Oakland in Their Bones, and in Their Films

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/movies/blindspotting-oakland-daveed-diggs.html

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OAKLAND, Calif. — Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal stood squinting in the June sun, unsure what to make of the graffiti-covered walls of a Boys & Girls Club here. The bright blue building in front of them had been spotless just a few months earlier, when Mr. Casal and Mr. Diggs, both Oakland born and bred, had last seen it.

More jarring was the new Ford GoBike docking station that a Lyft-owned company had installed next to the clubhouse. A trendy bike-sharing service in West Oakland? “All I know is that it was clean and blue when we scouted it, and it was clean and blue when we shot in front of it,” said Mr. Diggs, who stars with Mr. Casal in “Blindspotting,” an Oakland-set comic drama that arrives in theaters on July 20. “And then the shiny bikes came and now there’s graffiti. That means something.”

Mr. Casal had a guess. “I see a neighborhood screaming, ‘You can’t erase me,’” he said. “The rebellion of graffiti sometimes is to shout, ‘I’m here. Don’t forget that I’m here.’ It’s putting your name on things when you’re being swept over.”

In that case, consider “Blindspotting” their graffiti.

Mr. Diggs, who won a Tony Award in 2016 for his spirited performance as Lafayette and Jefferson in “Hamilton,” and Mr. Casal, a spoken-word savant, both wrote “Blindspotting” as a type of primal howl: Their gritty Oakland — an artistic hotbed, particularly for black culture, powered by cycles of oppression and defiance — was becoming unrecognizable. They saw white tech-industry workers arriving in hipster swarms, driving up rents and displacing residents of color.

“As artists whose context has always been that city, what’s being lost — erased, ignored — is terrifying,” Mr. Diggs said, noting the drastic drop in Oakland’s African-American population. (It is about 25 percent black today, according to government estimates, down from 44 percent in 1990.) To emphasize that fear and anger, the characters Mr. Diggs and Mr. Casal play in “Blindspotting” sometimes burst into provocative spoken-sung rhymes on topics that include police brutality.

The intersection of race and class amid gentrification is old terrain for independent film. Spike Lee’s seminal “Do the Right Thing,” set in Brooklyn, explored similar issues in 1989. But “Blindspotting” is also part of something new: For the first time in Oakland’s long history as a cultural wellspring, major film artists are surfacing in rapid succession — a development that reflects an overdue shift in Hollywood regarding what kind of stories and storytellers receive support.

Mr. Casal, 32, and Mr. Diggs, 36, arrive in the wake of Boots Riley, an Oakland musician-turned-filmmaker whose euphorically reviewed “Sorry to Bother You” was released in theaters on July 6. Starring Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson, “Sorry to Bother You” is an absurdist dark comedy about a black telemarketer who, to succeed, magically makes his voice sound like that of a peppy white guy.

Leading the Oakland filmmaker charge has been Ryan Coogler, whose wrenching “Fruitvale Station” (2013) told the story of Oscar Grant III, an unarmed black man fatally shot in the back by a white transit system police officer on an Oakland train platform. Most recently, Mr. Coogler directed “Black Panther,” which was set partly in Oakland and shattered a Hollywood myth about the overseas viability of movies rooted in black culture. “Black Panther” took in $1.3 billion worldwide.

“To have all three — Boots’s film, ‘Blindspotting,’ ‘Black Panther’ — contributing to the cultural conversation at once is remarkable,” said Rajendra Roy, the chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Roy, who grew up in Northern California, said “Blindspotting” was particularly timely because it grapples with a range of issues affecting American life: racial profiling, toxic masculinity, fear of change.

Still emerging are Oakland-rooted filmmakers like Anthony Lucero, whose “East Side Sushi” (2015) focused on a Latina woman in East Oakland. Oaklander Nijla Mu’min received a special jury award at the South by Southwest festival in March for “Jinn,” her first feature, while Evan Cecil created a stir at the 16th annual Oakland International Film Festival in April with his horror movie “Lasso.”

It’s not as if Oakland just discovered cinema. The Afrofuturist fantasy “Space Is the Place” (1974) was partly filmed in “the town,” as locals call it. The documentary filmmaker Shakti Butler has been active here since 1998, when she released “The Way Home,” featuring 64 women from diverse backgrounds talking about racism in America.

But it is striking that Oakland is only now gaining serious traction in film, particularly given the city’s huge contribution in other cultural areas — most notably music, through a thriving jazz and blues scene in the 1940s; the rise of soul and funk bands like Tower of Power in the ’70s; and hip-hop and R&B rap artists in the ’80s and ’90s, including Too $hort, MC Hammer, En Vogue, Tony! Toni! Toné! and Tupac Shakur.

Oakland has been such fertile cultural ground for a variety of reasons. Geographically isolated on the east side of San Francisco Bay, the region became a center for African-American liberation in the early 20th century, with people moving from the rural South as part of the Great Migration. The subsequent influx of Latino and Asian immigrants “made the area an unusual confluence, a place that offered a collective safety — a unique cultural opportunity to be free and imaginative,” said Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Bay Area-based arts activist and performer.

Add as kindling the Free Speech Movement (born at the nearby University of California, Berkeley) and oppression by a police department notorious for abuse and misconduct. The Black Panther Party originated here for a reason.

Oakland’s current gentrification and the resulting clash — often with racist overtones, as with the recent #BBQBecky incident, in which a white woman called the police on black picnickers — have stoked creativity anew. Oakland is almost a character in Tommy Orange’s best-selling new novel, “There There,” which examines what the city means as an urban hub for Native Americans. Mr. Orange, who grew up in Oakland, is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

Film seems to be finally coming into its own because of greater opportunity. Academics and activists have castigated Hollywood for excluding people of color. As a result, distributors are pushing ahead films by black directors and writers, including Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), Jordan Peele (“Get Out”), Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle in Time”), Justin Simien (“Dear White People”) and Steve McQueen (who is following up “12 Years a Slave” with the fall drama “Widows”).

“Why has Oakland not been more known for film? Because there has never been the necessary market support,” said David Roach, director of the Oakland International Film Festival.

Mr. Casal and Mr. Diggs echoed that point.

“Making a movie did not seem like something that was particularly available to us in the past,” Mr. Casal said. “We’re not from L.A. We’re not from a lineage of filmmakers.”

Growing up, Mr. Diggs said, “I never thought about films as a way to express myself. Just a totally foreign concept.” (YouTube was another matter.)

“Blindspotting,” which Lionsgate acquired for distribution at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, got its start nine years ago, when a young Los Angeles producer, Jess Calder, sent Mr. Casal an out-of-the-blue message through his YouTube page. She had seen him perform on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam” and said in her note, “This will sound crazy, but I feel like you might have a really great film idea in you, and I’d love to be part of the process.”

Mr. Casal, whose pursuits include rapping and playwriting, introduced his new friend to Mr. Diggs. “She had only flipped half the coin,” Mr. Casal said.

The two men had known each other since high school, when they were active in Youth Speaks, a Bay Area nonprofit that encourages teenagers to “make art, be creative, change the world,” in the words of Mr. Joseph, a co-founder. After high school, Mr. Diggs, a track star and budding hip-hop artist, left for Brown University, while Mr. Casal, a two-time National Poetry Slam champion, toured as a spoken-word performer before joining a theater company.

Mr. Casal and Mr. Diggs reunited one night in 2004, when Mr. Diggs was back in Oakland and stopped by a modest recording studio that Mr. Casal had built. “We worked on music until the sun came up,” Mr. Casal said. “And I don’t really remember much after that that didn’t involve Daveed.”

“Blindspotting” started to form when, encouraged by Ms. Calder, they began writing a story about two friends. One is a parolee (played by Mr. Diggs) trying to adhere to the conditions of his release and restart his life. The other is a mischief maker (Mr. Casal) whose unpredictability threatens to send his pal back to prison. Police brutality simmers beneath nearly every scene, as does Oakland’s changing identity — as when a greasy burger joint, Kwik Way, shuts down and reopens with the same jagged neon sign ... and a foodie menu.

The real-life Kwik Way, located on Lake Park Avenue, underwent a similar transformation. The new owner might as well have started selling 49ers jackets. (This is Raiders territory. At least until they decamp for Las Vegas.)

Directed by Carlos López Estrada, “Blindspotting,” is an angry movie. But the film, perhaps surprisingly, also looks at the pros and cons of change and lays blame on both locals and newcomers for tension. “It’s about trying to get people to see things from another perspective,” Mr. Casal said. “And acknowledge that your perspective may not be the only one in play. And just because it’s yours doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

He continued: “Most people, when presented with the whole story, are empathetic. But getting people to the whole story without hesitation or resistance or defensiveness is very, very, very difficult. People need really safe spaces to change their minds. And maybe that’s in the dark in a movie theater.”

Mr. Diggs and Mr. Casal in some ways embodied the tension of “Blindspotting” as they returned to Oakland last month to promote their film. (They now live in Los Angeles, where Mr. Diggs has a role on “black-ish.”) They lamented the changes they saw. Yet they had changed: The Claremont Club & Spa, a luxury hotel, served as a base, and they toured the town in a chauffeured studio S.U.V.

“It was a little awkward, sure,” Mr. Diggs said. “We just tried to be as respectful as possible. I took selfies with some fans. We tried to apologize to everyone for the disruption.”

Around noon, they stopped at the Filbert Street apartment where they had been roommates in 2009, and knocked on the door. No answer. They lingered in the driveway, and a suspicious resident eventually came outside. What the hell did they want?

“We met exactly who we assumed would live there now,” Mr. Casal said afterward. “White hipster kid. Sunglasses on inside. Dyed blond hair.” Mr. Casal said he understood the man’s attitude — they were intruding on his space — but “we were also trying to engage and have a very loving and peaceful conversation about being from this neighborhood. The reality is that it meant nothing to him because he’s not from there.”

Mr. Diggs played devil’s advocate.

“To be fair, he also seemed pretty hung over,” Mr. Diggs said, with a laugh. “He seemed to be living a similar life to the one we did.”