film director; cinematographer
Personal Information
Born c. 1952 in Newark, NJ; married twice, second wife, Traci; children: Janet, born 1984; Ernest, III, born 1991.
Education: B.A. in architecture from Howard University; graduate studies, New York University Film School.
Memberships: American Society of Cinematographers
Career
Film director and cinematographer; worked as medical photographer at Howard University School; directed and/or photographed student films at New York University, including Spike Lee's Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, 1980. Served as cinematographer on feature films The Brother from Another Planet, 1984; Almacita di Delolata and Krush Groove, 1985; She's Gotta Have It, 1986; Enemy Territory and Eddie Murphy Raw, 1987; School Daze, Vampires, and The Laser Man, 1988; Do The Right Thing, 1989; Def By Temptation, Ava and Gabriel: Un Historia di Amor, and Mo' Better Blues, 1990; Jungle Fever and Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, 1991; Cousin Bobby (documentary) and Malcolm X, 1992. Photographed television series Tales from the Darkside and Law and Order, 1990; filmed music videos for Anita Baker, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, the Neville Brothers, and others; directed television special Spike and Co.: Do It A Capella, 1990 for PBS's Great Performances series; directed television commercials, 1991--; co-writer and director of Juice, 1992; founded Original Film, a bi-coastal company formed to produce television commercials and public service announcements, 1992; directed Surviving the Game, 1993; Demon Knight, 1995; Bulletproof, 1996; Blind Faith, 1998.
Life's Work
While cinematography--the art of motion picture photography--is often seen as a lesser ingredient in filmmaking behind acting, writing, and directing, some names emerge into the forefront by virtue of their talent, innovation, and individual style. Ernest Dickerson is one such example. Long regarded as former NYU- classmate Spike Lee's exclusive cinematographer, Dickerson struck out on his own in 1991 and assumed the director's chair for the controversial film, Juice. To date, Dickerson has four films under his belt as director with no signs of stopping. Whether he'll shoot again for Lee remains questionable, although Lee was well prepared for that outcome. "I knew there would come a day where he would not be able to shoot my films," Lee admitted to Sally Weltman of Premiere. "'Cause I always knew he would end up directing. In school, Ernest had the best films. This is what he's wanted to do all along."
Born and raised in the Newark, New Jersey housing projects, Dickerson was the only child of an A&P grocery store manager and his librarian wife. Following the death of his father when he was eight, Dickerson found solace in the neighborhood movie theaters and was particularly struck by the 1948 film Oliver Twist by famed British director, David Lean. "That was the first film that made me realize that films are photography," Dickerson told Nick Ravo of the New York Times. Although his newfound interest in film was strong, Dickerson never thought he could make a career out of it and instead chose to pursue architecture.
Dickerson attended Howard University where his love for photography and film flourished amidst the many film institutes and revival houses in the Washington D.C. area. Although his major was architecture, he took a number of photo and film classes and began to work as a photographer for the school newspaper. Upon graduation Dickerson landed a job photographing medical procedures at the university's medical school which allowed him to stay in the Washington area to see and study all those movies. "And I think it was then that I started thinking a lot more seriously about film," Dickerson admitted to Kari Granville of the Los Angeles Times. "I saw that's the way I'd really love to spend the rest of my life-- making movies." After photographing an amputation procedure proved too much for Dickerson, he decided to follow his dream and went off to attend New York University's film school. Here he became fast friends and a working partner with another classmate in the graduate program--Spike Lee.
"Ernest and I were in the same class," Lee reminisced to Nelson George in the book, Spike Lee's Gotta Have It. "We came in together. He was from Howard. I was from Morehouse....We were the only blacks at NYU." Dickerson was cinematographer on Lee's first student film, Sarah, and later, Lee's thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which won Lee a Student Academy Award. Dickerson's cinematography on Joe's was noticed by independent film director John Sayles, who drafted him to shoot what would be Dickerson's first professional feature film, The Brother From Another Planet, in 1983. "I lied when he asked me if I had ever shot 35-millimeter before," Dickerson confessed to Nick Ravo of the New York Times. "I figured a camera is a camera. All the camera is is a recording device. You have got to see it first in your mind's eye, manipulate the image to make it look like it does in your head." Dickerson then went on to shoot the television series Tales From the Darkside and Michael Schultz's 1985 rap musical, Krush Groove.
In 1986 Dickerson began his long career as Spike Lee's director of photography in Lee's feature film debut, She's Gotta Have It. Filmed in black and white, Dickerson's imaginative camera work helped put Lee on the filmmaking map. Dickerson also helped Lee as a director when Lee was on screen in the role of Mars Blackmon. "Spike knows what he wants," Dickerson told Ravo. "But there have been times when he was so involved in acting, producing and casting that he wasn't able to design sequences and he left them up to me-- a pretty big responsibility for a cinematographer." Lee said as much to Nelson George in Spike Lee's Gotta Have It. "There was a problem at the beginning of the shoot when I was in front of the camera," Lee said. "I was divided. I was still playing the role of the director and I was saying, `OK, everybody. Sound. Roll sound. Camera. Action.' Then I was acting. And this wasn't working. So the gaffer, Mike Hunold--a good friend of ours who went to NYU--said, `Let's just try this: Let's leave all that stuff to Ernie.' I said fine, and everything went smoothly after that. When I was in front of the camera all I had to worry about was Mars Blackmon and Ernest was the director."
In between Spike Lee films, Dickerson kept himself busy by shooting Eddie Murphy Raw for director Robert Townsend and Peter Manoogian's suspense film Enemy Territory. In 1988 he worked again with Lee on the campus comedy School Daze followed a year later by the controversial and widely acclaimed Do the Right Thing. Among the many highly regarded aspects of the film was Dickerson's vibrant color cinematography. As David Mills of the Washington Post said, saturating the screen "in yellows and reds so the audience feels, feels the heat of a Brooklyn summer." Dickerson won the New York Film Critics Award for best cinematography for his efforts and along with a recommendation from Martin Scorsese, was tapped by director John McNaughton to shoot Eric Bogosian's performance film, Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. This coincided with two other Lee films; the moody jazz piece, Mo' Better Blues, and the bittersweet interracial love story, Jungle Fever. In addition, Dickerson was cinematographer on a number of music videos for the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Anita Baker, and the Neville Brothers.
All the while, Dickerson was looking for an opportunity to direct his own film, an eight year-old script co-written with Gerard Brown, entitled Juice. It told the tale of four young black men in the Harlem section of New York City growing up in the violence of the urban ghetto and doing whatever they can in order to get power and respect, or "juice" as it's known on the streets. For years the script had been shown to various studios who wanted Dickerson to lighten it up and turn it into a comedy. Dickerson refused. "I had very specific ideas of what I wanted the story to say and how I wanted it to be said," Dickerson told Granville of the Los Angeles Times. "I wrote it to be a piece for me to debut as a director....I wanted to do something that dealt with coming of age and the hard choices teen-agers had to make and about the forces that sometimes push young men into making the wrong choices."
The rise of popularity of Lee's films and other films aimed at a black audience such as Boyz in the Hood and New Jack City ensured a climate that allowed Dickerson to make the movie he wanted to. "It's a good thing, too," Dickerson declared to Deborah Gregory of Entertainment Weekly. "Because there's an untapped wealth of black stories, and now some of them will finally get told." The new found freedom for Black filmmakers, however, arrived with negative implications. Violence began to erupt at screenings of Black oriented films and Juice was no exception. Following its release in 1992, Dickerson found himself and his movie being discussed more for the violence that surrounded it rather than its merits as a film to the point where Paramount Pictures, the film's distributor, provided extra security at theaters where the movie was screened.
With a budget of $3 million, Juice went on to gross more than $30 million making it a commercial success although reviews were decidedly mixed. Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote that while the story idea was far from original, the execution worked "thanks to natural, affecting performances from the principals and a very sharp visual style." Leah Rozen of People, echoed these sentiments, calling Juice a commendable initial effort but "excessively limited in its reach and its characters." Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly was the most positive professing Dickerson as having "instantly arrived at the forefront of the new wave of black directors. His film aims for the gut, and hits it."
Immediately following the release of Juice, Dickerson was back behind Spike Lee's camera for the director's epic biopic, Malcolm X. The two came up with the idea of using colors in order to emphasize certain parts of Malcolm X's life. "What we wanted to do was use color and light to express the different mood's of Malcolm's life, the four parts of the film," Dickerson wrote in Spike Lee's By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X. David Ansen of Newsweek described Dickerson as "brilliant" in how he and Lee "accentuate the radical disjunctions of Malcolm's odyssey by finding a distinct visual style for each of the key episodes of his life."
For his next film as a director, Dickerson had planned to make a science fiction film he wrote entitled Future Crimes, but failed to find a studio who would back him. Instead, he returned to work on music videos and joined the staff of Original Films, a production company that makes commercials and public service announcements. Still, Dickerson chose to concentrate on directing instead of trying to duplicate the his previous success as a cinematographer. "Cinematography is a craft that sometimes rises to the level of art, depending on the subject matter and what you're able to do with it," Dickerson explained to Granville of the Los Angeles Times. "As a cinematographer I'm able to paint. It allows me to try to express the emotions of a story, through color and camera angles and lighting, light and shade. Being the director, I'm not as concerned with that as much as I am with telling the story with the actors." While he was sent scripts by various studios, he chose to wait for one that would appeal to his sense of storytelling. In choosing Surviving the Game however, most reviewers felt he should have kept on waiting.
An action thriller starring rapper/actor Ice-T as a homeless man unknowingly hired to be the prey of six wealthy hunters, 1994's Surviving the Game, did not do well at the box office after receiving many lackluster reviews. "Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson doesn't live up to the promise of his directing debut, Juice, with this thread-bare chase movie, which almost makes surviving the screening its own endurance test," Brian Lowry wrote in Variety. Janet Maslin of the New York Times also mentioned Juice, in that Dickerson's first film at least had a sense of place while Surviving the Game meanders through the wilderness which didn't suit the action. "More damagingly," Maslin wrote, "Mr. Dickinson does nothing to keep his cast from chewing up the mountain scenery." Owen Glieberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly contended that except for a few moments, "Dickerson doesn't do much to revitalize the apocalyptic cliches of the heavy-duty- action genre."
Faring a little better, but not by much, was Dickerson's next film, 1995's Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight. Based on the HBO series and 1950's comic book, Demon Knight aimed to be a gruesome, yet comical live-action cartoon, which on some levels at least, succeeded. "Gruesome, garish and smutty in a very juvenile way," Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today wrote, "Knight...nonetheless is often frightfully engaging, thanks to a game group of performers and visually electric direction from Ernest Dickerson." Most of the criticism revolved around the script--which Dickerson did not write. "There's not much effort to make anything about the story persuasive or compelling," Los Angeles Times reviewer David Kronke wrote, adding, "{Dickerson's} work is competent, though he doesn't provide the kind of jolts a movie like this needs to keep audiences engaged." Stephen Holden of the New York Times countered that what the film does best is "sustain a look and tone that bring a comic- book's broad strokes into the realm of a live-action movie without seeming too mannered or arty."
Dickerson's next film, 1996's Bulletproof, received his worst reviews yet. A buddy comedy starring comedians Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, Dickerson inparticular was assailed for falling so far from his once brilliant status as a gifted cinematographer. "Bulletproof is both offensive and depressing," Mike Clark of USA Today wrote, "from its sociopathic mix of graphic violence and slapstick to its severe career blighting of the once-formidable Ernest Dickerson." Clark went so far as to devote the last paragraph of his review bemoaning that Dickerson was becoming a "great cinematographer who has opted to become a mediocre or worse filmmaker." Christine Spines of Premiere agreed saying what a pity it was that "Spike Lee's brilliant cinematographer" was turning all his "visual razzle-dazzle into a shtickfest."
Dickerson followed the ill-received comedy with Blind Faith, a drama set in the fifties about a black family whose son is accused of murdering a white youth. Although the film did well at 1998's Sundance Film Festival and was shown on the cable network, Showtime, it had not secured a theatrical release, much to Dickerson's disappointment. "A lot of companies feel that black films that have done well have been family dramas with a feel-good happy ending," he explained to Bernard Weinraub of the New York Times. "But that's not life. They have to realize that the African American experience is not all happy endings."
Still, with all the critical and distribution problems Dickerson endures as a director, he continues his focus, even turning down such prestigious cinematography assignments as Batman Forever. His photographic eye continues to guide his decisions as a director, however. "To my mind, the camera placement and lighting can help to tell as much of the story as the script," he told Weinraub. "Photography is, after all, writing with light, telling the story with pictures....Films are an experience; it's not a neutral but a visceral medium. That's what I try to convey."
Awards
New York Film Critics Award for cinematography for Do The Right Thing, 1989.
Further Reading
Books
- George, Nelson, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies, Harper Collins, 1994.
- Guerrero, Ed, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Temple University Press, 1993.
- Kendall, Steven D., New Jack Cinema: Hollywood's African American Filmmakers, J.L. Denser, Inc., 1994.
- Lee, Spike, Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking, Fireside, 1987.
- Lee, Spike with Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X, Hyperion, 1992.
- Back Stage, March 20, 1992, p. 1; July 24, 1992, p. 6.
- Christian Science Monitor, February 11, 1992, p. 13.
- Entertainment Weekly, January 24, 1992, pp. 36, 39; July 31, 1992, p. 66; April 29, 1994, p. 54; September 20, 1996, p. 50.
- Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1991, (Calendar) p. 3; January 13, 1995, p. F-1.
- New York Times, January 17, 1992, p. C-10; January 22, 1992, p. C-13; February 4, 1992, p. A-20; April 18, 1993, p. B-14; April 16, 1994, p. A-11; January 13, 1995, p. C-20; January 30, 1998, p. E-10.
- Newsweek, January 27, 1992, p. 63; November 16, 1992, p. 74.
- People Weekly, January 27, 1992, p. 19; May 2, 1994, p. 18; January 30, 1995, p. 17.
- Premiere, February 1992, p. 40; November 1992, p. 88; September 1996, p. 16.
- USA Today, January 13, 1992, p. D-1; January 13, 1995, p. D-4; September 6, 1996, p. D-3.
- Variety, April 25, 1994.
- Washington Post, January 17, 1992, p. C-1.
— Brian Escamilla
