“I think there kind of needs to be a little bit of a come-to-Jesus moment for us as an industry to say, ‘What are we doing?’”
I’m about an hour into a candid conversation over Zoom with director Tina Mabry about her new movie, “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” and, even more so, the state of Black cinema, when she says that.
It’s a fair diagnosis, even from an audience member’s perspective.
A few weeks prior to our sitdown, I screened Mabry’s latest film and couldn’t get over how much of a relic it feels like. It’s a story about three Black women who call themselves “The Supremes” (no relation to the music group), whose friendship spans decades beginning in 1960s Indiana. Throughout it all, they experience all aspects of life: personal conflicts, triumphs, belly-aching laughs and damn good food. It’s a rather simple concept, not particularly exceptional.
But it took me back to the cozy Black female friendship films and TV series like 1989’s “The Women of Brewster Place” and 1995’s “Waiting to Exhale.” These and offerings like them went on sprawling journeys with Black women, who you couldn’t help but root for even when they made you want to yell at the screen or just as quickly laugh or cry. For Black women, they reminded us of our own families and friends, even though larger-than-life actors like Oprah Winfrey or Angela Bassett helped illuminate their stories from their literary sources.
“The Supremes” boasts these things as well, with its own star power in the form of Sanaa Lathan, Uzo Aduba and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor with the bestselling 2013 novel by Edward Kelsey Moore as source material.
It’s not like this type of narrative doesn’t still exist. But similar films are few and far between, and many of them don’t even see the light of day. One reason, Mabry suggests, is that Hollywood spends more resources on blockbusters and far less on what the industry frustratingly now considers niche, like…
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