User:Jcampbell1205/Singleton

Boyz n the Hood, Style, and the Rise of Hip-Hop
Largely the works of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas influenced John Singleton, as a child. Singleton to this day admits his fascination with comic books and was deeply moved in his youth by films like “E.T.”, “Indiana Jones”, and “Star Wars”. He enjoyed the thrill that these films gave him at a young age with the excitement of fantasy that they gave to their audience. To a kid from South Central Los Angeles growing up to what is referred to as the “hood”, kids like Singleton would go to the movies to simply escape. However, Singleton after graduating from USC Film School in 1990, knew he wanted to make movies with a different feeling, an altered approach, that were unique from the high-budget Hollywood films that captivated him as a child. Singleton wanted to focus more on what was pressing politically and socially within the black community during the post Rodney King civil rights movement.

Singleton is most revered and well known for his first film “Boyz n the Hood” that he both wrote and directed in July of 1991, at the remarkably young age of 23. The low cost drama about ghetto life in the streets of South Central Los Angeles proved to be well worth the investment and backing that Singleton received by Columbia Studios. Only costing 6 million dollars to produce, “Boyz n the Hood” ended up earning $57.5 million dollars by the years end. As well as being a colossal commercial success, it was highly acknowledged critically as well. The film gained recognition at the Academy Awards for nominations as best screenplay and best director making Singleton the first African American director to ever be nominated. Roger Ebert praised the movie as being, “not simply a brilliant directorial debut, but an American film of enormous importance.” The film over two decades after its production still moves audiences and is respected as a work of genius. What made his initial film so powerful was the multitude of themes and controversial issues of race, gender, and socioeconomics that he interwove into the film’s plot. “Boyz n the Hood” was so effective not just because of its cinematic aspects, but its cultural crossover. “Boyz n the Hood” was one of the films in the early part of the 90’s that contributed to a “black film renaissance” much like the previous one in the 1970’s with “Blaxploitation” movies. His films along with other famous African American directors like Spike Lee, the Hughes brothers, and F. Gary Gray, fed off of the hype that was beginning to be generated by this movement. The result of this new black film movement was that studios began to recognize how profitable it was and began to back more films that were written by blacks and directed by blacks. This was something that was unprecedented that probably wouldn’t have been funded a decade before.

Hollywood became intensely fascinated by black culture during the early nineties because of the demographics they were beginning to recognize in movie-goer-trends. African American in the 1990s made up 12% of the U.S. population, but the black communities made up 25-30% of the population that attended movies. Mr. Ken Smikle who in the 90’s was the publisher of Target Market News magazine, which was a magazine that tracked black consumer trends, stated. “The black population is younger, and is growing faster than other segments of the U.S. population, other than Latinos…so our future numbers look even better to studios” (ticket sales), “because young people buy the bulk of movie tickets”. In 1991 alone after the release of “Boyz n the Hood”, this new “Ghettocentric Film Genre” that was created spawned the likes of films nineteen films by black directors. This was unheard of because most of these 19 films were like Boyz n the Hood in the sense that they were major studio films, primarily written for black characters, written by African Americans, with crews that were 90% black. These films helped pave the way and create audiences for films in the future such as “Straight Out of Brooklyn” (1991), “Juice” (1992), “Poetic Justice” (1993), “Menace II Society” (1993), “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” (1993), “Clockers” (1995), and “Set It Off” (1996). Hollywood became more accepting of these types of films because of the impact that “Boyz n the Hood” had. “Boyz n the Hood” had a unique script as well as a unique soundtrack

During the time of Singleton’s rise to success, rap music was also slowly becoming America’s top musical genre, which would later dominate record sales in the last half of the decade. It was no secret that Hip-Hop was becoming more popular every year, but what was even more appealing to Hollywood as well as moviegoers was the cross over appeal that people were starting to see with the genre. Hip-Hop in the nineties came to appeal not only to blacks, but to other ethnic groups of the population as well, especially white teenagers. MTV was dominating television screens and “Yo MTV Raps!” became something that anyone could tune into weekly. Mr. Singleton knew this and so did the production studios. Directors like Singleton have had stars such as Ice Cube (Boyz n the Hood), 2pac (Poetic Justice), Janet Jackson (Poetic Justice), Snoop Dogg (Baby Boy), among others who are popular Hop-Hop/R&B stars appear in his films. This speaks to the crossover appeal of Singleton’s movies as well as other “ghettocentric” films that were created during this time period. Some of these stars as were highly influential in attracting nonblack audiences to “hood films”, because these films became seen in teen’s eyes as expansions off of the videos they watched on MTV on a weekly basis. As Ms. Tricia Rose, author of “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America” points out, that “young white listeners of black music are trying to ‘perfect a model of correct white hipness, coolness, and style by adopting the latest black style and image.’” Most of the Hip-Hop performers that are featured in these films usually were in charge of helping put together the sound tracks as well, making appearances in billboards, and helping advertise the movies they were in. So even if the potential audiences conceptually weren’t interested in the movie that was being advertised, if they were a fan of Hip-Hop, they would be interested in the featured movie. Directors, producers, and movie studios knew this and used this as another way of generating interest to these films. This aspect of these films in the 90’s was huge in making these films popular and relevant within popular culture as well. Music plays a vital role in Singleton’s movies: “Boyz n the Hood”, “Poetic Justice”, “Higher Learning”, “Rosewood”, “Shaft, Baby Boy”, “2 Fast 2 Furious”, and “Four Brothers”. Mr. Singleton was also the Executive Producer of “Hustle and Flow” and hand picked actor Terrence Howard, to play the role of Djay, the films protagonist and aspiring rapper. Hustle and Flow was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Actor and won Best Song for, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”, by “Three 6 Mafia”. Singleton believes that music in films plays a huge part in how they are received by their respective audience. Singleton revels the amazing work done by one of his childhood heroes Steven Spielberg in his film “Schindler’s” List. Mr. Singleton was so influenced by the score that was created in Schindler’s List, that he hired John Williams who was the composer for Schindler’s List, to be the composer for “Rosewood”. Of Spielberg Mr. Singleton says, “I loved the way Spielberg structured his scenes and the way he used music and how he didn’t make his antagonists one-dimensional.”

Simultaneously to this new found fascination in black cinema during the early nineties, of rough, ghetto narratives of inner city crime and violence, some of the highest grossing films during this time were highly graphic and in your face. Films such as the “Lethal Weapon” series, the “Die Hard” series, “Silence of the Lambs”, “Pulp Fiction”, the “Terminator” series, and “True Lies”, all topped the billboards during their time in theatres and spawned the likes of many other gruesome horror, drama, and hyper-violent movie series. Gangster movies in particular had a major impact on hood-cinema because of the focus of minorities from different generations rising to success in a country that was highly oppressive different ethnicities. Films such as “Scarface”, “The Godfather”, “Goodfellas”, and other gangster movies were influential on both hood films and on Hip-Hop/Rap. The black movie renaissance was took place in the 1970’s with Blaxploitation films, like “Superfly”, “The Mack”, and “Shaft” had similar effects on the black community, but in many ways failed to cross over to the extent as the hood films that came out in the 90’s. These movies in the Blaxploitation period were based on literary works and sometimes written by blacks, but mostly were produced, and directed by whites. However, just like in the early nineties, these movies culturally have had profound impacts on American culture today and impacted some of the Hip-Hop/Rap that was showcased in the hood film renaissance of the 90’s. American audiences as a whole were then and still remain today, infatuated with intensely violent cinema. Most of these movies were advertised by their violence and shown on T.V. to be very edgy. This appetite for these types of scripts was another reason that many “ghetto-centric” movies were so popular to American mainstream. Although the African American population was less than 15% of the U.S. population during the early 90’s, the rest of the country was highly curious about the black community that it was segregated from. America was far from a post-racial society during this time and the majority of images that were shown the news of blacks were highly controversial. Amidst the “civil rights movement” that was still going on, the L.A. Riots, and the Rodney King incident, America more than ever wanted to understand this community that they were so isolated from. These “ghetto films” were a view into the life of the violent black youth that had been appearing in the news and negatively portrayed by some parts of the media. This unique experience was something that added to the appeal of this genre as well. America was able to see first hand by going to the movies what living in some of these economically depressed areas like South Central Los Angeles was like, without having to actually make an appearance in the ghetto. Although some of the depictions were still Hollywood, Singleton made it his goal to make these depictions as real, as accurate, and as chilling as possible to evoke to the rest of the country of the atrocities that were occurring in these communities. In many ways, his movies helped explain conditions of the oppressed within these communities to the media. Also, they gave the black community more of a voice in fighting racial segregation and crime. The main message of these films were to not only reach white audiences about how blacks were still being highly neglected, but to also reach the black communities at large to “Increase the Peace” as he makes clear in “Boyz n the Hood”. Some of his more recent films such as “Shaft, 2 Fast 2 Furious”, and “Four Brothers” have been highly critiqued as being too “Hollywood” and too unrealistic to the type of style in which he shot films like “Boyz n the Hood” or “Higher Learning”. However, Singleton still puts his efforts into showing the horrors that the black youth is faced with every day. Singleton shows reality whether it is entertaining or not. In this it can be said that he is a Neorealist director by the approach he takes to making movies. Singleton after “Boyz n the Hood” has been criticized of deviating too much from his style that made him famous in the early 90’s—Neorealism.

Italian Neorealism was a film genre that was started in the 20th Century after World War II. This film movement was driven by the question of: how to reflect social reality? Neorealism in Italy was meant to inspire national identity and patriotism by showing how everyone in the country lived, not just the bourgeois or ruling class. It was a movement that focused on the poor, the less fortunate, and the socially oppressed in order to create change. Italian writers and directors such as Giovanni Verga started the Verga Group of writers/film makers that looked for ways to represent reality as close to what they observed in the world. Other writers within this group and students of this movement were (Rossellini, Visconti, and De Sica). These three scholars of this movement later would become the 3 pillars of Italian Neorealism. The writings of the Verga group wanted to promote more social mobility within the class system. These writers wanted to direct more recognition to the lower classes, so they could have a voice in society, that the upper class elites in Italy during the 1940’s post “Fascism” would essentially suppress; this became known as Verismo to the Verga Group. Giovanni Verga coined the term Verismo as a movement that was created where the subject is the common folk instead of the bourgeoisie. In short, Verismo represented truth, fact, and life the way it existed much like the way John Singleton went about creating “Boyz n the Hood”. This Verga philosophy of Verismo would later turn into Neorealism. Verga filmmakers wanted to exploit Italian reality on film by sketching the common man and how he behaved within his surroundings no matter how poor he was. Film and dialogue under this movement were meant to be different from common upper class speak to show how peasantry interacted. Italian Neorealists therefore wanted to represent a “slice of life” through their filmmaking. Everything to the audience is lived instead of heard or seen. Everything is supposed to be shot on location, with real people instead of actors, and usually with a relatively low budget. No special effects, no CGI, and relatively no editing. The film is supposed to be raw and almost feel as if it were shot on a single take. This is similar to how Singleton shot Boyz n the Hood and the approach he took to directing it.

Another parallel theme that is a mainstay of the values within “Boyz n the Hood” and Italian Neorealism is the role that children play and how they are represented. Children within most Neorealist films play a huge role, because they represent the future. This is very true with the overarching themes of children and young adults within “Boyz n the Hood”. One of the main themes that Singleton implements into the story is a loss of opportunity and how children within South Central Los Angeles never get a fair shot at life. Children in “Boyz n the Hood” are out in the streets late at night, with relatively no supervision and are never expected to reach their thirties. Singleton makes it clear that if places in America like South Central are to get better, children need to be looked after.

Neorealism, as Cesare Zavattini put it, is suppose to portray poverty in order to improve it. “To portray poverty is to protest against it.” This is accomplished by uncovering problems of the poor by portraying them on screen. By this, Neorealist films are films that are meant to provoke thought and create change. In order to fully accomplish this, Neorealist films are films set in the present and portray someone’s perceived reality. These ideals fit into what is known as the Poverty of Means and what dictates how a film is shot. Just like how these filmmakers wanted to secure a sense of nationalistic values within their audience, Singleton’s aim in creating “Boyz n the Hood” was no different.

Many of the themes that surrounded the message of “Boyz n the Hood” were the decay of municipal infrastructures, systematic racism, and loss of effective roles as they related to gender. Singleton highlights the increasing hyper-masculinity that plagued the black communities in the ghetto by looking at how men are taught to buy into this ideology of hegemonic masculinity; and gangs only perpetuate this problem. In order for survival in places like South Central men in particular can show no weakness, no feelings, and be relatively invulnerable. Gangs make this worse because they breed a sense of hyper masculine values in order for members to keep their status within the gang. Singleton states, “Gangs are just a symptom of the problems in the black community, they’re a rite of passage to manhood. Every society has that. For black youths in South Central, it’s joining a gang. In another society, it’s joining the football team. The problem with the right of passage in South Central is that it can get you killed.” But as Singleton portrays with the relationship between Cuba Gooding Junior and Laurence Fishburne, men especially in the most violent communities need to be able to show their vulnerability. Because boys at such a young age in communities like South Central aren’t meant to show vulnerability, it creates a very unhealthy message for them as they become older and turn into men. Singleton points out that if these extreme values of masculinity can be more or less abandoned, it would lead to less violence, more family structure, and more progress.

The techniques that Singleton used back in the early 90’s launched a whole new style of movie making that has changed Hollywood for the better. He has given the black communities more of a voice and advocates for progress within them. His work has also given careers to many other actors, directors, and writers because of his audacious attitude in how he creates and promotes his work. He is a professional and has worked to show the realism in American culture that is sometimes neglected or turned a blind eye to.