BEFORE: I've got nothing but anxiety right now, as we wait to see how our bathroom remodeling is going, and while it feels like great progress is being made overall, there's only so much progress on each day, and with a holiday weekend coming up, it just feels like it's going to take forever. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to hear if I'm welcome to go back to my second job at any point, so more anxiety there, and then on top of that there's still lingering anxiety over the potential second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
So I haven't been sleeping very well, but I think the main reason for that is the construction noise in my own house that starts at 8 am, which is much earlier than I'm used to being awake - then I can't exactly nap during the day while construction is ongoing. Thankfully the workers knock off for the day at 4 pm, but by then my afternoon coffee has kicked in, so I just lay in bed for half an hour today at 6 pm and couldn't even doze off. I'd love to catch up on sleep this weekend, but to make the right film land on July 4, I'll need to double-up and watch two movies on Saturday.
Actually, I don't NEED to, all I'd need to do to shorten the list by one would be to drop or re-schedule "Dolemite Is My Name" - which presents a problem, because I WANT to see it, and I can't say that about every movie these days. With Mike Epps (and Maggie Grace) appearing in both "Faster" and tomorrow's film, I could skip this one, only I don't want to. So I'm going to proceed with it and double up on Saturday, kicking the problem down the road a couple of days.
Now, at the same time, I've worked out some preliminary scheduling for August - and I found several paths that can get me from the end of the music documentary chain (July 31 or so) to the release of "Wonder Woman '84" or August 14, assuming that movie theaters are open then and that film's release stays on schedule. This relieves some of my anxiety, but I'll still need to find a path from that superhero movie to the start of the Halloween/horror chain on October 1 - and let's say I need to do that in 30 steps, leaving 10 slots to connect Halloween and Christmas. I can't rest easy until I have a path to the end of the year.
The worst-case scenario, let's say, would be watching "Dolemite Is My Name" today, when I could have skipped it, and then finding out that it's impossible to get from my film on August 14 to my film on October 1, without going through "Dolemite Is My Name". That's too horrible to think about, but right now it's all I can focus on. That's stinking thinking, though, and I should just make the best plan I can for right now, live for today, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
So Mike Epps carries over from "Faster".
THE PLOT: The story of real-life legend Rudy Ray Moore, a comedy and rap pioneer who proved naysayers wrong when his hilarious, obscene, kung-fu fighting alter ego, Dolemite, became a 1970's blaxploitation phenomenon.
AFTER: I'm perhaps a bit out of my comfort zone tonight, because I haven't watched many blaxplotation films, I'm a bit outside of their target market. Sure, I could, and the original "Shaft", "Superfly" and "Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song" are all on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", but I always seem to have more important things to watch. Does this make me racist? I don't think so, I just feel like I'm in touch with what films on that list are going to appeal to me, and it's a matter of priorities. Look, "Enter the Dragon" is on that list, and I'm just not a fan of kung fu movies, or Bruce Lee movies. I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt.
But sure, I'll watch an Eddie Murphy comedy ABOUT the man who played Dolemite, that's like one degree removed from watching "Dolemite" and I can count on this one being funny, then I don't have to pick apart what's funny because it's so unfunny, or parse out what makes a bad good movie different from a plain bad movie - and if I get that one wrong, then I will sound racist. As tonight's movie itself points out, the humor in "Dolemite" was aimed straight at the black audiences, who loved it partially because it was speaking directly to them.
But let me back up a bit for my fellow honkies - Rudy Ray Moore was a real comedian who found greater success after adopting a "pimp" character named Dolemite, which he based on the stories of older black men in Los Angeles, some who were homeless ("hoboes" or "bums", back in the day) yet still had dignity enough to brag about their accomplishments in the urban arena, to prove how macho they were, sexually or in fights with other men. Moore listened to them, recorded some of them, and pumped up their brags even more for his routines, which moved him from the comedy clubs to putting out comedy records (which you couldn't buy in most stores back then because they had nekkid women on the album covers) and then into film stardom via the 1975 movie "Dolemite", famous for its low production values, and for being almost as profitable as "Deep Throat" was.
There's plenty of funny material outside the routines here - I particularly enjoyed seeing how the film was made, by a director who barely cared and a cast and crew that barely knew what they were doing. This called to mind two other films for me, "The Disaster Artist" for its similar portrayal of a clueless independent filmmaker who was determined beyond belief to bring his vision to life, and also "Bowfinger", another film on the same topic which also had Eddie Murphy in two roles, as a famous actor who appeared in this low-budget film without consent, and also his naive identical cousin who got roped into being that actor's stand-in.
Rudy Ray Moore signs away the profits and royalties from his comedy albums in order to raise the money from his record company to make his Dolemite movie, because he believes that this is where his character belongs, on the big screen. The appeal of being in a movie is partly a feeling of immortality, because such works live on long after we're gone. Sometimes I'll watch a black and white movie on TCM and think about how everyone in that film is dead now, but I can still see them whenever I want and I know all of their names. I've been in a couple movies myself (docs and animated) and I sometimes wonder how long people will know my name, if only from the credits on IMDB. If I'd stayed working in retail, or became the manager of a movie theater, I couldn't even think along those lines - so to be working outside of movies, I'd feel like maybe a day would come when nobody would remember me, I'd just be a file in a county records office or something.
Rudy is portrayed as a man who will do whatever it takes to get that film made, from using film students as camera-men to offering to fix up an old hotel in order to use it as a shooting location - and I admire that. Having encountered tasks before the pandemic at one studio that I preferred to not do, I feel terribly ashamed now. I should have regarded getting up every weekday and being allowed to work on movies as a great gift, and now I feel like I squandered that gift. To work on an animated feature for five years, to do everything from typing up the script to scanning drawings, from filing copyright forms to calculating payroll, from timing exposure sheets to posting the cast list on IMDB, I got somewhat complacent, and I didn't realize how good I had it. If I can't work on the final year of that film's production, I'm going to feel like I dropped the ball somehow, like I blew it. Not to mention that I've been friends with that director for nearly 25 years, so I would hate to think that I ruined that friendship at the same time. And now I'm feeling anxiety again, so let's move on.
Rudy gets his film finished, after hitting up his record company for another round of funding, putting more of himself on the line if the movie doesn't turn out well. And then he encounters "four-walling", which is a real process in which a movie theater will screen a film, but only if the production company buys ALL the tickets in advance, and then absorbs all the risk in the event that nobody shows up to see the movie. BUT, if the crowd does show up, then the producers stand to make a nice little profit. I've encountered this in a couple theaters in Manhattan, when we finished an animated feature the only way to have a NYC premiere was to buy out the whole theater - which does help keep independent cinemas alive, but it also puts the burden on the filmmakers to promote the film, and the tricky thing about promotion is that you just never know if you've done enough. No matter how much promotion you do, on the night of the screening, you're going to be standing in the lobby, wondering if a line is going to form. That rings true - though part of me wonders whether four-walling was a thing back in 1975, or if it's a more recent convention.
(EDIT: Wikipedia is telling me that four wall distribution was around in the late 1960's and the 1970's, but mainly in smaller markets, and almost never in New York or Los Angeles. And an interesting implication, which I did not know, is that if a film is distributed ONLY via four wall distribution, for copyright purposes it may be considered an "unpublished work". Apparently if the filmmakers are forced to buy up all the tickets, even if they sell or give away all the tickets, that's not the same as people buying tickets for a theater that may have empty seats. Something to think about.)
This is also close to other aspects of indie film production that I've experienced - you put the best filmmaking team together that you can afford. You call your friends for help, or you hire (semi-) professionals who might become your friends during the process. You may disagree or argue with people during the production, but the bottom line is that everybody's got their eye on the prize, working toward that day you can premiere the film in the theater, or at a film festival, or show somebody a DVD of the film and say, "Look, right there, THAT'S ME!" And in doing so, in a small way, for just a brief period of time, you might feel immortal. And that's why we do what we do.
Also starring Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Vampire in Brooklyn"), Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "The Predator"), Craig Robinson (last seen in "Table 19"), Tituss Burgess (last seen in "Set It Up"), Da'Vine Joy Randolph (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Wesley Snipes (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Aleksandar Filimonovic, Tip "T.I." Harris (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Chris Rock (last seen in "Top Five"), Ron Cephas Jones (last seen in "Venom"), Luenell (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Gerald Downey (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Joshua Weinstein, Allen Rueckert, Kodi Smit-McPhee (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Tommie Earl Jenkins, Snoop Dogg (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Bob Odenkirk (last seen in "Little Women"), Baker Chase Powell, Barry Shabaka Henley (last seen in "State of Play"), Tasha Smith (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Jill Savel, Ivo Nandi (last seen in "Creed II"), Michael Peter Bolus, Kazy Tauginas, John Michael Herndon, Phil Abrams (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), with archive footage of Jack Lemmon (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Walter Matthau (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), and Rudy Ray Moore.
RATING: 7 out of 10 clubs on the "chitlin circuit"
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