Tyler Perry article in the Guardian

• 
• • Ed Pilkington
  • The Guardian, Friday 3 April 2009
  • Article history

Part Widow Twankey, part Shakespearean fool ... Tyler Perry in Madea Goes to Jail (2009). Photograph: Lionsgate/Everett/Rex Features

It's Friday night at the 12-screen Cobble Hill multiplex in Brooklyn, New York, and the crowd are in high spirits. The largest auditorium is sold out. Bags of popcorn, heavy on the butter, are being crunched in the aisles; kids are slurping on giant Cokes; a baby is crying. But nothing distracts the almost exclusively African-American audience from the drama being played out in front of them. As the film gathers pace, it is as if the whole room is in interaction with the moving images. When the leading man rejects his spiteful fiancee at the altar, a huge cheer erupts. A few scenes later, when the same character holds his true love in his arms and says, "I love you", several women stand up in their seats and shout at the screen: "I love you, too!" The atmosphere is electric. This isn't cinema. This is worship.

Such displays of mass devotion, repeated in movie houses across urban America, have turned the film in question, Madea Goes to Jail, into a 2009 box-office sensation. In its first five weeks, it took in $87m (£60.7m), almost half of that in the first weekend in February alone. Not bad going for a film that cost little more than $10m (£7m) to shoot.

Such zeal from fans has also propelled the film's director, writer and star into a unique position in American cinema. His well-oiled machine has churned out seven films in the past four years, each one grossing on average more than $45m (£31.4). That makes him easily one of the most consistently bankable commodities in Hollywood. But if you live in the UK, the chances are you won't even have heard of Tyler Perry. None of his films - the likes of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Daddy's Little Girls, and Why Did I Get Married? - has ever been released in British cinemas. (Only one, Madea's Family Reunion, has even been put out on DVD.)

Why is the man ranked by the business magazine Forbes as the third top-earning black artist in America, with a personal income of $125m (£87m) a year, also described by Forbes as the "best kept secret in movie-making"? Why is he a virtual unknown outside America, while even within the US, he is regularly panned by critics or, worse, utterly ignored by them? Why, in return, has he turned his back on mainstream Hollywood, shunning the big studios, refusing to screen his films for critics, barely marketing them to wider audiences?

The mystery deepens when you factor in the female character who is central to most of his films. A 6ft 5in, alarmingly buxom 68-year-old grandmother who packs a gun, talks trash and grows weed in the back garden is hardly the most obvious formula for a blockbuster franchise. But then there's nothing obvious about Madea - so named after the southern abbreviation of "Mother dear". She is, after all, played by Perry himself, in drag.

Part Widow Twankey, part Shakespearean fool, Madea holds the key to understanding Perry's phenomenal following. In the latest, Madea Goes to Jail, she takes us on a high-speed car chase with the police and ends up in prison, where she promptly intimidates the prison guards and tears a strip off her anger management counsellor. It is through Madea, and the morality tales that swirl around her, that Perry secures his deep connection with his fan base, which is overwhelmingly African-American, primarily female and largely Christian. Or as he has put it himself: "I know my audience, and they're not people that the studios know anything about."

Sidney Poitier, arguably the supreme figure among black American film actor/directors, tells me why, in his opinion, Perry's output marks an important landmark in African-American cinema. He begins by speaking in general terms, about the void that Perry helps to fill. "He is talking to an audience that the American film industry has ignored for many, many decades. An audience that would like to see themselves reflected in their own image, that has a hunger to see themselves as they see themselves - as regular, ordinary, loving, fallible human beings."

Perry grew up in a poor black area of New Orleans. He was raised by an abusive father, Emmitt Perry, whose name he shared, but dispensed with after enduring frequent childhood beatings. His mother Maxine would take him everywhere with her to avoid the violence - to beauty parlours, shops and, crucially, to church, her haven in a harsh world. Those early experiences, and the characters they presented, have been the raw material for Perry's image factory ever since.

It took the inspiration of another woman to get Perry started: Oprah Winfrey. When he was in his early 20s, he heard her advise on her TV show that writing down one's feelings was cathartic. That set him composing letters to himself about his abused past, his anger towards his father, and that in turn led to a play, I Know I've Been Changed, in 1992.

Lean days followed. Perry scrimped enough money as a used car salesman to hire out a theatre in Atlanta, Georgia for the premiere of his play. It flopped. Just 30 people saw it in its first weekend - quite a contrast to four million or so who packed cinemas for the first weekend of Madea Goes to Jail. But Perry is no quitter. He slept in a car to save on rent, and through persistence gradually built his audience from the ground up. He began touring his plays to black neighbourhoods across the South, and in Newark, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, performing up to 350 times a year.

What emerged was a following wholly different from the profile of most theatre-going audiences. Black churches were his ticket booths, black women his touts. "What I've learned is you treat women right, and they bring everybody else," he has said.

His interaction with his mushrooming audience was symbiotic. He gave them stories about their own lives - about the search for love as an African-American woman, the search for a role as an African American man - that they could not find in any "mainstream" theatre or cinema. They gave him their business, filling his seats with fans as young as four and as old as 86. "He has been very loyal to his audience, and they are very loyal to him," says Miriam Petty, a specialist in African-American studies at Princeton who is studying the Perry phenomenon.

By 2005, Perry's success in theatres was secured - a tour of any one of his plays is now guaranteed to earn $100m, drawing crowds largely through email or word of mouth. But that was just the start. His genius was to take that same theatre audience and drag it with him into moving images. First, he made DVDs of his stage performances, which have sold more than 11m copies. Then he moved to feature-length film versions of the plays, beginning with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005. The film introduced Madea to the big screen. She seduced his army of churchgoing admirers into the cinema, a place that many were visiting for the first time. The movie was slammed by critics as bad and over the top. It grossed more than $50m.

As with his plays, Perry has insisted in nothing less than total creative control over his films. He puts them out through Lionsgate, an indie distributor whose other big franchise is the gory horror series Saw. Perry's deal with Lionsgate is simple: he makes the films, they distribute them. No questions asked.

The ultimate manifestation of Perry's total control was the opening last October of his own custom-built film studios in Atlanta, occupying more than 30 acres, and carrying its own motto: "A Place Where Even Dreams Can Believe." He now shoots all his films there, as well as two hit TV sitcoms - House of Payne and Meet the Browns - that he has recently added to his empire. He has, in effect, become the first black chief executive of a movie studio. His own.

The opening party for the studios earlier this year was not only a crowning event for Perry, it was a breakthrough moment for African-American cinema. Tears flowed freely among the guests, who were served by waiters with tissues from red velvet boxes. Poitier was there, and had one of the five sound studios named after him. Also present were Cicely Tyson, who starred in Perry's first two films, Louis Gossett Jr, Ruby Dee and Will Smith, who gave the keynote speech. "There is something happening in America and the world that is powerful," Smith said, alluding to the presidential election of Barack Obama just days away. "Perry is not letting anyone get in his way."

Smith's endorsement was itself powerful. But not everyone has been convinced by the Madea franchise. One school of thought likens her outrageous character to the bad old days of the minstrel show. Todd Boyd, an expert on race and popular culture at the University of Southern California, draws a connection between the stereotypes of black people perpetrated by Hollywood in the days of legal segregation and Perry's caricatures. "Black people were portrayed as slow and dumb; they scratched when they didn't itch, laughed when they weren't funny. They were buffoonish.

"Tyler Perry has taken a number of those stereotypes and owned them - reinterpreting them for a new era. The difference is they used to be perpetrated by white Hollywood studio bosses. Now we have an African-American getting rich off them."

Boyd also draws a parallel with the so-called "chitlin' circuit" - the string of theatres and music dives through the south and north-east of the US where black performers found an outlet for their work. In the grim days of overt racial segregation from the 1930s to 1960s, many artists - film-maker Oscar Micheaux, actress Della Reese, Billie Holiday to name but three - had no choice but to embrace the circuit, unable to find work in mainstream venues. But by dragging African-American art back on to a circuit that is in effect segregated, so the argument goes, Perry has set back the struggle for equality in entertainment.

Perry himself is well aware of the "chitlin' circuit" label that has been attached to him. In interviews, he has admitted to having been initially embarrassed by the term. "But then I found out the history of it, and now I'm really, really proud of it."

A better way of looking at Perry's work, though, at least in terms of its content, is to think of it in terms of the pulpit. His movies are Gospel morality tales, retold in contemporary settings. So Diary of a Mad Black Woman is the battle of good versus the evil of adultery and lust for money. Daddy's Little Girls (2007) is a sermon on the power of love to overcome class prejudices. The Family That Preys (2008) exhorts its viewers not to covet thy neighbour's house, nor desire their spouse.

The interesting thing, as Miriam Petty points out, is that Madea herself often preaches the exact opposite. She refuses to go to church, grows cannabis and is quick to fight. In Madea Goes to Jail, she says: "The Bible says you turn the other cheek. You only got two cheeks, so how long are you going to wait before you whip their ass?" Another huge cheer erupts from the Brooklyn crowd.

Critics be damned. As he turns 40 this year, Perry is the master of his own universe. The audience - his audience - love what he does, and keep coming back for more. Eleven hit plays, two smash TV sitcoms, seven blockbuster films and three more underway. Will Smith was right: Tyler Perry is not letting anyone get in his way.