Love it or hate it, Tyler Perry bucked the trends by being true to his formula and knowing his audience for better or worse. While some people may lie, claiming they didn't see his movie because the content is beneath them, Perry's astronomical box-office numbers continue to tell the truth.
In the beautifully murky and intermittently-colorful, prismatic limbo called modern entertainment, the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
Unlike other cultural diversions, businesses, arts, sciences, and disciplines there is no template, no format, no mold and no formula. Sometimes it’s right place wrong time, wrong time right place. Sometimes it's a sure thing turned flop and shoe-in for clunker turned runaway smash. One word, "Macarena". No, two words, Vanilla Ice. No three words, High School Musical. Actually four, Riyatttch-ass Tyler Perry, who just scored another suprise hit with Why Did I get Married?.
Whatever your opinion about these temple-scratching phenomena, the unescapable fact remains that when you put entertainment and retail commerce together, numbers don’t lie, even if people do.
You see, numbers equal happy executives, which equal more marketing to make more numbers, which equals more appearances on Oprah Winfrey, which equal more numbers of people knowing and caring about who you are, which in turn creates, well more numbers.
They’re so honest, those damn numbers. Those numbers make us do things we might not otherwise do and pretty soon we find ourselves folding our arms chanting gibberish Spanglish (Aight!!!). Suddenly, we’re mouthing, “word to the mutha!” Abruptly, we’re breaking into song and dance in front of our lockers and we’re giggling nervously at a grown-ass, six-foot black dude in a dress talking sassy. We are clapping when a woman hits a man in the back of the head with a bottle of wine.
Forget everything you know about “good” filmmaking or “compelling” play writing or what you think those endeavors might entail. Just trust me when I say that despite Tyler Perry’s awe-inspiring, head-slapping, jaw-dropping nearly billion dollar success, there’s no mystery as to why Tyler Perry’s gender, genre and dimension-bending fare rakes in drug lord money.
I’ll back up that statement thoroughly in a stanza or two but for now, if you’re a hipster auteur or a tortured but “integrity-laden” scribe, or a thespian who thinks your blood should be sold in cherry-flavored vials at the Royal Shakespeare Theater company because you’re that good, be prepared to work with or for Tyler Perry.
That’s right, pull up your checkered tweed pants that you got from Buffalo Exchange on La Brea. Iron your Che Guevara shirt and pop the collar on your vintage, too-tight-for-your-body leather army jacket. Then extinguish your American Spirit cigarette and get your reel, pages and clips and headshots together because Tyler Perry is killing ‘em out there! He can’t be stopped, he can’t do wrong, and he can’t lose. All you skeptics need to acknowledge this and proceed accordingly.
I know this because close friends of mine, confidants who are series regulars on network shows and have appeared on HBO and Showtime and on the silver screen made a confession to me recently. These are classically trained working artists, who actually got masters degrees in acting and producing and they recently confided in me as if I were a priest when the subject of Tyler Perry came up.
I won’t embarrass them by mentioning their names but they told me that if Mssr. Perry came knocking, they’d be a fool, and I quote, “not to 'F&!@#,' with him,” meaning they’d happily star in whatever contrived, silly, preachy, countrified, black-face-in-drag show he produced because it means high visibility, it means gold. It’s instant recognition, it’s raw and uncut box office Cocaine straight out the wrapper.
Angela Bassett is appearing in Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, scheduled for release in February. That’s right, no sentence or paragraph transition, no need for an explanation. The exception proves the rule. I repeat Angela Bassett is appearing in Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, scheduled for release in February.
Now back to you hipsters, go three pars up and come back down: You good? Okay, now why is Tyler Perry printing money, just for starring in movies by Tyler Perry, which were written by Tyler Perry, produced by Tyler Perry and bear the brand name Tyler Perry? Why does that self-indulgent and kind of creepy and weird but certainly comical viaje de’ accion create back-breaking success? The secret is his personal story, his demonstrated albeit seemingly feigned humility and most important -- and this is crucial -- his built-in audience.
When I say built-in audience, I don’t mean black people. No, I mean a sub-division of black people. They have a lot of buying power mixed with the need to relate to something, anything, in the post civil rights era. They are motivated by a pinch of religious zeal, real, imagined or hypocritical, along with -- to Tyler Perry’s delight -- tunnel-vision taste.
These are people who are mostly over 30, mostly Christian, some professional, some para-professional. They are a smart group yes but without enough discerning intellect to fill a paper bag or for that matter the collection plate packed with dough at church on Sunday. These are folks who subscribe to Jet, Ebony, Essence, Vibe and the Bible.
They also love them some Tavis Smiley and listen to that idiot Michael Baisden and that nimrod Tom Joyner, who are both Riyatttch and have nationally-syndicated radio shows. And somehow, no matter how much loot they have, they always end up in the Bahamas come vacation time.
They also are loyal to a fault, which explains why someone of that ilk would write to Roger Ebert and accuse him of “hating on a brotha.” Yeah, someone with the screename “Demon Deacon,” accused a prominent cultural critic of “hating on a brotha,” when Ebert suggested that Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman had an implausible plot and that a decent movie was ruined by the constant appearance of a “balloon-breasted gargoyle with a bad wig, who likes to wave a loaded gun and shoot test rounds into the ceiling.” That would be Tyler Perry as a grown-ass man dressed up like a woman, which is apparently a role every black comedian must play to make the A-List.
What made “Demon Deacon” snap off like that was that Tyler Perry is his “peeples.” The Jet-Ebony-Baisden-Joyner-Steve Harvey-crowd identifies with Perry because he’s really not a writer or an actor, but he’s one of them made good. He makes them laugh, he makes them happy to come home from work or go out to a local theatre and not have to think – at all.
He’s not James Baldwin, he’s not Ralph Ellison. Let’s face it he’s not even James Evans or Ralph Kramden. What he is, is a church boy from a broken home who once lived in a car, whose first play bombed but who enjoyed great success thereafter. Perry's people paid him back for being with them, being of them, proceeding as if he was doing it all for them. He doesn't intentionally dumb the content down as a more conscious and arrogant artist would do but essentially creates his own lane, by purportedly “keeping it real” and letting the market come to him. And boy did it come to him and it’s gonna keep on comin.’ I think he got five deals as I was writing this.
I won’t list his accomplishments and upcoming projects because they are too numerous to mention here. I only ask this: can $75 million in ticket and DVD sales, $200 million in television development coin and a box-office gross total approaching a quarter billion be wrong? Well, some of you duplicitous charlatans out there will soon be forced to admit that if that’s wrong, you don’t want to be right.
