Black Out

What happens when
you put a black movie in a theater outside of the black
community its opening weekend?

Let me take a
guess. Well, if it's a good movie with a solid cast, it
will sell out two shows, one on Friday and one on
Saturday. It will then pull a higher per-screen
average than any of the top-10-grossing films in
America. In this case it beat out The Golden
Compass ($7,308), This Christmas ($2.640),
Fred Claus ($1,446), Beowulf ($1,524),
Bee Movie ($962), and American
Gangster ($1,190).

And then it will
be pulled from the theater because of concerns that
"the producers may have bought the gross." Coupled with
suspicions that over $1,500 in advance ticket sales on a
Sunday before the theater opened is "highly abnormal
for a Sunday movie."

Let me guess, too
many blacks in line last weekend?

But that's just
my guess at the reasons that Dirty Laundry, a new
black PG-13 rated film starring Rockmond Dunbar,
Loretta Devine, Jenifer Lewis, and Terri J. Vaughn,
was pulled from the Clearview Chelsea Theater in New York
City just days after its opening. Did I mention
it pulled a higher per screen average than any of the
top-10-grossing films in America? But what do you
expect when you take a movie with an almost all-black cast
and put it on one screen in Chelsea? Chelsea?

Do you think that
would ever happen to a Tyler Perry film or a Spike Lee
joint? Do you think they did this to Juno, which
also opened last weekend? Black films need black
audiences to succeed, and we're not in Chelsea. Try
Harlem, the Bronx, and the Jamaica section of
Queens. But what pisses me off even more is that
when we make the effort to go out of our way, in the
cold, to support the film at a theater that is miles away
from where it should be screening, we get accused of buying
out the tickets and falsifying numbers. Give
me a break.

And you may be
wondering how this could have happened in the first damn
place, and I hate to be the one to say I told you so, but I
did. I just hope that because of the film's gay
character, black America doesn't ignore the that fact
this is still a black film that's being unfairly
removed from its only theater in New York during a time when
black films are far and few between.