The Revenge of the Angry Black Artist

Years ago, when I was a Disney Screenwriting Fellow (a program that evolved out of the need for Disney never again to be dead last in employing women and writers of color, probably more out of corporate embarrassment than enlightened self interest), I had the thankless task, they didn't even own the rights, of adapting Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

From where I'm from, you need to know when a game is getting run on you. Disney, though it seems pretty naive of me at the time to have been surprised, was white as toast, and I sensed from day one that all things being equal, I was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong side of town.

I lowered expectations, prepared myself for disappointment by not really trying. The kind of behavior any son of the inner city should be familiar with: If people think you're a fuck up from the git go, might as well be one than make a Herculean effort to prove them otherwise. Take Barack Obama for example, an exemplar of reconciliation while having to prove his blackness to black people and being pleasantly biracial to wildly receptive white people.

This issue of blacker than thou is interesting and annoying; suddenly we have a reverse brown-paper-bag test that would advantage Clarence Thomas as he engages in moanin' and wailin' about liberals and light skinned(ed) black people with all the authenticity of a Stepin Fetchit. Black folks have always had this broad tent of blackness: if nothing else, however tangentially you might be of color, still there was a place for you in the community... if you wanted in.

Not only was I not interested in hanging out with the preening executives who could help advance my career, but I actively sabotaged it. I refused to show up for screenings; I'd rather have blinded myself than suffer through Swing Kids or The Cemetery Club or Alive, that life-affirming movie about cannibalism.

I developed bad habits, like stealing pens and legal pads far beyond whatever a normal writer or even Trollope or Steven King would need in a lifetime. Once I pinched four iced Frappuccinos from the pitch-room refrigerator and had them clink and crack in my cargo pants, and I leaked sugary milk coffee all the way home.

Certainly this was destructive behavior, ruining my chance to be part of the business of manufacturing dreams, but I don't think I had the stomach for it. All I could offer these people was my desire to be taken seriously, and a need to get paid. Neither one of those things was going to happen. I needed to get my colored ass out of Burbank and get back to Pasadena's pleasant coffee shops to work on a novel.

The one friend I have who is making it in the film world has an expression of such deep anger that when I used to see him at Jack and Jill functions I had to summon courage to approach him. His look of perpetual anger is largely a function of him drowning in the bullshit of Hollywood. He explained how Hollywood wouldn't change until blacks and browns and Asians had those executive positions that paid very well--those were the jobs that opened the door wide for colored talent, or kept it closed. I guess the truth is to the winner goes the spoils.

A couple of days ago, I happened to glance at the box office for Will Smith's I Am Legend and I felt some faint hope that the hermetically sealed white world of film had finally started to break down. But in some sense Will Smith is the new Great Exception: He doesn't have to play black. He occupies that lofty position that Michael Jackson use to own; he is defined by his talent and ambition not constrained by his race, though I hope Will Smith won't go ghoulishly mad and bleach himself into an object lesson of the perils of racial self-loathing.

Oddly enough, what gives me hope is that shining light of literary ambition, the astonishing Wire. The HBO television series that aspires to be the War and Peace of the declining American city, as represented by bedraggled Baltimore, has accomplished a remarkable feat, presenting the most complex and integrated representation of African American life that I've seen, and yet the number of Africa American writers on the show isn't exactly chocolate city-ish. As my angry African American director said to me when I asked if he would want to write for The Wire, "No, man, I'd be scared to fuck it up."

I guess the angry black artist takes great art where he can find it.