Iconic filmmaker Gerge Lucas appeared on the The Daily Show With Jon Stewart this week to share details about his forthcoming Red Tails movie and the difficulties faced by films like it.
Red Tails, with an all-star cast boasting Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr. singer Ne-Yo, and more, depicts the well-publicized story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a valiant group of fighter pilots in World War II. The Star Wars creator put forth $58 million of his own money towards the overall price tag of the film.
“It’s a reasonably expensive movie. Normally black movies, say Tyler Perry movies or something, they’re very low budget,” the film’s producer, Lucas, told Stewart on the show. “Even they won’t really release his movies, it goes to one of the lower, not major distributors…And this costs more than what those movies make.
“They don’t believe there’s any foreign market for it and that’s 60 percent of their profit…I showed it to all of them and they said ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this,'” Lucas added.
In Hollywood, it seems to Lucas, there must be at least some White element to films in order for them to be seen as lucrative. “It’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first, all-black action pictures ever made. It’s not Glory where you have a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fire. They were real heroes.”
Red Tails hits theaters on January 20. Check out the trailer below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpA6TC0T_Lw]