Screening
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Free admission. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
In person: Introduction, including a brief talk, by Artel Great, associate professor, San Francisco State University School of Cinema, and author of The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance. Q&A with Spring Mooney, daughter of comedian and actor Paul Mooney.
Screening 1 of 3
Coming to America trailer
Year: 1988
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 2 min.
35mm. Color.
In the most commercially successful Black comedy feature of its era, Eddie Murphy stands at the center of the Black Pack as Prince Akeem, heir to the throne of Zamunda, who leaves royal luxury for Queens, New York, in search of love on his own terms.
Screening 2 of 3
The Five Heartbeats trailer
Year: 1991
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 2 min.
35mm. Color.
Robert Townsend pens a soulful love letter to Black popular music in this film loosely inspired by Motown-era vocal groups. It follows a fictional quintet from 1960s chart success through industry exploitation, infighting and addiction.
Screening 3 of 3
Hollywood Shuffle
Year: 1987
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 82 min.
35mm. Color.
Robert Townsend’s audacious directorial debut remains a razor-sharp satire of Hollywood’s degrading and limited roles for Black actors. Townsend stars as Bobby Taylor, an aspiring actor pressured to erase himself to fit an “Eddie Murphy type” while auditioning for an outlandish Blaxploitation knockoff. A foundational text of the Black Pack collective, the independently produced film insists on comedy as social critique — using satire not as escapism, but as a strategy to expose industry gatekeeping, reclaim authorship and speak truth to power.
Director: Robert Townsend. Screenwriters: Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend. With: Robert Townsend, Anne-Marie Johnson, Helen Martin.
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