So then you decided on a strategy for combining that cause with your knowledge of movie history and the African-American part of our film heritage. And you came up with what I would call an industrial-strength satire.

I got to write that down; can I steal that from you?

Sure. I took it from some commercial.

What was that, Mr. Clean? I remember that, or something just like it, labeled "industrial strength" -- it came in a plastic drum.

Do you think that Damon Wayans' character, Pierre Delacroix -- someone educated beyond any natural reflexes or connection to his heritage -- is unique to the black experience? Or can he be compared to cultural bureaucrats from other racial and ethnic groups?

What makes Damon's character unique is that Pierre Delacroix has a lot of self-hatred. Here's someone who's never been comfortable with his blackness: hence the name change and the diction and that type of stuff.

He seems to have stylized himself into a parody of white cultivation. How specifically did you and Damon work that out?

We talked about it. It was Damon's idea for the diction. First he came up with a Cockney accent; we made a couple of changes on that until we agreed on what you hear in the film.

Was there a real-life model for Delacroix?

Yeah. Damon never told me the guy's name, but it's an African-American TV writer in Hollywood today. The sad thing about Delacroix is that he doesn't gain knowledge of self until he's getting ready to buy the farm. And that is something people haven't really picked up on: We took the device from one of the great masters, Billy Wilder. It's from "Sunset Boulevard," where William Holden is floating in that pool and you hear his voice and it's not until the end of the movie that you realize the voiceover is coming from a dead guy. In this movie, all the voiceover of Delacroix comes from after he's gone to the "upper room."

Well, I got that. But I'm not sure I picked up on every beat in Delacroix's progress. I understood his opening tactic. Responding to the order to deliver what the top suit considers a real black show, he decides to develop the most awful stereotypical program he can think of -- a blackface minstrel show. He wants to get fired. But after that the transitions got hazy for me.

Well, see, once they decide to do the show, he's trying to make the best out of it. He knows that if this type of material falls into the wrong hands, he'll definitely become a Dr. Frankenstein. So the film then becomes a struggle between Delacroix and [the white network boss] Dunwitty. Delacroix gets tricked into thinking he has some power on the show. And then once the show becomes a hit, he gets intoxicated like everybody else and therefore becomes protective of it. That's the point when the downward spiral really begins.

For a portion of that descent, I thought Delacroix was sincere when he tried to make a post-modern, post-whatever argument: as if he believes he's so ironic about this blackface stuff that he feels he's a pioneer.

He's trying to convince himself of that. It's the standard defense for that type of stuff.

But in your mind there's no validity to it?

No, I don't think we can justify what he does. I don't think we make any alibis for that.

The initial response of the TV studio audience to the minstrel show --

It's the same response we get in the audience of people watching the film.

Right. And that, I think, is totally accurate. I imagined you throwing people into the seats of the TV studio set and watching them go into shock during the minstrel show.

They weren't acting. Not everybody knew that Tommy [Davidson] and Savion [Glover] were gonna come out there in blackface. And we did that live. By live, I mean we had cameras on the audience and the performers at the same time.

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