Robert Townsend's Seminal Show Business Satire Hollywood Shuffle is Important But More Importantly It is VERY Funny

Like El Mariachi, another landmark independent film from a Robert who peaked early, the story behind Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle is perhaps better known and more important than the film’s actual plot. El Mariachi and Hollywood Shuffle were both famously financed by their writer-directors on a shoestring budget as a way of proving their viability as filmmakers and creators to a brutal industry. 

Hollywood Shuffle and El Mariachi are Horatio Alger tales hungry, desperate aspirating filmmakers tell each to convince themselves that it is possible to go your own way and succeed, that you can beat the Hollywood bastards at their own game. In that respect it also echoes a much fiercer seminal black film, 1971’s Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Melvin Van Peebles gritty, grimy howl of rage towards the crimes of white America was similarly a very direct reaction and response to the racism Van Peebles experienced working in show-business, most notably as director of The Watermelon Man. 

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Hollywood Shuffle are both scrappy, game-changing black independent films that forever changed cinema but tonally they’re dramatically different. Famously rated X by an “All-White jury”, Song was punishingly intense and angry and borderline experimental in its filmmaking. Hollywood Shuffle, is similarly angry, but it alchemizes its righteous anger towards the injustices faced by black entertainers in a racist white society into deep, cathartic chuckles. 

Van Peebles made his anti-hero a fantasy figure for, to quote the film’s dedication (which I borrowed as the dedication to my memoir, The Big Rewind), “all the brothers and sisters who have had enough of the man.” Townsend just wants to make a movie for black actors who want to work in the business without sacrificing their self-respect. But his film is equally pitched to black audiences who were understandably tired of seeing African-Americans cast as pimps, prostitutes, soul brothers and drug dealers.

On a cinematic level, Hollywood Shuffle isn’t much of a movie. It’s an awfully slight comedy about an aspiring actor named Bobby Taylor (Robert Townsend) who dreams about making it big in movies while working at a hot dog stand ruled with benevolent craziness by Mr. Jones (inveterate scene-stealer John Witherspoon, at his demented best), a culinary mad scientist whose creations include the “Ho cake”, the first cake made specifically for sex workers. Because, in a line that would become instantly iconic (and inspire the title of an MF DOOM song), “Hos gotta eat!” 

Before we see Bobby Taylor we hear him, as he rattles off the hilariously pulpy, over-the-top lines of a street hustler character he’s auditioning for who makes Stepin Fetchit look like a paragon of black dignity by comparison. In a hustler’s desperate nasal whine, Bobby spits up ungodly chunks of a clueless white man’s conception of how black people talk. 

In another of the many lines that have become iconic, Bobby’s ridiculous caricature of a gangsta whines, “I’m bleeding!” before adding, “But I’m bleeding cool!” The meekness of Townsend as an actor adds to the comedy. Townsend’s persona is “nice young man”, so to see him posture and pose and degrade himself to try to fit into Hollywood’s conception of rugged black masculinity adds an additional element of satire to the comedy. 

Structurally and tonally, Hollywood Shuffle recalls both The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty and UHF. Both are about pleasant, unassuming men who escape the mundanity of their everyday lives via wild fantasy sequences that, in the case of Hollywood Shuffle and UHF, double as succinct parodies of popular genres, characters and archetypes. 

As a leading man, Townsend is a little on the bland side but he comes to life playing outsized characters like the tony, British-accented pitchman for Black Acting School, a one-of-a-kind acting academy for African-Americans where they will pick up the skills and experience to play everything from pimps to pushers to drug dealers to pimps who moonlight selling smack. 

It’s a hilarious spoof of blaxploitation cliches but it also highlights how blackness, for show business, is in many ways about performance, something that has not changed in the three decades since Hollywood Shuffle came out. In Hollywood Shuffle, the gulf between the genuine personalities of the black up and comers desperate for a big break, who are generally eloquent, confident and assured, and the slaves, hustlers, gangsters, rapists and lazy servants they play because work is work, is both hilarious and oddly poignant. 

Under the pointed gags about graduates of the world’s finest acting academies squaring off against each other for the honor of playing cartoonish insults to both their dignity and racial heritage lies a genuine sense of anger and sadness over Hollywood’s treatment of minorities. So while the thin plot functions primarily as a rough framework for a series of spoofs, parodies, fake commercials and blackout bits, it also qualifies as a blunt morality tale about a man who must choose between the potential professional opportunity of a lifetime and honoring himself and his people. 

For a ramshackle comedy, Hollywood Shuffle takes itself very seriously. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it is ultimately about the state of the black man in show-business, and how that reflects the state of the black man in America. There are moments throughout that eschew humor entirely to make a point about its characters and their dreams. Most notably, Bobby gets a little inspiration from a friend who tells him that he gave up on his dream of being a singer and that he regrets that sacrifice every day of his life. In another, more white context, this might have come off as maudlin or hacky, but it’s surprisingly resonant here thanks largely to the disarming sincerity Townsend brings to the movie, both as an actor and a filmmaker. 

There’s a lot that’s problematic about Hollywood Shuffle today. In a parody of Siskel & Ebert, for example,Townsend and his talented collaborators take a punishingly extended break from smartly satirizing the racist stereotypes of white Hollywood to imagine what it would be like if a movie review panel show hosted, by, um, a pair of racist stereotypes of African-Americans as scheming, conniving, criminally minded hustlers. 

And the film’s anger towards hateful stereotypes makes a tossed-off gay slur and brief but stereotypical depiction of an effeminate gay hairdresser seem not only tone-deaf and desperately unfunny but hypocritical as well. And when I write that Hollywood Shuffle is about the state of the black man in America, that’s because women don’t really factor here as anything other than moms, grandmas, girlfriends and hookers. 

Despite its flaws, Hollywood Shuffle remains an often hilarious and unmistakably important satire. Townsend would end the year Hollywood Shuffle came out with the release of Eddie Murphy Raw, which he directed, and while Townsend’s follow-up would be one of the most commercially successful stand-up films of all time, Hollywood Shuffle represents Townsend’s enduring legacy. Townsend had an awful lot to say as a filmmaker, but he seems to have said just about all of it in his first film, which like superior debut novels and albums has an energy, density and sense of purpose missing from later, more polished efforts. 

As the strangely prescient, scathing Bamboozled (which starred Hollywood Shuffle supporting player Damon Wayans) illustrates, movies about the unconscionable racism of American culture, particularly pop-culture, will forever remain timely. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way since the days when Hollywood Shuffle was received not just as unusually assured debut but as an unintentional referendum on the future of black independent film but I’m not sure how true that is. We’ve made a number of bold steps forward, thanks to people like Townsend, who took a huge gamble on himself and his vision of black cinema, but we’ve also regressed. These days the largest single employer of black movie actors is probably Tyler Perry, whose oeuvre doubles as an non-ironic, unashamed, unabashed encyclopedia of the kinds of racist stereotypes Townsend both satirizes and exploits here. 

Townsend makes for an unlikely rebel. He’s no bomb throwing revolutionary, just a man who wanted to tell his story, his way, without the compromises that comes with working within the system. Townsend wanted to make a black movie for black audiences and black actors and black comedians that would make them proud and maybe inspire them to tell their own stories. 

A whole lot of hungry filmmakers followed Townsend’s lead. If Hollywood Shuffle were the sketch show pilot it often resembles, I suspect it would look and feel exactly like In Living Color, which was created by Keenan Ivory Wayans, who co-wrote Hollywood Shuffle (and would soon write and direct his own smart, funny send-up of blaxploitation stereotypes, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka) and appears in Hollywood Shuffle alongside his brother Damon.

But if Hollywood Shuffle quietly picked up the revolutionary call of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and gave it a biting satirical spin, the war on racist stereotypes and regressive, reactionary depictions of African-Americans in pop culture is still far from over. In many ways, it has only just begun. Hell, the war may never be won, but thanks to sneaky triumphs like Hollywood Shuffle, there will at least be victorious battles along the way.