The Hollywood Jim Crow by Maryann Erigha

Author:Maryann Erigha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

Figure 3.2. Ava DuVernay at the Ultimate Disney Fan Event, Anaheim Convention Center. Photo by Disney / Image Group LA, July 15, 2017.

Black women are also vastly underrepresented as directors of big-budget movies, whereas men of all races and white women direct more expensive pictures. Estimated at just over $100 million, Ava DuVernay’s Wrinkle in Time (2018), about a girl, her brother, and her friend venturing into space to find her missing father, who is a scientist, is the biggest budgeted movie directed by a Black woman. Based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle, the multiracial-cast Wrinkle in Time stars Oprah Winfrey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the South Asian actor Mindy Kaling, and the white actors Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine. The second biggest budget for a Black-female directed film is only $50 million for Angela Robinson’s Herbie Fully Loaded (2005), about a young white woman training to become a NASCAR competitor. At any rate, these numbers trail behind the biggest budget movies directed by white women. For example, Patty Jenkins’s action/adventure flick Wonder Woman (2017) was made on a $149 million budget.

Even the most successful Black female directors who helm multiple films for Hollywood studios face limited production budgets. Sanaa Hamri’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008) was made for $27 million. The white-cast movie with one Latina star, America Ferrera, follows four college freshmen whose lives take on divergent paths, though they keep in touch while sharing a pair of jeans. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love and Basketball (2000), a romance drama in which two childhood friends move through adulthood sharing a love for basketball, and The Secret Life of Bees (2008), a southern drama about family and beekeeping, were made for $20 million and $11 million, respectively. Kasi Lemmons’s The Caveman’s Valentine (2001), a crime/music drama about a cave-dwelling man who vies to bring to justice the murderer of a homeless boy, and Black Nativity (2013), a music drama about a teenager who spends the Christmas holiday with estranged relatives in New York City, were made for $13.5 million and $17.5 million, respectively.

Some Black-female-directed movies reach a mainstream market or get international exposure, but many Black-female-directed movies that are theatrically released face scarce resources and do not receive enough studio support to sustain long theatrical runs. Moreover, few Black-female-directed movies get international exposure. Rather than theatrical distribution, Black women’s movies tend to travel through other venues: such as DVD distribution, broadcast and cable television, film festivals, and online releases—though nontheatrical distribution routes tend to garner smaller audience viewership and receive less attention from critics.42

Movies by and about Black women are scarce on the big screen. DuVernay believes that white leadership in Hollywood is not interested in movies told from a Black female perspective: “I’m interested in films about the interior lives of Black women, which I cannot find a studio that’s interested in that kind of story.… [They’re] not interested in that type of story from a Black woman’s gaze, maybe interested in it from a white man’s gaze.”43

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