"Hollywood Shuffle" Now On Hulu
If you've never seen the movie - and there's no reason why you shouldn't have, if you are over 21 years old - here's your chance to see it for FREE!
Robert Townsend's hilarious spoof lamenting the dearth of roles available for African American talent in Hollywood, and the narrow-minded casting policies of casting agencies, is one that just about every actor/actress of African descent will readily relate to - even still today, 21 years since the film's initial release.
But you don't have to be in show-business to appreciate the film's message. The struggles of the films leading cast should be familiar to anyone who has been on the receiving end of rejection from any profit-driven institution unabashed in its ignorance and discriminatory practices.
It's obviously a film with not much of a budget, relative to the average cost of typical studio-produced fare. But that won't get in the way of your ability to enjoy screening it. It's minuscule budget actually works in the film's favor, which plays out more like a documentary with a few often very funny fictional elements sprinkled throughout.
The film was a timely entry into the market - a year after Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It took America by force, introducing black characters we'd rarely seen on screen up until that time. I wonder if there would have been a Hollywood Shuffle if She's Gotta Have It didn't enjoy the kind of success it did. And for the following 5 to 6 years, after its release, Hollywood experienced what some have called the "golden age of black cinema," when we were treated to several original works and their countless clones, which seemed to get progressively watered down, and thus worse.
Hollywood Shuffle remains a cut above the rest, and I believe will still be remembered fondly when all the others are a distant memory. Not that it's a perfect film. It certainly has it flaws, but they are far-outweighed by its pros.
I encourage you to watch it if you haven't already. It's the kind of guerrilla filmmaking that every independent filmmaker will applaud.
Here it is. Or go to Hulu.com and watch it there in a larger window:
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