‘Exhale’ Strikes Chord With African American Audeiences : Why Surprise at Film’s Success?

Executive Tom Sherak missed the boat in his comments to Elaine Dutka when explaining the success of 20th Century Fox’s “Waiting to Exhale” (“It’s a Big Sigh of Relief for ‘Exhale,’ ” Calendar, Dec. 25).

Sherak expressed great surprise in the box-office success of “Exhale.” Sherak attributes the movie’s first-weekend $14.3-million gross as being “helped by [film] critics” and the “sense of urgency in the African American audience”--whatever that means. The surprise expressed by Sherak speaks volumes about the widespread misinformation and misunderstanding about African American people and culture.

While Hollywood has been busy defining African American culture by churning out films about depraved young (and old) gun-toting black men, (“Straight Out of Brooklyn,” “Strapped,” “Juiced”), it has ignored black women who have held onto their movie-going dollars “waiting” patiently for a film that reflects their lives and a more true view of their community.

The African American community comprises many independent, successful, financially sound residents--many of them women. In this global community of color are women who struggle each month to make ends meet--but hundreds of thousands of us are gainfully employed, purchase and live in comfortable homes, drive luxury cars, shop on Rodeo Drive and just enjoy life.

One of the basic tenets of making a film is to appeal to a target audience; make a film that reflects a community or creates mystery and fantasy, and the film will have an audience.

So, why all this surprise when black women went in droves to see a more closely accurate portrayal of themselves? Did 20th Century Fox really make a movie it thought no one would go and see? The belief that men will patronize action-adventure movies and children will want to see cartoons but that women will not respond to other successful, smart, independent women is wrong-headed.

Sherak’s “surprise” that black women have collectively embraced “Waiting to Exhale” suggests something more troubling--that they were not aware of the existence of the middle-class black America that is educated, intelligent, well-dressed and independent, who want to see films in which women are portrayed not as high school dropouts, single welfare mothers with 10 kids, prostitutes, victims or crack addicts, but as more accurate reflections of themselves.

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“Waiting to Exhale” depicts an image that mainstream America and Hollywood have been late to accept--that not all African American lives are riddled with conflict, despair and poverty, a notion that shakes the comfort zone of many white Americans. If Sherak and other movie executives continue to take their cues from the drama on the evening news, they will not reap the monetary benefits of a large number of movie-going patrons. Ignoring the middle and upper classes of any minority group is just plain bad business.

Sherak and his team should move away from the television set and spend time inside the African American communities like Leimert Park, Ladera Heights, View Park and Baldwin Hills or black subcommunities in Encino or Sherman Oaks, and get their fingers on real African American culture and the communities in which it thrives.