E-mail a friendReginald Hudlin
airdate September 9, 2004
Writer-director Reginald Hudlin began to realize his filmmaking talent as a student at Harvard. After graduation, he built an impressive list of film credits. He made his directorial debut with House Party, which inspired three sequels, an animated series and a comic book. Boomerang and Bebe's Kids, the first African American animated film, were also successes. Recently, he teamed with cartoonist Aaron McGruder on the comic novel, Birth of a Nation.
Reginald Hudlin
Tavis: Reginald Hudlin is a talented director, screenwriter, and author, about to be daddy, who's teamed up with "Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder for a new book called "Birth of a Nation," a comic novel inspired by the contested 2000 Presidential election. Reg, how you livin'?
Reginald Hudlin: Great, man.
Tavis: Nice to see you.
Hudlin: Always good to see you.
Tavis: Baby's due--well, not your baby, but your wife's baby. I guess you had something to do with this, though.
Hudlin: Yes, I will have to. People sometimes say, "Congratulations! Who's the
father?" but...
Tavis: Ha ha ha ha!
Hudlin: I know for a fact it is mine. November 20. I keep a catcher's mitt in the trunk, in case it comes early--bam! I'm right there. I got it.
Tavis: How do you expect--how do you expect, if you've even thought about this, uh, that this will impact, affect, change, alter your work?
Hudlin: Well, everybody, from Steven Bochco to Chris Rock, says the same thing, which is that it will actually make you a better artist. Your game will deepen, be more profound, particularly since I have a baby girl on the way, you know. You have a whole new level of sensitivity to the world. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that Chris Rock opened his last special talking about, "The main thing to do as a father is to keep your daughter off the pole." So, I say that's now my goal, too.
Tavis: Yeah. Keep your daughter off the pole. You'll be a success if you can do that.
Hudlin: Exactly. That's the first tier of success.
Tavis: You grew up in East St. Louis. I was stunned, when I got the book "Birth of a Nation" here, and started looking at it, because it was inspired by having grown up, in part, in East St. Louis. And I guess I always thought, like everybody else, that you and your brother Warrington were from New York. I think of "Boomerang" and I think of all the work you guys did in New York. I didn't know you were from East St. Louis. East St. Louis has had for years a reputation as one of the, uh, I don't want to demonize-- I stopped, 'cause I don't want to demonize your hometown, but East St. Louis is, you know--
Hudlin: It's a barrel of butcher knives, that's what you're trying to say.
Tavis: That's what I'm trying to say, for God's sake, a barrel of butcher knives.
Hudlin: It's the kind of town where, you know, you get to the city limits there's a big metal detector. And if you don't have a knife or a gun, they give you one 'cause we believe in a fair fight in East St. Louis. Uh, and, you know, I'm joking. You know, the reality is East St. Louis, it's like Newark. It's like Compton. It's like Harlem. It's like Gary, Indiana. Like War said, the world is a ghetto. There are all these black towns all over the country and they are full of really good people, and--
Tavis: Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
Hudlin: Hey, Miles Davis.
Tavis: East St. Louis.
Hudlin: Don't front. Rock and roll was invented 2 blocks from my house, 'cause Ike met Tina in East St. Louis. So, you know. So, you got all this great creativity going on. You've got good working-class people there, and you have a system that is failing them at every turn. Um, you know, the federal government, the state government, the local government--none of it's working. And when you grow up in a town like that, despite all those obstacles, you have a tremendous amount of pride because you're in an all-black town with a black mayor, a black police chief, a black fire commissioner. And you say, "Well, how can we make it better?" And the dream of not just myself but everyone I know from East St. Louis is "I'm gonna go away, be a big success, come back home, and transform the town." And--but, you do that, you go away--I've been, you know, pretty successful. But you start realizing how hard it is to change things.
Tavis: And yet while it's hard to change things, you learned a great deal growing up there. Jackie Joyner-Kersee learned a great deal growing up there. Miles, and Tina Turner clearly learned a great deal having grown up and they appreciate, I'm sure, every one of them I've talked to and read about, appreciate the opportunity of growing up in that background. You can't really appreciate success unless you come from a struggle in the first place. The question is, what is your daughter, coming in November, not going to get that her daddy got because she's living in Beverly Hills, Coldwater Canyon somewhere?
Hudlin: Well, that is, in fact, one of my great fears...is to have the feeling of flavor, first of all. I mean, I used to turn on W-Wesl in East St. Louis and, you know, we'd go from B.B. King to Earth, Wind, and Fire to, you know, Rapper's Delight, and it was just, like, you had the entire cultural spectrum. In fact, I felt sorry for people who grew up in New York and L.A. because the radio in St. Louis was so good. That feeling of seeing black people in charge. Whether something's wrong or not, you get to see black folk in power, and that's really the thought behind the book. Because obviously us voting, us participating in government on the highest level--that's the first step. The second step is what are we doing with that power? Are we guiding--are we living our lives, controlling our communities in the way they should be? And if we are not, what do we do to change that?
Tavis: Is your daughter going to see, to your point, black people empowered if she grows up...and I suspect she will...in Hollywood? You smiled. You knew where I was going with that, didn't you?
Hudlin: Ha!
Tavis: You knew where I was going with that.
Hudlin: Well, I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. My grandfather had his own business, my dad had his own business, and I have my own business. You know, my wife is a businessperson herself. And it's funny because we were watching the Olympics, and I was watching tae kwon do, and I was, like, "Whoo, look at them girls! What if my daughter's a tae kwon do champ?" I mean, she's kicking already. She ain't even out the womb yet. So, she could be. She could be nice! I'm thinking about naming her Lee, after Bruce Lee. That's how nice she is in the womb. So then I thought I want her to be a doctor. I want her to go to business school. I want her to take what I've done and go to the next level with it. And that's what it's about. I mean, the great thing about this generation, it's a generation of entrepreneurs. You know, from Puffy and Russell to folks in businesses we don't even know about, like the cat who supplies all the, you know, vegetables for McDonald's. You know, there are brothers and sisters out here who are doing it on very high levels, and what I hope for my daughter, what I hope for the next generation--not that I'm hardly done yet--is that they take whatever we've done, and they pull it all together. I think that's the challenge of our generation, to take the cultural flavor that we create in music, in film, in every art form...combine that with sharp business skills, and coalesce our political power.
Tavis: You speak to this in your own way, Aaron speaks to it every day--Aaron McGruder, your co-author here--speaks to it in his own way through to the issue that you raise now, tell me whether or not you really believe that our generation, to your point, has represented, as we say. And by that I ask...I mean, we've made some contributions, if you call hip-hop a contribution. I think it is a contribution.
Hudlin: I would agree.
Tavis: A viable art form. But have we really made a contribution? I mean, what is our generation going to be known for? We know what our parents' generation did, we know what our grandparents, the World War II generation did. What is our generation going to contribute? What's our hallmark going to be? Are we really just--are we a bunch of busters?
Hudlin: Ha! I think we're halfway done. Meaning that we still have a lot of work to do. Like I said, I think what's impressive about our generation is, you know, you look at these kids go from being drug dealers to being in the music business to being in the clothing business, and that's fantastic. I mean, that kind of trading places entrepreneurship--
Tavis: That's individual, though. Dr. King's generation made strides and gains for the collective.
Hudlin: And the challenge of our generation to come is to take that entrepreneurial attitude and combine it with a new political outlook. A new definition of what our community should be. And when I say community, I just don't mean the black neighborhoods. I'm talking about America. I'm talking about the world. 'Cause the fact is we're now global players. Whether we acknowledge it to ourselves or not, when you have kids from Sweden to Soweto listening to our music, dressing like us, talking like us, we're leading the world, so we have to acknowledge our power and assume it and not always feel that we're being put upon, that we are incompetent and say, "No, we are competent, we are powerful," and behave accordingly, and to do that, and here's the big hole for our generation, is a spiritual and moral center. I think there's a materialism, there is a shallowness that comes from petty gain, and until we get a proper rudder that is spiritually based, we're not gonna fulfill our promise.
Tavis: Well, in the fine tradition of the black church, I'll just say "Amen" on that point. In the 45 seconds I have left, because I want your daughter to eat and have a quality education, daddy had better be workin' on somethin' so she's got a good life, so what is daddy workin' on? We didn't get a chance to talk about that tonight.
Hudlin: Daddy's always workin'. Daddy don't know nothin' but work.
Tavis: Yeah.
Hudlin: "The Boondocks" as a television series. It'll be coming out in 2005 on the Cartoon Network. There will be a new graphic novel that'll be coming out next year that'll be based on the music and concepts of George Clinton...Parliament Funkadelic--and there's a film project I'm developing with Tom Joyner that's gonna be incredible, incredible.
Tavis: Well, you got the talent to sell it, that's for sure.
Hudlin: No, no, no, it's a machine and I went on the Fantastic Voyage crew and it was just so incredible to see a black organization that tight and to see what I call the silent majority of black folk--hard-working, college-educated, together folk doin' our thing and doing it on a very high level.
Tavis: And gettin' they groove on.
Hudlin: Yes.
Tavis: I'm out of time, Reg. Nice to see you. Come back in a few months and tell me how the baby experiment is coming along.
Hudlin: I'm gonna have the baby for ya, I'm gonna have a new special project in February.
Tavis: All right, I'm looking for that. Black history month, even. I ain't mad at you. That's our show for tonight. As always, you can catch me on the radio on
NPR. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles, and as always, keep the faith.
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