“Dating back to the beginning of Hollywood, Black films were always seen as lesser-than projects. I wanted to correct that and do something that honors all of these films,” said journalist Len Webb. “And since I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided: I want to watch every Black film ever made. And I knew if I was going to do something like that, I wanted to make it constructive. So I said, let’s do a podcast.”
In 2016, he teamed up with fellow journalist Vincent Williams and launched The Micheaux Mission, named for Oscar Micheaux, one of the earliest prominent Black filmmakers who spent much of his career in Chicago. “There’s a vacuum of Black voices in film criticism,” said Williams, “and I love the fact that Len’s first instinct was not to sit and complain about it. He said, let’s do something.”
The pair’s latest podcast installment, premiering March 6, is called "The Class of 1989" and it takes an in-depth look at six pivotal films: from “Driving Miss Daisy” (which won the Oscar for best picture) to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (no best picture nomination) to the Denzel Washington Civil War epic “Glory” to Eddie Murphy’s 1930s-set crime dramedy “Harlem Nights” to the contemporary high school drama “Lean on Me” to the lesser known South African apartheid drama “A Dry White Season.”
Webb and Williams joined me by phone to talk about why they singled out 1989 as a watershed year. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was it about 1989 that stands out?
Webb: You have the disregard by the Academy of “Do the Right Thing,” which is overtly about race from the Black perspective vs. the old tropes that are in play in “Driving Miss Daisy,” which were the prevailing narratives about the Black experience as far as Hollywood was concerned.
Q: And that was persistent; it continued with “The Help” in 2011.
Webb: And we had a repeat of it not long ago with “Green Book,” which won the Oscar for best picture in 2019. So that is definitely a throughline.
But even looking at “Do the Right Thing” and “Driving Miss Daisy” from that point of view, we still have to take the time to honor — regardless of what we might think of “Driving Miss Daisy” as a whole — that it does feature two very outstanding performances by Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman.
Williams: I’ll speak for myself: I’m the “Driving Miss Daisy” hater. Len just said it features two great performances and I’m going to go along with that for the sake of solidarity. But in my heart I’m like, hmm, they were all right. But I hope I have a more complicated relationship to this film now because it does resonate.
Certainly, it resonates in the way that it reinforces racial stereotypes; it’s almost like this racist comfort food. But when I think about the commentary of someone like Bill Duke, who speaks to the humanity of Hoke, the character played by Morgan Freeman, and this fine line he had to walk as a performer to demonstrate this humanity — I’m trying to extend more grace to something like “Driving Miss Daisy.”
Webb: But they’re all subject to critique. Early on in creating “The Micheaux Mission,” we recognized that, yes, we’re talking about these movies from a Black point of view — but also from a male point of view. So it was intentional on our part that, when we bring guests on the show, more often than not we’re talking to Black women to provide that different point of view.
Even “Do the Right Thing,” as heralded as it is now as one of the great movies of all time by many film historians. One of the issues we point out is that it kind of embodies the lack of the Black female experience that you see in these films from 1989.
Q: That’s actually the primary focus of the podcast’s first episode — how Black women are portrayed onscreen, where they fit into these stories and why is their perspective so noticeably absent in meaningful ways — and you interviewed a number of Black women critics, including Elizabeth Wellington of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Webb: There’s a lack of Black women with any true agency in these movies so we were like: Let’s talk about it. And we didn’t have to lead the horse to water, because the guests that we spoke to, from Maori Holmes, who founded the BlackStar Film Festival, to Elizabeth Wellington, who you mentioned, they just came with it.
Elizabeth especially has thoughts about Spike Lee and women in his films, which is definitely on view in “Do the Right Thing.” People think of Rosie Perez either dancing in that opening scene or the other scene without her clothes on. (The podcast includes a clip of Perez talking on “Fresh Air” about how uncomfortable the nude scene made her, and how she resolved that with Lee.) And then there’s the sage woman in the window, who has long become a trope in Black films. But that’s it.
This has been an ongoing conversation Vince and I have had as we’ve reviewed Spike Lee’s movies and, to be honest, it has been a bit of “Huh, that’s interesting,” because maybe we didn’t think about it the first time we were watching.
I know Spike Lee is a learned man, I know he has high regard for Black women and has been very prominent and intentional about putting Black women behind the scenes on his crew. It made me wonder: From a story point of view, is he more interested in the male perspective? Is that why it’s so prevalent in a lot of his films?
Because to be fair, that is also a criticism that one could throw on Stanley Kubrick.
Williams: “The Class of 1989″ is collaborative by design, and as we started talking to Black women critics and creators, they said: You haven’t talked about Euzhan Palcy, who directed “A Dry White Season.”
Superficially, it’s a white film. It’s a film about South Africa and it stars basically an all-white cast (including Donald Sutherland, Marlon Brando and Susan Sarandon). But this is the first Black woman who directs a studio-backed film. So you have this important thing that also happens in this same year.
Q: What’s the focus of the other episodes?
Webb: There are six episodes and they are themed. The second looks at Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy, two boys from Brooklyn who put seminal work in their filmographies that year. “Harlem Nights” was Murphy’s sole directorial output and he’s fulfilling this childhood dream of working with Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor in this period piece.
Then we have an episode where we look at Hollywood’s idea of race as focused through a white lens.
Then we have an episode that gets deep into the drama of “Driving Miss Daisy” being heralded as the best picture of 1989 vs. “Do the Right Thing,” which wasn’t even nominated. We have a lot of critics who definitely had words to say about that.
Then we look at the movies that came in the wake of 1989 and the performers and directors who continue with the legacy.
And then the final episode is me and Vince going deep and giving our own points of view, both on these movies and also about this exercise.
Q: I was rewatching the “Beverly Hills Cops” movies recently and it’s striking that Eddie Murphy’s character is surrounded by white people. You can see that once he had enough clout in Hollywood, he started making films like “Coming to America,” “Harlem Nights” and “Boomerang,” which are such intentional rebukes of that.
Williams: That is absolutely a recurring theme we discuss. We joke and say Eddie Murphy has white films and he has Black films. There’s a great interview with Eddie Murphy in Playboy where he talks about being Eddie Murphy and how much there is this microscope on him — both within and outside of the Black community. He makes all these observations about how people wrote about him and his friends, it was this really racially-loaded language about his “posse.” And he was like: It’s just my uncle and my brother and my boys. But there’s something about being Black, in a group of Black people, that unsettles a lot of America.
And when you look at these films, he’s cognizant of that. You can’t help but think this is on his mind.
Q: We can’t touch on all the movies, but let’s talk about “Lean on Me,” which also stars Morgan Freeman, who plays a zero-tolerance high school principal. The role is based on a real person, Joe Clark, who was also criticized for his methods.
Williams: I am utterly fascinated by this movie because I think it is a Black film that resonates with a certain type of Black person. There is this real vein of Black conservatism that we don’t really talk about, especially in this moment when hip-hop is beginning to find its footing as a cultural phenomenon. I think it appealed to those Black boomers who are now settled and middle class. I called it “Pull Up Your Pants: The Movie.”
There is this sort of ambient, almost misogyny of it — like, we need a strong Black man to come in here and yell at these kids and straighten them out and that’s the problem: No men in the house. It’s a fascinating case study of a certain kind of mindset.
Lynne Thigpen, who plays the villain in the film, she has one of the great lines. She says: The only reason you’re allowed to act all crazy like this is because these are poor Black and brown children. You would never be allowed to be in a white school running around like a madman!
It’s such a wonderful critique. But they put it in her mouth and she’s this cartoon supervillain — she’s like welfare mother Lex Luthor — so it undercuts the power of what she’s saying.
Q: In rewatching these films, did anything new or unexpected jump out?
Webb: The conversation we’ve had about the lack of the Black woman’s presence in films? Believe it or not, I recognized that in “Do the Right Thing.” But I didn’t really recognize it as much in “Harlem Nights” until I rewatched it. I didn’t recognize how little Jasmine Guy is in that movie. And Della Reese is bold and bodacious, but as Elizabeth Wellington points out, he’s punching a Black woman in that movie. Hard. And that really made me cringe.
I have found myself over the last four or five years really reconsidering a lot of films that I enjoyed in the past. Some of them, even Black films, I can’t enjoy the same anymore because of the blatant misogyny in them. There are some films where the misogyny is baked-in as part of the story and, OK, I get it. But there are some where it’s just so subtle yet still upfront — you just didn’t realize it initially because of the culture at the time. And this was one of them.
Williams: I still find the relationship in “Driving Miss Daisy” between Hoke and Miss Daisy problematic.
But the relationship between Sal (Danny Aiello) and Mookie (Spike Lee) in “Do the Right Thing” — outside of everything else that goes on in the film — it’s this beautiful father-son surrogate relationship that gets destroyed because of this other stuff. But I think Spike Lee does a great job building that relationship.
Obviously, the great tragedy is Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) murder. But there are multiple tragedies and one of them is the end of this relationship.
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