The Mother Brain Files Underrated Actors Special: Robert Townsend
By Mother Brain
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Hollywood had a narrow perspective on African-Americans in the film industry. Most black actors were limited to portraying villains or sidekicks. Black screenwriters and directors were rarely noticed or undiscovered. The late 1980s, however, saw a rise of promising black talent working in front of and behind the camera. As part of the black filmmakers movement of the time, Robert Townsend defied the odds in Hollywood to break new ground for aspiring black actors and filmmakers.
Born in Chicago, Illinois on February 6, 1957, Townsend grew up as the second oldest of four children raised by his single mother. Having spent many hours watching various movies and episodic shows on television, Townsend entertained his family by impersonating such childhood heroes as James Cagney and Bill Cosby. The acting bug, however, did not bite Townsend until his adolescence when he not only read William Shakespeare’s Oedipus Rex in front of his elementary school English class but also morphed himself into each character with very little effort.
Following his tenure at Chicago’s Experimental Black Actors Guild X-Bag Theatre and the Second City improvisation group, Townsend spent his late teens searching for acting gigs. Townsend was regularly hired for bit roles in independent films such as 1975’s Cooley High and worked his way up to big-budget Hollywood films in 1984’s Streets of Fire and 1985’s American Flyers. In between films, Townsend toured the comedy club scene in Los Angeles where he struck a partnership with fellow comedian and struggling actor, Keenan Ivory Wayans. Ironically, Townsend and Wayans turned their hardships as black actors in Hollywood into a screenplay called Hollywood Shuffle.
Hollywood Shuffle was a satirical look at the film industry’s tendency of limiting African-American roles to indentured servants, criminals, and comedic sidekicks. From 1984 to 1986, Townsend utilized his credit cards to produce the $100,000 film, hired unknown black actors and comedians in supporting roles, obtained b-roll footage from his previous films with permission from the filmmakers he worked with, and shot on L.A. locations without a permit. Released in early 1987, Hollywood Shuffle was a critical and commercial success that launched Townsend and his “partners in crime†into the limelight.
Hollywood finally wanted a piece of Townsend. Even megastar Eddie Murphy personally hired Townsend to direct his 1987 Raw concert film. As a director, Townsend pursued dream projects like the coming of age musical, The Five Heartbeats, and the black superhero adventure, The Meteor Man. While neither film made the cultural impact of Shuffle, they demonstrated Townsend’s willingness to diversify by working in different genres and gave a lot of acting opportunities to up and coming black actors (Harry Lennix, Don Cheadle, Eddie Griffin, etc). Townsend would also continue to act in his films as well as produce various programs on television such as the HBO variety show, Partners in Crime, the Fox Network’s Townsend Television, and the WB Network’s family sitcom, The Parent Hood. Townsend received many accolades for his television efforts; however, he made history at the NAACP Image Awards in 2001 when three individual actors from three of his television projects were nominated for best actor/actress including Leon in Little Richard for NBC, Alfre Woodard in Holliday Heart for Showtime, and Natalie Cole in Livin’ For Love: The Natalie Cole Story for NBC. In May 2004, Townsend became President of Production and CEO of the Black Family Channel, which produces original programming of black-oriented shows and films. He just recently released the critically acclaimed documentary, Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy.
In 2004, I had a chance to meet Townsend at the American Black Film Festival in Miami after a special film screening of Lady Sings the Blues, which he was presenting. Then at the 2009 festival, I finally got a chance to take a story pitch workshop he was lecturing and not only got to meet him again but also managed to talk one on one with him about how much of an inspiration he was to me. As an independent filmmaker, my once in a lifetime chance to meet him was very important because I am also an advocate for the advancement of African-Americans in front of or behind the camera and having the ability to control the images of black individuals on film properly. Like Townsend, I try not to limit myself to one specific area of filmmaking by learning the essential elements of being an actor, screenwriter, producer, and director. I’ve always admired Townsend’s perseverance to create Hollywood Shuffle on his own without the pressure from a major studio and he made me and many other aspiring filmmakers believe that we can create our own successful films as long as we have the knowledge, the talent, and a team supporting it. On his official website, The Official Robert Townsend Website, Townsend mentions that “in order to reach the stars you must set your sights on the moon” (“Biographyâ€). In other word, the key to success relies on one’s willingness to never settle for less.