There’s an odd piece by Dustin Rowles over at Pajiba on the release strategy of Fruitvale Station. For those of you not in the know, Fruitvale Station is the (factually shaky) cinematic interpretation of the shooting of Oscar Grant by Oakland transit cops. It has received critical plaudits and some mild commercial success and expanded to more than 1,000 theaters this weekend.*
Rowles questions why his hometown of Portland, Maine—which "regularly elects Green party candidates" and "has the fourth highest concentration of gay couples per capita in the nation" and is a "funky, liberal socially progressive city"**—has yet to have the film play on any of its 48 screens. Rowles suggests that "racist assumptions" have caused Portlandia East to be deprived of the film.
Hollywood has spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of data on what audiences watch what, where, for how long, and at what intensity. If they skipped Portlandia East in their mid-tier rollout, I strongly doubt it’s because they consciously decided to leave money on the table; it’s because they decided that a tiny market couldn’t support the film at the level needed to maintain momentum during the platforming stage. I guarantee you they have reams of data on how well "issue movies" have done in the city, as well as how well "black movies" have done in the city. You think they don't know how well Bully did in markets like Portland, Maine? Or Lions for Lambs? You don’t think they know exactly how well a Tyler Perry release does in the city, or how well Think Like a Man did in the city?
It’s worth noting that the remarkably white Portland, Oregon has multiple screens in multiple theaters playing Fruitvale Station despite having a lower percentage of black residents (Portland, Maine is 7.1 percent black; Portland, Oregon is 6.3 percent black). Of course, it’s kind of an apples/oranges situation, since Portland, Oregon has roughly nine times as many people—which is one of the reasons it can support more mid-range releases than its namesake in Maine. Then again, once you account for the "Greater Portland Area" rather than Portland, Maine, proper, it about evens out, population wise.
All of which is to say: this stuff is really complicated and a reductive accusation of racism is not terribly helpful.
And that’s the point I want to make here. I actually kinda-sorta agree with Rowles that it’s weird this film wasn’t shown in Portlandia East; it strikes me as Grade A SWPL Bait, the sort of thing one in that community would need to see to be considered a right-thinking person. I imagine it would do quite well in Rowles’ city, assuming you could whip up the right sort of marketing campaign in the local alternative press.
But casually tossing around accusations of racism—even if one tempers them later on, as Rowles does—strikes me as a slightly counterproductive method of fighting an issue he thinks "makes our problems worse" and eliminates "a shared sense of cultural preference." It’s a debater’s tactic that not only gets us asking the wrong questions but also weakens the power of the accusation. If you want to know why so many people are so skeptical of accusations of racism, it’s because you have otherwise intelligent writers casually tossing around empty allegations when it is far more likely that very basic financial calculations and matters of demography dictated the decision.
I get that Rowles is frustrated. But chalking up every perceived slight to racism is not a game plan to fixing what ails Maine's movie scene.
*It’s worth noting that it is, by no means, a runaway success: Compare Fruitvale Station to, say, Black Swan, which did roughly twice the per-theater average in its third weekend. There’s a reason the studio is wary about over-expanding.
**Next time just say "We’re like Portlandia, but Maine!" It’s quicker.