The new Amos 'n' Andy?

Critics hate Tyler Perry's outrageous comedies, but his black fans love them. Is Perry a stereotype-spouting minstrel -- or a smart writer and actor who knows how to connect with his audience?

By Russell Scott Smith

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features

Feb. 23, 2006 | Blacks and whites don't always understand each other. But in Hollywood, everyone's favorite color is green. So movie executives of all races took notice last February when a movie called "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" hit No. 1 at the box office -- despite no bankable stars, scant mainstream press attention and reviews that were almost laughably bad.

"Downright awful," "an absolute mess" and "one of the worst pictures in ages," critics wailed. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek called it "the sort of movie that's so bad, you just wish it would go away." Roger Ebert was offended by the movie's star, a "Big Momma's House"-style granny named Madea, who smokes reefer, keeps a pistol in her purse and slices up furniture with a chain saw. This "Grandma from Hell," as Ebert called her, was played in drag by the film's 6-foot-5 writer-producer-mastermind, Tyler Perry. "All blame returns to Perry," Ebert wrote. "What was he thinking?"

But there was no arguing the numbers. Perry made "Diary" on a shoestring $5.5 million budget, and as of last April it had grossed some $50 million. Perry's distributor, Lions Gate Films, quickly greenlighted $10 million for a sequel, "Madea's Family Reunion," which hits theaters Feb. 24. Now the suits are thinking franchise. "We've got Tyler fever," says Lions Gate head of production Michael Paseornek. "As far as we're concerned, the last weekend of February belongs to Tyler Perry, and we plan to be there every year."

What shocked Hollywood insiders was how Perry seemed to come out of nowhere. In the wake of the "Diary" success, the Hollywood trade paper Variety wrote a story that led off, "Tyler who?" Paseornek had been asking himself the same question a year before, after he received a letter from Perry's agent, talking about a guy who wrote plays for African-American audiences on the "chitlin circuit," a name that goes back to Jim Crow days, when African-Americans were banned from mainstream auditoriums. Nowadays, Perry's plays regularly sell out major venues such as New York's Beacon Theater and the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, where the Oscars are held, and in the last eight years, they've grossed more than $100 million through ticket sales and DVDs of live performances sold through his Web site.

"It was an astronomical number for someone I'd never heard of," Paseornek recalls, "so I called around to other people in showbiz, and they hadn't heard of him either."

But those people were white. Paseornek got his first insight into the Perry phenomenon when he walked down the hall to the Lions Gate inventory control department, to talk to an African-American employee named Kenya Watson. "She said, 'Sure, I've heard of Tyler Perry,'" he recalls. "'I own all his DVDs. Whenever we have a cookout, we put one on.'"

"When I first went to the studios," Perry told Salon in a recent phone interview, "they told me my fans didn't go to movies." But actually, his audience -- hardworking, family-oriented, Christian African-American women -- had just been waiting for someone to make a movie they would like, and Perry used his own powerful marketing apparatus to get the fans out for "Diary." In the weeks leading up to the film's release, there were constant ads on black radio stations and Perry reached out to the more than 500,000 fans who've signed up on his Web site's e-mail list. "Every week or so, we tell them what's going on," Perry says of his fan base, adding that a similar countdown has been underway for "Family Reunion." He also talked to pastors at some of the country's most important African-American megachurches, with whom he says he has "really good relationships"; they got the word out, sometimes even talking about "Diary" from the pulpit. Church auxiliaries started buying group tickets and making plans to see "Diary" en masse.

"People forget that churchgoing folks like to be entertained," says Tamara McLaurin, a 32-year-old catering sales manager at the Atlanta convention center. The release of "Diary" was a major event for McLaurin and the other women in her church's "dance ministry," a group that dances during services. They were traveling to perform that weekend, watched four Perry DVDs in a row on the bus, and then piled into a multiplex to cheer "Diary." "We called it 'Tyler Perry Day,' " recalls McLaurin, who now owns a "Diary" DVD that she still watches about once a week -- "just in the background, while I do things around the house."

"These people were desperate to be spoken to," says Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris. "When something came along that was even remotely relevant, they threw all their weight behind it, even though it was a shittily made movie." Morris didn't like "Diary." "Blows to the head are delivered with more subtlety," he wrote in his review. He also happens to be African-American, but as soon as his review came out, he says, he got phone calls and e-mails from Perry fans who accused him of being white -- and a racist at that. The fans were even harsher when they knew for sure that the critic was white. Ebert, who is married to an African-American woman and has long been a champion for black cinema, received so much angry e-mail and became such a lightning rod because of his negative "Diary" review that Perry felt compelled, during a visit to Chicago, to plead with his fans to lay off the guy.

Next page: Perry's rise from homelessness