does better--it will be hard for Hollywood to explain why it continues to under-serve this segment of the moviegoing audience.

It should already have happened, complains Doug McHenry, who directed “Kingdom Come” and was executive producer on “The Brothers.”

“There are still only a handful of movies released every year featuring African American casts,” says McHenry, “despite the fact that it’s statistically proven we go to the movies in greater proportion than whites. If we’re 12% of the population, then of the 500 to 600 movies that are made every year (including television movies), there should be about 60 featuring primarily African Americans.”

Instead, there are fewer than half a dozen, not counting star vehicles (Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Denzel Washington) or studio films featuring one or two African Americans. Most of those movies have nothing to do with life from the perspective of African Americans or, if they do, they’re about racism (usually set safely in the past, such as “Remember the Titans,” “Men of Honor,” “The Hurricane”) or life in the inner city (“Finding Forrester,” the upcoming John Singleton drama “Baby Boy”).

It’s not that those movies shouldn’t be made, argues Todd Boyd, a professor at USC’s school of cinema and television and author of the film study “Am I Black Enough for You?” It’s just that there should be more diversity in subject matter.

Several years ago, with the popularity of such urban dramas as “New Jack City,” “Menace to Society” and “Boyz ‘N the Hood” and for the first time since the “blaxploitation” films of the ‘70s, there seemed to be a handful of commercially viable African American films, though they were largely restricted to dramas and comedies about street-savvy inner-city youth. But, until “Waiting to Exhale,” that’s all Hollywood made, says Boyd.

“They continue to regard us as monolithic. We only get one kind of movie at a time. And they arrive so sporadically that [the audience] is practically starving for them.”

The audience is decidedly there and accessible, according to Valerie Van Galder, executive vice president of marketing for Screen Gems, which released “The Brothers.”

Though it grossed a little less than “Heartbreakers” its opening weekend, on a per-screen basis “The Brothers” actually performed far better because it was playing in only half as many theaters (about 1,380).

‘The Brothers’ Got

an Early Buzz

Through a targeted and highly effective grass-roots marketing campaign, says Van Galder, “The Brothers” was highly visible in the African American community as early as last Christmas, when the first trailers hit theaters, even if it was consistently under the radar of the mainstream media, which gave only cursory attention to the film’s four principals, each of whom has a strong following among African Americans.

D.L. Hughley and Bill Bellamy are prominent stand-up comics, both of whom promoted the film during their live engagements around the country. In addition to starring in “The Best Man,” Morris Chestnut had also appeared in John Singleton’s “Boyz ‘N the Hood,” and Shemar Moore is a regular on the popular soap opera “The Young and the Restless.”

Long before the bulk of its advertising was aired on television, awareness of “The Brothers” was high as early as a month before it opened. Exit surveys at theaters opening weekend (March 23-25) confirmed the high level of anticipation and attested to an equally positive satisfaction level. “About 80% of the people we polled said they would pay to see it again,” Van Galder says.

“Kingdom Come” has a somewhat higher profile because it features more widely known performers--Goldberg, LL Cool J, Pinkett Smith--who have made the rounds of all the major talk shows to promote the movie.

The potential for crossover attention is there, says Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight, because, unlike most of the other African American titles, it is rated PG and is, at heart, a comedy.

“If you can believe the tracking surveys, there is a wide awareness for the movie,” says Rice, explaining that some African American films have been restricted by R ratings and a lack of big stars.

In addition to the dearth of attention in the mainstream media to African American personalities, says director McHenry, critics have been negligent in bringing these ensemble films to the attention of the public.

“Critics don’t take these films seriously or single out standout performances by African American actors unless they’re appearing in white films.”

The success of “Kingdom Come” so soon after “The Brothers” would strengthen the argument that African American films have break-out potential. McHenry, who has been a producer for several years, says the motion picture industry is lagging behind the rest of the entertainment industry in tapping the drawing power of the middle-class African American audience.

One explanation is the lack of African Americans in power in the film industry. Other areas of entertainment--music, theater, television--have the same problem but still manage to promote African American projects.

“When you look at the rest of popular culture, how diverse it is, it’s obvious that the movie business has a long way to catch up,” says Rice.

Since the 1960s, the music industry has capitalized on both the African American and mainstream audience in promoting everything from jazz to rhythm and blues to rap. Pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime (McHenry is directing a biography of former New York politician Adam Clayton Powell for Showtime) regularly turn out movies and even series (Showtime’s “Soul Food”) for the mass audience.

“Even advertisers are regularly targeting African Americans,” says McHenry, “though it’s often on network programs that are completely segregated.”

One persistent perception in the film industry (as well as in network television) is that African American subjects don’t travel beyond the core audience.

“So these movies have to be made for a price (mostly $12 million and under),” says Malcolm Lee, who directed the $9-million “The Best Man” and is at work on the comedy “Undercover Brother” for producer Brian Grazer. That restricts the range and variety of subject matter.

Instead of interpreting the success of “The Best Man” as an indication of a large untapped audience, he says, the studio executives concluded that African Americans want to see “relationship comedies, four guys or four women, dealing with romance and commitment. But there are so many other stories to tell, some serious, some funny.”

Budget restrictions are also imposed, says Lee, because African American movies are not thought to have overseas appeal (unless they feature a prominent star like Murphy or Washington). The music industry long ago shattered that misconception.

But with movies, that argument, says McHenry, becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. African American films are largely niche-marketed to the core audience and largely booked in theaters close to African American neighborhoods, rarely venturing outside those areas. “You would never say that a film like ‘Chocolat’ only appeals to white audiences,” says USC’s Boyd, “but when we talk about a film like ‘The Wood’ [which Boyd co-wrote], it’s as though they’re saying, ‘Oh, that film is not for a white audience.’ ”

‘American Society

Is Still Racist’

The film industry isn’t entirely to blame, these critics concede. “I think what it comes down to is that American society is still racist, even if it’s in a more invisible way,” Boyd says. “I honestly think some people are uncomfortable going into a theater where the majority of the audience is African American.”

But as has been proved with so-called upscale movies--everything from “The Piano” to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”--it’s up to the industry to market the films to a broader audience. It was not until companies like Miramax and New Line began a concerted effort to broaden the marketing and distribution of what had been considered strictly urban art-house fare that these films started to connect with mainstream audiences. That a subtitled Mandarin Chinese martial arts film--Sony Pictures Classics’ “Crouching Tiger”--could gross $120 million means that traditional barriers have started to fall.

McHenry points to Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” as an example of the potential upside of African American themed films. Although the stars of the movie (Goldberg, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey) were, at the time, not household names, because it was made by a major studio (Warner Bros.) and directed by Spielberg, the film based on Alice Walker’s best-selling book was widely marketed and distributed like any other Hollywood movie and grossed almost $100 million. “It proved that if you handle a film that way, all audiences will go to see it,” says McHenry.

The requirement for building that broad an audience, these filmmakers say, is simply more movies about African Americans.

“There’s too much of a lag between these movies,” Lee complains.

But that could be changing. Screen Gems has already scheduled another African-American romantic comedy, “How to Make Your Man Behave,” with Chestnut and Fox, for September release. And, according to Rice, almost a third of Fox Searchlight’s upcoming development slate deals with African American subjects, including two original screenplays by novelist Walter Mosley (“Devil in a Blue Dress”), a love story called “Brown Sugar” and an African American remake of “Nine to Five” being developed by Pinkett Smith and her husband, actor Will Smith.

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At the Box Office

* “Waiting to Exhale,” $67 million

* “Soul Food,” $43.5 million

* “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” $38 million

* “The Best Man,” $34 million

* “The Original Kings of Comedy,” $38 million

* “Love Jones,” $12.5 million

* “Love and Basketball,” $27.4 million

* “The Brother,” $23 million