You know it’s been a rough day when you need to see “Roots” to bring levity. That was the plight, however, as we stood on April 21 waiting for the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of the reboot of the epic miniseries that has affected generations since its original debut nearly 40 years ago.
Four decades in the perspective of time is relatively short, but in technology and ideology it may as well be centuries. Crazy that the former can have such an impact on the latter, but that’s where we are in 2016. Arts have to be aesthetically pleasing before the content is considered for consumption. One of the coproducers of the new undertaking, Mark Wolper, used a firsthand encounter as the catalyst for the project.
Wolper, whose father, David L. Wolper, executive-produced the original, wished to share the achievement with his teenaged son. The response was tepid, to put it kindly. Wolper shared the reaction. He said, “It looked funny. It was paced weird.” He added that the defining moment came when he noted, “he completely understood what was so important about the production. But, he said ‘It is kind of like your music. It doesn’t speak to me.’”
To help in the modernization of the remake, Will Packer was enlisted as a producer. With credits such as “Straight Outta Compton,” “Think Like a Man” and “Ride Along” under his belt, Packer understands those challenges, plus the added obstacles. Packer said, “As a Black man in America, that has kids, I empathize with a generation that screams their lives matter and fights against a system of oppression. My concern was how was this going to be received by that audience. There’s a whole generation out there that think they know this story. They think they know who they are and where they come from. And they’re trying to move forward. I don’t think they have really embraced that their ancestors had the courage that was displayed on the screen. They are direct descendants of warriors in Africa that survived, were put on the ship and had that passage and survived, sold into slavery on American soil with all the atrocities and survived. They are the descendants of those survivors.”
As we were about to wrap and hit the press, that generation had a voice in multiplatinum artist Snoop Dogg. Snoop, in full gangsta mode, went in on the film straight no chaser. So while we’d like to wax poetic about the exquisite performances of Malachi Kirby (Kunta Kinte), Rege-Jean Page (Chicken George), Erica Tazel (Matilda) and Anika Noni Rose (Kizzy), news prevails. With that, here are a few of the colorful quotes offered by the Doggfather:
“No disrespect, but I can’t watch no more Black movies with niggas getting dogged out: “12 Years a Slave,” “Underground,” “Roots”—none of that.”
“They wanna just keep showing the abuse we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but guess what, we’re still taking the same abuse. Think about that part.”
“When you all going to make a [expletive] series about the success that Black folks is having?”
“Let’s create our own [expletive] based on today. How we live and how we inspire people today. Black is what’s real.”
Right out of the “Willie Lynch: The Making of a Slave,” playbook. Although some will question the validity of its historical accuracies, the psychology is tried and true. Here’s a stanza that might be fitting: “They say that the mind has a strong drive to correct and re-correct itself over a period of time if it can touch some substantial original historical base, and they advised us that the best way to deal with the phenomenon is to shave off the brute’s mental history and create a multiplicity of phenomena of illusions, so that each illusion will twirl in its own orbit, something similar to floating balls in a vacuum.”
If this theory has a remote possibility, then would we have a better chance of finding a substantial historical base in “Roots” or in “Soul Plane?” Sip on some gin and juice and lay back and think about it.
Over and out. Holla next week. Til then, enjoy the nightlife.