Black Film, White Money

by Jesse Algeron Rhines

Author	: Jesse Algeron Rhines
Publisher	: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages	: 220
Release	: 1996
Genre	: Performing Arts
ISBN	: 9780813522678

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Why are there so few Black filmmakers who control their own work? Why are there scarcely any Black women behind the camera? What happens to Black filmmakers when they move from independent production to the mainstream? What does it mean for whites to control Black images and their distribution globally? And, was it always so? Could it be different? In this vivid portrait of their historic and present-day contributions, Jesse Rhines explores the roles African American men and women have played in the motion picture business from 1915 to the present. He illuminates his discussion by carefully linking the history of early Black filmmaking to the current success of African American filmmakers and examines how African Americans have been affected by changes that have taken place in the industry as a whole. He focuses on the crucial role of distribution companies, the difficulty of raising money for production, the compromises that directors and writers must make to get funding, and the effect of negative, sensationalistic images on the Black community. Many well-known directors, including Spike Lee, Reginald Hudlin, and Grace Blake are interviewed in the book, allowing Rhines to give readers an inside look at how deal making does--or does not--work. Rhines surveys significant eras in film history and their impact on African Americans, from the silent era and the impact of The Birth of a Nation, through the emergence of the Black-owned Lincoln Motion Picture Company, and the later introduction of sound, to the postwar era, the antitrust suit against Paramount Pictures, the introduction of television, and Blaxploitation movies that won audiences back. He brings the story up to date with present-day blockbusters and the success of Spike Lee, who began as an independent and became a force in the industry, and others who hope to follow in Lee's footsteps. Rhines, who has worked behind the camera himself, reflects on independent filmmaking, the risks of both failure and success, and his hope for positive change in the African African community if more African American filmmakers can come to the forefront in the business.

The Color of Money

by Mehrsa Baradaran

Author	: Mehrsa Baradaran
Publisher	: Harvard University Press
Total Pages	: 382
Release	: 2017-09-14
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 0674982304

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“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment...Beautiful, heartbreaking work.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates “A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.” —The Atlantic “Extraordinary...Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America.” —Ezra Klein When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth in America. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted “black capitalism,” a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But the catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. “Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A must read for anyone interested in closing America’s racial wealth gap.” —Black Perspectives

Colorization

by Wil Haygood

Author	: Wil Haygood
Publisher	: Knopf
Total Pages	: 473
Release	: 2021-10-19
Genre	: Performing Arts
ISBN	: 0525656871

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A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.” —Shondaland This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

Black Film, White Money

by Jesse Algeron Rhines

Author	: Jesse Algeron Rhines
Publisher	:
Total Pages	: 195
Release	: 1996
Genre	: Performing Arts
ISBN	: 9780813522661

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Looks at the history of Black filmmakers, and shows how the motion picture industry controls and influences Black films

White Money/Black Power

by Noliwe M. Rooks

Author	: Noliwe M. Rooks
Publisher	: Beacon Press
Total Pages	: 240
Release	: 2006
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 9780807032701

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The history of African American Studies is often told as a heroic tale, with compelling images of black power and passionate African American students who refuse to take "no" for an answer. Noliwe M. Rooks argues for the recognition of another story that proves that many of the programs that survived were actually begun due to heavy funding from the Ford Foundation or, put another way, as a result of white philanthropy.Today, many students in African American Studies courses are white, and an increasing number of black students come from Africa or the Caribbean, not the United States. This shift-which makes the survival of the discipline contingent on non-African American students-means that "blackness can mean everything and, at the same time, nothing at all." While the Ford Foundation provided much-needed funding, its strategies, aimed at addressing America_s "race problem," have left African American Studies struggling to define its identity in light of the changes it faces today. With unflinching honesty, Rooks shows that the only way to create a stable future for African American Studies is through confronting its complex past.

Black City Cinema

by Paula Massood

Author	: Paula Massood
Publisher	: Temple University Press
Total Pages	: 281
Release	: 2003-01-22
Genre	: Performing Arts
ISBN	: 1592130038

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In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.

African Americans in Film

by Camille R. Michaels

Author	: Camille R. Michaels
Publisher	: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Total Pages	: 106
Release	: 2017-07-15
Genre	: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN	: 1534560823

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The whitewashing of roles in films and the lack of representation at awards shows such as the Oscars are only two of the career obstacles African American actors and filmmakers have historically faced. Although blackface is now taboo, racism is still prevalent in Hollywood. Readers explore the causes of the systemic oppression that has made it difficult for African Americans to break into the movie business. Through full-color photographs and primary sources, readers will learn how to become more thoughtful viewers of movies and television.

Shaping the Future of African American Film

by Monica White Ndounou

Author	: Monica White Ndounou
Publisher	: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages	: 319
Release	: 2014-04-29
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 0813562570

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In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. How does history come into it? Hollywood’s reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions as Bamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history. By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations—and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.

Black Manhood on the Silent Screen

by Gerald R. Butters

Author	: Gerald R. Butters
Publisher	:
Total Pages	: 294
Release	: 2002
Genre	: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN	:

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In early-twentieth-century motion picture houses, offensive stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were prevalent. Watermelon eating, chicken thievery, savages with uncontrollable appetites, Sambo and Zip Coon were all representations associated with African American people. Most of these caricatures were rendered by whites in blackface. Few people realize that from 1915 through 1929 a number of African American film directors worked diligently to counter such racist definitions of black manhood found in films like D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 epic that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. In the wake of the film's phenomenal success, African American filmmakers sought to defend and redefine black manhood through motion pictures. Gerald Butters's comprehensive study of the African American cinematic vision in silent film concentrates on works largely ignored by most contemporary film scholars: African American-produced and -directed films and white independent productions of all-black features. Using these "race movies" to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race in popular culture, he separates cinematic myth from historical reality: the myth of the Euro American-controlled cinematic portrayal of black men versus the actual black male experience. Through intense archival research, Butters reconstructs many lost films, expanding the discussion of race and representation beyond the debate about "good" and "bad" imagery to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race as device in the context of Western popular culture. He particularly examines the filmmaking of Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific and controversial of all African American silent film directors and creator of the recently rediscovered Within Our Gates—the legendary film that exposed a virtual litany of white abuses toward blacks. Black Manhood on the Silent Screen is unique in that it takes contemporary and original film theory, applies it to the distinctive body of African American independent films in the silent era, and relates the meaning of these films to larger political, social, and intellectual events in American society. By showing how both white and black men have defined their own sense of manhood through cinema, it examines the intersection of race and gender in the movies and offers a deft interweaving of film theory, American history, and film history.