The Politics of Filmmaking

In the year President Clinton initiates a dialogue about race relations in America, there’s a side argument taking place regarding Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad.”

Despite a respectable two-week box-office total of $9.7 million in limited release--50% from African American audiences, according to DreamWorks--there’s the perception the film isn’t performing up to expectations, suffering from doubts about the film’s veracity and about Spielberg, indeed, any white man, as the director.

Within Hollywood and the media the argument is twofold. One states that acclaimed African American directors like Spike Lee and Carl Franklin are victims of Hollywood’s racial Catch-22. While their identities as African Americans and talents as filmmakers make them ideally suited for subject matter like the slave revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad, they are shackled by the bottom line.

The fact that Spielberg got the film made, they argue, is evidence of de facto racism, not on the part of the director but of the studio system that would not greenlight the same picture with any of them attached to direct. “There’s nobody else that could have made this film except Spielberg,” Lee lamented recently on ABC’s “Nightline.” “I could not have gone to the studios and got this film made with the budget that they had to make this film.”

The second has less to do with the Hollywood pecking order and is more a question of artistic turf. Should white filmmakers make films about particularly significant episodes and individuals in African American history? Why not, say those like “Amistad’s” African American producer Debbie Allen, insisting that passion, sincerity and talent render identity politics moot in movie-making.

Over my dead ancestors, say others, noting Hollywood’s chronic habit of distorting history by focusing on peripheral or altogether fictional white characters.

“The Hollywood happy ending masks gaping sins of omission and commission of historical fact,” charged New York’s Amsterdam News, one of the oldest and largest African American newspapers in the country, in a two-part series titled “The Still Untold Story of Spielberg’s ‘Amistad.’ ”

While those debates rage, outside the media nexus, a third point is overlooked. It is not about the ways and means of production or even what “Amistad” could or should have been but whether the film that does exist connects successfully with audiences, particularly African American audiences. If it does, it puts critics in the dangerous position of arguing black audiences don’t know what’s good for them, that they have been duped.

If it doesn’t, bad faith between filmmakers and audiences over race, background and cultural credentials could lead to an artistic impasse. Important films, some of them potentially good, may never get made, as was the case several years ago when Oliver Stone was preparing to film “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Worrying about historical and emotional accuracy, gay activists objected to a straight filmmaker adapting the life story of Harvey Milk, the legendary San Francisco politician assassinated by homophobic fellow supervisor Dan White.

According to the film’s openly gay co-producer, Craig Zadan, those concerns and Stone’s previous depictions of gay characters made the director the target of demonstrations and denunciations until he dropped the project. Bringing “Amistad” to the screen was much smoother, but now that it’s here, pundits, critics and activists have turned the film into a referendum. While “Amistad” has generated a healthy $6,834 per screen in its second week and continues to expand its release, crossover questions remain.

Critic Manohla Dargis claims in the L.A. Weekly that black audiences have been “intensely negative--though not always in public” about “Amistad.” During “Amistad’s” opening week, however, African American filmgoers at the Magic Johnson Theatres in Baldwin Hills were enthusiastic.

Taking time out from holiday preparations, Catherine and Leroy Green decided to see the film and make up their own minds concerning the controversy. “It’s a good film, an important document about the struggles of all people,” said Catherine Green, a first-grade teacher. “It doesn’t matter who made it; the person could have been orange, yellow, green or blue. Truth is truth. To think that Spielberg has done something wrong because he documented history, well, he’s just reported it and directed it as he’s seen fit. I don’t think a person of a different color could have done it any better. They might have shared their own viewpoints or details, but the story is the story. He’s done a good job portraying what is most important.”

Faulting the film for being a fictionalized account of a historical episode instead of a factual documentary was also beside the point for her husband.

“It doesn’t make a difference if those are the exact words people said as long as the people behind it truly understand how it was,” said Leroy Green, a security supervisor. “The film was honest and passionate.”

Among many of those who were initially skeptical, the film made an impact. For Wanda Ballenger, 41, a homemaker who saw the film with two friends, a multicultural cast and crew made all the difference in her appreciation. “I didn’t think it was going to be bad because there were black people involved in making it. I thought that was good.”

“It told what our people went through in order to get to where we are today,” said Patrick Paxton, 24. “In some instances, we’re still facing some of the issues depicted in the movie. It shouldn’t matter if the director is white. People were saying the same thing when Steven Spielberg made ‘The Color Purple,’ and he did an excellent job on that movie and he did an excellent job on this one.”

The first big-budget feature from a major studio depicting the horrors of the transatlantic Middle Passage is seen as a triumph of storytelling, even among many of the film’s critics. In its mostly critical series, the Amsterdam News still called “Amistad” a “towering saga of heroism and courage” that is “masterfully staged, choked with emotion and filled with high drama.”

Even director Lee claimed to like the film, saying, “for the most part, I’m glad it was made.”

Whatever “Amistad’s” aesthetic or historical shortcomings, what is significant beyond all the media posturing is that the film depicts a significant moment in the history of the United States that most Americans, including those editorializing at length, were unaware of before Spielberg’s high-profile motion picture.

Indeed, the Oakland Post, the largest African American newspaper in Northern California, is one community voice championing the film not necessarily for its historical accuracy but for reminding history to never forget.

“As Americans struggle with issues of affirmative action, diversity and the changing racial demographics,” wrote editor Gail Berkley, “these images and the story of the Amistad Africans, which are unknown to most Americans, will, if nothing else, add vivid illustration and background to the dialogue on race.”

Filmgoers of both races seem to appreciate learning more about the story on the screen than the one on the editorial pages. They understand that Clint Eastwood’s “Heartbreak Ridge” is not an accurate document of the U.S. invasion of Grenada just as Lee’s “Malcolm X” is hardly the definitive story of Malcolm X.

Hollywood history is no substitute for the real thing and audiences so far appear to appreciate the difference, even if pundits and critics don’t.