With lines such as “the dumber I behave the richer I get,” Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction does sound like cinematic dynamite. What this film does for the literary world, Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, from 1987, has already performed for the movie industry.
Townsend plays aspiring actor Bobby Taylor, who finds that Hollywood prefers to cast blacks in gang movies. Script in hand, the eloquent Bobby must rehearse lines such as, “I ain’t be got no weppin,” and “you be got your gang.” In auditions, formally trained actors must say, “What it is, bro?” and such with authentic inflection.
In the “Black Acting School,” staffed entirely by whites, actors learn “Jive talking 101,” and how to “walk black” and play epic slaves, gang leaders and street hoods. Graduate Ricky Taylor has played nine crooks, four gang leaders, dope dealers, rapists, and such. “We teach you everything,” Taylor explains, so “Don’t try to be cool, call Hollywood’s first black acting school!”
For another example of jive talking, dial it back to 1980 and see Barbara Billingsley (no relation) counseling two black passengers in Airplane! As she explains, “chump don’t want da help chump don’t get da help.”
While American Fiction’s December release awaits, film fans might brush up on James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Chester Himes, a black writer who should be more famous.
Himes authored Lonely Crusade, which deals with the conflicts between blacks, the labor movement, and the Communist Party, which Himes never joined. True to form, the American left hated his book, but the French version ranked with the top five novels published in France during the 1940s.
Black Boy and Native Son author Richard Wright did join the Communist Party but left, with good reason. As Wright explained in his contribution to The God That Failed, white Communists charged that he was an intellectual who “talked like a book,” and if he didn’t follow the party line, CP bosses could make him disappear.
The trouble with the modern world, Jean Cocteau reportedly said, is that stupidity has begun to think. “The dumber I behave, the richer I get,” reflects that reality. As it happens, the great Jay Leno was ahead of the curve on woke culture, what used to be called political correctness.
In a 2002 appearance in Washington DC, he recited the lines from Isaac Hayes’ theme to the original Shaft, from 1971. The “black private dick, who’s a sex machine for all the chicks,” left the audience uneasy, so Leno updated the lyrics to: “the African American investigator who has consensual sex with women of equal pay,” and the place went crazy. As Duke Ellington said, things ain’t the way they used to be.
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