Last Wednesday marked the 10th anniversary of Diary of a Mad Black Woman. The film shocked Hollywood by debuting with a $22 million opening weekend and announced the arrival of one of the more interesting, and polarizing, filmmakers of the last decade. The film was written and produced by co-star Tyler Perry. I had exactly zero idea who Mr. Perry was or that his plays had become a sensation in the so-called "Chitlin' circuit." I would learn pretty quickly. It would be the first of fifteen theatrical features (the next fourteen of which he would direct) released between February 2005 and May 2014. This is not a career obituary, as while Perry has no new theatrical films on tap I'm sure we haven't seen the last of him in theatres. This is not a film-by-film rundown as Evan Saathoff handled that pretty well. And this is not the place for me to argue that someone who genuinely doesn't like Perry's output is objectively wrong. But ten years after the arrival of Mr. Perry and his explicitly unique brand of theatrical entertainment, I think we can admit that, no matter if you liked his movies and no matter if you agreed with his specific (sometimes tangentially religious and arguably socially conservative) philosophies, his films are uniquely his own and wholly unique. As someone who liked his films in theory even when I didn't like each specific movie, I continue to make the argument that Tyler Perry was an artist to be respected and that Hollywood is better off for his filmography.
Diary of a Mad Black Woman introduced moviegoers not just to the specific styling of a stereotypical Tyler Perry film (melodramatic romance, bawdy comedy, and no small amount of old-school religion) but also to his trademark character, Mabel "Madea" Simmons. The character was a broadly comic grandmother type (who was funniest when used sparingly and not as a primary plot motivator, such as I Can Do Bad All By Myself), who of course was actually Mr. Perry in drag. Madea, a towering, profane, righteously indignant, and explicitly atheistic unwilling den mother, was only a real presence six of Perry's fifteen features. After the first two (Diary of a Mad Black Woman and the much-improved Madea's Family Reunion), the character was semi-retired onscreen for three years and four films. It wasn't until the relative under-performance of Meet the Browns and The Family That Preys (two of his best films, as Family That Preys is my personal favorite) that he brought Madea back for Madea Goes to Jail, which scored an eye-popping $40 million debut weekend and earned $90m at the domestic box office.
Madea Goes to Jail is not one of Perry's best films (and Madea spends about as much time in jail as Jason spent in Manhattan), although it is far-and-away his most successful. Coupling that with the unfair critical dismissal and box office under-performance of For Colored Girls a year later, an adaption of Ntozake Shange's beloved stage play, and it would seem Tyler Perry (in the film realm at least) became well-aware of what did or did not bring him bountiful box office. The reliance on Madea-fronted projects over the second half of his current filmography (Madea's Big Happy Family, Madea's Witness Protection, and A Madea Christmas), represents either a man resigned to do what makes him popular as opposed to making him happy or a man at peace with the knowledge that he can use his iconic (and broadly comic) character as a vessel to achieve the box office results necessary to give him more freedom and potentially more "serious" opportunities elsewhere.
For most of his ten year run, Tyler Perry single-handedly "saved" a generation of black actors and actresses from relative underemployment. That's somewhat simplistic, but Perry's rise to stardom came right as the DVD bust was laying waste to the kind of low-budget studio projects that might have otherwise given such actors steady employment in an industry that otherwise saw fit to cast them only as the doomed partner or the sassy friend. We were no longer seeing films like Waiting to Exhale, The Best Man, or Love & Basketball with any regularity, as the major studios were chasing away the mid-budget adult drama, the mid-to-low budget kiddie flick, and the minority-fronted genre film in favor of the so-called four-quadrant global blockbusters. For much of Perry's run with Lionsgate, or for as long as it took for Hollywood to slowly realize that there was real money to be made in low-to-mid budget films starring black actors that weren't necessarily "very important pictures" about the horrors of slavery and racism, Tyler Perry represented a life raft in an otherwise dwindling ocean of honest-to-goodness leading and supporting roles for the kinds of actors that otherwise had to make due with bit parts in "mainstream" features.
Looking at Perry's filmography and the casts that filled his films, you see an absolute murderer's row of (arguably) underrepresented and (arguably) underemployed talent, including many of the "big" names that you now see as prime examples of mainstream Hollywood getting with the "diversity" picture. Kerry Washington, Taraji P. Henson, Viola Davis, Kimberly Elise, Keke Palmer, Idris Elba, Lance Gross, Sofía Vergara, Michael Jai White, Derek Luke, Loretta Devine, Gabrielle Union, Thandie Newton, Phylicia Rashad, and Tessa Thompson (among many others) all put in time in the Tyler Perry universe. We can debate whether the films were worthwhile, but the actors and (especially) actresses all got real roles with real meat to them, the kind of leading/supporting character work of theoretical substance that is hard to find when you're being relegated to being the token black person in a white person's journey. I'm sure, for example, that Michael Jai White enjoyed his leading roles in the Why Did I Get Married? series more than his "angry black gangster" cameo in The Dark Knight.
For the record, I am a heterosexual, agnostic (Jewish by culture) white male talking about a series of melodramatic comedies and dramas that mostly starred African-American actors and were aimed at African-American women of varying degrees of Christian religious faith and social conservativism. I bring that up because I am aware that I have the luxury of dismissing the notion that Tyler Perry's eccentricities speak for the black community at-large while not having to take his flaws as a potential libel against me and mine. I have long argued that the reason Perry took so much grief, give or take some inexplicable narrative choices (the finales of Why Did I Get Married Too and Temptation come to mind) is because as the only regular multiplex producer of mainstream black-centric entertainments, his characters and their issues had a nasty side effect of potentially "representing" black people in the eyes of the audience. While I'd like to think that most audiences, black and white, were smart enough to realize that Tyler Perry only speaks for Tyler Perry and Tyler Perry's characters in Tyler Perry's various movies, television shows, and plays, I also have the luxury of not worrying about how "I" am being represented onscreen when I watch one.
So when it was argued that Tyler Perry's films were not always the best representation of black America, I would simply say that the answer to Tyler Perry's storytelling flaws is simply to stop making Tyler Perry's films the only mainstream multiplex releases that feature majority-black casts telling stories involving majority-black characters. For much of his first ten years in Hollywood, Mr. Perry really was the only game in town, and as such his films were a lightning rod for criticism in and around the black community in terms of how his popular pictures represented black people and especially black women. Yes they often told simplistic stories of young women undone by bad rich men only to be "rescued" by good working class men and/or God. Yes the darker-skinned women and professional women were often portrayed as villainous, and the films often had a sledgehammer simplicity to how they dealt with social or cultural issues, even though I would argue that Madea herself (a bitter and cantankerous atheist) was Perry acknowledging that life didn't have simple answers or the ability to be wrapped bow. But he was also the only filmmaker actually making movies for and about black women.
If it took nearly a decade for Hollywood to catch on to the fact that Perry was making a fortune for himself and his empire by serving an otherwise malnourished demographic, then that is not entirely Perry's fault as it took Hollywood almost as long to merely stop being surprised when one of his movies opened above $20 million. He is almost single-handedly responsible for reminding Hollywood that there is money to be made by targeting audiences outside of the conventional young white male demographic. Moreover, he was basically the only mainstream filmmaker outside of Clint Eastwood who regularly made old-school character dramas outside of the Oscar season. Films like Daddy's Little Girls, The Family That Preys, and Good Deeds were straightforward dramas and/or melodramas (the uncharacteristically grey and grim The Family That Preys feels like a Douglas Sirk film, and I mean that as a compliment) that not-so-subtly dealt with social issues and cultural conversations in a way that was mostly ignored by Hollywood as the old-school mainstream "drama" went the way of the dinosaur as tent pole fever took over.
Tyler Perry's legacy is cemented, even if his decade-long (and hopefully not-yet-over) run may merely be trivia in a future when films like The Best Man Holiday or No Good Deed no longer need "Hooray for Hollywood!" think pieces. His work gave countless black actors and black actresses meaty roles in a Hollywood that otherwise pushed them to the side, and his films by virtue of their success pushed the issue of racial diversity in mainstream Hollywood to the forefront right as it threatened to vanish into a sea of Jack Sparrows and Spider-Men. He got us box office pundits to stop being surprised by the notion that African-American genre films could be box office hits and he offered mainstream melodramas featuring black actresses in an industry where such things are otherwise mostly nonexistent. I wish his championing of Lee Daniels's Precious and his production company housing Tina Gordon Chism's Peeples (a gentle riff on Meet the Parents that I would argue is superior to the Ben Stiller/Robert De Niro film) was less of an exception, but the work he did give us is wholly unique unto itself, which is the highest compliment I could pay it.
He made fifteen features between 2005 and 2014. Some of them (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea Goes to Jail, Temptation, and Why Did I Get Married Too if only for the last five minutes) I would argue are quite bad while some of them (Meet the Browns, The Family That Preys, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, and For Colored Girls) I'd argue are quite good. The rest are somewhere in between I wish that his output was objectively good enough that I didn't need to often cut him perhaps too much slack out of appreciation of what he was trying to do. I certainly wish he hadn't so soiled the bed with Rob Cohen's Alex Cross, as he is a genuinely compelling actor when he's properly motivated. He was a blast in David Fincher's Gone Girl and relishes the opportunity to play the straight man in his own films, while pulling off Madea is quite simply not something just any actor could have done. The movie industry overall is a better place because Tyler Perry and Lions Gate Entertainment teamed up to give audiences something they otherwise were going without.
Hollywood is slowly learning the box office lessons of Tyler Perry's empire, a strategy which brought the man a net worth of $400 million at last count, and the actors and actresses who worked in his repertoire benefited by virtue of having substantial lead and supporting roles in mainstream American films. Perry's box office clout may-well have diminished in correlation with the rise of films like Think Like A Man and Ride Along, although he remained remarkably consistent throughout. The non-Madea/non-Why Did I Get Married films were a mixed bag, but the Madea and WDIGM films were $20-$30m openers and $50-$65m grossers throughout. If the end of his deal with Lionsgate (and the arrival of his first child later this year) is really the "end" of anything (and LGF did distribute his 65-minute animated DVD feature earlier this year), it should be noted that he helped keep a generation of black actors and actresses employed in feature films while they waited for the rest of the world to notice them.
I'd be interested to see how Perry's films would be viewed in a vacuum in a theoretical Hollywood where black-centric mainstream genre releases were not an anomaly. Were some of his critics unduly harsh in terms of the values represented in the films and the face he put out to represent mainstream black America because he was the sole teller of said stories, or were "fans" such as myself easier on his work because he represented such an unlikely success story and represented such an outlier in terms of the kinds of films being released in multiplexes? Both answers are probably "yes." But the Tyler Perry movie empire turned 10 years old last week. I thought it was worth celebrating, even if I am a few days late. Honestly, I thought Diary of a Mad Black Woman came out March 25th, 2005, not February 25th. I'm sure Mr. Perry can forgive me, even if Madea won't.
