TV tries to do history. It usually fails. When they offer a minis-series like ROOTS of THE WINDS OF WAR, we can applaud that they're dramatizing a larger truth. But when they start calling themselves documentaries, it tends to fall apart quicker than you can say "Produced by Tom Hanks." THEY'VE GOTTA HAVE US is about as offensive as any documentary could ever be. NETFLIX presents it as one of their original programs which is probably lie number one. This is a BBC program -- which goes a long way towards explaining the racism. Why is a White man making a documentary entitled THEY'VE GOTTA HAVE US?
The documentary is supposed to be about African-Americans and film. It's not about that. It's not about that by any stretch of the imagination. It is about Mike Connolly, a White man, producing a project to enshrine his obsession with Spike Lee.
Spike Lee has directed many strong films. He is not, however, the Lord Jesus Christ. Someone might want to break the news to Connolly. At one point, Connolly's stretching the truth so much that that the documentary appears to suggest DO THE RIGHT THING brought rap into film. It didn't. KRUSH GROOVE (1985) and WILDCATS 1986 both predate it. But it gets worse. In the need to make Spike the Messiah, Connolly's crowd offers many ridiculous claims -- such as when Nelson George shows up to insist Spike altered dance and that only Rosie Perez could have danced the dance at the start of DO THE RIGHT THING which was unlike anything before.
Every step in that choreography is a rip off of Michael Jackson's music videos. That tends to happen when someone's not a trained dancer. She would go on to 'choreograph' a few videos and would rip off in those as well.
The documentary suffers from a lack of perspective and history throughout. Let's go to the 70s.
The 70s, in the documentary, are about Blaxploitation. A shout out to Pam Grier, for example, is all we really get. But the 70s were more than that. There was SPARKLE, there was CAR WASH, LET'S DO IT AGAIN, UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT, ROSS 110th STREET . . . These and so many other films are ignored. What's worse? Richard Pryor's legacy is insulted.
Richard Pryor was a movie star, the first African-American male movie star since Sidney Poitier. That's buried, that's ignored. Instead, they note him briefly with a clip of him stammering in character and say that he wasn't smooth like Eddie Murphy.
Richard Pryor was a trailblazer. He deserves a lot more than that. He was a movie star, someone people paid money to see. Two of his seventies films starred the first African-American movie star since Dorothy Dandridge: Diana Ross.
She's completely left out of the documentary. Now when bi-racial Halle Berry won the Academy Award and felt the need to salute all African-American women who came before and did not include Diana Ross, there was a controversy that ended with most just assuming that Halle didn't know her history. But THEY GOTTA HAVE US is supposed to be history. So how do they excuse ignoring Diana Ross?
Diana Ross was a movie star. Her name got a film made. She was the first African-American woman to be paid a million dollars for a film (THE WIZ). She was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA for LADY SINGS THE BLUES -- the first African-American female to be nominated in two decades for those two awards. And then there's MAHOGANY. Not only did Diana star in the film, Berry Gordy directed it. Unlike the Blaxplotation films Connolly was wet dreaming over (while admitting they were directed by White men), MAHOGANY was directed by an African-American male. Berry Gordy's MOTOWN PRODUCTIONS would make the feature films LADY SINGS THE BLUES, MAHOGANY, THE WIZ, THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY and THE LAST DRAGON. Berry was a movie mogul and it's an insult that he wasn't even mentioned in the documentary.
There are so many insults in the documentary.
Let's note this:
BLACK FILM MAKING GOES BACK TO THE all-black Lincoln Motion Picture Company, established in Los Angeles around 1916. Then, during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and into the 1940's, the independent producer and director Oscar Micheaux created many films for black audiences. These films -- romances, comedies, dramas and adventures -- depicted black people in their rich variety, from the pious bourgeoisie to less savory characters. For the next 30 years there were sporadic Hollywood films about blacks -- almost always directed by whites -- and of course the ascension of Sidney Poitier. In the 1970's, the "blaxploitation" films -- like "Super Fly" -- became the first black movies to receive significant attention from the general public, though these films, too, were frequently made by whites. Star vehicles for Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy followed.
That's not in the documentary. That's from Karen Grigsby Bates' "THEY'VE GOTTA HAVE US," THE NEW YORK TIMES June 14, 1991.
So a White, British man makes a film about Black filmmakers and rips off an African-American woman's 1991 article? A White man is saying "They've gotta have us"? And we're left remembering Angie edict on 30 ROCK, "Don't do impressions of other races."
Or other's experiences?
We pondered that when Carmen Ejogo was speaking. We pondered this as she spoke with a melodic voice. We pondered this because we saw SELMA (not a great movie) and we were appalled by the squeak Ejogo spoke in as Coretta Scott King. We wrongly assumed that was the actress' only speaking voice. Now that we know better, we especially find her performance insulting. In the documentary, you get an idiot blathering on about how he thinks the script was better once Ava DuVernay got ahold of it and added the scene with Coretta. If, like most Americans, you missed the movie, you missed Coretta confronting MLK on his affairs -- a scene that never took place in real life but one Ava injected into a historical drama and one that a documentary now praises.
Are you starting to see the problem?
Samuel L. Jackson is shown in an interview for a radio station where he talks about the fact that maybe MLK should be playing by an African-American and not by a British Black person. It's dismissed. Instead we hear about the training, the this and the that. But there's something more. There's living it. And we do agree with Samuel L. Jackson that an African-American should have played MLK. Knowing now that Carmen Ejogo does not speak in that squeak, we especially believe that an African-American woman should have played Coretta.
A documentary has to deal with reality. Time and again, Connolly refuses to do so. The point of this three-part series appears to be two-fold: Spike Lee is God and British actors are better than American actors. We don't find either point to be truthful.