There's always work at the post office!

The film, Hollywood Shuffle, was really interesting to me on many levels. For one, as Harriet Margolis brings up, it uses self directed stereotypes to make a point. The point being that there is a lack of substantial roles for African American actors in film and television and the characters that are there are stereotypical and misrepresented of actual African Americans. Through the use of satire, Robert Townsend uses these negative stereotypes put out by the mass media and turns them against Hollywood. The film is obviously a comedy but to a white audience I think the intent was supposed to make them think "should I really be laughing at this?"

The narrative is split up into two parts, the real life of Bobby Taylor, an aspiring actor who has a crappy job ("Winky. Dinky. Doooog!") and his fantasy sequences that represent the mental and external roadblocks he encounters being a black actor in Hollywood. The dream/fantasy sequences reminded me of the ones characters on my favorite television series, Six Feet Under have, which basically brings to light what the individual character is feeling internally. In Hollywood Shuffle these sequences, including "Black Acting School" and "Sneaking into the Movies", all deal with stereotypical characters from movies featuring black actors. I think the comedy and satirical nature of these sequences really bring out how ridiculous these stereotypes are and also how true it is that films and the media misrepresent African Americans. This is why the jokes make white people laugh uncomfortably. Again, the question is "should I really be laughing at this?" 

Hollywood Shuffle deals with racial and stereotypical issues in a very different way than those of other films such as Crash, which is not a parody at all. However, there is a scene in Crash that makes me think of  Hollywood Shuffle. Terrence Howard's character in Crash, a film director, gets told by a white producer of a film that a certain actor is "talking a lot less black lately" certainly inferring that the actor must act less intelligent to be in a black character's role. In Hollywood Shuffle, Bobby gets told to act "more black" by the white director and producer of the black exploitation film he gets cast in. It is interesting how these two films are completely different in genre but bring up the same points of how African Americans are represented in film.