Last year, I read about Danny Glover's troubles in finding a financier for his upcoming biopic on Toussaint L'ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution. Why wouldn't it be funded? I mean, it's a great story: slave uprisings, people taking the French Revolution to its logical end, people coming into their own and realizing they, too, deserve rights, and will fight and die for it. Toussaint L'Ouverture wasn't really part of my consciousness until I read Nora Jemisin's The Effluent Engine, whose protagonist is a daughter of this legendary hero.
Meanwhile, in France, a TV movie of this hero is being made, starring Jimmy Jean-Louis. Jean-Louis is Haitian-born himself, which is also incredibly rare (Glover's vision will star Wesley Snipes), so it's pretty awesome! I found this trailer while googling for "Steampunk Toussaint L'ouverture" (which got me no steampunk results, predictably). Have a trailer, in French with no subtitles:
"Toussaint L'Ouverture" Trailer from Tambay Obenson on Vimeo.
The more we talk about these issues, the clearer it becomes that Hollywood (and many mainstream media producers) simply does not care about non-white stories. There are lots of really great English-language movies which simply fall to the side. Why?
Because they're not about white heroes.
Producers won't finance a movie with no white heroes because they're not sure such a movie will make any money. (Glover finally found a Venezuelan financier.) (But seriously, it shouldn't have taken him that long. And seriously, he shouldn't have received that weak-ass "but it got no white heroes!" malarkey in the first place.) (What kind of reasoning is that.)
George Lucas recently went on the Daily Show to talk about this: it took him 23 years to fund Red Tails, which is, in his words, the "first all-black action movie" to come out of a big name Hollywood producer like himself. And when all he asked was for marketing, Hollywood said no, because they don't know how to market a movie like this.
Red Tails is a movie about the Tuskagee Airmen, a squadron of all-black pilots, who, due to racist discrimination in the U.S. Army, were disallowed from fighting in the front lines. Black people can't fly, can't fight. Black people aren't real American soldiers, amirite? Red Tails shows them being given a chance to prove themselves, and prove themselves they do. And simply because George Lucas repeats what he's been told, over and over, that Hollywood does not know how to market non-white films, he's called racist, and he's whiny, and he's discriminating, and he made an anti-white movie.
