Hello, my name is Justin Aclure, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're talking Tyler Perry.

Expect some wild tonal shifts in this podcast.

Half heavy melodrama, half aggressively wacky comedy.

Tyler Perry is a name that everybody knows, but most

people consider, eh, he's bad. Well, most people that we know, white middle class people.

But, you know, he is incredibly popular. I was looking online, and one of the years that he was

making his movies, he was one of the most

high earning creative people. He made something like $120 million. And you know, on this podcast,

we often like to talk about black filmmakers. We often like to... That's two white guys. Yeah. Well,

we often like to talk about filmmakers who are outside of our frame of reference.

And, you know, now we're talking about not only one of the most successful black filmmakers,

but one of the most successful black moguls, period.

Yeah, like all of his films are independent productions.

That's why you make so much money.

Tyler Perry started with nothing, built it up through stage plays, which really

allowed him to start a brand, move to movies, and those were big financial successes as well,

and then has just kept on trucking. He has TV. He has so much merchandise, like books,

dolls, everything. And I think it's fair to say he burst into white consciousness on one weekend in 2005

when out of nowhere a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened at number one at the box office.

It was his first, like, main feature film.

...