Hollywood Shuffle (1987)

(On Cable TV, August 2019) There are a few movies out there that are best reviewed after reading about their production. A first uninformed look at Hollywood Shuffle is invariably going to come across as being too harsh on the material. This can be explained by the film’s extremely low-budget, writer-director Robert Townsend’s overriding satirical intentions, and sheer underdog nature of the project (which was financed through credit cards and acting gigs, and took two years to complete in guerilla-style filmmaking conditions). It’s clearly didactic in how it really wants you to understand the problems that faced black actors in 1980s Hollywood, and unapologetic in the ways it gets in your face about it. The result is unequal. With Keenen Ivory Wayans writing part of the script, the humour is very uneven, ranging from classic sequences (such as the one where he imagines a hostile press berating him for not being black enough, or the fantasy movie-review sketch) to more humdrum material. It’s also (especially in hindsight) imperfect in how it tackles inequality—loudly advocating for fewer black stereotypes while indulging in other kinds of stereotyping. I do have a sneaking suspicion that the film is funnier if you know all about life in 1980s Hollywood for black actors: that it’s an inside joke that happened to have wider appeal. Still, in the evolution of black cinema through the decades, there’s clearly a place for Hollywood Shuffle as an eloquent capture of a specific time and place—not that things are necessarily perfect now, but that by the 1980s you could see black cinema go from the superstars à la Eddie Murphy (explicitly referred to here) to a more accessible brand of black cinema. Consider that Spike Lee had just come out with She’s Gotta Have It in 1986…

(Second viewing, On Cable TV, July 2022) A second viewing of Hollywood Shuffle, better-informed about the state of Black Hollywood cinema in the mid-1980s, reinforces my gnawing suspicion that the film was much funnier if you were then paying attention to how Hollywood was presenting black actors at the time. I’m not completely saying that it’s inside-baseball … but it is quite inside-baseball. Part of writer-director Robert Townsend’s success in completing this showbiz satire (often bending rules and maxing out his financing to do so) is that the world eventually caught up to his criticism: Black representation in Hollywood has considerably improved since Hollywood Shuffle, and the obstacles he describes are slowly, thankfully fading away. As a time capsule, his film remains quite effective: the portrait of a struggling actor fighting to have more than low-life roles or Eddie Murphy imitations is scattershot but considerably enlivened by sketch comedy moments that make the comedy far more overt. I like it quite a bit, even if I feel as if I’m not the right person at the right time to get the laughs. I’m sympathetic to the cause but ultimately an outsider, and Hollywood Shuffle is very much an insider’s sarcastic laugh at an industry that’s fading away.