20th CENTURY FOX'S WHITEWASHING OF BULWORTH
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Warren Beatty's got issues.  play audio►  stop
Beatty, the septuagenarian undisputed king of white bread, better known for such all-American fare as Reds and Shampoo, made a movie in 1998 about a politician who loses his mind. Jay Billington Bulworth, Kennedy Democrat and senior senator from the state of California, faces an effortless reelection campaign to return him to his Capitol Hill address for another six years. Immersed in the typical gang of thieves that swarm around politicians, Bulworth blithely goes about the business, and I do mean business, of getting reelected, shaking down Paul Sorvino's cartoonishly wicked insurance executive for huge life insurance policies in exchange for Bulworth's guarantee he'd "bottle up" a Senate bill that would force Sorvino to stop turning down poor minorities for insurance policies. Clearly depressed and overwrought, trapped in a loveless marriage with the equally Flintstonian Christine Baranski (who cheats on him with the uncredited William Baldwin), as the story begins, Bulworth has not eaten or slept in three days and is clearly suffering an emotional breakdown. Well, clear to us, anyway, as no one else seems to notice.

sound clip contains explicit language

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


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