Ownership of Images

“Despite the naysayers, a handful of self-fashioned modern race women and race men such as Bacote had begun to realize the possibilities for moving pictures at the curious moment when black life was turning inward and expanding outward at the same time.”
– Cara Caddo, Envisioning Freedom; Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life

For more than a century, Black creators of film and television have stood by their belief that ownership of images and profitability of projects starring people of color is possible. Time and time again they have resisted Hollywood’s traditional way of ‘doing things’ and charted new territory for their audiences. There are multiple examples of filmmakers of color who were able to break barriers in the film industry at a high level during times of overt segregation and separation.

Hundreds of race films were made from 1915 into the 1950s, even though fewer than 125 survive today. Race films were independent Black American films made unapologetically by Black people for Black people. Notable Black film producers of the time: Luther Jay Pollard, owner of the controversial, Chicago-based Ebony Films, valued at what would equal $25 million in today’s dollars; and Ralph Cooper, co-founder of Million Dollar Productions. Black audiences are not a monolith and critics during these early years both embraced and implored Black filmmakers to make better content. Journalist Loren Miller wrote in a 1938 Crisis essay, “Improved films featuring Negro actors for Negro audiences are coming from Hollywood, but the cameras need to be refocused, says this writer, to record Negro life in terms of everyday Negro problems.”

Movie-Goers, 1940 [Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images]

But even earlier than the creation of these films was the forward-thinking film exhibition talent of Black ministers such as Reverend Samuel Bacote and the leadership of the Second Baptist Church of Kansas City, Missouri. Author Cara Caddoo writes in Early Race Filmmaking in America that in 1897 the group made the bold decision to organize a “moving-picture show” to raise funds for the church’s building fund. A Vitascope exhibition was organized and the event was heralded by the Black Omaha newspaperThe Enterprise as a “great hit.” Thanks to their daring entry into film exhibition, by the next year the church had enough money to begin construction on their new building and had “staked claim to urban space in the Jim Crow city.” According to Caddoo, “‘Well attended’ in Kentucky, drawing ‘large audiences’ in Maryland, and having ‘filled’ the churches in Ohio, moving pictures became a popular instrument for drawing crowds to black churches and – black ministers hoped – away from ‘less respectable’ commercial amusements.”

Visit Black Film Archive to stream Black films from the 1910s through the 1970s.

Making Moves

Singer/songwriter Irene Cara won an Oscar® in 1984 for the song “What a Feeling” from the movie Flashdance. With this win, Cara became the first Black woman to win an Academy Award® in a non-acting category. Click this link to see 42 Black Oscar® winners from 1940 thru 2021.

Flash forward to present-day Hollywood and some may say that artists of color are rebuilding, instead of breaking barriers. In 2021, less than six percent of US-produced films are being led by Black producers, writers or directors. That may sound surprising to some, considering that Black artists have made major waves at the Academy Award®s over the last few years; Mahershala Ali won two Oscar®s for Best Supporting Actor (2017, 2019), Kobe Bryant took one home for Best Short Film (Animated) (2017) and Barry Jenkins received an award for Best Adapted Screenplay (2016), just to name a few.

In that same year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences celebrated another milestone. Ninety-three years since the Academy’s first awards show, the first all-Black producing team was nominated for a best picture Oscar®. Judas and the Black Messiah, a film about the Black Panther movement, was produced by Charles King, Shaka King and Ryan Coogler. When asked about how the nomination made him feel, Shaka King was clear about his mixed emotions, “I think about, ‘Why did it take 93 years for there to be three Black producers nominated for an Academy Award®?’ Is it because there weren’t three Black people willing to produce movies? Probably not. Was it because we didn’t have the access to the kind of capital to make a big, sweeping studio feature? Maybe a little bit. Was it because we made that stuff and they didn’t recognize it? Maybe a little bit. But none of it feels good. So it’s bittersweet.”

Visit the Academy Museum to see a timeline of Oscar® history

Below the Line

Hair department head Mia Neal and hairstylist Jamika Wilson also made history at the 2021 Oscar®s when they won for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom alongside makeup artist Sergio Lopez-Rivera. They were the first Black women to ever win in the makeup and hairstyling category of the Oscar®s since the organization began recognizing the craft in 1980. Acknowledging the historic moment in her speech, Neal said, “I can picture Black trans women standing up here, and Asian sisters, and our Latina sisters, and Indigenous women. And I know that one day it won’t be unusual or groundbreaking, it will just be normal.”

Neal and her team are a part of a larger Hollywood legacy that is often overlooked. In addition to filmmakers, directors, producers and actors, film and television crews consist of hundreds of workers behind the camera, creating film sets, designing costumes, pulling cable and ensuring the final product is edited with precision and passion. Labor unions such as the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) represent and protect over 150,000 technicians, artisans and craftspersons in the entertainment industry that are known in the movie business as the “below the line crew.” While these unions became international in representation in 1893, membership was restricted to white workers until the 1920s.

Hollywood is aknowledging its lack of diversity ‘below the line’ on film and television sets. To support an effort to be more inclusive, studios and production companies are embracing databases and initiatives such as The Black TV & Film Collective, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Hue You Know and ARRAY’s own ARRAY Crew that help level the playing field when it comes to equity behind the scenes. Hear from four Oscar®-nominated crew members about what life is like on set.

Admission to unions didn’t necessarily translate to equity or equality. The May 1966 publication of the Negro Digest described IATSE and Hollywood’s discrimination practices as follows, “In the craft unions, a training program has been instituted for all apprentice aspirants regardless of race, but according to a spokesman for MPPA, the program is in its infancy and has very few unions under its wing. This has led the NAACP to threaten decertification proceedings by appealing directly to the National Labor Relations Board. One such target is the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), with which the unions are affiliated. Meanwhile, IATSE steadfastly insists that it does not practice discrimination, but produces no figures to prove it. And so it goes. Hollywood’s discrimination against Negroes remains, for the most part, true to tradition, compounded upon a premise which by its very nature is not only bad, but normally unjust.”

“By 1991, Black filmmakers were channeling the resistant and entrepreneurial spirit of past innovators such as Oscar® Micheaux. Producer Steve Nicolaides has said that “Probably the least known and most heroic thing about Boyz N the Hood, is that the lives of so many people who worked on the production were changed because of it.” Throughout his career, director John Singleton gained a reputation for hiring Black people and other minorities behind the scenes. On his first feature alone (Boyz n the Hood), as many as 30 people in the nearly all-Black crew earned union cards from the IATSE.”

According to a 2021 study on Black representation in film and television by McKinsey & Company, “There is also a widespread misperception in the industry that content starring Black actors will not perform well with international audiences. In 2019, the top films with Black leads were distributed in 30 percent fewer international markets on average—yet they earned nearly the same global box-office sales as films with white leads and earned more than those films on a per-market basis. (Nearly two-thirds of the box-office earnings for the Men in Black film series came from the international box office.)” This issue, according to the report, is rooted in a lack of diversity at the decision making levels in Hollywood.

History is filled with examples of Black and other underrepresented creatives and entrepreneurs finding ways to harness the power of filmed media for the purposes of storytelling and economic empowerment. So what does ownership in media look like in this century?

For many, it means the creation of television shows, feature films, animated series or documentaries, but for others, the best stories are being told in the form of podcasts.

Podcasts are being called “the new YouTube” and “the soundtrack of our lives.” According to Edison Research, 80 million Americans, which is almost 30% of the population over the age of 12, are now weekly podcast listeners and the listening audience is super diverse, with 43% identifying as non-white.

Read the report: Black representation in film and TV: The challenges and impact of increasing diversity