ABSTRACT

This article draws attention to The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978) as the first Blackcast blockbuster and reassesses its significance to issues of Black media production, reception, and distribution. With a focus on press reviews, this article uses what I am theorizing as racialized media reception to understand The Wiz's historical and industrial import beyond its $23 million budget for Black and white reviewers and moviegoers. Providing an analysis of reviews from both the Black and mainstream presses, archival production documents, and documents about the film's distribution, this article argues that film reviews, as cinematic paratexts, helped to structure consumption and shaped the narrative of The Wiz as a failure.

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Within Black film and media studies, The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978) is understood in direct relationship to its US box office failure. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin write only that the film "was a box office disappointment," and Christopher Sieving asserts that "the enormous budget ... ensured severe losses when [The Wiz] opened to smaller audiences." (1) The discursive centering of the film's box office receipts in scholarly and industrial discussions of the film served as rationale for the scant scholarly engagement paid to the film and, more importantly, Hollywood's disengagement with Black-cast films for decades afterward. Donald Bogle contends that in the 1970s, Hollywood's understanding of African American moviegoers shifted; the decade started "by revealing to the industry that there was a black audience [and] closed with the industry believing that the black film and the black audience were both dead." (2) When films with primarily white casts fail, their whiteness does not signal a disinterest in white-cast films, but The Wiz's Blackness was used as an industrial case study for (white) audience's diminishing appetite for Black-cast films. (3) Throughout this article, I argue that The Wiz's reputation as a failure cannot simply be reduced to the lack of attention paid to its financials. It is also racially inscribed.

Although an example from more than forty years ago, this article uses The Wiz to explore the precariousness of Hollywood Blackness, a precariousness about which Black spectators are well aware. In an interview for my project on Black women and anti-fandom, a Black woman exemplified this knowledge. She said, "To my understanding, part of the reason projects aren't greenlit is because Hollywood is determined that [Black people] don't support [Black] films. So, if I just show up with my dollars, I fly in the face of that." (4) While this woman was discussing her consumption of Tyler Perry's oeuvre, her rationale speaks to a larger phenomenon. Black people are often willing to see any Black-cast film because of its Blackness and because they understand that any singular Black failure industrially represents the limits of all Black-cast media content, a phenomena I have elsewhere called "must-see Blackness." (5) In other words, industrial understandings of Black-cast film production is univocal: any Black-cast film must be a financial success, or it will vanquish the idea of making others like it. Such anxieties...