Comedy as Resistance: Hollywood Shuffle
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series The Black Pack: Rewriting American Comedy. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
In person: Introduction, including a brief talk, by Artel Great, associate professor, San Francisco State University School of Cinema, and author of The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance. Q&A with actor Anne-Marie Johnson and Spring Mooney, daughter of comedian and actor Paul Mooney.
Coming to America trailer (1988)
In the most commercially successful Black comedy feature of its era, Eddie Murphy stands at the center of the Black Pack as Prince Akeem, heir to the throne of Zamunda, who leaves royal luxury for Queens, New York, in search of love on his own terms.
Hollywood Shuffle (1987)
Robert Townsend’s audacious directorial debut remains a razor-sharp satire of Hollywood’s degrading and limited roles for Black actors. Townsend stars as Bobby Taylor, an aspiring actor pressured to erase himself to fit an “Eddie Murphy type” while auditioning for an outlandish Blaxploitation knockoff. A foundational text of the Black Pack collective, the independently produced film insists on comedy as social critique — using satire not as escapism, but as a strategy to expose industry gatekeeping, reclaim authorship and speak truth to power.
Director: Robert Townsend. Screenwriters: Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend. With: Robert Townsend, Anne-Marie Johnson, Helen Martin.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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