Spending an hour with Robert Townsend — producer/director/writer/star of the anarchic shoestring extravaganza The Hollywood Shuffle — is like watching a television commandeered by a hyperactive ten-year-old kid with a remote control unit.
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Sophocles is switched off and we are, for the moment, tuned into Robert Townsend, a slim young man in a hotel room wearing a navy blazer and a T-shirt printed with stylized ducks. Touted as the latest addition in the Richard Pryor-Eddie Murphy line of blockbuster black movie talent, he is surprisingly self-effacing. He has some of Murphy’s taut good looks — the skull-tight hair and the insouciant mustache — but not yet much of the superstar’s swagger or flinty aplomb. To a certain extent Townsend remains that precocious fifth-grade kid amazed at his ability to speak in voices and to command an audience and make them laugh.
“I had all this money in the bank from Streets of Fire and Soldier’s Story,” recalls Townsend. “My friends were asking, ‘What are you gonna do? Get a Porsche, a town house?’ But I was happy where I was living and my Mustang was still running. What I really wanted to do was act. My agent told me there were no roles, nothing was happening. So, I said, ‘Why don’t we create something? All these people bitching and moaning about no work, why don’t we make our own movie?’ Everybody said it was a big mistake, you’ve never made a movie, you didn’t go to film school, you’re going to waste your money. But it was my money. I told them I’d get more joy out of watching out-of-focus dailies than driving around all day in a BMW doing nothing.
For a film financed with plastic, The Hollywood Shuffle is pretty impressive — sufficiently so at any rate to convince its distributor, Sam Goldwyn, to pay Townsend’s Visa bill. Loosely autobiographical, it is the story of struggling black actor Bobby Taylor, who longs to play Lear and Superman and ‘Rambro’ but gets stuck trying out for roles as a fright-wigged, prancing gangbanger. Taylor’s plight is a framework for Townsend’s wild satirical imagination. As Taylor mopes in audition lines his daydreams of dread and grandeur spin off into sketches such as “Sam Ace,” “Black Actor’s School,” and “Chicago Jones.” The comedy is crude, outrageous, and often wickedly accurate, and only rarely does the manic energy of Townsend and his troupe fail to compensate for low production values and bad taste. One such lapse is Townsend’s characterization of gays as flamboyant hairdressers and bodybuilders in tutus, an indiscretion that seems particularly out of place in a film attacking stereotypes.
“Even a movie like Platoon,” continues Townsend, his mask of seriousness breaking into the grin of the kid with a finger on the remote control. “I mean, it was a good movie but those black guys, I’m sorry, they’re stereotypes. I call it the ‘Father Knows Best as a pimp’ type. You got Charlie Sheen, he’s so straight [switch to Sheen’s excruciatingly Caucasian earnestness] Why . . . why do they . . . treat people like that? Why are things . . . LIKE that? And the brother is always like [cut to older and wiser black grunt cooing between tokes on a hash pipe] Heeyyyy, bebbee . . . this is NAAAMMM, joon-yuh! This what it be like. . . . Let me educate you, junior . . .”
