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There are a lot of things in Hollywood that can kill a young filmmaker, but one of the most effective is being compared to Orson Welles. Indeed, being compared to Orson Welles pretty much killed Orson Welles.
When John Singleton galvanized Hollywood with his debut feature Boyz N The Hood back in 1991, he was not even yet 25, the age Welles was when he signed off on Citizen Kane. Singleton not only got hit with a lot of “next Orson Welles” comparisons/analogies; he also got a slew of “black Orson Welles” blurbs. Singleton went on to a career not at all analogous to Welles’, but the ways in which he thrived were considerable, and significant. What felled Singleton, at the entirely too young age of 51, was a stroke.
The comparisons to Welles were unfair in a lot of ways. As a young filmmaker, Singleton wasn’t interested in breaking formal molds or norms. He had stories to tell, and he concentrated on telling them as clearly and forcefully as he could. And they were Black stories, and the freedom he most insisted upon as a filmmaker was the freedom to tell Black stories as a Black artist.
Boyz ‘n the Hood, from its idiomatic title on, represents a singular point of view, one that white Hollywood couldn’t simulate even if it had wanted to. “I’m like a child born of two things — hip-hop music and film,” Singleton told Rolling Stone‘s Alan Light back in 1991. Los-Angeles-born-and-raised, an alumnus of USC’s fabled film school, Singleton began as a script reader before his own writing got him signed with mega-agency CAA. He seemed to believe that his ability to come up within that system was at least slightly significant with respect to the cinematic statement he made. What made Boyz stand out were the detailed characterizations and an unforced cultural specificity — while its storyline of life and death in the ‘hood is compelling, it’s unfortunately not wholly new. Also working in Singleton’s favor were his two leads, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ice Cube, in roles that perfectly set their onscreen personae for years, even decades to come.
Singleton was, as all young men tend to be, brash. Profile writers took droll note of the fact that he had a dog named “White Boy.” But he was also sensitive and self-aware; when considering his own youth, and that the possibilities held out to him by cinema rescued him from a potential life of delinquency, he cited another filmmaker who emerged out of the same circumstances: François Truffaut. And he had an engaged way of dealing with criticism. His second feature, 1993’s Poetic Justice, starring Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur, was in a sense an answer to critics and colleagues who expressed dismay over the seemingly dismissive treatment of women in Boyz N The Hood. The movie got mixed reviews — many critics cited implausibility, although it’s clear that Singleton was playing with the idea of implausibility just as much (if not more) than he was indulging it — but the fact of its acting leads being icons of Black music would more than justify its existence were such justification sought.
1993’s Higher Learning was a fevered, often over-the-top consideration of the college campus as a microcosm for a racially-stressed-out U.S.A., and as frustrating as it can be in its melodramatics it still carries plenty of weight on topics such as cultural appropriation and white supremacy.
Singleton’s switch at the turn of the century to action films may have been emblematic of how difficult it had become — maybe we should say “how much MORE difficult it had become” — to make meaningful social drama within the studio system. (Singleton did not venture out into the world of indies all that frequently, although he did coproduce the controversial, lively Craig Brewer pictures Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan in 2005 and 2006.)
But action movies were part of his cinematic upbringing and vocabulary, and he did himself proud with 2000’s Shaft, and his 2003 2 Fast 2 Furious was a refreshingly lean entry in that action franchise. In between those pictures he made Baby Boy, a ‘hood coming of age story with a twist: its protagonist has already come of age, he’s just choosing to live as if he hasn’t. The movie’s perspective on personal responsibility is here coming from a filmmaker who’s been a father several times over.
In recent years, after dropping out of a Shakur biopic over the ever-dreaded “creative differences,” Singleton was keeping busy producing for television, particularly on the 1980s-set crack-epidemic series Snowfall.
One of Singleton’s last directing gigs was on the Showtime series Billions, the season two episode “Victory Lap.” Showrunners Brian Koppelman and David Levien (both friends of this writer) have made it a point throughout the series to hire directors they’ve long admired and wanted to work with, Singleton being one of them. Koppelman told Decider, “Everyone knows John Singleton was a great American filmmaker and writer. David and I know he was a wonderful creative partner, an enthusiast who always rooted for his friends, and a brilliant, kind and good man.”
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.
