Singleton, John 1968–

John Singleton 1968–

Screenwriter, director

At a Glance…

Portrait of a Young Black American

Film Debut Marred by Violence

Selected writings

Sources

John Singleton’s debut film, Boyz N the Hood, critically acclaimed for its realistic treatment of the black urban setting and media sensationalized for the violence that accompanied its opening, has contributed greatly to the recent revival of black films by black filmmakers. Film critic Susan Stark, writing in the Detroit News, claimed that these filmmakers “are an extraordinary group of artists. They are energizing American movies on a scale not seen since World War II, when Hitler forced many of Europe’s greats to seek refuge in Hollywood.” Whereas the black exploitation films of the 1970s (Shaft, Super Fly) offered stereotyped, violent entertainment for blacks but were often directed or produced by whites, the black films of the late 1980s and early 1990s address critical social issues indigenous to the black community. And the black filmmakers who write, direct, and produce these films, Stark described, “come variously armed with passion and compassion, with fury and humor, with searing questions and prescriptions” to the problems facing them and their brethren. According to Karen Brailsford in Elle magazine, these filmmakers are artists with a social conscience “who record the evolution of black boys into invisible men (should they live so long), in the tradition of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.”

In the new black cultural renaissance this evolution is no more poignantly documented than in Boyz N the Hood. The reason is that John Singleton is a writer before he is a director. “He’s the most impressive of this year’s debuting young black filmmakers,” critic Kathy Huffhines explained in the Detroit Free Press, “because he puts his anger into words, not just camera angles—into the detailed screen-writing that makes audiences feel what he has felt.” And unlike Spike Lee, whose breakthrough films like She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and School Daze (1987) heralded this recent wave of black films, Singleton probes deeper into the black social psyche, examining “a more sprawling form of claustrophobia and a more adolescent angst,” according to Janet Maslin in the New York Times. Although Singleton readily admits his and others’ indebtedness to and admiration of Lee, he justifiably emphasizes that his film was made because of his story. “In this business you get hired for your vision, and your vision begins with your script,” he told Karen Grigsby Bates in the New York Times Magazine. “I’m a writer first and I direct in order to protect my vision. Boyz is a good story, a real story, and they wanted it. Simple as that.”

At a Glance…

Born in 1968 in Los Angeles, CA; son of Danny Singleton (a mortgage broker) and Sheila Ward (a pharmaceutical company sales executive). Education: Received degree from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, 1990.

Signed on with the Creative Artists Agency during second year at USC; signed three-year contract with Columbia Pictures to develop and direct films, 1990; writer and director of film Boyz N the Hood, 1991.

Awards: Three writing awards from the University of Southern California.

Addresses: Home —Baldwin Hills, CA. Agent —Bradford W. Smith, Creative Artists Agency, Inc., 1888 Century Park E., Suite 1400, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

The forceful realism of the screenplay is attributable first to Singleton’s growing up in south-central Los Angeles. Raised in the same type of neighborhood depicted in his film, Singleton spent his childhood years shuttling between his unmarried parents. “My parents didn’t have a lot of money,” he told Time magazine’s Richard Corliss. “I used to steal little stuff, like candy, toys, and Players magazines, but I never got into anything too rough.” Part of the reason he stayed clean was the attention his parents paid to him, and part of that attention, which ultimately influenced his career choice, was his father’s taking him to see movies. By the time he was nine years old, Singleton decided he was going to make motion pictures. “He gorged on films by Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Steven Spielberg, Akira Kurosawa, John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola,” Bates noted. Singleton learned from these masters, but he needed to express something that they could not. “I always wanted to do a real film about what it’s like growing up Black,” he told a reporter for Ebony. “There are always stories about how Whites grow up, films like American Graffiti or Rebel Without a Cause.”

The second factor behind the veracity of the screenplay is Singleton’s ability as a writer. While in high school, Singleton learned “that the film business was controlled by screenplays. After I heard that, I knew I had to learn how to write, so I did,” Corliss quoted him as saying. This focus proved valuable. After graduating from high school in 1986, Singleton was accepted to the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television’s prestigious Filmic Writing Program. During his four-year studies there, he won three writing awards.

These achievements in writing earned Singleton a contract with the powerful Creative Artists Agency during his sophomore year at USC, and in May of 1990, his agent sent the script for Boyz N the Hood to Columbia pictures. The response was immediate: “I thought John’s script had a distinctive voice and great insight,” Frank Price, chairman of Columbia Pictures, said in an interview excerpted in the New York Times. “He’s not just a good writer, but he has enormous self-confidence and assurance. In fact, the last time I’d met someone that young with so much self-assurance was Steven Spielberg.” Columbia wanted to make the picture, but at first wanted someone else to direct it. Singleton believed only he could do it. “They asked me if I would consider anybody else directing it,” he recalled to Interview’s Steven Daly. “And I said, Hell, no, I’m not gonna let somebody from Idaho or Encino direct a movie about living in South Central Los Angeles. They can’t come in here and cast it and go through the rewrites and know exactly what aesthetics are unique to this film.”

Portrait of a Young Black American

Columbia finally agreed, giving Singleton a $7 million budget to film his “powerful drama depicting the first realistic portrayal of what it’s like to be young, Black, and American in the ’90s,” according to a reporter from Ebony magazine. The film, which had its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1991, follows three characters at two different stages in their lives: first at the age of 10, then at the age of 17. At the beginning of the film, Tre Styles, the protagonist, is sent by his mother, Reva, to live with his father, Furious, in hopes that the unruly boy will learn to be a man. In his new neighborhood Tre meets two half-brothers who live across the street: Rickey and Doughboy. Together, these three characters grow up in an environment where, as David Denby described it in New York magazine, “all day, jets heading for LAX come in low over the small tract houses; at night, police helicopters join in the din, training down their lights. The sun shines regularly, but the little boys play football with a corpse lying nearby, and a teenage girl tries to read through the rattling of gunfire.”

What differentiates the direction of the three characters’ lives is that Tre has a father who is present and strong and concerned. Furious’s program for Tre, as Stark delineated it, is simple: “Look people straight in the eye, don’t respect anyone who doesn’t respect you, stay clean, work hard.” His guidance insures that Tre resists the deadly temptations of the street and becomes responsible. Conversely, the two half-brothers lack attendant fathers and their lives are open to jeopardy. Rickey is a gifted athlete and his mother’s favorite, but he must pass his SATs to win a scholarship. Doughboy, disliked by his mother because she hates his absent father, is a complex character “whose intelligence and street eloquence do battle with a penchant for self-destruction,” Bates observed. He is reduced to selling drugs and spewing anger from his mother’s front porch steps.

The quote “One out of every 21 black males will be murdered. Most will be shot by another black male” opens the film. True to this appalling statistic, only Tre emerges at the film’s end, a survivor guided by his father’s teachings, ready to enroll in college and leave the neighborhood. “In the end, Boyz N the Hood asks the all-important question of whether there is such a thing as changing one’s fate,” Maslin pointed out. “If there is—and Mr. Singleton holds out a powerful glimmer of hope in the story’s closing moments—then for this film’s young characters it hinges on the attitudes of their fathers.”

Critical reaction to this “American coming-of-age story told from a new, black perspective,” as David Ansen described it in Newsweek, was predominantly positive. Critics lauded Singleton’s recreation on film of the milieu of the neighborhood, the geography of a place heretofore unexplored. Bates found it a “challenging film, a disconcertingly gritty peek into a facet of life to which virtually no white audiences have been privy—and that a fair number of black middle-class viewers will find alien as well.” Denby praised the film’s nuances, how Singleton was able to depict the “insane combustibility in ordinary encounters—the jostling among teenagers that ends with guns blazing. He gets the heat and sass of young women, the despair of the older ones. He presents a coherent picture of a tragic way of life.”

But some critics were disenchanted with Singleton’s treatment of his characters. For Corliss, the women in the film “are shown as doped-up, career-obsessed, or irrelevant to the man’s work of raising a son in an American war zone.” People’s Ralph Novak went even further, stating that none of the characters were realistically outlined, and that only the actors kept Singleton’s “too-symbolic characters from turning into cardboard.” But this fault, according to Stark, was not a result of Singleton’s inability as a writer or director, only a result of his inexperience and ambitiousness: “What he needs to do … is cut back on the ideological burden of his scripts. Hood is overstuffed with ideas. All are worth exploring, but not in a single film.”

Film Debut Marred by Violence

The most negative publicity, however, occurred when Boyz N the Hood opened to violence in and around theaters on July 12, 1991. Shootings and knifings left two dead and more than 30 injured in incidents at about 20 theaters from Los Angeles to Chicago to Detroit. In immediate response, 21 of the 829 theaters showing the film decided to drop it. Singleton labeled this response “artistic racism.” He told Stevenson, “I didn’t create the conditions under which people shoot each other. This happens because there’s a whole generation of people who are disenfranchised.” He elucidated this idea in an interview with Newsweek’ s Andrew Murr: “It was the fact that a whole generation [of black men] doesn’t respect themselves, which makes it easier for them to shoot each other. This is a generation of kids who don’t have father figures. They’re looking for their manhood, and they get a gun. The more of those people that get together, the higher the potential for violence.” Denby concurred, citing the film’s purpose in depicting the useless and unwarranted violence in the neighborhood. “What the gunshots mean is that a number of young men are so excited by the presence of images of gang warfare that they cannot see what the images or the context around them is actually supposed to mean.”

No justifiable argument has been offered to show a causal relationship between the film and the violence that accompanied its opening. Indeed, the function of the film was not to propagate violence, but to offer a solution for its erasure. “If you make a film,” Singleton told Corliss, “you have a responsibility to say something socially relevant.” Stark believed that through Boyz N the Hood, Singleton did. “This is a film that makes a plea for conscientious parenting. This is a film that shows self-respect and hard work as the only hope for children. This is a film that concludes with a challenge, written in bold titles across the big screen: ‘Increase the peace.’” As he stated in an article he wrote for Essence magazine, Singleton knows of the duality of film, “that it has the power to shape, change, and educate. It also has the power to bring down, exploit, and degrade.” The power of Singleton’s debut film, Corliss recognized, belongs to the former category: “BoyzN the Hood functions both as a condemnation of the world outside any big-city movie house and as an inspiration to those aspiring outsiders who would change history by filming it.”

Selected writings

(And director) Boyz N the Hood, Columbia, 1991.

Sources

Detroit Free Press, July 12, 1991.

Detroit News, July 12, 1991; July 20, 1991.

Ebony, November 1991.

Elle, June 1991.

Essence, November 1991.

Interview, July 1991.

Newsweek, July 15, 1991; July 29, 1991.

New York, July 22, 1991; July 29, 1991.

New York Times, July 12, 1991; July 14, 1991; August 2, 1991.

New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1991.

People, July 22, 1991.

Time, June 17, 1991.

—Rob Nagel