‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Scream Rayciss
‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out
Julie Dash, Matty Rich, Darnell Martin, Ernest Dickerson, Leslie Harris and Theodore Witcher on a boom that went bust, and what’s different now.
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After “Boyz N the Hood,” which was released the same year as “Jungle Fever” and “New Jack City,” people were talking about this black wave, or this “class of ’91.” But it was almost talked about as a fad, or as if “black” was a hot genre that the studios could cash in on.
Yeah, I remember the onslaught of bad nigger movies back when I was a brat. THey sucked and were probably only made as a form of affirmative action anyway. And isn't that horrible nigger Tyler Perry still around and making eyeball scarring abominations?
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Speaking for a 1991 story titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” — from a New York Times Magazine issue that featured the aforementioned black filmmakers on its cover — the director Charles Lane was one of many who foresaw permanent change: “The Berlin Wall, having been pulled down, will not be re-erected.”
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But as the decade wore on, a wall was re-erected, black filmmakers now say, and many of the same people who had been held up as the faces of a changing industry watched as their careers ground slowly to a halt.
“I was told that I was in director’s jail,” said Matty Rich, whose emotionally incendiary 1991 debut film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Major film studios hailed him as a prodigy. But he’s made only one other film since — in 1994.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/m...ors-1990s.html
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