#1
2/18/02
2/19/02
2/20/02
Everyone knows how much I love
THE BOONDOCKS or at least you should.
Even though no one bought me the BOONDOCKS book for Christmas. Anyway on a listserve, we were talking about who we consider to be the most embarrassing Black person and it struck me that I wanted to know what my GC family thought as well.
#2
I read last week in the USA TODAY weekend magazine that Aaron McGruder is working with Reginald Hudlin to make the Boondocks into a movie. Here is the article:
Pop Culture
Reginald Hudlin and Aaron McGruder
Interview: Jan. 10, 2002
Ever since they met four years ago in New York, 40-year-old director Reginald Hudlin ("House Party," "Boomerang" and the upcoming "Serving Sara") has wanted to partner up on a project with Aaron McGruder, 27, creator of the hip comic strip "The Boondocks." Now they're finally collaborating on several endeavors: an animated version of "The Boondocks" for Showtime, an adaptation of Angela Nissel's "The Broke Diaries" and two screenplays. What took these guys so long to hook up? They're currently tackling many mediums — film, TV, the funny pages — and are unwilling to compromise their creativity, which has forced them to "walk away from more than a few prospects," Hudlin says. Here, the duo discuss black power in mainstream entertainment.
McGruder: When I was 16, "House Party" was my life in that, you know, I felt it was a very realistic portrayal of what young black kids are actually like as opposed to the Hollywood ghetto-ized version. There was a balance between a sort of universal humanity and culture nuance so that everything felt just right. Spike Lee's films were very heavily racialized and politicized but they didn't resonate with me as much as yours did. "Boomerang" was sort of a nice fantasy, like, "Wow, maybe I could work in an office with all women and have this gigantic apartment in New York City and still be hip and cool and not be the stereotypical whitewashed corporate Negro. I can be all those things: debonair, smart and successful."
Hudlin: When I showed my brother, Warrington [a filmmaker], "The Boondocks" books and he was reading them, he said, "You know, Aaron gives me hope for this generation." And it really is true because your work epitomized all the principles of my own personal aethetic code, which is that it is funny. It is political. It is human. And it is genuinely original. The characters are [real]. You're willing to have the protagonists be flawed characters. You are a genuinely courageous person, and willing to say what most people think, and says it in a very clever original way, which is why this strip is such a huge success. And I think the more people who get to hear your world view, the more people will be excited about it.
McGruder: And the strip is successful with an audience that it's not really targeted for. So when we make it to television and it's more accessible to a broader demographic of people and it is free from the inherent constraint of the newspaper medium, since we'll do primetime cable, it'll really only be more of what has made the strip successful in the first place.
Hudlin: It's been tough because we've been very uncompromising. You have a very unprecedented deal with newspapers, and we wanted to do whatever it took to maintain that creative integrity, because that's what has made the strip so successful. [Because you] make a very good living just doing the comic strip, which is a full-time career, when we decided to take it to another medium, we were more than willing to walk away from more than a few prospects before we would do something that would weaken the material.
McGruder: Maintaing the strip and getting accustomed to deadlines [seven strips a week, every week of the year for a five-year contract] was difficult at first. It's a never-ending creative endeavor, and I was just coming out of college and went right into this. It took a level of discipline that I hadn't really developed yet. But [the newspapers] never tried to tell me what to do creatively. Not once. And I'm very fortunate for that.
Hudlin: What I've really tried to do with my films is present black life [in a way we haven't seen before]. When I was a kid, I would watch movies like "American Graffiti," "Animal House" and "Risky Business." I didn't know why I couldn't have movies like that about my life, so that's what I've tried to change. I've tried to present "normal" black life in my work, not black life where we are reactive to white people and white institutions, where black people are mad all the time because of The Man or suffering because of The Man or sucking up to The Man — just leading their lives like normal people. When people tell me what they like about my movies, it is that aspect that they respond to, particularly in a film like "Boomerang" where there are so few images of professional black people who have a sense of humor, who have a strong sense of their cultural identity and at the same time are very good at their jobs. So to make a film that embodies those ideas, which are not explicitly political but are inherently very powerful, I think that those are the contributions that have made a major impact, and the fact that my work inspired someone as talented as Aaron is very satisfying.
McGruder: I came up with the idea for "The Boondocks" while I was in college [at the University of Maryland]. I was a big fan of "Bloom County" and "Calvin and Hobbes," and I decided to try something like that — a social satire targeting racial politics and popular culture.
Hudlin: I like to describe "The Boondocks" as "imagine if Chris Rock drew 'Peanuts.'"
McGruder: Well, I have no problem with Chris Rock, and I have no problem with "Peanuts."
Hudlin: Well, it's a funnier answer.
McGruder: As long as they like it, it's all good to me. I would describe it as a strip about angry black children. I try to question everything or spark the brain to go in a new direction. Pop culture needs to be more creative and balanced. I've been [especially] critical of contemporary black music. I'd like more variety. Not everyone has to sound like Jay-Z or DMX. It's not that everybody in music is bad. It's just that you don't want to have to listen to the same two or three people over and over and over again, because no matter how good they are you're going to get tired of them. As it becomes more creative, it'll become more balanced. There'll just be different styles, there'll be the natural evolution of black music, which I think has been artifically stagnated over the past half-decade or so by corporate interest.
Hudlin: The main thing is that you maintain your voice. To succeed in a variety of mediums, you can't get pigeonholed. As long as you do your homework and study another medium, why not try something new? I grew up admiring guys like Howard Hawks, who'd do a movie like "Red River," then he'd do a movie like "His Girl Friday," where you can have a real diversity of style. It's harder to have a career like that these days, so you just try to prove the point by doing. A movie like "House Party," which is a teen comedy, is different from a movie like "Boomerang," is more of a classic Rock Hudson-Doris Day romance, vs. "Great White Hype," which is more political satire, vs. "The Ladies Man," which is just a silly fun movie, vs. "Serving Sara," which we wanted to do that kind of classic romantic road comedy like "It Happened One Night."
McGruder: The hardest part has been not quitting. After I moved to L.A. [in 1999], Reggie constantly stayed on me to keep the strip going. And now all this Hollywood stuff is happening on our own terms.
Hudlin: Which is the way it should be. One of the biggest challenges of my career has been trying to overcome the myth that if something has a black cast or is centered in black culture that it is marginal. When you talk to studios, there's still a second-class attitude taken to a lot of black material unless there's a very, very large star attached. Over the years, there has been incremental change, but I can't say it's been much more than that, despite the fact that black pop culture is mainstream culture. If you look particularly at the hip-hop generation in film, in television, in music — many of the biggest stars are black. And that's an assumption we have to make no matter what we're working on.
— Moderated by New York-based writer Sara Anderson.
Syndicate Says 'Boondocks' May Not Return
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