Hello everyone! Just lucked upon the motherload when I discovered blacksciencefiction. I was a film school major and got so disallusioned I dropped out for a few decades. Then the new video boom came along with very nice professional equipment that was much less expensive than film. As I began to get back into it, I came to believe that it was possible now for everyone to get their vision out there. (the internet hadn't yet become huge in the 80's) I look around and I'm surprised that I still don't see more people of color getting stuff done.My one question, (and I've thought of these strategies for quit some time) is what do we mean by a Black SF show. Do we mean 1. a show populated mainly by Blacks. 2. a show written, produced and directed by blacks regardless of who the characters might be. or 3. both 1 and the first half of 2?I guess it depends on what the goal is. To ever get the clout and cash to do something like an Inception or Avatar, you have to get some very large demographics before people with money will pony up. The problem as I see it is that Hollywood knows that a Spike Lee, R Townsend, or T. Perry can do the type movies they do. They also know that a Steven Spielberg can direct "The Color Purple". What they don't believe is that a black person can direct a Star Wars, The Dark Knight, an Avatar. (You could probably do an entire season of any show on televison now with the money made off Avatar, and I hated that movie.) Money aside there is the concept of clout. You own a property like that, and you can do anything you want, of course if you make that kind of money, you can fund it yourself. Remember no one wanted to put that much money into Avatar, Cameron used his own cash mostly made off Titanic.Basically I take a Harlan Ellison stand on this. He vehemently fought his books being labeled and marketed as SF, and we already know that once you label something as a Black this or that, you've lost some of your potential audience right there. I want those ppl watching and reading Black SF so they can see how good it can be, or how good SF can be when done right. I realized this wasn't just theory when I discovered that a good number of white SF fans didn't know that the writer Steven Barnes was Black, of course these are the fans that don't read Locus, or regularly go the cons, but I have no doubt that if Barnes, or Delany or Butler only had their books in a section of the book store labeled Black Science Fiction, those people would have never read those authors. We make the mistake of thinking SF fans to be progressive, and trust me, they aren't by a long shot.I just think you need to be a bit Machiavellian to be successful at this.
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