Both a historical review and a contemporary consideration, Justin Simien’s 4-episode “Hollywood Black” chronicles and comments on the century-plus Black film experience.
From its minstrel origins to the first talking picture which was highlighted by blackface, through demeaning stereotypes, civil rights and Oscar-winning acceptance “Hollywood Black” celebrates, explains and reveres.
Simien, 41, has assembled not just an encyclopedic trove of film clips but a “cast” of commentators who react, reminisce, analyze. They include directors like Ryan Coogler (“Creed”), Ava DuVernay (“Selma”), Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”). Hyphenates like Issa Rae (“Insecure”), LaKeith Stanfield (“Judas and the Black Messiah”), Gabrielle Union (“Cheaper by the Dozen”), Lena Waithe (“The Chi”) and Forest Whitaker who’s also a producer.
It’s been quite an up-down journey. “Piece by piece we just put this thing together over the past four years,” Simien said. “Every time a studio changed hands or changed names, the project died. Then, it would just come back and made me feel like, ‘Okay! This is maybe something bigger than myself.’ ”
As he began he was, “At a crossroads in my career. I was outwardly successful but inwardly very unhappy and confused.
“It was seeing myself in the Black experience, really from the beginning of cinema, combined with a discovery of a lot of movies that resurfaced that I was able to see for the first time.
“It made me so angry that it was so hard to connect to this history (that I found absolutely edifying) in terms of my own experience in Hollywood. And it just grew from there.”
This overview is inspired by the eminent Black historian Donald Bogle whose “Hollywood Black” book “deals more,” Simien said, “with filmmakers as well as actors — exactly what I wanted to focus on.
“Ultimately, it serves as a much-needed resource. Because a lot of this history has, frankly, been erased from the official history.”
Simien was also insistent this, “Not feel like a stale history lesson. I want people to understand why this was so important to me.
“That’s because it speaks and illuminates the present moment in a way nothing else could. That’s why you have these conversations with me and others who are working in present day.
“I’m trying to show that this is very much a past that is still with us. It is not locked in a box far away. It is in everything we do.
“In the way we talk about our role in Hollywood, in every fight and every conversation we have about freaking AI and our jobs in Hollywood.
“It is wrapped up in all of that and was vital for me to connect that with the present.”
The 2-episode premiere of “Hollywood Black” streams Sunday on MGM+
