Director Justin Simien in a hat with his mouth resting on his right hand in Hollywood Black
The Big Picture Inspired by the book of the same name from historian Donald Bogle, the MGM+ docuseries Hollywood Black took filmmaker Justin Simien on a journey through cinema from a Black perspective, as he examined films from the silent era to the present, including his own work.
JUSTIN SIMIEN: It’s just in me. I’m a history nerd, and history is often where I go, to find answers. For a long time, I just accepted that there wasn’t any real documentaries about Black film history and I kept watching the Ken Burns Jazz documentary over and over again because at least there’s an allegorical experience there. I think it was 2020. It was after Sundance. I was hella depressed, and I just kept hitting these walls.
The comment at the beginning of the docuseries, “Cinema is not really possible without Blackness,” sounds like such a profound statement, but it’s so simple and it’s so true. When you decided you were going to be a filmmaker, what was your vision of success at that time? Without knowing this history, do you feel like it was a puzzle without all the pieces?
SIMIEN: It has not stopped for me. And for everything that comes out, there are five or six announcements that didn’t get made. And for every announcement you see, there are even more projects that started that didn’t even get to the announcement phase. The only way to keep working is to be developing 30 things at once. That’s the craziest way to even make art in the first place, to be that distracted, but I don’t really know any other way.
Director Justin Simien Is Ultimately Proud of What He Accomplished With 'Haunted Mansion' Now that you have had some time and distance from Haunted Mansion, how do you feel about that whole experience? You’ve talked about how things changed and what you learn from test screenings, and you’ve also said that there’s probably a four-hour version because of everything you shot that didn’t make it.
SIMIEN: This probably comes with age. I’m 41 now, and inside of me, there’s gotta be a conversation between my own personal metric for success and what society or culture deems a success because that has something to do with my career and the jobs that I get. It has to a conversation between both of those things for me. With Haunted, of the things that were in my control, and there weren’t a ton of things, I’m really proud about how those things turned out. I am.
SIMIEN: Star Trek has always been there for me. It might seem weird, but especially when you’re looking at the last season of Dear White People, Dear White People is such an ode to Star Trek: The Next Generation. My fandom as a kid was X-Men and Star Trek. You couldn’t tell me anything else was important in the world, but Star Trek a little bit more because it’s live-action and I learned the earliest roots of how I might write something in that.
And then, for whatever reason, like many projects in Hollywood, that didn’t happen. How far along was the development of that? Did you have a series Bible? Did you have a very clear plan, or was it still in very early conversations? Was there ever actually a direct conversation where they said, “The Star Wars series is not happening,” or did they just never mention it again?
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