David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele.

David: Ngofeen is one of the producers on our show and he's here to introduce things. Ngofeen, what's on deck here? What are we up to?

Ngofeen: Today, we're talking about Black film. I noticed a few years ago, around 2016, that it felt like every single year, there was a big Black movie coming out that I was looking forward to.

David: Just the one?

Ngofeen: Yes, [laughs] just one, just one. 2016 was Moonlight, 2017 was Get Out, 2018 was Black Panther. Then, TV, too, 2019 was Watchmen. I was very curious at a certain point, like, "Oh, I wonder, is something actually happening? Is there a renaissance or something happening, or did I just not pay attention to movies before now?"

David: How are we going to go about examining this and answering the questions that are central to this?

Ngofeen: We're talking to the Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins, who directed a little film called Moonlight. We're talking to Sheryl Lee Ralph, who is on the new show Abbott Elementary. Over the course of her career, she's worked with Sidney Poitier, Lauryn Hill, and just been part of these iconic moments of Black Entertainment. To start, I figured I should go to someone who actually knows film well.

I talked to a film scholar, a professor at Northwestern named Aymar Jean Christian. He specializes in the ways that Black stories, brown stories, queer stories, break into the culture through new media. I asked him Aymar if something unique is happening in Black film?

Aymar Jean Christian: Yes. It's a really great question.

Ngofeen: Aymar said yes. I quickly learned that there's a lot that goes into why the answer is yes.

Aymar: Historically, Black film rises and falls based on broader industry trends, regulation and culture.

Ngofeen: This idea that Black film is connected to what's going on in the wider industry, is really important to Aymar. He says, in order to understand the current moment, we have to step back to the very beginnings of filmmaking.

Aymar: Black film in the US starts in the early 1900s at the dawn of cinema, independent film studio owners who created a lot of really exciting Black films, when the medium was totally new.

Ngofeen: Aymar says that after this, the classic era of Hollywood comes into being where studios have these exclusive agreements with theaters and pretty much dictate what movies the theaters show.

Aymar: We associate the classic Hollywood studio era with really conservative storytelling, and that means that Black people didn't get a shot at leading films. If you watched the Ryan Murphy Netflix show Hollywood, which is about that time, the whole thing was, how could a Black person write a movie?

Ngofeen: Until 1948, with a Supreme Court case that breaks up the classic Hollywood studio system.

Aymar: Yes, the breakup of the studio system forces the studios to figure out what the audience actually wants. When they don't have these exclusive, really controlling relationships with the theaters that show movies, they actually have to figure out what do people want to buy tickets to, because before, they would just tell people, "These are your movies. These are your options. This is all you have."

By 1960, they start making edgier films. They start making films starring younger people with more violence, more sex. That kind of works for a little bit, but it really isn't until the '70s when they've really hit rock bottom and their revenues are really struggling, that they try putting Black movies in theaters. Of course, there's more independent theaters happening right now. Theaters just end up showing these really low-budget films starring Black people and they just kill at the box office.

Speaker 1: [unintelligible 00:04:08] The soul sisters answer to James Bond and the most exciting new starring years, six feet two of [inaudible 00:04:15].

Aymar: Because of course, by the 1970s Black people haven't had films for an entire generation [unintelligible 00:04:23] and cinemas. There are hugely underserved audience and it ends up stabilizing Hollywood's revenues. Of course, blaxploitation crystallizes these edgy Black stories with violence and sex and Hollywood makes a lot of money off of that.

Movie Clip: Man, that broad is 10 miles of bad road.

Aymar: It ends up stabilizing the business until the '80s when they invent the blockbuster. You have Jaws and Star Wars in the mid to late '70s. Then, Hollywood figures out, "Oh, we can just put blockbusters into cinema and that becomes the thing in the '80s. Big budgets, special effects, big stars or Oscar films. Then, in the '90s you get 'ghetto pictures'.

Ngofeen: Just real quick, give me an example of a film in that genre.

Aymar: 'Ghetto pictures'? Boys in the Hood.

Ngofeen: Got it.

Movie Clip: Now, what we need to do is we need to keep everything in our neighborhood, everything, Black. Black-owned with Black money, just like--

Aymar: When we think about Boys in the Hood or Belly, or even later in the '90s, like Friday, these were kind of Hollywood's attempt to embrace Hip hop, embrace the rise of Hip hop in culture, which, as Craig Watkins says, was Hollywood's response to the introduction of new media and the growth of television and people spending less time in the theaters. They always used the Black audience to draw people back into theaters when they've lost to the audience in some other way.

That is what's happening again now in the 2010s. I think Django Unchained was a huge hit and that reminded Hollywood that Black people like movies [chuckles], that we deserve movies. I think with that, and 12 Years a Slave, which also did really well, paved the way for films like get out to get financed, which would have never been financed before. I think what we're seeing now in Black film that we haven't seen historically, every moment is a different type of genre.

Blaxploitation was like gangs and sex. 'Ghetto pictures' was that but the cities had changed. Now, of course, Hip hop is mainstream, so that's not edgy anymore. What is the new edgy thing to do in Black film? I think it's genre.

Movie Clip: You get to decide what kind of king you are going to be.

Aymar: We're seeing Black Panther, Black people in fantasy.

Movie Clip: There's too many white people are getting harrassed.

Aymar: Get Out, Black people in horror, which we haven't seen in a long time.

Ngofeen: I guess what I'm wondering is in the '90s, I remember watching these shows like Martin, Living Single, In Living Color. Then, in retrospect, it seems like the Black shows disappeared in the 2000s. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Aymar: Absolutely. The stories about vertical integration. In 1996, the federal government passed the Telecommunications Act, and that allowed media companies to buy more media companies. All of a sudden, if you were pitching a TV show in Hollywood, you needed to get not only the president of the studio and the president of the network to say yes, but then their boss and their boss's boss to say yes.

Because of racism, there's just always going to be some person who's like, "No, that's too risky. I don't want to do that." That didn't really change until the ratings had gotten so bad, that they finally had to just try new things and let Shonda Rhimes make Scandal and let A24 do 12 Years a Slave and release that widely in theaters, and Django Unchained with Tarantino. Finally, they just-- the numbers don't lie.

The ratings don't lie. The box office numbers don't lie, and they will follow those trends. In the meantime, it just became an industry-wide shutout in the 2000s, which is why you had people making web series, by the way. This is my entry point into this conversation.

Ngofeen: Yes, go ahead.

Aymar: I was like, "Why does Issa Rae make a web series on her own in the year 2011?" It's because she couldn't pitch that show to Hollywood.

Speaker 5: Awkward moment. What's the protocol for repeatedly running into someone at a stop sign?

Speaker 6: [unintelligible 00:08:45].

Speaker 5: Oh my God. I totally didn't even see you in so long.

Speaker 6: I know, right.

Issa: No, seriously, what the fuck is it?

Aymar: Lo and behold, this low-budget web series made for, like, no money has millions of views on YouTube, and Hollywood is like, "Oh, great. The Black audience. We forgot about y'all. Welcome back."

Ngofeen: [laughs] Who is going and saying, "Our numbers are too low, now, let's introduce Black film?" What I mean is, what is the mechanics of that? Is it intentional? Is it nefarious? How does the mechanics of that work?

Aymar: It's a confluence of factors. It usually is a visionary director or producer who manages to get someone to give them money to make something that ends up getting seen and shows the industry that there's money to be made. Once there's a hit, the industry will follow. For the 20-teens, I really think it was Django Unchained.

Speaker 7: Amongst your inventory, I've been led to believe as a specimen I'm keen to acquire.

Speaker 8: What's your name?

Speaker 7: Django.

Speaker 8: Then, you're exactly the one I'm looking for.

Speaker 9: Hey, no sale.

Aymar: Because it made so much money globally. It just made so much money, and it was such a racially charged storyline that the industry hadn't tried before, a story about slavery. Of course, who was that? It was a white director that was able to do that. How does this wave get started? Well, white men always have access, so sometimes it's them. They try something. A lot of the directors of Blaxploitation films were white people, were white men who were able to get the capital to do it.

Ngofeen: If the current moment has given us these films, like Get Out, a huge horror film, and other movies, like Underground Railroad, the TV show. Things about racism, things about slavery, things about these big high concept issues. Does that affect the kinds of stories that one tells in the sense that, essentially, your story must be big to succeed?

Aymar: Yes, absolutely. I think it really puts a constraint on artists who want to tell stories about the Black every day, about Black love, about Black parenting, about Blackness outside of trauma. So much of the moment right now is compelling artists to tell stories about the most difficult parts of the Black experience, which is important. We have to tell the stories about our pain and our trauma, because that's very real and it affects our lives. A lot of Black viewers are pushing back now and saying, well, "Why do I need to be triggered and be traumatized every time I want to go to the theater or go to watch a TV show? Can't I just have a nice story about two Black people falling in love and that's it? Do we need more stories about how we are attacked and violenced?"

Maybe, but I think we also need stories about solidarity, about how to love each other, about how to heal, and I just don't think that this hyper-capitalist, hypercompetitive environment is really incentivizing that kind of storytelling. I think it could have cultural effects that really prevent us from healing, from building together, from connecting with each other outside of our trauma.

David: Film scholar Aymar Jean Christian, talking with The Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele.

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