Bamboozled (2000) on Netflix
Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated writer at the CNS network, has his scripts rejected by his boss. Hoping to be fired, he pitches a minstrel show that puts black actors in blackface.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.7/1013,209 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes52%
Trailer
Plot summary
Pierre Delacroix, Harvard-educated and employed by the television network CNS, endures his boss Thomas Dunwitty, who speaks in African-American Vernacular English, uses a racial slur freely, and claims that his black wife and their mixed-race children make him blacker than Delacroix. Dunwitty keeps rejecting Delacroix's scripts, dismissing them as clones of The Cosby Show. Wanting to escape his contract by being fired, Delacroix has his assistant Sloan Hopkins help him devise Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, a minstrel program with black actors in blackface, racist jokes and stereotyped cartoons. They cast Manray and Womack, two performers living on the street, as its stars. Womack is appalled when Delacroix describes the show; Manray sees a chance at fame for his tap dancing.
Cast
- Susan Batsonas Orchid Dothan
- MC Serchas Mau Mau: 1 / 16th Blak
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Bamboozled (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Spike Lee shot most of Bamboozled on Mini DV using the Sony VX 1000 camera and converted it to film afterwards, which kept the budget to $10 million and let him run several cameras at once to capture masters, two-shots and close-ups together.
- In a 2015 interview, Spike Lee credited A Face in the Crowd as the film that inspired him to make Bamboozled.
- Six tracks on the soundtrack album were performed by India.Arie in what were her first official appearances on an album, years before she became a Grammy award winner.
- In 2023, more than two decades after its release, Bamboozled was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
- Bamboozled took $2,463,650 at the box office against a $10 million budget, earning back less than a quarter of what the film cost to make.
