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LaToya Peterson, writing at Jezebel, is worried that Tyler Perry is the wrong person to adapt For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf on the grounds that a) a man really shouldn't be writing the improvisational work, and b) that Tyler Perry, given his track record with female characters, is particularly the wrong man to adapt the play and bring it to the screen. Slb at PostBourgie is worried that Perry will rush the movie, resulting in something cheap-looking and predictable.
I'm interested in both of those objections. But I suppose what bothers me most about this is what it suggests about what Perry intends to do with his vast resources and business potential. This seems like an obvious project for which Perry could recruit talented African-American female writers and directors, throw a lot of commercial weight behind the project, and prove not only that he can make commercially successful movies but that he can help other people make commercially successful movies. It's not like there are no options out there. Perry could have tapped Kasi Lemmons, or Gina Prince-Bythewood, or Angela Robinson, to name just a couple of options. Perry could, by helping any one of those women make and market a terrific project, give them an enormous career boost.
But he's not going to do it. And since he launched 34th Street Films, an arm of Tyler Perry Studios meant explicitly to promote the work of other filmmakers, almost exactly a year ago, IMDb lists just three projects the studio has under development: For Colored Girls..., Hot Tub Time Machine, a dudely comedy with some high-profile white stars written and directed by four men, and Georgia Sky. (He probably also deserves some credit for helping to produce Precious, which looks like it could be absolutely extraordinary.) It's the company's first year, and maybe things will be different. But until Perry turns over a high-profile project that he could do, but could be better done by another writer or director, to someone else, I'm not really going to believe that he's interested in developing the work of other directors. And you know what? That's fine. This is America. Tyler Perry has all the right in the world to go out there and make all the money he can get his hands on, and make his reputation as big as it could possibly be. But Oprah's recognized that at least part of her power stems from the fact that she can make artists' and authors' reputations. If Tyler Perry did the same, he could do pretty amazing things for film, and for filmmakers.
And if he doesn't, well, hegemony gets boring after a while. Perry's churned out a huge number of projects, but his trademarks are generally obvious in all of them. At some point, audiences are going to want something else, or someone's going to offer the audiences Perry targets something higher-quality and less predictable, and he's going to have to figure something to give them. And when that time comes, he'll be more prepared to do that if his company is cultivating other artists, not just supporting his projects.