eric monte: television revolutionary
Posted: September 3rd, 2007 | Author: kamau | Filed under: magazine, race, television | 1 Comment »
in 1971 eric monte and mike evans wrote a script for 2 characters who first appeared on the show “all in the family”. those 2 characters were spun off into the sitcom “the jeffersons”. in 1971, eric monte and mike evans pitched a humorous story about a black family struggling to get by in the cabrini-green projects of chicago where monte grew up. in 1974 that script became “good times”. tired of fighting norman lear and the show writers on how to keep the show true to the reality of inner city life, he quit the show after the first season and went on write the semi-autobiographical “cooley high”. that seminal film was spun off into a tv show called “what’s happening!!”; although monte had minimal involvement with that show, beyond writing the initial script.
it is amazing to think how much impact one man had on changing the tv landscape, post civil rights struggle. before he appeared there were few significant real black characters on television. after he left, aside from the cosby show, no other show on network tv has broken new ground in portraying the realistic AND positive experience of being black in america (monte even claims he gave the idea of that show to cosby executive producer marcy casey). and like many revolutionaries, he did not benefit from the fruits of his efforts. when this npr interview [audio] was done in 2006, he was living in a homeless shelter, blackballed from hollywood for being “hard to work with” (read: fighting against stereotypical black characters, fighting for control over the direction of shows he had created).
source: waxpoetics, issue 20 dec/jan 2007 pp. 30-33
[...] Eric Monte, the creator of Good times, grew up in the infamous Cabrini-Green projects on the North Side of Chicago (shown at 0:32 and after), before hitchhiking to Hollywood to become one of the most important and prolific television writers of the last forty years. These days, Good Times is probably more remembered for the debut of Janet Jackson, Ernie Barnes’ Sugar shack, and charges of black stereotyping (read here about Comte’s horror when his writing staff tried to get John Amos to say “I’se be wantin’ to go down by da ribba” ). Nevertheless, Good Times probably stands as the only sitcom that was set in the projects, which described (in its brilliant theme song especially) the long struggle of African Americans living in urban blight. It was the flipside of the upwardly mobile (but still cynical) Jeffersons‘ American dream. Unfortunately, not too long into its five year run, Comte left, and JJ hollered “Dy-no-mite!” as the show tumbled towards infamy. [...]