John Singleton: Not Just One of the Boyz
The audience at Harlem’s Apollo Theater is notoriously hard to please, but on this night Ice Cube is wearing the place like a suit. The crowd yells every word of every song back to “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” gangsta rapper. The theater is getting sweatier by the minute. Then Ice Cube stops the show.
“How many of y’all seen Boyz n the Hood?” Cube asks, and the Apollo roars its approval for the controversial film in which he costars. “And how many thought it had a positive message?” Again, loud screams. “I want to bring out the man who wrote and directed the movie,” Cube continues. “They’re blaming this man for some brothers starting static at some of the theaters!” A compact, beaming young man ambles onstage, tossing Boyz n the Hood T-shirts to the cheering crowd.
“They clapped for me!” a still-astonished John Singleton says the next week, back in his native Los Angeles. “A filmmaker, not a rapper, from L.A., not New York, walked onstage at the Apollo, put my fist in the air, and they all pumped their fists!”
Such unexpectedly warm responses are becoming common for the 23-year-old Singleton. On the way to this interview, he ran into Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, who began raving about Boyz, compared Singleton to Orson Welles and offered — practically begged — to contribute music to the writer-director’s next project. In a ritual that was oddly appropriate for this meeting of young black cultural warriors, Reid removed a gris-gris (a protective voodoo locket) from around his neck and hung it on the visibly moved Singleton.
Not everyone, however, has taken so kindly to John Singleton or his movie. Though his debut feature about three friends’ coming of age in the killing fields of South Central L.A. took in over $22 million during its first two weeks of release (maintaining a higher per-screen average than even Terminator 2) and won stunning critical notices, what most of America knows about Boyz n the Hood is that 33 people were wounded and one killed at theaters across the country on its opening night.
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This movie about the tragic condition of the black American family, which opens with the warning “One out of every 22 black American males will be murdered each year” and ends with the blessing “Increase the Peace,” is being condemned as a “gang movie.” Boyz has come to represent black American cinema at a crossroads: An unprecedented number of movies by black filmmakers are being released this year — some tremendously successful — but violence outside theaters has led many observers to fear for the future of black film.
Singleton says the attention that’s focused on violence is a smoke screen. “People in the media don’t want to deal with the issues at hand,” he explains. “They don’t want to deal with the fact that the high crime and murder rates are directly related to the illiteracy problem, the homeless problem, problems in the American educational system.” Theater security, he says, is simply a matter of finding the appropriate measures for potentially explosive films. He cites the Baldwin Hills Theater, a black-owned movie house near South Central, where the management installed metal detectors, addressed the crowd before each show and asked gang members to check their colors at the door. There were no incidents there, but, says Singleton, “you don’t see them reporting that.”
After the opening-night violence, some blamed the movie’s preview for pandering to a hyped-up gang audience by promising an action-oriented film. Indeed, the trailer shows virtually all of the film’s gunplay and spends little time on the powerful father-son relationship that stands as the movie’s center. Singleton, who helped cut the trailer himself, stands by the strategy. “It got motherfuckers in the theater,” he says. “That’s the bottom line. If the trailer for Terminator 2 showed the part where he agreed not to kill anyone, nobody would have gone to see it.” In fact, Singleton feels the tactic makes the movie’s message even stronger. “People went with lower expectations; they thought it was the same old bullshit action-adventure in the streets of South Central L.A. But when they saw it was more, they really watched it.”
The violence associated with the movie seems to have scared away (at least initially) the white audience that Columbia Pictures hoped to attract. But Singleton thinks the studio’s obsession with crossing over is misguided, given that black Americans, who represent only 12 percent of the population, constitute a disproportionate 25 percent of the moviegoing audience. “Everybody else copies young black men,” he says. “If I reach them, everything else will fall into place.” Normally soft spoken and restrained, Singleton lights up when describing a recent trip to L.A.’s marina. “These little white kids came over, screaming my name,” he laughs. “You know something’s happening when you’re a young black man making movies and a little white kid comes up and tells you, ‘When I grow up, I want to be just like you!’ ”
When Singleton was growing up, his dreams were probably just as remote. In a story similar to Boyz‘s, he moved at the age of 12 from his mother’s house to the home of his father, a mortgage broker, in South Central. Inspired by Star Wars and E.T., Singleton began devouring movies, fantasizing about someday making them himself. Then in 1986, the 18-year-old Singleton saw a movie called She’s Gotta Have It, by a young director named Spike Lee, and everything changed. “That was the turning point in my life,” he says. “I met Spike at the opening night in L.A., and it solidified everything I’d dreamed about already.”
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