The bridge is yours.

-Mo Ryan talks Game of Thrones changes with D.B. Weiss.

-Kim Cattrall approves of Girls.

-Can it be Vamps-o-clock already?

-Drama in the Archie Comics family!

-Tyler Perry is an evil genius for passing this off:

The bridge is yours.

-It’s nice to know that Tyler Perry can get charges he was racially profiled investigated.

-I cannot fathom why a veteran producer would think it was okay to edit George Zimmerman’s 911 call selectively.

-Jimmy Smits will mentor Jax Teller.

-The fact that Jason Antoon is going to be in Downwardly Mobile makes me much more excited for it.

-Are there people left who don’t think Felicia Day is cool?

The bridge is yours (and apologies for yesterday, it has been busy!).

-The hats of Downton Abbey.

-Todd VanDerWeff defends slow television.

-Honest posters for Oscar movies.

-I adore this Hunger Games movie tie-in.

-This is so true, and so good, and so sad:

Tyler Perry Expands His Fan Base With New Films About Sassy, Chinese Grandmother

The Times Magazine’s profile of George Lucas is very interesting, particularly in its description of how his long-term girlfriend, Mellody Hobson, or as Al Sharpton calls her, “black America’s business princess,” has transmitted Lucas’s dedication to racial equality and channeled it more directly into politics, whether calling Obama a Jedi or showing up for the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. And it captures his determination to make Red Tails a truly black movie (he’s joked about Spike Lee making a prequel to it):

“They say, Now, who are you making this for?”

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”…

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.” [...]

To execute his popcorn vision of “Red Tails,” Lucas turned to Anthony Hemingway, a 36-year-old director who made his name on TV shows like “The Wire.” Hemingway, who had never directed a feature film, comes from the church of David Simon, which values moral murkiness over naïveté, documentary detail about East Baltimore over an ethnography of the Ewok village. It was like hiring a “Hill Street Blues” veteran to direct “Return of the Jedi.”

But from the beginning, Lucas wanted “Red Tails” to have a black director. “I thought, This is the proper way to do this,” he said. Indeed, to scan the credits in “Red Tails” is to see Lucas’s fidelity to African-American filmmakers. There are two black writers and a black executive producer. Terence Blanchard, a Spike Lee collaborator (“Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X”), wrote the score, and Art Sims, another Lee veteran, designed the one-sheet.

I really hope Red Tails does well not simply to disprove the idea that black leads can’t open blockbusters or that black history is a niche genre. Lucas has said that this will be his last blockbuster. So if the movie makes bank, maybe Lucas could do for black artists what Tyler Perry hasn’t entirely done yet, and what Queen Latifah still might do: spread the wealth and give a financial springboard to projects that could be commercially viable if only they could find financing and support, and an imprimatur that would reassure distributors. The battle might be to get individual non-white (or for that matter, female) writers and directors credentialed and established. But the war is about getting a lot of them in the game.

In the course of a long discussion about how to get to a place where Hollywood and mass audiences recognize that stories with minority leads, and that contain references to minority culture and concerns, can also be vehicles for universal stories, commenter Paulie made, over the course of two comments, a valuable point that leads to a question with no easy answer. He wrote:

Can we agree, for example, that the work of Tyler Perry is simply not very good? It has no universal appeal. It’s created solely to pander to the lowest-common-denominator in black audiences. If white people like me dislike Tyler Perry, it’s not because his work is “too black.” It’s because it sucks.

I’m sure you can come up with counter-examples of stuff that actually was artistically good, and should have had universal appeal, but was rejected for being too black. (Jazz certainly comes to mind, along with many other forms of black music that were eventually embraced by white audiences, but were initially written off as being solely black.)…My point in the post before that was that quality storytelling is inherently universal. Of course this means that the concept should be defined in concert with minority populations. My point applies in reverse as well: if something only appeals to white audiences but nobody else, then maybe that’s a sign it’s not actually very good.

It’s a really tough situation: when all you’ve got isn’t very good, do you champion it? Ask people to turn out, spend money on it, ignore its flaws in the hopes that it’ll create space for something better? I was profoundly relieved when Bridesmaids turned out to be genuinely excellent so I didn’t have to feign enthusiasm or to write a very qualified endorsement as I’ve done in the past. I could recommend it unreservedly, and be pleased that it did so well because it’s not the thing that needs to succeed to let us get the good thing. It is the good thing.

But I do hit my limits sometimes. And it was interesting that after we finished that discussion yesterday, commenter Kyessa L. Moore wrote a long critique of my piece explaining why I find the way Alan Ball (I would note, a white man with an extremely spotty record on race) has framed Tara Thornton as a perpetual victim exhausting:

Are you really beyond the ability to understand or see the desire of a child of an alcoholic single mother (with no other family) to take advantage of the shelter and care being offered by a woman with so much to give and other people in need under her care? Can you truly be faulting Tara for being bewitched? Do you fault everyone else for their bewitchment as well? And are You Really asking Tara to have been psychic and discerned that the nice lady was really a maenad intent on destroying her life? Because I refuse to believe that someone who went to college would expect precognition of a Black female character as the grounds for the character to be considered ‘dynamic.’..Clearly, the reasons you present for why Tara is “static” are really reasons rooted in a desire for her character to be superhuman, infallable, maternal, and rooted in a quasi-behavioral Whiteness which you point out as being necessary for this to be possible…Now, if you list wonderful things and add, “–and she’s white.”, then follow by saying, “he made her black and an object of perpetual humiliation”, what you are doing, even if inadvertently, is setting up the similarity between the wonderful world of possibility that is White Tara in the book and how awful Black Tara is in the show. You are linking the characteristics to color not for the purpose of clarity, but to further establish why Black Tara is so faulty for this indistinct, intangible but seemingly preferential list of vague plot details.

I don’t think this is a particularly accurate description of my piece, and I’ve said as much to Ms. Moore in comments. Because, look, at the end of the day, I don’t need Tara to have any particular set of characteristics for me to like her more. All I need to see is that she gets as much of a shot as anyone else on the show to win.

My dislike is aimed at Alan Ball’s choices, not at Tara herself. As a white writer, it makes me viscerally uncomfortable to see another white writer take a character, make the conscious decision to turn her from white to black, and then make her the perpetual and most persistent object of abuse on his television show. Maybe, in the process, he’s turned her into a profound and moving portrait of an abuse victim that resonates deeply with some people. I don’t have the lived experience to speak to that. And even if some folks think Ball’s gotten it right, I just can’t tell people to embrace the character and the show when they come out of a process that seems to me like it could lead not to the next good thing, but to something disastrous.

Given Tyler’s post last week arguing that “The conversation we need to have is one in which minorities think about what kinds of economic models will make it possible for them to make cultural products for themselves and about the way we’d have to redefine what success means in order to do that,” and our debates about what Tyler Perry’s done with the power he’s assumed in Hollywood, I’ve been particularly curious about what Queen Latifah’s going to do with her Flavor Union studio. Turns out her first project is going to be a crime drama that involves Cam’ron and Deadwood veteran Omar Gooding committing credit card fraud. As much as that’s not a project that interests me, this sort of conventional-sounding and economically un-risky thing probably makes sense for a fledgling, black-owned studio. The more you prove you’re economically viable, the more leeway you have to do something boundary-pushing or downright weird without pressure to make bank on that, too.

Of course, it would also be nice to demonstrate to white studio heads and white investors that so-called risks on features with black stars will pay off, and handsomely. One of the reasons Red Tails is such a key test movie for black blockbusters is that George Lucas has spent so much money on it. I honestly thought I’d misheard the numbers the first time I heard them, but Lucas has spent $58 million making the movie and $35 million on promotion. That’s not insane in a world where $100 million-plus budgets for movies are no longer shocking, but it’s a lot of cheddar for even a very rich man to splash out on a project. It would be really nice to have a world where black — and minority, period — Hollywood power brokers’ successes weren’t always seen as flukes or the result of extremely rigid formulas. And to have a world where white dudes were interested and invested in backing minority projects for fun and profit.

Lady Gaga may have topped Forbes’ annual list of the highest-earning celebrities, but when it comes to the rest of the list, it’s good to be a white guy. Sixty-seven of the 100 celebrities or groups on the list are men, 32 are women, and 1, the Black Eyed Peas, is made up of men and a woman. Seventy-six of the 100 are white, 23 are black or Latino (there are no Asian individuals on the list), and the Black Eyes Peas are, again, the lone representative of mixed-race groups.

These results aren’t really that surprising, and I feel some temptation to dismiss them as telling us what we already know: that white men have a lot of financial power. But at the same time, it’s worth noting that if you pull this kind of bank, you have power beyond your pocketbook. As a proven earner, you’re likely to have more creative power than someone who is critically acclaimed but not necessarily commercially successful, or someone at the start of their career. And that means you can take time to do prestige projects, get your own ideas greenlit and have someone else pay to make them happen, or pay to make your own projects happen without the requirement that you listen to anyone. If Tyler Perry’s the only black movie producer on this list, then we’re probably going to get a lot more Tyler Perry-style characters on movies and television and not much else. If we want mass entertainment to get more interesting, supporting your favorite artists with your dollars actually matters. It doesn’t just support them. It can help buy them creative freedom.

Lizz Winstead mentioned this when I talked to her on Tuesday, and it’s something I think about fairly frequently as well: what do you do when you come up against a movie or television show you’re not sure you’re going to like, but that you think you should watch to prove there’s an audience for that kind of movie or television show? My sense is that you take a deep breath and go as often as you can, or set your DVR to record things you don’t really intend to watch just so you can juice the numbers a bit. Sometimes, what feels like it might be a duty watch, turns out to be a delight, as was the case with Bridesmaids. Sometimes, it turns out to be 2 Broke Girls, which looks like it’ll be generally frustrating but with the occasional thing that is so funny and true that I get sucked back in all over again:

But it’s a risky strategy. Proving there’s a market for one thing won’t necessarily convince studios that there’s a market for things like it, but rather that there’s a rigidly defined market for that single thing, as has proved to be the case with the announcement that Lionsgate is giving Tyler Perry his own network. Perry is not exactly known for giving projects that might be better suited to other artists, like For Colored Girls, to other directors and writers, so it remains to be seen if he tries to write and program the entire network himself. We can only hope that it’s too much even for the famously productive studio head, and that he has to let other creators handle some shows, and put some new ideas out there.