Back in July, I asked if my wife & I are the only two white people to watch two Tyler Perry movies all the way through. Maybe we’re easily entertained, but we enjoyed the flicks: there was a sorta non-Hollywood-ness about them (even if most of the male leads were model-types), an earnestness that doesn’t come off as laughable (which is pretty rare nowadays). Sure, many of the characters are devoutly Christian, but their faith doesn’t lead to miracles and perfect solutions to all problems. Oh, and Madea and her brother Joe are hysterical, allowing Perry managed to keep up the Flip Wilson tradition of black men playing drag and the more recent Eddie Murphy tradition of playing multiple characters in the same scene.
Nobody commented on my post (sigh), but the release of Perry’s third movie has mooted the question; it doesn’t matter if any white people see his movies, because there are a ton of black people who have made him Hollywood gold. Why Did I Get Married? took in almost $22 million in its opening weekend, doubling up the sales from George Clooney’s well-reviewed new movie about, um, the evils of Monsanto (I think).
My favorite part of the Perry story is how he “came out of nowhere.” Salon ran an article that includes a great anecdote about what happened when Perry’s agent approached a Hollywood studio. No one had any idea who Perry was, despite his stage success among black audiences:
What shocked Hollywood insiders [after Diary of a Mad Black Woman] was how Perry seemed to come out of nowhere. In the wake of the “Diary” success, the Hollywood trade paper Variety wrote a story that led off, “Tyler who?” [Lions Gate studio head of production Michael Paseornek] had been asking himself the same question a year before, after he received a letter from Perry’s agent, talking about a guy who wrote plays for African-American audiences on the “chitlin circuit,” a name that goes back to Jim Crow days, when African-Americans were banned from mainstream auditoriums. Nowadays, Perry’s plays regularly sell out major venues such as New York’s Beacon Theater and the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, where the Oscars are held, and in the last eight years, they’ve grossed more than $100 million through ticket sales and DVDs of live performances sold through his Web site.
“It was an astronomical number for someone I’d never heard of,” Paseornek recalls, “so I called around to other people in showbiz, and they hadn’t heard of him either.”
But those people were white. Paseornek got his first insight into the Perry phenomenon when he walked down the hall to the Lions Gate inventory control department, to talk to an African-American employee named Kenya Watson. “She said, ‘Sure, I’ve heard of Tyler Perry,'” he recalls. “‘I own all his DVDs. Whenever we have a cookout, we put one on.'”
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Eugene Robinson has a nice opinion piece about the Perry phenomenon, and how refreshing it is to see something other than the “magic negro,” whose role is to explain life to white people.
You know me: I may love me some failure, but I also love success that flies under the mainstream radar.