Low Ebb and Flow
If it wasn’t for Paul McCartney’s song with Stevie Wonder, Ebony would have a sinister connotation to it because of the linguistic correlation with Ebola. The latter is not a scientific word. It was originally the name of a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the disease was first discovered. It’s the same reason why Negro went out of fashion in the seventies. Ironically, there was never a Blaxploitation movie called Negro Hero. The more that you look at the word, the more that you associate it with negative. It’s a testament to the contents that the Ebony magazine is still going strong, albeit in online form.
Despite being around since 1945, it took a longer time for its official spin-off to be published i.e. Ebony Man debuted in 1985 - the same year as Live Aid, but also the same year when Eddie Murphy left Saturday Night Live after a five year stint. Because it was stylized as a separate pair of initials above the name, it became unofficially known that EM was the black equivalent to GQ (i.e. Gentlemen’s Quarterly). You can see the thinking process behind it. It’s like why Femme Fatales premiered in 1992 because there weren’t enough pages in magazines being devoted to women in front and behind the camera. The difference in this case is that the majority of the men were being forced to jump ship so as to make way for the women in the metaphorical mother magazine.
From another perspective, you could argue that Ebony Man is for women who like men in the same way that Playgirl was for women who like men. The crucial distinction being that Ebony still have covers featuring men from time to time so as to make it less obvious. For your information, the African-American equivalent to Playboy was Black Men since Hugh Hefner’s magazine was fixated primarily on white women, with Latinas and Mediterranean women in general coming second in exposure. Even that wasn’t enough, so 1996 saw the arrival of a magazine called Latina. Back to Ebony, the Ebola virus was discovered in 1976 - six years before McCartney’s Ebony and Ivory. You have to hand it to publisher John H. Johnson for not wanting to change the name of the magazine to something like Mahogany or Nutmeg. Even Asian Trash Cinema was forced to change its name to Asian Cult Cinema.
Speaking of Asians, Sammo Hung starred in a U.S. TV series called Martial Law. It started off promisingly until it became retooled to cash in on the box office success of Rush Hour, which meant that Arsenio Hall was cast to be the Chris Tucker to Sammo’s Jackie Chan. In Hong Kong, Sammo was not only Jackie’s surrogate big brother but he was also a rival, so he wouldn’t have been happy about being seen as a second-rate Chan. That said, I feel sorry for Arsenio Hall. In the June 1992 issue of Ebony, he talked about having personally experienced racism in Hollywood: “On a daily basis, more than I'd like to describe. If I started talking about the pains of racism in this town, we'd sit here and use up an entire box of tissue.”
Exactly ten years later, the June 2002 issue had an article titled Has Hollywood Really Changed? Film critic Roger Ebert was specifically interviewed for this piece where he articulated: “No one doubts the economic power of African-American actors; Hollywood these days hardly ever makes a big-budget action picture without a Black star. Oscar-worthy roles are in especially short supply...and African-Americans are still underrepresented at Oscar time – that's obvious. The two big wins this year should not be allowed to obscure that fact. But, as Poitier observed, if you take a longer view, then yes, the situation is improving.”
Sidney Poitier died in 2022. Going back twenty years to that issue of Ebony, director Spike Lee addressed the importance of TV versus film since many film studios have their own TV networks. Spike said: “We need to get on the boards of the networks. Those are the gatekeepers, the ones who hold all of the keys. They determine what movies get made, what movies do not get made, what television shows get made, and which television shows do not get made. And they determine who gets hired and who gets fired. It's very important for Blacks to get involved behind the scenes, that's where the power is.”
Ten years earlier, there was an article about actress Halle Berry in the February 1992 issue where it was mentioned that her mother is white. Judith Berry told her: “What do you see when you look in the mirror? You see what everyone else sees. They don't know that you're biracial. They don't know who your mother is, and they aren't going to care.”
In the October 1978 issue, Jim Kelly said: “There's a lot of racism in Hollywood, so a lot of actors are visiting Europe and the Orient, looking for work.”
He went to Hong Kong to co-star in a film called The Tattoo Connection (1978). The real star was Dorian Tan Tao-Liang, but Jim was in enough scenes that the film could be pitched overseas as a sequel to Black Belt Jones (1974). The January 1984 issue of Ebony is important to read (and you can find it on Google Books) because it explored the topic of black entertainers not being on many covers of major and minor magazines. This probably explains why Ebony Man came into existence in 1985.
About the September 1990 issue of Ebony, Quentin Tarantino would either have cringed or bathed in ecstasy about the original script for Heart Condition, as Denzel Washington said: “Having done Heart Condition right after Glory, I just couldn't deal with it. I said there are too many racial slurs – cut it out, cut it out. They had the word n!gger in there about 50 times. Now it's used once and I still think it's too harsh.”
Twelve months later, the latest issue had a shocking article about Wesley Snipes where he talked about something bad that happened during the making of an independent film starring Eric Stoltz. While shooting The Waterdance, Wesley was manhandled by members of the Los Angeles Police Department who, because of a rental company's mistake, suspected him of driving a stolen car. Arrested at gunpoint, Snipes said he was handcuffed to a bench and held for hours at the station despite numerous third party attempts to explain the error. Wes said: “They came over, threw my hands in a wrist lock, cuffed me, then put his knee on my neck, then put the 9mm to my head.”
He says disgustedly of the police: “Everybody was coming out looking at me like a monkey in a cage, walking past me smiling, snickering and shaking their heads like ‘Umph, umph, umph. You see that. A n!gger is a n!gger. You know you can't give the n!ggers nothing. He's gonna steal a car and he makes movies.’ You will never hear me say I don't see myself as a black actor but just an actor who happens to be black.”
In that same issue, September 1991, there was an article about interracial stories in TV shows and films. Wesley's agent, Dolores Robinson, said: “It's whatever's hot at the moment. Right now, its interracial movies. Next year, who can tell? If Jungle Fever and Love Field make money, then the studios will assume that people are interested and make more films. Then they'll wear that trend out and move on to something else.”
In the November 1997 issue, Wesley talked about One Night Stand - a Mike Figgis film that was originally written for Nicolas Cage: “Early on there were concerns about the Black community reminiscing to Jungle Fever, and missing the point of the story. So we didn't want to go that route, and I've done a lot of movies where I've had white women as my co-stars. That would have been kind of redundant, so I said ‘Well let me go either Spanish or Asian. That's something unusual.’ The only thing we don't have in this film is a Sister.”
The film still had a white leading lady in the form of Nastassja Kinski, so they could have got their cake and eaten it. If I was casting it, I would have gone with the Latina because Wesley Snipes said something that made the decision seem unintentionally self-indulgent: “Primarily, I've dated black women. Mostly. Either the hot-headed ones or the ones who just think they're divas. I like them because they have spice and creativity. I like a woman who reads. I think a number of my relationships…because she didn't read and we didn't have anything to talk about. But I'm not into the ones who want to jump up, fight and get loud. That's not my flavour. But it just so happens that now I'm dating an Asian woman. It's different. Different energy, different spirit, but a nice person.”
In the June 1991 issue, there was an article by actress Robin Givens titled Why are Black Actresses Having Such a Hard Time in Hollywood? White actress Laura Dern was quoted for it. Coincidentally, she had worked with the aforementioned Eric Stoltz on two films. In fact, Eric had a black agent named Helen Sugland. Anyway, Laura was quoted as rightfully saying: “There's Denzel Washington, there's Morgan Freeman, there's Forest Whitaker...where are the black actresses?”
Half-caste actress Raw Dawn Chong summarized Hollywood: “Let's face it, it's a racist industry but everything is racist. I just have the willingness to go for it. And I want to be one of the few, if not one of the many, Black women to win an Oscar.”
In the March 2003 issue, Kimberly Davis wrote an article called After Halle's Oscar: Why Black Actresses Still Can't Get Any Respect in Hollywood. One longtime Hollywood agent, who asked not to be named, claimed that Hollywood executives don't live with and don't have significant relationships with African-Americans, and therefore don't or won't give many of them a shot. The agent, who had represented many black actresses over the years, said: “There are so many talented blacks out there who will never get an opportunity because it's a closed shop. That's the reality. It's all about revenue. If they see an opportunity to make money off of, we're in. Other than that, get back!”
In the July 1988 issue, Eddie Murphy let it be known that his stardom didn't allow him to evade the pervasive racism in Hollywood: “There's a very strong, underlying kind of racism in Hollywood that's characterized by the person who smiles in your face and then stabs you in the back. When you watch those film clips of black people being beaten and sprayed with water hoses during the Civil Rights Movement, you realize that period wasn't so long ago, and some of those people who sprayed the hoses are still around. They have children who have children, and some of them have the same values as those who sprayed the hoses. I know there are a lot of people in this business who would rather not have to deal with this 27-year-old black man.”
Eddie was promoting Coming to America, co-starring Arsenio Hall and featuring Samuel L. Jackson in a one scene role. Another black actor in the cast, John Amos, was quoted in the article: “I've been acting 22 years, and I've never seen this many blacks on a movie set. It's all because of Eddie Murphy. Despite what people might say about him, Eddie's social consciousness speaks for itself.”
Speaking as a ‘90s kid who lived in England, John Travolta’s White Man’s Burden (1995) didn’t get aired on U.K. TV. I kept up with all the latest releases whether it be on pay per view, terrestrial (five channels) or free (non-PPV) cable, so my memory is not playing tricks on me. Even in the noughties, I never saw it listed in Britain’s number one TV magazine (Radio Times). The excuse was that it wasn’t a mainstream film in terms of who produced and distributed it. Nowadays, you still can’t watch it on Sky TV. Anyway, the September 1996 issue of Ebony had a quote from co-star Harry Belafonte about the making of the film: “But there was not the courage to go to the higher and more significant places. We kept our fingers crossed that it would get over, but it didn't quite make it because it lost a lot of its vibrancy.”
White Man’s Burden was produced by Quentin Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart. In Quentin’s second book, Cinema Speculation (2022), he admitted that the premise of Django Unchained (2012) owed a debt to a screenplay written by a black man who his mother dated back when Quentin was very young. Quentin could have filmed it after Pulp Fiction (1994), but the memory of Tombstone (1993), The Unforgiven (1994), Wyatt Earp (1994) and The Quick or the Dead (1995) was too fresh. Jackie Brown (1997) starred a black woman (Pam Grier), and was less profitable than Pulp Fiction. Quentin couldn’t do Django Unchained next because, while being less ambitious than Kill Bill (2003), people would have compared it to Will Smith’s Wild Wild West (1999).