MO'KELLY REPORT on the Akeelah and the Bee Boycott

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Posted | May 24, 2006 02:29 AM

Ladies and gentlemen, put your damn hands together for the successful boycott of the movie Akeelah and the Bee. It takes real temerity to ignore arguably the best movie of the year. Not the best ‘Black’ movie of the year, but the BEST movie in all of 2006. That takes a level of dedication rarely seen and unheard of unmitigated gall.

Yes, I remember the odds were more in our favor with Phat Girlz. We had more ‘excuses’ available at our disposal. Everything from “not wanting to support a movie starring Mo’Nique,” to not supporting a movie with a supposedly misguided marketing campaign.”

Yes, I was worried. Deep down inside I knew ‘we’ wouldn’t be able to rely on those excuses the next time around and I worried whether we’d have the gumption to make sure another positive movie highlighting the Black experience would under-perform commercially.

When you lay it out on paper, it really didn’t look promising. There was a great script, great starring cast, including two Academy Award nominees Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne…and even a superb performance by relative newcomer Keke Palmer.

But ‘we’ had an ace in the hole. ‘We’ didn’t give a damn.

The movie was executive produced by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Not Oprah, not Quincy, not Bill (Cosby), not Bob (Johnson) but Mark.

As in Mark Cuban. Uh, no thanks Mark. I’d appreciate it if you left the meaningful and ‘positive’ movies to ‘us.’ You have no business trying to produce thoughtful and thought-provoking African-American cinema. You AND Steven Spielberg can go straight to hell. I’m still mad at him for that abomination called The Color Purple. 11 Academy Award nominations? What in the hell was HE thinking?

See, what Mark Cuban didn’t understand was although he had the best of intentions and produced a stellar cinematic piece…he forgot one minor detail.

‘We’ don’t give a damn.

Never underestimate ignorance and indifference. They are more powerful and potent than virtually any force known to man. They are mother and father respectively to self-hatred and self-destruction. It’s true. Ignorance and hatred are inextricably linked; ergo ignorance of self can have only one end result. Mark Cuban was trying to mess all that up with messages about the ‘value of education’ or ‘being proud of who you are.’

How dare he?! Ignorance is bliss and he’s messing with our collective euphoria.

I was so scared that African-Americans might come out and support this movie I saw it three different times, err uh of course in the hopes of making sure other African-Americans didn’t try to see this movie. My job as a card-carrying ‘hater’ is to make sure that I, like most African-Americans would continue to wallow in mediocrity and relative stupidity.

No way in the world did I want Black folk seeing this wonderful story. No way in hell did I want people, especially Black people to support a movie that portrayed African-Americans AND Latinos in a positive light…even with a bit of innocent interracial romance included.

That’s simply unacceptable.

Unless Blacks and Latinos are trying to kill each other or shoot their way straight to jail, we have no business spending our money to see such uplifting garbage. Everybody knows that there are only three stories about minorities worth producing and supporting. You know, the one where we go to jail, the other one in which we just got out of jail…and that other, other one in which we go to jail, get out and develop a scheme that threatens us going back to jail. If the movie is not on the following list, we have no business supporting it. Please support all of these movies, now out on video.

Lockdown

3 Strikes

Caught Up

Get Rich or Die Tryin’

(and 187 other movies that I don’t have time to list)

Thank God, ‘we’ are still stuck on stupid. Then again, most of us seemingly aren’t interested in having a relationship with the Lord, so probably He didn’t have anything to do with this. This is all on us. ‘We’ get all the credit.

Thanks be to ‘we.’ Let the church say ‘Amen!’

As it turned out, my services weren’t needed. The theater patrons were mostly White anyhow. I didn’t have to keep the multitude of ‘us’ away. ‘We’ staged our own successful boycott and nobody can take that away.

Mission accomplished.

To add further irony to insult, Akeelah and the Bee was written and directed by Doug Atchison, a White man. I had followed this script for many years, dating back to when it won a national honor in the Nicholls Fellowship Screenwriting competition. For the uninitiated, that’s the Academy Award amateur screenwriting competition.

In other words, all of Hollywood knew that this was a great movie waiting to be made from jump. Another Nicholls Fellowship winner was the shamefully positive (and commercially unsuccessful) movie Down in the Delta

Thank God though for the livid indifference of my people. Without your collective help, ‘we’ wouldn’t be celebrating today.

Let’s put it in quantitative terms:

After four weeks in wide release…Akeelah and the Bee with a great story, cast and matching performances has grossed:

$15,728,000

To put that number in perspective…

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (50 Cent)

$30,981,850

Baby Boy (Tyrese – 2001)

$28,734,552

Antwone Fisher (Denzel – 2002)

$21,078,145

Soul Plane (Bunch of fools – 2004)

$13,922,211

Phat Girlz (Mo’Nique)

$6,922,865

Down in the Delta (Alfre Woodard)

$5,662,985

Soul Food (Ensemble - 1997)

$43,490,057

Waiting to Exhale (Ensemble - 1995)

$64,236,823

Dead Presidents (Ensemble – 1995)

$24,104,295

If we disregard inflation and assume these figures to be both static and directly comparable, we can come to the following conclusions.

• The commercial appeal of Akeelah and the Bee is akin to the maligned Soul Plane. I’m not sure how anyone should view this fact, no matter how you look at it. I’m disappointed that Soul Plane didn’t do better. I’d much see more cinema with ‘us’ acting like buffoons and smoking marijuana, than I would watch a story about an African-American girl attempt to win the national spelling bee.

• African-Americans have no intention of supporting meaningful Black cinema, irrespective of the color or gender of the writer, director or producers. That’s a very positive sign.

• Black Movies starring Black Academy Award-winners or nominees don’t do well. See: Antwone Fisher. It is a better business decision for a Hollywood studio to put out a movie featuring a rapper with a gun in both his hands, shooting at people who look like him…and that’s a beautiful thing.

• It’s been almost 10 years since a Black, positive, non comedic movie has been a commercial success. Hallelujah!

Today is a great day in Black America. We should all stop and take moment to fully appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment. Only in America can a movie about two gay cowboys (which was supposedly so ‘repulsive’ and allegedly antithetical to American ideals and morals) could be better received and supported in its community than a positive movie about African-Americans in ours. Although Brokeback Mountain did not have national distribution upon its release…you fill in the rest. Although gays are estimated to be 10% of the population and African-Americans are 12%...you fill in the rest. If you can’t, I’ll do it for you.

Brokeback Mountain

$83,025853

Akeelah and the Bee

$15,728,000

Congratulations Black America…you didn’t let me down and your continued indifference is both noticed and needed.

Keep hope alive. You are not somebody.

The Mo'Kelly Report is an entertainment journal with a political slant. It is meant to inform, infuse and incite meaningful discourse...as well as entertain. The e-book "The Best of The Mo'Kelly Report" will be available...uh, soon. For more Mo’Kelly, http://mokellyreport.blogspot.com.

#1.

Posted by kimade | May 25,2006 09:10 PM

Fortunately, I don't think that it is a "boycott." Although I feel your pain, I think the problem is that most Black people have been slow in getting off their butts and getting to the theatre to see the film. I think that most people have heard about the film, have heard great things about it and have the film on their "to do" list. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate the way in which the film industry (i.e., distribution)works. They do not realize that the amount of money that a film makes in its first few weeks will determine whether it stays in theatres. They assume that all films get a certain amount of time in theatres.

You should, however, take heart. Most Black people, who find it soooo difficult to make it to the theatre to support a quality film like "A and the B," are exceptional when it comes to making it to the video store!!!

#2.

Posted by First One | June 08,2006 06:05 PM

Speaking of the video store. I worked at a video store some years back.

The store was in an area where many blacks lived as well as other cultures. It was a white owned video store. The classes of people who frequented the store were mostly middle to lower class.

Most of the black people who rented from the video store didn't rent the "HOOD" movies often. Often times black folks were renting action, drama, science fiction, western, comedy, etc.

Mostly the young white folks were renting the "HOOD" movies. I guess the influences comes from watching MTV music videos and BET.

People do need to learn more about what's a B movie and an A movie. Movie theaters need to be culturally inclusive. Images go a long way.

We allow ourselves to get caught into statistical nonsense.

There was an article in a newspaper that said straight to video is the market for Black independent filmmakers. All white people don't make it to the big screen either. Hollywood does have its favorites beyond ethnicity. Though, I have to agree that the Black and White issue still exists. Money is a factor, but if Black people built a country without receiving the proper reparations you bet your britches that Hollywood will continue pumping out mythical comedies and "Hood" movies to keep the BUCK AND MAMMY IMAGE ALIVE TO KEEP BLACK FOLKS IN THEIR PLACE. That's why I'm very cautious to believe in all of these so called "STATISTICS" in the Media.

Now, I can say that the white filmmaker chose Laurence Fishburn and Angela Basset do in large to their persona. Living large actors with cross over appeal.

Of course the white filmmaker had to have interest in black culture. He possibly studied black aesthetics, but "WISELY" I don't know. I'm not threatened. To each is own. He had to have seen a black girl at a spelling Bee and said hey, there's an idea.

We need to know what's going on with Black film festivals and the black filmmakers who attend them. If we keep our concentration on particular white individuals making movies with black folks in them with no black business people and black production people involved then we should SHUT UP! DO FOR OURSELVES!

What happened to BET PICTURES? BET's not making movies no more. From what I heard their studios were too small to hold movie sets in them.

There are tons of black filmmakers and business people who know how to make clean family images. Africa was the first place to have griots, folklore, and distinctive artists who made the most beautiful pieces of art in the entire world.

So, why should we as black folks be concerned with one white man making a movie about a black girl name Akeelah and a spelling Bee competition?

I'm not interested in discussing the same old issue. I know every time we look up just like back in the 1970s and beyond white filmmakers took advantage of "BLACK" culture and duplicated as well as exploited the "BIG BREAK" opportunity that a black filmmaker could've had to make movies with black cultural images.

There are black folks who know what strategic planning is and how to organize. There's no excuses for blaming so and so for not supporting a movie. Not all white people as I said before make it in Hollywood.

I don't have time to say blacks are going to have it hard. We know that we have it hard every where. But to say that there's no BIGGOTS in Hollywood I'd be lying to myself.

How in the world are black folks going to succeed in a place like Hollywood that don't give two cents for unknowns. It's bad enough blacks are too well known on "CRIME REPORTS"
on every NEWS TV STATION in the world.

Hollywood shape shifts whomever they choose and it seems like a petty place to live. Think about the Bus Boycotts during the Civil Rights era. Think about the desegration of school issue going on today in regional territories that falsely promotes multicultural environments. Black people are still looked upon as "PERCENTAGE" carriers. We're carried by percentage estimates to see if we're still capable of intergrating or should I say assimilating into being "WHITE."

Like these talk shows with a black host but 99 percent white audience participation. So, a white man making a movie with black people as the main leads still have problems because "RACISM" still prevails. And that small percentage of brain power in certain black people's minds have been duped into believing the myths of fractured fantasies with themselves on the big screen screen.

The black imagination has been bound to limited thinking. When we think as black people do we have positive images. Because all black people don't live in the same environments

I know what people want to say. They want to say a lot of black people live in the city. But what people have to realize is that many blacks are moving out of the city into rural areas where many blacks once grew up.

"BUSINESS" is the key. Knowing the business of movie making along with history, production skills, and communication skills can mature the thinking process of making quality made movies. To many people want quantity instead of quality.

LET'S JUST MAKE OUR OWN MOVIES AND DISTRIBUTE THEM OURSELVES.

WHERE'S THE P FUNK MOVIE?! GET IT OUT TO THE THEATERS PLEASE. I'M WAITING AS PATIENTLY AS POSSIBLE FOR THIS HIGH CONCEPT GALACTIC ADVENTURE.

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