20 2000s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today
5. Bamboozled (2000)
Released by New Line Cinema in the autumn of 2000, Spike Lee's cutting social satire Bamboozled barely got noticed by mainstream audiences, scoring just 2.5 of its $10 million budget back at the box office. Nevertheless, it’s one of the director’s best efforts and one of the more controversial films of the noughties.
Harvard-educated African-American Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is struggling to get his scripts developed at the CNS network. Under the thumb of a jive-talking white boss (Michael Rapaport’s Thomas Dunwitty), he devises a way out by proposing a modern minstrel show, with black actors in blackface, convinced he will be canned. But the executives, the live audiences, and the general public love it, launching Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show with great fanfare and bringing Pierre and his actors to question everything about their place in society.
Given people got up in arms about Adam Driver shouting the N-word once in Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, it isn’t hard to see what audiences today would think about a picture in which white people use racial epithets indiscriminately, and jokes involving watermelons, gollywogs, and ‘porch monkeys’ are part of the furniture.
Featuring black actors in blackface for a minstrel show would be too rich and risky for Hollywood to touch today. And yet, the very point is to paint a target on the contemporary film and television scene, highlighting the shaky racial politics at play in the kind of media that producers and executives regularly program.