Justin Simien is out to show Black creativity has always been integral to Hollywood’s success

By Ronda Racha Penrice, NBC

Director, writer and producer Justin Simien, who a decade ago crashed through the Hollywood gates with his Sundance-winning film “Dear White People,” doesn’t approach his four-part MGM+ documentary series, “Hollywood Black,” from the perspective of Hollywood letting Black talent in. Instead, he emphasizes how Black talent or at least the concept of Blackness has been a part of Hollywood from day one.

“From its very beginnings, Hollywood has been fascinated with Blackness,” Simien says in the first episode. “Not only are we the first subjects in early motion pictures, but we are also the subject of the first blockbusters, early animation and, of course, the first talkie.”

The Houston native, who takes his cues from iconic Black Hollywood historian Donald Bogle’s 2019 book of the same name, told NBC News that the series is personally meaningful — it is what he, himself, needed.

“So many times in my career, I reached for a documentary about our experience in film, and there just wasn’t one there,” he said. 

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Curating a collection of films for the Criterion Channel, which spotlights classic and contemporary movies from around the world, during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests also helped spur him to action. 

“I just started to get angry about the filmmakers that I had never really heard of before. I had heard the name Oscar Micheaux, but we never sat down and watched one of his movies in film school. It was never really explained to me how the reaction to ‘Birth of a Nation’ is actually what began the independent film movement as we understand it. And that independent film movement was Black,” he said. 

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Simien learned of Oscar Micheaux, who created movies during Jim Crow and is credited as the first Black filmmaker.

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