Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990 TAG: 9003162050
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID MILLS THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
"Culturally specific" is the phrase Hudlin likes to use, though what comes to mind is that wry slogan some college kids wear on T-shirts: "It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand."
Seriously, do you think Pauline Kael ever heard of "Tear the Roof Off the Sucker" by Parliament? But to Hudlin, 28 years old, born and raised in East St. Louis, Ill., that 1976 song was a party anthem, as it was to many blacks of his generation.
And that's not the only "culturally specific" reference in Hudlin's feature film debut, "House Party," which opened March 9 in fairly limited release (in Roanoke, the film is playing at the Towers Mall and Valley View Mall 6 theaters). Mention is made of "Dolemite," a low-budget 1975 action movie; "The Signifying Monkey," a classic of profane lore from the urban jungle; and the "Hey, Love" TV commercial, a cult favorite with an interesting history (which we'll get into later). Even Spike Lee doesn't get this arcane.
Sure, everybody is going to get Hudlin's toilet jokes, his bad-breath jokes. But there seems to be something specifically, refreshingly black about humor that emanates simply from kids dancing in close quarters.
"I really believe in the dense-packed theory of humor," says the writer and director, "which is that you have highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow jokes. Also you have culturally specific jokes that will fly over a certain segment of the audience's head, and you have jokes which are universal, because you are basically working with universal themes. You know, bullies, falling in love, father-
Okay, yeah. A kid is grounded by his father after getting into trouble at school, but he sneaks away to attend his best friend's party, and perchance to get lucky with one of the two finest girls in class, but he has incurred the wrath of the school ruffians, and so on. This ain't Kabuki. White folks will be able to follow.
But check this out. "House Party" includes a cameo appearance by singer and record producer George Clinton, playing a hip deejay stuck with a decidedly unhip, black-bourgeois gig. His scene isn't crucial to the story line, but Clinton happens to be an influential and revered figure in the black popular culture. Also known as "Dr. Funkenstein," he was the architect of the whole Parliament-Funkadelic empire of the '70s.
And the executives of New Line Cinema, who put up the $2.5 million to make "House Party," wanted his scene cut from the film.
"They didn't know who George Clinton was," Hudlin recalls. "They thought he was just, like, a buddy of mine." A burst of laughter comes out of him. "And I said, `This man is a cornerstone of American music.' I said, `Look, you wouldn't cut Bruce Springsteen's cameo, and you don't want to cut George Clinton's. When he appears on screen, people will cheer. I guarantee this.' It was a hard sell."
In the end, New Line trusted the judgment of Hudlin and his older brother, Warrington, who produced "House Party." The white executives "were working in a milieu that they admitted they didn't understand," Hudlin says. They hadn't even heard of the rap stars Kid 'N Play, around whom Hudlin built the movie.
Sure enough, he adds, preview audiences have been cheering when they see Clinton. "There are a lot of things in the film that we feel strongly about, and that we know audiences are plugging into and going, `Oh! That's the real funk! Yes!' "
And how are the nation's film critics - quick! name three black ones - going to react to "the real funk"? Roger Ebert gave "House Party" a hearty thumbs up last week, though his partner Gene Siskel dismissed it as old hat. The New York Times and Rolling Stone were enthusiastic. And Owen Gleiberman of the new Entertainment Weekly wrote, "Here, at last, is a shrewd and sassy pop entertainment about black life. . . . The hip-hop lingo whizzes by at an exhilarating clip. . . ." (Yo, get down, Owen!)
"House Party" got off to an auspicious start last January at the Sundance United States Festival in Park City, Utah (at Robert Redford's place). By a vote of the directors entered in competition, "House Party" was awarded the Filmmakers' Trophy. Audiences around the country seem to share that enthusiasm - "House Party" was No. 3 on last week's list of top drawing movies, beating out "Bad Influence," which stars Rob Lowe, and "Driving Miss Daisy," which is nominated for nine Academy Awards.
Nowadays, people refer to East St. Louis as sort of a post-industrial lost cause, if they refer to it at all. But Reginald Hudlin remembers a different city. His ginger-colored skin almost glows when he talks about the place.
Ike Turner met Tina there, he says. Chuck Berry played his formative early gigs there, making East St. Louis virtually the birthplace of rock-and-roll!
Hudlin points to a photograph on the wall of the movie publicist's office in midtown Manhattan. "Miles Davis grew up in East St. Louis. His mother was our third-grade teacher," he says.
"If you have any kind of storytelling impulse, East St. Louis is just such a mother lode of black folk culture. When we were kids, Katherine Dunham set up a program in East St. Louis where she would bring in master drummers from Senegal, and of course instructors from her own dance company, and martial-arts masters, and all this culture," Hudlin says.
His father was an insurance agent, his mother a schoolteacher. They sent Warrington to Yale, where he studied philosophy until he saw Melvin Van Peebles' groundbreaking, angry 1971 film "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" ("starring the black community"). "That was it," Reginald Hudlin says.
By the time Reginald was ready to attend Harvard in the late '70s, Warrington had established himself as a documentary filmmaker, and had co-founded the Black Filmmaker Foundation in New York. Through his older brother, Reginald Hudlin was exposed to foreign and independent films, and he decided that he too wanted to make movies.
"Most black kids who go to Ivy League schools, their parents are like, `Yo, we paid a lot of money. Get that law degree!' You know?" Hudlin laughs. "Our parents were comfortable with us, as long as they saw we were not goofing off, that we were being serious about our careers. They were always very supportive, because really, that kind of self-confidence comes in the 3-to 6-year-old period. That's when your parents either tell you you can do anything, or they don't."
In the summer of 1982, before his senior year at Harvard, Hudlin wrote a script for his senior thesis project. "The Kold Waves" was about a white kid who wants to be a drummer in an all-black band.
"I felt real good about the script," he says, "and I was packing up to go back to Harvard. The radio was on. And as a mental exercise, I would make little music videos in my head based on the songs I would hear." When Luther Vandross's "Bad Boy-Having a Party" came on - a gentle R&B tune about a kid who sneaks out of the house to go to a party - Hudlin was hit with a thunderbolt. That night, he wrote the script for a 20-minute version of "House Party," which he completed in 1983 as his thesis project for about $7,000.
The Rev. Mark Venson, a friend and classmate of Hudlin's at the time, now a United Methodist minister in Columbia, Md., portrayed a partygoer in the original "House Party." "What I remember most about that project is Reggie's sense for black humor, and a keen sense for working with people," he says. Hudlin used Boston-area high school students as well as his friends for the party scenes. "He basically let them be themselves, and sort of observed them," Venson recalls. "He really brought out the best from them."
Eventually, the Hudlin Bros. began working as a production team, doing music videos and other projects. Then the success of Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It" in 1986 gave a shot of life to the whole black filmmaking community.
"Spike turned me on to my first Hollywood gig," Hudlin says. A few years ago, in the early stages of his hotness, Lee was approached to write and direct a feature-length vehicle for Janet Jackson and The Time, the talented funk band Prince put together in 1981 but that had broken up. While turning down the project, "Spike was generous enough to say, "Call Reggie. Reggie's cool.' And that meant a lot to people," Hudlin says. "He really helped put me in the mix," although the Jackson-Time project never got beyond Hudlin's script.
A year ago, New Line Cinema executives, who had seen some of Hudlin's short films, asked him if he had any feature-length scripts. Hudlin sent them two - "House Party" and "The Kold Waves." New Line made the pick.
If "House Party" is a hit and the Hudlin Bros. get a Hollywood career going, they'll be "hopping around genres a lot," Hudlin says. "Some action movies, some science fiction, some horror. Warrington has a thriller that he's working on. We got a stack."
by CNB