Bamboozled
It’s Showtime
Image courtesy of Park Circus/Warner Bros.
Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover, Michael Rapaport, Tommy Davidson
Bamboozled | It’s Showtime
Image courtesy of Park Circus/Warner Bros.
Tommy Davidson, Savion Glover
Bamboozled | It’s Showtime
Image courtesy of Park Circus/Warner Bros.
Paul Mooney, Damon Wayans
Bamboozled | It’s Showtime
Image courtesy of Park Circus/Warner Bros.
Pierre Delacroix is the only Black writer at broadcaster CNS. With the channel in crisis, his boss tasks him with creating a spectacular “N word show”. He comes up with the “New Millennium Minstrel Show”, featuring racist tropes including, among other things, Black actors in blackface. Delacroix hopes it will cause a furore and get him fired. But instead, the show, for which he hires two homeless Black street performers, becomes a huge hit and its tap-dancing main man an overnight star. When that star is then kidnapped by a radical hip-hop group calling for Black liberation, a wave of violence is unleashed that also engulfs Delacroix.
Referencing a quote from his film Malcolm X (1992), Spike Lee’s nasty media satire portrays how all the Black protagonists, alongside a host of Black actors and comedians from Hollywood history who we see in film clips, get and got bamboozled. Cast with luminaries including Mos Def and Savion Glover, it is a scathing indictment of the unrelenting racism in American popular culture.
Referencing a quote from his film Malcolm X (1992), Spike Lee’s nasty media satire portrays how all the Black protagonists, alongside a host of Black actors and comedians from Hollywood history who we see in film clips, get and got bamboozled. Cast with luminaries including Mos Def and Savion Glover, it is a scathing indictment of the unrelenting racism in American popular culture.
With
- Damon Wayans
- Savion Glover
- Jada Pinkett Smith
- Tommy Davidson
- Michael Rapaport
- Mos Def
- Thomas Jefferson Byrd
- Paul Mooney
- Craig Grant
- Gano Grills
Crew
| Director | Spike Lee |
| Screenplay | Spike Lee |
| Cinematography | Ellen Kuras |
| Editing | Sam Pollard |
| Music | Terence Blanchard |
| Sound Design | Rolf Pardula |
| Production Design | Victor Kempster |
| Costumes | Ruth Carter |
| Make-Up | Eleanora Winslow |
| Producers | Jon Kilik, Spike Lee |
Additional information
35mm print: Cinematek - Royal Belgian Film Archive