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Reginald Hudlin’s home office is a monument to an audacious American dream – the Black scion who grew up far from Hollywood glamour and rose to become one of the industry’s most adaptable storytellers. On the walls, a framed Black Panther comic page he penned glints under glass near a portrait of Jamie Foxx – a souvenir from Hudlin’s stint producing Django Unchained – and a piece of the Martin Luther King memorial that he was gifted while shooting the Disney sports drama Safety. “Look, I’m pleased with my life,” he tells me with a wry smile. “But honestly it’s taken a lot of trickery to get people to let me do these crazy things. It’s taken a lot of effort, but the reward is always worth it.”
Hudlin may be the nearest thing in Hollywood to a real-life Forrest Gump, given the things he’s done, the folks he’s worked with and the history he’s made. On Marvel Comics’ Black Panther graphic novel, Hudlin was the writer who repositioned the franchise as an explicit Black empowerment allegory, laying the foundation for Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster feature films. On the big screen, Hudlin has directed Eddie Murphy in Boomerang, Samuel L Jackson in The Great White Hope and Chadwick Boseman in Marshall.
On the small screen, Hudlin helped launch the arch Boondocks comic strip on Adult Swim before taking over as the president of entertainment at BET – guiding the network’s strategic turn toward award shows and reality television. “You understand the importance of looking at your studio as a partner and not an opponent,” he says of the lessons learned before pivoting to Skydance’s controversial acquisition of BET’s parent company, Paramount. “There are gonna be a lot of changes, but I still think that BET is important and hasn’t remotely reached the potential of how great and globally important it can be.”
Ultimately, the 64-year-old owes his long and varied career to House Party, the 1990 teen comedy that shattered industry prejudices around the viability of Black film on the way to becoming a cultural touchstone. At a time when Black expression on film stretched from slave narratives to Spike Lee joints, House Party centered Black youth, friendship and joy, preserving hip-hop’s daisy-age exuberance – with yin-yang duo Kid ’n Play, AKA Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, pointing the way. This week, Hudlin’s debut film enters the Criterion Collection with a 4K restoration, commentary from the director and his brother Warrington (a House Party producer), and a cast reunion.
House Party still resonates, on TikTok and beyond. NFL stars Jalen Hurts and AJ Brown revived the trademark Kid ’n Play dance for a touchdown celebration during the Philadelphia Eagles’ Super Bowl march last year. To mark the film’s 30th anniversary in 2020, future second gentleman Doug Emhoff retweeted a clip from the seminal dance scene and shouted out Hudlin’s wife, Chrisette, for setting him up on a blind date with a California state’s attorney named Kamala. “Doug’s a great guy, Kamala’s a great lady,” Hudlin says, “and now we get to all hang out as couples on double dates. I’m just grateful about the whole thing.”
Hudlin comes from a long line of high achievers. His great-great-grandparents were conductors on the underground railroad, and his great-uncle Richard was a trailblazing college tennis player who went on to coach Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe. Hudlin grew up in the historic Mississippi River town of East St Louis, Illinois, dreaming about making movies as Warrington, nearly a decade his senior, went off to Yale to study film in the early 70s. Warrington would phone home, and Reginald would turn those long-distance check-ins into exhaustive pitch meetings. “I had a lot of ideas,” he remembers. “Finally one Christmas, he gave me a book; I opened it, and it was blank. He said: ‘Stop telling me your ideas. Write them down.’”
Hudlin carried the notebook to Harvard, jotting down scenes with friends, snatches of ear-hustled dialogue and other “cool moments”; they would become for his senior thesis film titled House Party, about a Black teen who sneaks away from home to attend an epic fete. Three years later, She’s Gotta Have It was released in theaters to widespread acclaim and had Hollywood clamoring for the next Spike Lee with a fresh perspective on the Black experience. Seeing his opening, Hudlin pitched his short and a feature-length script treatment to all the major studios and got rejected by everyone but a junior executive named Helena Echegoyen; she wound up convincing her bosses at New Line Cinema to advance Hudlin $2.5m.
The modest budget wasn’t going to attract any major stars to the film even if the Harvard grad somehow managed to intrigue someone on the level of Murphy or Sidney Poitier or even the up-and-coming Will Smith. “The only Black stars that existed back then were giant stars,” Hudlin says, “and it’s not like there were a bunch of Black teen stars we could turn to either. Even BET was not in the hip-hop business yet.” So he turned to Video Music Box – a New York-based showcase for hip-hop acts – and immediately gravitated toward Reid and Martin, their hair, their moves. “I knew a girl who knew them, and she was like, ‘They show up on time,’” Hudlin recalls. “That’s all I needed to know.”
The ensemble cast was a mix of bright young talents (future sitcom leads Tisha Campbell and Martin Lawrence), music royalty (George Clinton, Bowlegged Lou) and bold performers on the verge of wider fame; arguably, none was more cherished than the comedian Robin Harris – who died a week after House Party’s release from cardiac arrhythmia while aged 36. “He had this whole Red Foxx/Rodney Dangerfield thing going on, like he had just been thawed out of a block of ice,” says Hudlin, who had been developing another project around Harris’s biographical standup routine called Bebe’s Kids. “It was originally supposed to be a live-action film starring him. But when he passed, we said, ‘Let’s keep him alive so the people don’t forget his name.’”
At age 28, Hudlin saw his debut feature gross $26m at the box office and prove that stories about Black middle-class acceptance and aspiration could flourish without centering trauma and subjugation. Mainstream audiences were thrilled by the movie’s candy-colored outfits and set designs, and intimate camerawork that dropped viewers right on the dancefloor. Meanwhile, a soundtrack (remember those?) featuring LL Cool J, Flavor Flav and other turn-of-the-decade hitmakers peaked at No 4 on the US R&B charts.
House Party paved the way for a Black comedy film boom that would come to define the early 90s and help set the tone for wider conversations around safe sex. But even as films like Bebe’s Kids, Meteor Man and Boomerang rode the House Party wave, Hudlin could nonetheless feel the shift in tide as New Jack City and Friday were released in theaters around that same time with gangsta rap stars at the fore.
“House Party was a celebration of the happy rap era, where you just made songs about going to parties and meeting girls,” he says. “To me it was an underrated era of music history. But with the success of Ice-T and NWA, that whole vibe shifted. The culture moved away from it. But these things are just phases, you know. They come back.”
But amid the ebb and flow of popular tastes, an appetite for House Party has endured. The original film would spawn four sequels, the last two non-theatrical releases. In 2023, New Line released a rebooted version of the original film for contemporary audiences that was co-produced by the NBA’s LeBron James (who played himself in the film) and featured a cameo from Kid ’n Play – one in a slew of callbacks to their celluloid breakout down the years.
For it all to culminate with the first House Party entering the Criterion Collection makes for quite the career souvenir for Hudlin. But he’s not one to linger on past accomplishments, even with reminders all around. “I haven’t done a superhero movie, I haven’t done science fiction,” he says when I ask if there’s anything left on his to-make list. “I haven’t done a full-on, no-holds-barred musical. There’s a couple of big dramas I wanna do. I have a really long list.”
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House Party is out on 4K Blu-ray now in the US and in the UK on 2 February
