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Disclaimer: I want to be sure folks understand that my overview of Black Film history is extremely brief here and I do not profess to be a film history guru.  I will fully admit that many of the things stated here are generalized for the sake of brevity, and that an entire book could be written on this subject.  I simply tackled it for the big picture affect.  This idea was sparked from my last entry regarding my review of Red Tails, and the ensuing clamor I saw happening the weekend it premiered.  Enjoy.

George Lucas appeared in various places to promote Red Tails, a film paying homage to the Tuskegee Airmen. In a viral explosion, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and various other media quoted Lucas on how he couldn’t get financial backing from major studios for Red Tails because of its all Black cast. In the minds of major film studio execs, an all Black cast for any story would not generate enough sales domestically or internationally. Lucas shared the logic of the execs with blunt terms, and said that he put $58 million of his own money to distribute the film. Lucas had confirmed the racism within the Hollywood system, and it became a rally cry to support Red Tails with its dollars to disprove “the suits”. Various other Black writers and bloggers were skeptical as to why they should see the film, even using Lucas’ interracial relationship as fodder for their criticism.  Nevertheless, the primary voices seemed to shout, “We have to show Hollywood that Blacks have a voice!  If we don’t support this with our money, we can say goodbye to high budgeted, good quality films!”  It was  a call to action to prove the power of the Black audience and their desire for positive portrayals, that all black casts were just as equal to the primarily all White films distributed, as well as pay homage to these Black war heroes. If people didn’t see the film, it would prove the studios right and we would pretty much say goodbye to all Black films.  One must ask, is Black cinema truly in danger of extinction?  Through a brief look at Black film history we see that if extinction were possible, it would be less about the restrictions from major studios and more about the Black community that has diversified in many directions.

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*sigh*…

First question…have you seen The Great Debaters?  EXCELLENT film.  Great writing.  Great acting.  And a piece of history that maybe no one hardly knows about.  The movie has the ability to make verbal debates look like war. Which in a way it is.  You are talking about all African Americans, the underdogs, showing their intelligence and wit.  It has all the drama you need and to this day is one of the best portrayals, I think, of historical events in telling one piece of the African American legacy.

Now about Red Tails…

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Even Tyler Perry thinks he’s created a monster.   He wants Madea to die.

This past weekend Tyler Perry released his eleventh film (that’s right, 11) under his production company.  11 films, all of which he has written and produced, 10 of which he has been the director, and 10 in which he was an actor.  As his film approached this coming weekend, I saw posters everywhere of Madea, the matriarchal, gun-toting, “Don’t take no mess” grandmother, with the words “Hallelujer”, and smiles that looked creepy.  A man dressed as a 70 something year old black woman.  Madea’s character has stirred up a lot of debate regarding Tyler’s sexuality and whether or not he may even be a conspiracy against black people in the emasculation of Black men.

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Finally, there’s proof.  Something I always felt I saw happening.  Something many people have commented on in various ways, perceiving, but not quite able to articulate.  Probably part of the reason why a lot of films are starting to feel redundant, why the music is so repetitive, why you probably can’t name four contemporary pioneers of visual art right now…

Creative intelligence is dropping.

I got this article from Newsweek that states that creative intelligence has been steadily dropping year by year since 1990.

Intelligence can be marked in various ways.  Some have emotional intelligence, meaning they can perceive emotions well or how to manipulate the emotions of others around them.  Some have a spatial intelligence, which would make them a great architect or artist.  Some have academic intelligence.  Some are creatively intelligent, meaning they are good at taking one thing and creating something new or improving it.  It could mean a whole range of things.  For all these kinds of intelligence there is usually some kind of test that is associated.  We most know of IQ tests or SATs.  Well then there’s the Torrance test.  The article goes into some detail on the test and so forth, but here are the most striking parts of what the article says about the decline of creativity over the years…

…there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly…

A large part of the reason why I created this site is because I wanted to use the arts as a way of communicating the idea of “creative intelligence”.  It’s my belief that in order to be a great artist/entertainer, you have to have some kind of creative intelligence in order to move what you’re doing forward.  Of course, there are plenty of musicians who can play instruments, but do not have the creativity to improvise a piece.  Many people who are artists can copy a picture, but probably can’t create something out of their own head without a direct reference in front of them.  But that’s what, to me, means they are not ARTISTS in the sense of it being their path of life.  The life of a person who produces a product based on their creativity.

Leonardo to Picasso.  Stravinsky to Stevie.  Hitchcock to Spielberg.  Some of these folks have an ability to take a medium to the next level.  That’s the kind of thinking I am talking about.  Someone that can take one piece of an idea (like the Torrance test does in it’s drawing section) and being able to expand on it to create something different.  It’s a quality of leadership.  It’s problem solving.

So when we hear music, see movies, or other things that make you say “I’ve seen that before” and we feel that it’s copying something else, it’s probably because the person behind it was not entirely creatively intelligent.  But the folks who have a deep following and fan base, that have set the trends, that have changed the game, were creatively intelligent.  Kanye West.  Heath Ledger.  You name it.  They take the art to the next level that inspire us.  They are leaders.

It’s not enough for a person to get a mic, pro tools, and a computer program to make beats, and then call yourself a music artist.  Sure you can do it, or imitate others.  But come up with something on your own, that’s honest, and catches fire like Prince?  That takes another level of thinking.

I’ve seen a lot of people suddenly take up cameras and call themselves photographers.  People who jump in front of that camera and call themselves models. Folks who buy the cheapest Flip Mino and want to make music videos.   But compare the work of an amateur to that of the creative intelligent person with the natural knack and learned skill?  You can’t compete.

So before someone jumps up and calls themselves an artist, I ask, are they creative? And as the article says you don’t  necessarily have to be in the arts.  A business person can be creative.  Anyone can be use a creative mind in any field, it’s just that we usually recognize efforts of creativity in musicians and storytellers.

And who are the culprits when it comes to the fall of creative intelligence?  Well we can definitely point toward the American school system.  We measure achievement by how well you can do on academic tests.  Your grade is reflection of your ability to learn. But plenty of people in leadership positions didn’t do well in school.  Along with that, how many of us learn how to create the solutions to problems?  We learn the process and get the answer.  But how often are we asked to create the process itself?

And furthermore, we have a society that doesn’t really reward creative thinking…at least, not until the thought has been proven to work.  Imagine someone coming up with the idea for an iPhone in 1978?  A computer, a camera, AND a phone all in one?  Yeah right.  How is that going to happen?  We doubt imaginations that don’t seem immediately practical.  A seed of doubt can kill an idea.  So we place a lot of doubt on “out the box” thinkers.  So then they also doubt their own intelligence.  But the ones that truly believe in their idea, and prove others wrong?  We praise them later, especially once they make millions of dollars.

I can go into a whole rant on the industries (i.e. film, music, television, radio, etc) that take “creative” works and market them.  Contrary to popular belief, people aren’t dumb.  It may take a while for others to catch on, but when they notice a remade film disguised as being “new”, a song that follows the exact same format as another one, people begin to catch on.  And when they notice their pockets being drained by nothing but the same product, that’s when the pirating happens.  And yes, the industry wants things “proven” to work, so they ask folks to copy the creative minds.  It’s a very interesting cycle that always happens in every business, but we treat it with a different regard when it comes to art.  We think of art as usually needing to have some kind of unique mind behind it.  I don’t care if my socks are the exact same, but the art I enjoy?  Some of it needs to be original and unique to me.

It’s no wonder that a lot of younger people now are listening to older music.  They feel the creativity and honesty in it.  People are going back to older things trying to figure out where to go next.  Leadership is dropping.  A lot of people sense it happening.

I saw this video a while ago and couldn’t wait for the right post to put it up.  I think you all should check out the WHOLE LECTURE HERE.

Let’s keep it real.  This summer kinda sucked in terms of films.  Once I saw that long awaited atrocity, The Last Airbender, it was clear this summer was on a downward spiral.  Strangely enough, it seems like cartoons and movies aimed at younger audiences have been gettin the best reviews and drawing in most adults.  What’s going on with films right now?  Why are there so many copycat formatted movies?  What happened to the original stories and the films that pushed the edge for new standards of film?  Yeah OK…Avatar.  Right.  But all that really spawned was a bunch of copy cats.  Now everything is in 3D, or 3D converted.  And the film industry seems to be killing itself slowly by overusing 3D and those terrible conversions that nobody likes.  After a while people are going to stop seeing things in 3D altogether, unless it’s clear that it will look better that way.

Sidenote- What do you do if you have poor eyesight and they give you 3D glasses?  Do you have to wear them on top of your glasses?  That’s seems wack.

Anyway, I have a new small prediction.  Call me crazy, but I think if the movie business stays on this course, it’s going to start crumbling like the music industry.

Let’s go back to about the mid-90s.  Cd’s cost nearly $20 a pop.  And a great deal of them would have a few hot singles, but the overall product was wack.  At some point, some people in the industry figured out if you have some great singles, and just put some filler material on the albums, it wouldn’t matter.  So you can drop a cd every 6 months to a year with just all your material and get back your money without puttin much time or energy into it.  After all, if the radio singles are killer, then people have no choice but to buy the album on instinct.  The CD sales would still be counted even if the CD was returned, and that was that.  The customers started losing out.  You had to wait and see if the album was really worth it.  Then Napster hit the scene.  And we know how the story goes from there.  Now you’re lucky to even go Gold.  Your album better be straight fire from start to finish if you expect anyone to actually buy all your tracks, and not just single songs off Itunes, IF they even want to do that.  It’s an option to pay.

Well think about it like this, the singles were the trailers for the album.  You hear a few good songs like seeing a few good scenes, and you anticipate it.  “Oh that’s gonna be a dope album (movie).”  You end up paying nearly $20, and then what do you get?  A bunch of crap.  2 hours of time gone, for $20.  Nothing to talk about.  Just a few flashy things, and it’s done.

Well now, a lot of films can be bootlegged online.  Torrents.  You name it.  Streaming online.  Folks bootlegging and putting parts on Youtube even.  With Twitter and other online networks the word can spread like wildfire if a movie is bad.  Last Airbender had a $250million budget overall, and over the weekend (with it’s HIGH anticipation/inflated price with 3D tix by the way) made about 60-70million.  Now of course it’s going to open world wide and etc, but some people have gone to see it because they heard it was bad (which I pray won’t become a new marketing tactic).  Then some others stayed away altogether, and saw it for free online.  My own Airbender reaction video got nearly 1,500 views in 4 days.  That’s nearly $30,000 potentially lost from 1 bad review.  And there’s a lot of similar reviews with way more views than mine.

Now films are gong to DVD even faster, which means they will appear on Netflix faster.  Going to the movies really means you want to see it immediately instead of a few months later.

Have you noticed the high amount of movies with names tied to already established followings or have a recognizable name?

Karate Kid.

Last Airbender.

Twilight.

A-Team.

Predators…

I read an article that opened up my eyes that even though they are doing Kung Fu in the Karate Kid, it still has that title because the name Karate Kid is such a recognized franchise.  But before the Karate Kid remake, someone came up with that original plot and script.  Are there anymore NEW original films that are starting their own franchises?  The Twilight  series was based on the book.  Iron Man on the comics.  The new Tron on the old 80s movie.  But many of these films still don’t capture the essence of the books, or the original films.  So as these kinds of films keep gettin released with inflated names, people will wonder if its really worth their time and money.  The films are like huge gift wrapped boxes…that YOU have to pay for!  And you have no idea what’s in there til it’s too late  Could be something awesome, or it could be a Cracker Jack prize.  But, if you bootleg it, or stream it for free, you lose a whole lot less in the gamble.

The only film I see coming so far that seems to have an original concept is Inception.  I can’t wait for that, especially since director/writer Christopher Nolan has made nothin but heat!

I really think there is going to be a point, if the film industry and studios don’t focus a bit more on story quality and move into original film franchises, where people will wait to see the reviews first, and get it for free. They will pay top dollar if, and only if, it really seems worth their time.  They may just pay for one movie, and see the others they want for free.  I’m sure that’s been happening anyway.  But I think people go to a theater for an overall experience.  Seeing a movie on your computer isn’t the same as the popcorn, soda, Red Vines, huge screen, and surround sound.  But some people may not care about that especially in this economy.

So I dunno folks.  You tell me.  Is the film industry headed in the tank like the music industry?  Is there a sacrifice on quality film that is being put out, or is this current trend so far just a fluke?

What films did you see so far this year that were great?  Let me know!  Peace.