The
senator,
ignoring both his schedule and his two-day old pizza,
then has his longtime friend Jack Warden put him in touch with Richard C.
Sarafian,
who plays a shady character named Vinnie, for an undefined
"Weekend research project." Of course, within a few
minutes of the terribly amusing scene between a disheveled Sarafian
and Beatty, we realize "research" is a metaphor for
"murder," and Sarafian is the go-to guy for hiring a hit man.
Bulworth presents Vinnie with an envelope containing two photos
of the man he wants researched, and Murphy opens the
envelope to see that the target is Bulworth himself.
Senator Jay Billington Bulworth:
If
I'm still alive on Monday, I'm putting a stop on that check.
This is the
unremarkable opening scene of what seemed to me to be a mildly
amusing political comedy, and my very first Warren Beatty film
ever. I was drawn to the film by the politics of it, by this
career political shark coming unhinged to increasingly riotous
effect. I was fresh off of Aaron Sorkin's brilliant The
American President, which starred Beatty's wife, Annette
Bening, and I was still hungry for the crisp dialog and tight
plotting and layered politics of that very funny and very romantic
and very political film. Hoping good taste ran in the family, I
bought the Bulworth ticket without knowing a whole lot
about what I was about to see.
Actually, I'd guess
none of us in the theater really knew quite what to expect. The ad
campaign for Bulworth was incredibly vague and lacked real details
about the plot or even the cast. All I saw were lots of images of
Jack Warden and Baranski, an exasperated Oliver Pratt as
Bulworth's campaign manager Murphy, and Graham Beckel's Man With Dark Glasses
stalking Beatty, as well as Beatty's Bulworth stuffing his mouth
full of crab, dancing, and waffling through a few speeches. It
seemed the fine folks at 20th Century Fox either didn't know how
to explain Bulworth to us, or were (my guess) terrified
we'd find out that Bulworth, for all its A Christmas
Carol meets Carol Burnette
farce, is actually a black film.
That's right. A black
film. Bulworth is a black film starring Warren Beatty. A film about blacks, starring blacks. There are, I'd guess,
about a dozen African American actors in Bulworth with
speaking parts, and at least 300 extras. Black actors everywhere,
in almost every frame of film once Bulworth leaves
Washington to return home to California to finish his campaign
sweep. In fact, there are black actors everywhere in Bulworth—
everywhere, that is, except on the key art (the art used
for movie posters, ads, and home video products). They are
blink-or-you'll-miss-them in the TV spots and feature trailer,
which concentrates more on Pratt, Baranski and Warden. None of the brilliant black supporting
cast made it onto the odd movie poster: a caricature of an
open-mouthed Beatty with Bulworth, dressed in hip-hop clothes,
emerging. It was an enigmatic image and a promo campaign designed
to obscure, as much a possible, what this film was actually about
and who was in it,
so, I suppose, Fox could trick Beatty's white-shoe crowd into
signing up for opening weekend and, astonishingly, not invite any
of the people this film would actually appeal to— black
people.
Debate Producer:
Just between us, Senator, do you think it's advisable to schedule campaign stops with industry leaders when you have such a low opinion of their product?
Senator Jay Billington Bulworth:
My guys are not stupid. They always put the big Jews on my schedule. You're mostly Jews, right? Three out of four of you?
[brandishes speech]
I bet Murphy put something bad about Farrakhan in here for
you.
Black people. by and
large, did not go see Bulworth. I didn't even know Halle
Berry was in Bulworth, let alone that her character, Nina,
is the central and pivotal figure in the story, and that Berry
spends two out of three acts with her jeans sagging below the
waistband of her panties. There's your ticket price right there,
son.
Add to the mix the wonderful Don Cheadle, Hollywood's most
invisible of invisible men, a guy not nominated for anything ever,
but who turns in one incredible performance after another. Berry's
entrance into the Compton after-hours club she's lured Bulworth to
is one of those classic film moments that should be enshrined
somewhere but won't because, alas, we are in fact talking about
black people. Bette Davis in her prime had absolutely nothing on
the sheer presence of Berry's power-walk entrance, the patrons
parting in Red Sea fashion as this incredible creature, jeans
sagging so low you can fairly see the crotch of her designer
panties, sashays in, taking command of the goings-on. It is a
testament to the power of Cheadle's performance that his own
entrance, moments later, upstages Berry, something I would not
have thought possible.
As Berry entered, I
was squirming in my seat, screaming at the screen, frightening the
white-shoes around me. This is what black people do at movies. For
blacks, movies are an inter-active recreation. We are not quiet.
Not when Berry is making film history with her entrance, one that
Julia Roberts' staircase descent in Oceans Eleven utterly
pales in comparison to, but you will never hear about Berry's
disco entrance anywhere because, as I said, these are black people
and so they don't count.
As Cheadle's
"L.D." entered, I squirmed for a different reason. LD
was on film and I was living in the "real" world and I
still wanted to get the heck out of this man's way. Without saying a
word, Cheadle literally floated onto the set with an icy gangsta
cool that established LD as a man of power and standing in his
community. A man to be feared and obeyed. A guy you just got out
of the way of. I was as utterly delighted as the crowd around me were
visibly horrified to discover they'd be snookered into seeing a film
set in Compton with an Ice Cube soundtrack. I found this only
fitting. After all, I was seeing my very first Warren Beatty film,
they were listening to their very first Cypress Hill song.
When Bulworth confuses
Kale with Collard Greens, I could literally hear the confused murmuring
in the theater as patrons turned to ask what the difference was.
Those closest to me would take cautious glances at me, as if
to get permission to laugh at the more racist
moments. Of course, I couldn't help but wonder what might have
transpired had no blacks been in the theater. From my
vantage point, I was the only one.
Angry black woman:
Are you sayin' the Democratic Party don't care about the African-American community?
Senator Jay Billington Bulworth:
Isn't that OBVIOUS? You got half your kids are out of work and the other half are in jail. Do you see ANY Democrat doing anything about it? Certainly not me! So what're you gonna do, vote Republican? Come on! Come on, you're not gonna vote Republican! Let's call a spade a spade!
[Loud, angry booing]
I mean
— come on! You can have a
Billion Man March! If you don't put down that malt liquor and chicken
wings and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you're NEVER gonna get rid of somebody like
me.
I found Bulworth
to be a very good film verging on a brilliant film, one which
earned Beatty an Oscar® nomination (he was nominated, along with Jeremy Pikser, for Best Original Screenplay, and he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor-- thank you, John Robinson).
The film was
unexpectedly delightful. Chock full of clichés, certainly, with
no truly unexpected turns in the well-mapped farcical road. The heavily
advertised Pratt, Warden, Baranski, et. al, are, thank God, quite
minimized in the film, but sheer brilliance such as Cheadle's
extended speech (below) as he tells Bulworth off, were never even hinted
at in any of the advertising. Speaking of which, Fox, again in
their nominal wisdom, has redesigned the packaging for Bulworth
home video to a benign set of political campaign buttons, one with
Beatty, the other with Berry. Still completely evading the
point of the movie, a movie I would suspect only a fraction of
black America has seen, but one that delivers some of the finest performances
from black actors in a decade. Performances most of our community
missed because somebody at Fox was too scared to tell us about
them,
fearing, I suppose, that we might actually go see the film, and that Bulworth
may have become known as a *shudder* black film and might
have done black film numbers.
As it turned out, Bulworth
hardly did any numbers at all, finishing its run with a
dismal Total US Gross of $26,525,834. For a non-Ishtar
Warren Beatty
movie (even a low-budget non-Ishtar Warren Beatty movie) that's still pathetic. Nobody
had a real sense of what Bulworth was. I had this vision of
incredibly stupid Fox execs, terrified by the explosively funny
yet fairly racist subject material, trying to find a way to
market this to the white-shoes. I imagine they feared the
white-shoes would be shocked. Well, they were supposed to
be shocked. That was the whole point of Bulworth, a
broad comedy about the hypocrisy of the status Beatty. It was
Beatty sending a message to his own fan base, liberal propaganda
at its finest (even though, in Bulworth, Beatty goes after
the liberals most of all).
Roger Ebert
said:
What it comes down to is a politician who can no longer bring himself to recite the words, ``America is standing on the doorstep of a new millennium.'' Over and over and over again he has repeated the same mindless platitudes, the same meaningless baloney, the same hot air. Now he sits in his office, playing one of his stupid TV commercials on an endless loop. He has not eaten or slept in three days. He is sick to the soul of the American political process.
These do not seem to be the makings of a comedy, but Warren Beatty's ``Bulworth'' made me
laugh—and wince. You realize that if all politicians were as outspoken as Bulworth, the fragile structure of our system would collapse, and we would have to start all over again. The movie suggests that virtually everything said in public by a politician is spin. ``Spin control'' is merely the name for spin they don't get away with.
But, here we had Fox
clearly and obviously "spinning" Bulworth, trying not to
offend the white-shoes, their marketing approach becoming the
complete antithesis of the product they were selling. It reminded
me of the campaign for Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire, a film I
didn't realize had any black people in it at all until Cuba
Gooding, Jr. was nominated and Sony began to feature Gooding in a
new ad campaign. I doubt Maguire's campaign was as
capricious as Bulworth's— Bulworth's having been designed
to surgically exclude the powerful contributions of its black
supporting cast while plastering images of Oliver Platt, Jack Warden and
Christine Baranski all over TV—
but it achieved the same net purpose: position the film in the
lucrative white audience and don't scare them away with naked
black men screaming, "Show me the money!" Show Cruise. Show the pretty girl,
Renée Zellweger. Run the
credits. Maguire was not a big hit in the 'hood, as very
few of my black friends had much of a clue what the film was
about. Had they made it clearer that not only are blacks in
Jerry Maguire, but an African-American plays the
pivotal role in the film, with the largest speaking part outside
of the two leads, we might have lined up in larger numbers. But
the numbers of African Americans lining up has never been much of
a priority with Hollywood.
Ebert
continues:
Following Bulworth through his conversion is a posse of foxy young black women, who pile into his limousine and direct him to an after-hours club, where he samples hip-hop and drugs. Lingering always nearby in the background is an attractive woman named Nina (Halle Berry), who eventually takes him home to her neighborhood, where he sees grade-school kids selling crack and is treated to the truth of families where everybody has lost someone to gunfire.
``Bulworth'' doesn't consist simply of the candidate making insults like a radical Don Rickles. There's substance in a lot of the dialogue, written by Beatty with a debt to the critiques of American society by such as Noam Chomsky. Beatty zeroes in on the myth that government is wasteful and industry is efficient by claiming that government runs Medicare for a fourth of the overhead raked off by insurance companies for equivalent health care. But why don't we have national health care like every other First World country? Because of insurance payoffs, Bulworth is only too happy to explain.
Doesn't Hollywood want
our money? Don't they want everybody to see Jerry
Maguire? And, if they think Bulworth will freak out
Beatty fans, why not market it to Ice Cube fans. Bulworth
has more in common with House Party and Boyz In The Hood
than it does with A Fish Called Wanda or As Good As It
Gets. But,
maybe Fox was going after the deep pockets, or maybe they thought we'd
be offended, or maybe that we're all too stupid to appreciate the
visceral subtext of the film, the profound political statement
Beatty makes. Maybe they thought we'd be grossed out by
Beatty kissing Halle Berry (well, okay, I'll give 'em that one).
I can't imagine why Fox
didn't even try to market Bulworth— a film with
four strong African American supporting roles and literally dozens
of other colorful (pun intended) characters— to the black community.
Why they kept the black cast largely out of the TV spots and mass
media ads, and banished them from the film's indecipherable key
art. Why there was never a coherent here's the plot mission
statement anywhere that blacks might have seen. I find it more
stupid than ironic that Fox, from all appearances, practiced
precisely the same hypocrisy Beatty lampoons in the film. From
where I sit, Fox tanked Bulworth, treating it as a Beatty
vanity project, when it could have been one of the bigger black
films ever released, if only Fox would have bothered to tell us
black people were in it. Isaiah Washington, Wendell Pierce, Berry, Cheadle, and a
very large cast of lesser names, including dozens of extras were all
ignored by the promotional efforts, while such lunacy as
George Hamilton's five-second cameo makes it in. Beatty should never
work for Fox again. I know I wouldn't. When you look up the word
"caprice" in the dictionary, there's an image of the Bulworth
DVD art:.
Ebert:
The movie fires shots in all directions. Some of them hit, some of them miss. When Bulworth asks Nina where all the black leaders have gone, her answer is as intelligent and plausible as a year's worth of op-ed columns. But when the movie presents black culture as automatically more authentic and truthful than white, that's a leftover knee jerk; the use of blacks as repositories of truth and virtue is a worn-out convention in white liberal breast-beating. (There is even a mysterious old black man who follows Bulworth around, reciting incantations that are meant, I guess, to be encoded universal truths.) It's better when Bulworth abandons political correctness and says what he thinks, however reckless, as when he theorizes that the solution to racial difficulties is for everybody to bleep everybody else until we're all the same color.
Was this a perfect
film? Not by a long shot. Did it suck? Absolutely not. Were there,
literally, dozens of fine performances by African Americans
that were summarily dismissed in Fox's appease-the-white-shoe
efforts? Yes. Forget about Beatty, Fox's capricious
whitewashing of Bulworth is an affront to me as an African American
and a film lover. It is moronic in the sense that, fearing audiences
might be offended by Bulworth, it seems Fox went out of
their way to offend an audience they'd written off as
disinterested in political satire, while attempting to cram Cypress
Hill down the throats of 60 year-olds hoping for a sequel to Love
Affair.
It was about the dumbest marketing of a movie I've
ever seen and, even as I type this, DVD case lying on my desk, my
blood still boils over the dozens of ignored actors in this
film. Ignoring their contributions, in so calculated a manner, can only be characterized as racist. Racism, in our new
Politically Correct environment, must withstand the crucible of
enormous benefit of doubt, being called racism only when all other
possible explanation has been exhausted. In depriving these fine
actors of their reasonable recognition, of an opportunity for
their communities to even know they're in the movie,
Fox has made it that much harder for every one of these fine
actors to progress in their chosen profession. In apparently
assuming the black community is too stupid to appreciate the
political nuance of Beatty's political fable, Fox has, with the
marketing of Bulworth, made a far more profound statement
than Beatty could have hoped for. They have exposed the racist
through-line of corporate thinking. Marketing Bulworth was,
most certainly, the rock and the hard place for Fox execs, but, by
any objective standard, their handling of this film was cheap and
cowardly. It was racist.
And, oddly enough, it
made Beatty's point for him.
Christopher
J. Priest
June 7 2002
TOP
OF PAGE
ACADEMY AWARD(S)®, OSCAR(S)®, OSCAR NIGHT® and OSCAR® statuette design mark are the registered trademarks and service marks, and the OSCAR® statuette the copyrighted property, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Roger Ebert's BULWORTH Review excerpts Copyright © 2003 Chicago Sun-Times Inc. All Rights Reserved.
BULWORTH images and audio clip Copyright © 2003 1999 Twentieth Century Fox Corporation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Text Copyright © 2007 Grace Phonogram eMedia. All Rights Reserved.
|