Quick: name a horror movie where one of the good guys is black. Well, hell, that's easy. One of the ship's crew in Alien was black, and some of the soldiers in Aliens. Danny Glover was the cop in Saw, Carl Weathers was one of the squad in Predator. Lawrence Fishburne in Predators. Hell, there are lots of them. Now count how many of them survived to the end.
Pointing out that black characters die in movies isn't even clever anymore -- it's the kind of obvious, trite joke that bad movies make about other bad movies. But, inexplicably, it keeps happening. In the original Terminator, every black character shown on screen dies. In Transformers, the "black" robot who speaks in inner city slang dies.
There are some exceptions. You can bet that he won't die if he's played by a superstar like Will Smith or Eddie Murphy, who, not coincidentally, are among the very few black top-grossing actors at the box office. Otherwise, the black guy is there to get killed.
So What's the Deal? Even in the 21st century, with a black president and posters of black athletes adorning bedroom walls all across the world, white audiences still prefer to watch white characters.
It would be easy to argue that the box office numbers are skewed because, say, Fellowship of the Ring was simply a better movie than Big Momma's House. But you can get the same results from focus groups with everything else being equal. In this 2011 study, white undergraduates were given the synopses of 12 made-up romantic comedies. Along with the summaries, they got cast pictures and fake IMDB pages, which were manipulated so that each movie had six versions of the cast; an all-white cast, an all-black cast and four different versions in between.
Same plot, same characters, same everything -- just different cast members. And unfortunately, the whiter the cast, the higher the likelihood of the students wanting to see the movie. So how does this play out in real movies? Black characters end up in supporting roles, instead of being well-developed characters. They're just there so we can "judge the other (white) characters by how they treat them." In other words, we certainly don't root for racist characters, and we'll boo racist stereotypes. But our open-mindedness usually stops at the point of actually paying to see a black leading man. Other than Will Smith.
Look at that list of the top-grossing actors again. Other than Murphy and Smith, the only names in the top 50 are Chris Rock, Billy Dee Williams (because of Star Wars) and Morgan Freeman. How many of them were the stars of their big movies? For Morgan Freeman, in his top 10 most successful films he was the lead in only one (Driving Miss Daisy -- a movie about race relations). Was Chris Rock the lead in any of his top 20 biggest movies?
What sets Will Smith apart is that he's one of very few actors who can get roles that weren't specifically written to be African-American. If the role is an action hero who could be any race at all, Hollywood usually interprets that as "a white guy, or Will Smith." And that's only after Smith became a superstar -- in 1996 he was a long shot for getting cast in Independence Day. In fact, director Roland Emmerich had to fight to get Smith at all. The studio wanted to cast a white guy.
And as that essayist has pointed out, none of our favorite black actors are spring chickens. They're getting old, and they haven't been replaced. And even when black actors are successful, like more-successful-than-any-other-entertainer-in-the-world-successful, white audiences are pretty oblivious. How many white people could recognize Tyler Perry in a crowd? Exactly.
When we see Martin Lawrence or Chris Rock or Ice Cube in a leading role, we automatically assume that, like a Tyler Perry movie, it's for a "niche" or "urban" market.*
Read more: 5 Old-Timey Prejudices That Still Show Up in Every Movie | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_1954...-show-up-in-every-movie_p2.html#ixzz20pf47uZC
Good thread.
