Chapter 1South Central

Foreword

For sixty-three years the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had read its nominees for Best Director into the record, and for sixty-three years not one of the names it read belonged to a Black filmmaker. Then, one February morning in 1992, it read out John Singleton's. He was twenty-four. He had been a professional director for less than a year, and the film that earned him the nomination had begun as a screenplay he wrote as a film-school student. The morning made him the youngest person ever nominated in the category and the first African American nominated in it, two records that arrived in the same breath and that between them said almost everything about the industry that was suddenly, belatedly, willing to look at him. A record is a strange kind of honor. It celebrates the man and indicts the sixty-three years in the same gesture. I wanted to understand a life that could hold both of those things inside a single morning, and I found, quickly, that the morning was the easy part.

I write about the people who made the screen, the directors and actors and playwrights whose work shaped how Britain and America looked at themselves through the middle of the last century and past it. Singleton sits at the far edge of that territory, later and more American than most of my subjects, and for a long time I told myself he belonged to someone else. But I had grown up in England watching American films teach me what America was, and South Central Los Angeles was, for me as for millions who never set foot in it, less a place than an image, a two-word shorthand delivered by newsreaders for everything that had gone wrong. Singleton spent his life correcting that image. It began to seem dishonest to go on watching from the distance he had worked so hard to close.

I expected to write the story everyone already knew: the prodigy who peaked at twenty-four and spent the rest of his career failing to be twenty-four again. That is the shape the coverage had given him, and I took it for granted the way one takes for granted anything one has heard often enough. Working through the public record instead, the interviews he gave across three decades, the trade-press accounts of each film's reception, the court filings that followed his death, the recent full-length biography, and above all the films themselves, watched again in sequence, I found the shape was wrong. What had been sold to me as decline was, read closely, something colder and more orderly: a career managed rather than developed, the second chances routinely extended to others quietly withheld from him, the margin for error narrowed until it was a line.

I found things I had not gone looking for. I found a father, a South Central mortgage broker who quoted Malcolm X at the dinner table and sat his nine-year-old down in front of Star Wars, standing behind every film the son would make and transfigured, in the most important of them, into its moral center. I found a boy who was not poor, which complicates the origin story the culture prefers for its Black artists, and who had been taught to watch the world as someone who intended one day to say something about it. And I found the two boxes that would define him: the physical one that redlines and freeways and police cordons had built around his neighbourhood, and the conceptual one Hollywood built around him, the assumption that a filmmaker from South Central could only ever be qualified to depict South Central. He spent a career trying to get out of both. He never entirely got out of either.

That is why the book exists. Not because Singleton was a prodigy, which is the laziest word the culture owns and which did him real harm, but because the gap between the career he had and the career he should have had is the truest instrument we possess for measuring how the American industry treats the Black artists it claims to celebrate. His nine films are extraordinary. The films that were never financed are extraordinary too, in their absence, and a life that contains both the made and the unmade is a life worth setting down in full.

I came to him a British writer comfortable at a distance, prepared to admire one great film and account politely for the falling-off. I leave persuaded that there was no falling-off, only a wall that had been standing since before he was born, and a man who put the first visible seam in it and was then made to pay, for the rest of his life, for the trouble he had caused. He pointed a camera at the neighbourhood the rest of America had learned to drive around rather than through, and he said: look. This book is my attempt to do the thing he asked.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · South Central

The house on South St. Andrews Place sat in a neighborhood that politicians and newscasters would eventually reduce to a two-word shorthand for everything wrong with urban America. But in January 1968, when John Daniel Singleton was born in a hospital a few miles from that address, South Central Los Angeles was still a neighborhood in the full meaning of the term, a place where people lived their lives, raised their children, knew each other's business, and held onto the modest promise that the generation coming up might have it better than the one before.

His parents were not poor. That fact would prove important to the story in ways that biographers of Black artists too often neglect, as if poverty were the only origin story that could explain a Black man who became important. Danny Singleton, John's father, was a mortgage broker, real estate agent, and financial planner who brought an unusually political consciousness to his work and his household. Sheila Ward, his mother, worked in pharmaceutical sales for a corporate employer at a time when very few Black women occupied such positions in corporate America. They were separated and would remain so through most of John's childhood, which meant that the boy grew up moving between two versions of South Central, his father's world and his mother's world, and learning, before he had any vocabulary for it, that no single perspective could contain the truth of a place.

South Central in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a landscape shaped by decades of deliberate policy decisions that its residents had no part in making. The neighborhood was carved into existence by restrictive covenants and redlining, the practices by which banks, real estate companies, and local governments conspired to confine Black Angelenos to specific corridors of the city while white families flowed outward into the San Fernando Valley, the Westside, and Orange County. The Watts uprising of 1965, three years before John's birth, had burned through blocks just south of where the Singleton family lived, and the political response to that uprising had not been investment or reconciliation. It had been containment. By the time John was old enough to walk the sidewalks around his father's house, South Central was a neighborhood that the rest of Los Angeles was learning to drive around rather than through.

But containment is never the whole story. The neighborhoods of South Central in the 1970s contained multitudes. There were blocks where homeowners kept their lawns manicured and their driveways swept, where families went to church on Sunday and held cookouts on the Fourth of July. There were small business corridors on streets like Crenshaw Boulevard and Western Avenue where Black entrepreneurs ran barbershops, beauty salons, auto repair shops, and restaurants that served the community with a pride that no city planner had authorized. There were schools that had once been among the best in Los Angeles County, before the tax revolts and white flight had gutted their funding, and there were teachers in those schools who still believed in the work. The gangs were real. The drugs would come later, and come catastrophically. The violence was present and worsening through the 1970s. But the mistake that outsiders made about South Central, the mistake that would later define how Hollywood depicted the neighborhood, until one of its own sons corrected the record, was imagining that the pathology was the whole of the place.

Danny Singleton was a man who understood money and property. He was not a wealthy man, but he was a man who grasped how wealth was made in America, through real estate, through leverage, through understanding the mechanics of ownership. He worked in an industry that was specifically designed, through decades of discriminatory lending practices, to exclude Black Americans from the single most reliable path to middle-class wealth. A Black mortgage broker in Los Angeles in the 1970s occupied a paradoxical position: he was selling access to a system that had been engineered to keep his clients out. Danny did this work with competence and persistence, and he brought to his fatherhood the same qualities he brought to his professional life, a directness, a refusal to sugarcoat, and an insistence that his son understand how the world actually worked rather than how anyone wished it worked. John later described his father as "very politically-minded, very black conscious," the only single dad on the block, a man the neighborhood kids looked up to because he had both authority and the willingness to use it. Danny was known, John recalled, as "that dude who knocks people out," which in the social calculus of South Central meant he commanded respect without being a gang affiliate. At age eleven, John moved to live with his father full-time, and the dinner-table education that followed, frank discussions about money, race, the mechanics of survival, gave him a foundation that his classmates whose fathers were absent never received. "I never had to grow up with a lot of the insecurities a lot of young black men have," Singleton said in a 1991 Golden Globes interview. "He gave me a foundation."

The father-son relationship between Danny and John became the central emotional fact of John Singleton's art. When, years later, Singleton sat down to write the screenplay that would make him famous, he built it around a father, Furious Styles, played by Laurence Fishburne, who was present, engaged, principled, and determined to raise his son to survive in a neighborhood designed to destroy young Black men. That character was Danny Singleton, or at least the version of Danny that his son understood and honored. In a media landscape where Black fatherhood was treated as an oxymoron, where the "absent Black father" had become such a reflexive trope that politicians and pundits deployed it without thinking, Singleton would insist on the presence of a father as the moral center of his most important film. He learned that insistence from experience.

Sheila Ward's household was different. Where Danny was blunt and practical, Sheila was the parent who represented another dimension of Black life in South Central, the professional class, the strivers, the families who dressed well and spoke carefully and kept their ambitions pointed toward a future that looked different from the present. Sheila worked for a pharmaceutical company, which placed her in corporate America at a time when very few Black women occupied such positions. She was organized, she valued education, and she saw in her son the kind of intelligence that could carry him out of South Central entirely if it was properly directed.

The tension between these two households, between Danny's streetwise pragmatism and Sheila's professional aspirations, gave young John an education in the complexity of Black experience that no university course could have matched. He was not raised in a single story. He moved between stories. He learned early that the same neighborhood could contain a man who quoted Malcolm X at the dinner table and a woman who wanted her son to dress for success; that the same block could hold a drug dealer and a deacon; that the violence and the tenderness existed not in separate worlds but in the same world, sometimes in the same family, sometimes in the same person. This was the education that made him a filmmaker. Everything he learned at USC would be technique. What he learned on South St. Andrews Place and in his mother's apartment was the material itself.

The neighborhood was changing through the 1970s, and not for the better. The economic dislocations of the decade, the oil shocks, the recession, the collapse of manufacturing jobs that had once sustained working-class Black families, hit South Central with disproportionate force. The aerospace industry, which had provided stable employment for thousands of Black Angelenos during the 1960s, was contracting. The city of Los Angeles, under the leadership of Mayor Tom Bradley, the first Black mayor of a major American city, was pursuing a development strategy focused on downtown and the Westside, and the benefits of that strategy were not flowing south. The gap between the neighborhoods that politicians pointed to when they wanted to prove that the system worked and the neighborhoods where millions of Black and Latino Angelenos actually lived was widening year by year.

Into this widening gap, two things arrived that would reshape South Central more profoundly than any policy decision: gangs and, later, cocaine.

The Crips and the Bloods had existed in various forms since the late 1960s, but through the 1970s they grew from loose neighborhood affiliations into organized structures with territory, hierarchy, and escalating violence. The reasons were structural, the disappearance of good jobs, the defunding of community programs, the aggressive policing tactics of the LAPD under Chief Daryl Gates, which treated South Central as occupied territory. The consequences were personal. By the time John Singleton was in elementary school, the map of his neighborhood was being redrawn by invisible lines that determined which blocks you could walk through and which you could not, which colors you could wear and which would get you killed.

John was not a gang member. His family's stability, two parents who were engaged, even if separated; two households that functioned; adults who paid attention, provided the kind of structure that made the gang's offer of belonging less necessary. But the absence of membership did not mean the absence of proximity. You did not have to be in a gang to know gang members, to have friends and relatives who were involved, to witness the violence, to understand the logic that drove young men into affiliations that terrified their mothers. Singleton absorbed all of this. He was watching, with an attentiveness that would later become his defining artistic quality, and he was storing what he saw.

The crystallizing event was a trip to the movies. When John was nine years old, Danny Singleton took him to see Star Wars. The film was, in 1977, the dominant cultural event of American childhood, and John watched it with the same wonder that millions of children brought to it. But then he went back. He watched it again and again, and something shifted. While other kids in the neighborhood were fantasizing about being Luke Skywalker, John found himself paying attention to a different question: who made this? How did it get made? Who decided what went in the frame? He began drawing scenes on sheets of paper and flipping the pages to create crudely animated films. His hero, he decided, was George Lucas. "Cinema was my rite of passage," he said years later. By nine years old, he had already decided he was going to make motion pictures.

He was also watching television and going to the movies with an increasingly analytical attention. The 1970s were the era of Blaxploitation, the cycle of low-budget films featuring Black casts that had emerged in the early part of the decade with pictures like Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972), and Coffy (1973). These films were controversial within the Black community. Some saw them as degrading stereotypes, recycling images of pimps and drug dealers for white amusement. Others saw them as the first time Black characters had been allowed to be the heroes of their own stories on screen, flawed heroes, sometimes, but heroes nonetheless. The young John Singleton absorbed these films with the same dual consciousness he brought to everything else. He could see what was wrong with them. He could also see what was exciting about them. And he could see, even as a child, the space between what these films did and what they could have done, the gap between the Black experience as Hollywood imagined it and the Black experience as he actually lived it.

That gap became his life's work. Comic books, video games, and movies were, as he described it in a 1993 interview with DIRT magazine, his "buffer against all the drugs, the partying and shit." The entertainment was not escapism in the passive sense. It was active preparation, a young artist absorbing the materials of his craft before he had a word for craft. "When you're living in the hood, you don't live this life where you're crying every day, downtrodden every day," he observed. The neighborhood was hard. It was also, in ways that outsiders could not perceive, alive. Both truths mattered. Both would end up in his films.

The church was a presence in both households, as it was in virtually every Black family in South Central during this period. The Black church in Los Angeles served functions that extended far beyond the spiritual, it was a social hub, a political organizing center, a refuge from the hostilities of the outside world, and a place where the oratorical tradition that had sustained Black Americans since slavery was kept alive and practiced every Sunday. John absorbed the rhythms of Black preaching without necessarily absorbing the theology. The cadences, the rising and falling emotional arcs, the ability to hold an audience through the combined power of language and delivery, these were lessons that would serve him when he became a filmmaker, when he directed actors in scenes that required the same emotional architecture that a Sunday sermon deployed. Furious Styles's monologues in Boyz n the Hood were secular sermons, and the church was where Singleton first learned what a sermon could do.

The schools he attended in his early years were typical of LAUSD in the late 1970s, underfunded, overcrowded, staffed by teachers who ranged from the dedicated to the defeated. The school system was in a period of crisis that mirrored the neighborhood's broader decline. Proposition 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that capped property taxes, had devastated public school funding across the state, and the effects were felt most acutely in communities like South Central, where the tax base was already insufficient. The schools that John attended were not terrible, but they were not what they should have been, and the gap between what they provided and what the children of wealthier neighborhoods received was another expression of the structural inequality that defined Los Angeles.

The photographs from this period, the family snapshots that survive from Singleton's childhood, show a boy who is gap-toothed and serious, who looks at the camera with an expression that is neither smiling nor sullen. It is the expression of a child who is paying attention. It is the expression of a child who has already begun the work of observation that precedes the work of art, the discipline of looking at the world not just as someone who lives in it but as someone who is going to have something to say about it.

He was not yet aware that he would become a filmmaker. That awareness would come later, in adolescence, when a series of experiences crystallized the vague attentiveness of childhood into a specific ambition. But the raw material was accumulating. Every walk through the neighborhood, every dinner at his father's table, every night at his mother's apartment, every funeral for a young man killed too soon, every Sunday at church, every argument overheard through thin walls, every afternoon watching movies on television, all of it was going into the archive of memory that would eventually produce Boyz n the Hood and everything that came after it.

South Central in the late 1970s was a neighborhood that America was preparing to abandon. The crack epidemic had not yet arrived, that catastrophe would begin in the early 1980s and would transform the neighborhood more devastatingly than anything that had come before, but the conditions that would make crack's arrival so destructive were already in place. The jobs were gone. The schools were underfunded. The police were hostile. The political leadership was indifferent. And an entire generation of young Black men was growing up in a landscape where the paths to legitimate success were narrowing while the paths to destruction were widening.

John Singleton was one of those young men. He had advantages that many of his peers did not, two engaged parents, stability, intelligence that was recognized and encouraged. But he was there. He walked the same blocks. He breathed the same air. He knew the same people. And when he sat down, years later, to tell the story of what it was like to grow up Black and male in South Central Los Angeles, he was not translating someone else's experience into art. He was translating his own.

The specificity of that knowledge, the fact that he had lived what he depicted, would become both his greatest artistic strength and the limitation that Hollywood would impose on him. Because the industry could recognize the authenticity of a filmmaker who came from the streets, but it could not quite imagine that same filmmaker having something to say about anything else. The box that South Central built around its residents was physical, made of redlines and freeways and police cordons. The box that Hollywood would build around John Singleton was conceptual, made of assumptions about what a Black director from South Central was qualified to depict. He would spend his entire career trying to escape both boxes. He would never fully succeed at either.

But that career was still years away. In the late 1970s, John Daniel Singleton was a boy growing up between two houses in a neighborhood that the rest of America was learning to fear. He was watching everything. He was forgetting nothing. And without knowing it, he was assembling the material for one of the most important American films of the twentieth century.

The house on South St. Andrews Place would not appear in any movie. But everything that happened inside it, and everything that happened on the streets around it, would appear in all of them. Every film he made was built from something he had observed or heard or carried from those years. He was not working from imagination. He was working from memory. And memory, deployed with craft and intelligence and the absolute refusal to look away, is the deepest source any artist can draw from.