A Singular Film by John Singleton: Boyz N the Hood

About a month ago, the airwaves were filled with tributes to Richard Roundtree, dead at 81.  Back in 1971, at age 29, Roundtree soared to international celebrity in Shaft. The story of a tough, sexy Black detective combing the mean streets of Manhattan helped launch the blaxploitation craze, in which crime dramas, martial arts dramas, and the occasional urban comedy featured African American casts, raw languages, and funky musical scores. As an underling at Roger Corman’s down-and-dirty New World Pictures, I worked on my share of blaxploitation flicks, but ours tended to emphasize female nudity.  We were the first to corral the talents of the bodacious Pam Grier, but my most vivid memory of that era is working on 1975’s TNT Jackson, in which a Playboy centerfold named Jeanne Bell played a kung fu expert fighting off bad guys in Hong Kong.

 The blaxploitation era as a whole had the virtue of helping talented Black performers become stars. But it didn’t make for the world’s best movies. Cut to 1991, the year when a 24-year-old writer-director set Hollywood a-buzzing with a coming-of-age drama set in South Central L.A. Boyz n the Hood started out as part of Singleton’s application for the famous USC Film School. Feeling deeply connected to the gang-ridden urban environment in which he himself had grown up, he knew from the start that this was material he had to direct himself. Which didn’t mean he made the film in a vacuum. Some of the early material involving four young boys checking out a dead body was influenced by the 1986 film, Stand by Me. And when he sold his script to Columbia Pictures in 1990, the greenlight came quickly because of the box office success of Spike Lee’s 1989 streets-of-Brooklyn masterpiece, Do the Right Thing.

 Singleton’s story, which leaps seven years at mid-point, explores what it’s like to grow up in an area dominated by gang violence. At ten, the little boys of the Crenshaw neighborhood of South Central, are already aware that they can easily become targets. There are roughnecks around to taunt them, and the local police (including an arrogant Black cop) are less than helpful in keeping trouble at bay. Young Trey has the advantage of a tough-love dad determined to keep him on the straight and narrow; young Ricky is a budding football talent. But as this section ends, Ricky’s half-brother, the chubby Doughboy, is already being arrested for shoplifting. The stage is set for the drama that is to follow.

 As a very young filmmaker, Singleton was helped by a cast that contained old pros as well as some bright new talents. The script’s essential father figure, “Furious” Styles, was portrayed  by the gifted Laurence Fishburne, who’d played major stage roles and been featured in films like Apocalypse Now and The Color Purple. Fortunately, Singleton had met him on the set of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse¸ where he was working as a production assistant and security guard. Day jobs have their uses: Singleton met Ice Cube while serving as an intern on the Arsenio Hall Show, then gave him a central role (as the teen-aged Doughboy) that has propelled the rapper into a major acting career. The elegant Angela Bassett played her first significant film character as Trey’s upwardly mobile mother Reva in Singleton’s film; both Cuba Gooding Jr. and Morris Chestnut—as 17-year-old Trey and Ricky—essentially began their careers with Singleton. (Bassett has since become a two-time Oscar nominee, and Gooding won the supporting actor statuette in 1996 for Jerry Maguire.) Nia Long and Regina King can be spotted too.

 

 

Spreading the Word About “Contagion”

Who’da thunk I’d watch a disaster movie and feel . . .  nostalgia? But that was my first reaction when viewing Contagion, the 2011 medical disaster movie directed by the very busy Steven Soderbergh. I first became a Soderbergh fan after seeing 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape, a modest but emotionally dynamic chamber piece that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and ushered in an era of adult-themed indies made by serious young filmmakers. Since then, Soderbergh has had a solid career in film and television, including Erin Brockovich, the multiple Oscar-winning Traffic, and a sexy George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez thriller, Out of Sight. For variety he’s helmed some lucrative franchises like Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels.

 When it was released in 2011, Contagion did nicely at the box office. Its impressive cast and far-flung settings attracted viewers around the globe, eager to see such major stars as Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law fight off a worldwide pandemic. But I doubt anyone took it terribly seriously. After all, in 2011 we hadn’t endured a true global medical disaster for almost 100 years. Not since 1918, and the latter days of World War I, had the world seen the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic that took the life of my mother’s father, as well as millions of others. It was exciting to watch Paltrow and Winslet in the throes of a horrible virus, but we knew perfectly well that we and our loved ones were safe.

 That was then. Now that we’ve been through 3½ years of COVID, I could watch Contagion from a new, more enlightened perspective. A lot of what appears on screen seems all too familiar: the origin of the virus among tainted bats and pigs in a Chinese marketplace; the spreading of the disease, in those first innocent days, from simple hand-to-hand contact; the fear behind every cough as the world starts to catch on to what is happening; the grimly mounting statistics on the TV screen; the desperate urge for a vaccine that will return the world to the way it was before. The filmmakers presciently show so many things that became all too familiar in 2020, like the turning of football stadiums into mass hospitalization sites. And there’s Jude Law’s blogger character, who evolves into an anti-vaxer urging the public to avoid vaccination altogether. Sound familiar?

 Some things that are shown in the film fortunately didn’t happen in real life. First of all, the film’s eventual miracle vaccine is injected into the nasal cavity (yuck!), something we fortunately haven’t had to deal with. Secondly, though some of us did help strip store shelves bare of toilet paper, we didn’t run out of food and find ourselves making do with MREs, like the movie’s characters. Nor, at least in my experience, did real-life vaccine injection sites devolve into vicious brawls as people fought over scarce resources. Another of the film’s plot strands has the U.S. and its western allies cynically sending placebos overseas so as to hang onto the precious dosages for their own populations. In some ways we’ve been very lucky that these hideous movie scenarios haven’t played out for real.

 Yet the movie overlooks some issues that we’ve had to acknowledge in the real world. Like: the fact that deaths from COVID have been very much linked to social class, with hard-working ethnic minorities (of which the film has very few) bearing the brunt of the infection. Contagion’s innocence in such matters makes it seem rather quaint. Still, we can’t say we weren’t warned.