Director Justin Simien tried his best to wipe away any remaining bad blood between himself and Tyler Perry last week with a TikTok aimed directly at the industry mogul. “I just feel like there’s still heat there and I really want to clear it up,” he says in the video. “And Tyler is really hard to reach!”
“I haven’t heard from him,” Simien told the Daily Beast. “I don’t know if he’s seen it. And I’m not even really sure what exactly happened there.”
Wrapped up in Simien’s desire to set the record straight with Perry is his promotion of his new docuseries Hollywood Black, which premieres Sunday on MGM+, and takes viewers through the fascinating timeline of Black people in cinema from the 1930s to today. The series also tackles some of the same questions about Black representation that Simien posed in his feature film debut, Dear White People.
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Days before Simien posted his TikTok, Perry appeared for an interview on Keke Palmer’s podcast in which he shared his thoughts after seeing Simien’s Dear White People characters express their disdain for his portrayals of Black life (the “F--- Tyler Perry!” line from the film about sums it up).
Beyond the mammy caricature comparisons Perry’s Madea character calls to mind for some Black viewers, his work also draws criticism from within the community for its continuous focus on Black people—women in particular—struggling or in pain. But Simien has since had a change of heart about Perry, which he says came about from his journey from industry “outsider” to “insider.” He says in the TikTok that after Dear White People was released, “Suddenly people were telling me to my face, I was not Black enough, I was not gay enough, my movie was not radical enough, and I was like, ‘Oh no, this is what I did to [Perry].’”
Perry hadn’t seemed aware of Simien’s shift in stance when he appeared on Palmer’s podcast earlier this month and asked, “Why can’t you tell a story that doesn’t have anything to do with your disdain for what I do?” In reference to a phone conversation Perry had with Simien in 2019 following his Dear White People name-drop, Perry told Palmer, “I called that n---a up and told him I was gonna beat his a--.”
Simien, who recently leveled up his career by helming Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, caught wind of the interview and addressed the situation again, sharing as he had in previous interviews his realization that his prior criticisms of Perry had been misguided—and that he understood why Perry wanted to “beat my a--.” Simien also points out in the video that he even went so far as to express his appreciation for Perry following that conversation in his own work, when in the Netflix adaptation of Dear White People he played a Perry-like character in a story arc that challenged the critiques he’d had and acknowledged Perry’s contributions to Black cinema. But he realizes that the episodes may never have made it to Perry’s radar.
“All you can really do sometimes is keep your side of the street clean,” he told the Daily Beast. “I didn’t want anything like that to get in the way of the historical record. Ultimately the biggest enemy [Black people] face is erasure.”
Squashing beef with your industry peers is one way to combat erasure, but so is knowing your history, Simien says. Cue Hollywood Black, a detailed history of Black people on screen with fellow Black filmmakers like Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Issa Rae, and more in conversation with Simien, who directed. The four-part series, produced by Forest Whitaker, serves as a potential antidote.
Based on Donald Bogle’s book, Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers, the series traces Black cinema from its earliest oughts to Hattie McDaniel’s 1940 win for Best Actress—the first for a Black person—all the way up to the culture-shifting careers of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry, Whoopi Goldberg, and Denzel Washington, before digging into Tyler Perry’s rise. The series allows critique of the other Black figures discussed, particularly early on but including Perry, without taking away from their contributions.
Though Perry’s work may not fall under the high-brow, European-originating styles that other mainstream Black filmmakers employ to tell stories driven by Black characters, Perry’s place in the industry is a monumental one, Simien says, particularly as it pertains to his opening of Tyler Perry Studios—the first major studio owned by a Black man.
“Whatever you might think of him as an artist, as a film producer, he's done something that has been the dream of all Black film producers since Oscar Michaud (the first known Black filmmaker), which is to own the mechanisms of production,” he explains.
Ryan Coogler and Justin Simien in ‘Hollywood Black’
MGM+Simien’s re-understanding of his position on Perry and the way he expresses it is indicative of what he told the Daily Beast he hopes to do with Hollywood Black: give viewers the history and context of Black people in cinema in a way that has the potential to reframe in-community critiques and spark more appreciation for Black cinema in its many forms, so long as it “serves” Black people.
In doing so, Simien hopes that Black creatives in particular can focus on the real battle—together. Because “oftentimes,” he says, “Black folks, we can be pitted against each other.”
