Page 2 - Black Hole Presentation

For many years it was the book cover I saw everywhere. On bookstore shelves, on tables of friends, gripped in one hand by strap hangers on New York City subways. Referenced
in pop culture and blockbuster movies. It seemed to be a wink and nod to something cool, mysterious. A secret club for those in the know. The black and white drawn image of an awkwardly smiling kid. Eyes covered by a RED BLOCK with bold white letters that read BLACK HOLE. That image drew me into Charles Burns’s graphic novel. Into his twisted yet also very real and grounded world. Everything felt both fantastically over the top, but also very personal and emotional.
A story of a mysterious BUG spread sexually among a teen population in 1970’s suburban Seattle to horrifying affect. With that, Burns tells a universal story of alienation and otherness that so many, adolescent and otherwise, can relate. The story also spoke to larger fears around the time that the HIV and AIDS health crisis was sweeping across the country and the world. I was hooked.
It’s a story that felt ripe for a screen adaptation. I wanted this to be my next film. However, how would those themes that sat underneath the surface and spoke so well to the 90’s and early aught world in which it was published, translate to my sensibility and point of view? I loved the book, but it also felt like this bubble. Both in its 1970’s set- ting, but also in the insular white suburban world it lived in. It was very authentic, and
no doubt personal to Burns, but felt detached from the world and events of the 70’s that was roiling cities across the country. Particularly in the post Civil Rights Era push for sys- temic change and the rise of the Black Power Movement. It also felt foreign to the mul- ticultural world in which we currently live. One that still grapples with racial equality and dismantling systemic racism.
I kept thinking about my own home town, Inglewood CA, and what was going on here during the same time in the 1970’s that Black Hole was set. It was the time that forced school integration though bussing and the after effects of the Watts Riots was transforming a once all white upper middle class enclave into the majority Black city that I would move to in 1986. The city that became the setting for my first film, The Wood and later Dope. In that, I found my way into Black Hole as a film that both honors the time period its was set, speaks to the continuing challenges of today, and to me personally. Black Hole would become the third film in my Inglewood Trilogy.
As a result, Black Hole becomes an allegorical story combining Burns’s classic story of teen angst and paranoia surrounding The Bug, with a layer of racial awkwardness and tension of bringing cultures together at Inglewood High School during busing. A fascinating, funny, scary and relevant exploration into the already emotional fraught teen experience. The Bug represents the other. However, The Bug could also be the key to enlightenment, embracing one’s voice, and celebrating our differences.
At Inglewood High School in 1974, a social experiment meets a societal plague. Along with the big Homecoming game and dance. Relationships, friendships, sex, drugs, and the Wattstax Music Festival. Oh yeah, and a serial killer who may be targeting kids with the Bug. Told with all the energy, style, irreverence, and heart that colors my point of view.
This is BLACK HOLE.