Hollywood Shuffle

Robert Townsend developed this 1987 comedy with co-screenwriter Keenen Ivory Wayans (who went on to create the skit comedy series In Living Color) after the pair became frustrated with the stereotypical roles available to black actors. Here, Townsend directs and stars as struggling young actor Bobby Taylor, who—like Townsend—finds himself competing to play pimps, gangbangers, and thugs who speak in exaggerated parodies of clichéd street dialogue. Hollywood Shuffle is constructed as a series of sketches that parody the kinds of exploitation films that feature black casts, most presented as daydreams. Taylor imagines himself as an action hero ("Rambro," of course), a slave in a historical drama, a student in a school where white actors instruct blacks how to act "black" on screen, and a streetwise TV film critic in Sneakin' Into the Movies. Uneven and a little ragged—the result of being a self-financed low-budget production shot in pieces over three years—Hollywood Shuffle is also sharp and funny at its best and succeeds at satirizing the state of affairs for African-American actors in the 1980s. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)