‘HOUSE PARTY’ AT 30: WRITER-DIRECTOR REGINALD HUDLIN ON ALMOST CAST WILL SMITH, HOLLYWOOD’S RESISTANCE TO BLACK TEEN MOVIES, AND MORE

“Thirty is the age of a grown ass person,” Reginald Hudlin declared on Monday, the day his directorial debut and cult classic House Party celebrated the 30th anniversary of its theatrical release. That means House Party, which starred popular rap duo Kid-N-Play as high school friends who plot a raucous blowout when one’s parents leave town, is officially a grown-ass movie.

Hudlin’s House Party journey extends well beyond 30 years back, though. As an undergrad at Harvard University, the East St. Louis, Illinois native directed a short film by the same name in 1983. The short won top honors at the Black American Cinema Society Awards.

“Back then, the whole black film hadn’t exploded yet, it was everyone making little movies,” Hudlin told Yahoo Entertainment.

“I’m meeting with different studios, and they’re all turning me down. One executive said, ‘Look. There’s two things that nobody wants to see: black movies, and teen movies. You have a black teen movie. No one wants to see that.’

The project did eventually garner the attention of New Line Cinema, a fledgling studio then best known for its Nightmare on Elm Street series, or as Hudlin called the distributor, “the last stop on the train.”

New Line bit, and they had the perfect hip-hop duo in mind to star: “Parents Just Don’t Understand” tandem DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, a.k.a. Will Smith. “And I was like, ‘I love them!,” Hudlin recalled. “So I went to talk to their manager at the time, who was Russell Simmons. Russell’s like, ‘Oh, we’re doing big deals in Hollywood!'”

In other words, no thank you.

“Years later, we’re all in Hollywood together, and I’d see Will Smith, who is the nicest, greatest guy in the world,” Hudlin said. “It was a great movie with Kid-N-Play, it would’ve been a great movie with Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff. I still would love to work with Will at some point. But this is what happens. It was meant to be the way we made it.” (In a fascinating twist of Hollywood role reversals, Christopher “Kid” Reid has said the success of House Party earned them an offer for an NBC sitcom, which they passed on; it ultimately became The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, starring… Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff.)

Hudlin was still interested in tapping into hip-hop to find his leads. “You really had to turn to the music world to find people who had a fanbase,” he said. The filmmaker had seen music videos from Kid-N-Play, best known for hits like “Rollin’ with Kid ‘n Play” and “Gittin’ Funky,” was drawn to their aesthetics: Kid’s famous high-top fade, their flashy wears, and synchronized dance routines. “They were cool, two guys with two different looks,” Hudlin said. This is gonna to be great, he thought.

Audiences agreed. House Party went on to earn $26 million on a budget of $2.5 million, becoming one of the most profitable films of the year and boosting the profile of New Line Cinema, not to mention costars like Martin Lawrence and Tisha Campbell (who’d later reunited in Hudlin’s follow-up Boomerang before costarring on the sitcom favorite Martin). It found an even wider audience on home video, and is credited with broadening on-screen portrayals of African American teens, helping usher hip-hop into the mainstream, and successfully endorsing the practice of safe sex thanks to its iconic broken condom scene.

It also led to four sequels, though Hudlin was not directly involved in any of them.

“I get a check,” laughed Hudlin, who in recent years earned an Oscar nomination for producing 2012’s Django Unchained and directed the 2017 Thurgood Marshall biopic Marshall. “Every year I open a mailbox and there’s a check! You go, ‘Yes!'”

That’s one benefit that comes from writing and directing one very successful and influential grown-ass movie.

Watch our full uncut interview with Reginald Hudlin here:

“WHO CAN’T GET ON BOARD WITH THAT?”: HOW ‘HOUSE PARTY’ BROUGHT THE BLACK TEENAGE EXPERIENCE TO THE MAINSTREAM

Released 30 years ago on Monday, the movie is best remembered for Kid ’n Play and an infamous dance battle. But the breakout hit was also one of the most important films of the 1990s. 

“The fact is, these black kids are just like every other kid in America,” Reginald Hudlin says. “It’s the same drama, which is why everybody relates to the movie: It’s the universal experience of being a teenager.”

House Party—the first movie Hudlin wrote and directed—isn’t a novel concept. A teen from Anywhere, USA, gets in trouble at school and is forbidden by his strict father from going to a friend’s party, an order he obviously disregards. From there, the kid spends nearly 100 minutes trying to avoid ass-kickings from three muscle-bound tormentors, two racist cops, and one pissed-off father, all while hedging his bet with two girls who have varying degrees of interest in him. But despite the simple formula, House Party stands in stark contrast to many of the teen films that preceded it—because, as Hudlin mentioned, these kids were black.

The teen movies of the 1980s, such as those written and directed by John Hughes, left an indelible mark on the decade. In many ways, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are as representative of the ’80s as Reaganomics. That is the snapshot of Americana his administration sought to protect. These films depict a distinctly safe, white, suburban teenage existence. Black teens of that era, on the other hand, had no quintessential equivalent. There were films targeting young black audiences that attained cult status, but they didn’t receive the same adoration. House Party, which was released on March 9, 1990, changed that. “Even though you had Beat Street and Wild Style, there was nothing like this,” says Christopher “Play” Martin, who portrayed the party’s suave host. Clueless sparked a teen movie revival during the mid-’90s and Cruel Intentions supposedly put the genre 6 feet deep at the decade’s close, but House Party set the standard.

House Party was the first teen movie released in the ’90s. It came amid new interest in black stories and black filmmakers, spurred by Spike Lee’s polemical Do the Right Thing the previous year; Keenen Ivory Wayans’s blaxploitation sendup, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, in 1988; Robert Townsend’s Hollywood satire Hollywood Shuffle in 1987; and Lee’s first feature, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1986. The headline for a New York Times piece that ran just days before House Party hit theaters proclaimed, “In Hollywood, Black Is In.” Despite how Hollywood might have viewed black cinema, it wasn’t a mere trend. House Party was about to prove there was potency in putting black people in the center of a universal experience.

“Nowhere in that movie is a city or town mentioned because [Reggie] didn’t want anyone who watched it to feel like, ‘This could only happen in Chicago, New York, or wherever,’” says Martin. “If you tell the story right, who can’t get on board with that?” says Christopher “Kid” Reid, who played the lead role. Many people got on board, as a matter of fact: House Party became a box office surprise, raking in over $26 million on a $2.5 million budget. It helped turn New Line Cinema, then a relatively small company, into a reputable studio. It also significantly elevated its rookie director and some of its cast, many of whom were appearing in their first film, to stardom. Kid ’n Play. Full Force. Tisha Campbell. Martin Lawrence. AJ Johnson. Daryl “Chill” Mitchell. The late Robin Harris, who died of a heart attack at age 36 about a week after the film’s release, and the late John Witherspoon. And because House Party was about kids who loved hip-hop and featured hip-hop acts prominently, its success also helped ease hip-hop into the mainstream.

House Party isn’t just one of the most important black films ever made—it’s one of the most important films of the late 20th century, a movie that showed Hollywood the breadth of the black experience, and the immense interest in it.

Long before House Party became a classic, it was a student film of Hudlin’s. An undergrad at Harvard University in the early ’80s, Hudlin spent an entire summer working to fund his senior thesis project. On the last day of his break, he was packing up to return to school when Luther Vandross’s 1982 hit “Bad Boy/Having a Party” began playing on the radio. “At the time, black music videos weren’t really a thing, so I would come up with a music video in my head to a song,” Hudlin says. “I kept thinking about what that would be, and then I thought: ‘No, that’s a movie.’” He had spent the entire summer working on an unrelated script, but “Bad Boy/Having a Party” convinced him to rip it up and start on what would become House Party, inspired loosely by his upbringing in East St. Louis, Illinois. With the assistance of his older brother, producer and director Warrington Hudlin, he got the 20-minute version of House Party in front of more eyes.

The elder Hudlin, who served as a producer for House Party, founded the Black Filmmaker Foundation in 1978 with Yale University classmates Alric Nembhard and George Cunningham. The organization, which distributed early films by directors including Lee and Julie Dash, held screenings each summer where the younger Hudlin showed his short films, including House Party. The film soon found its way into the orbit of Janet Grillo, then a junior executive for New Line. “One of my staffers, Helena Echegoyen, was friends with Reggie, so she brought the short film he’d made as a Harvard undergraduate that was the short of House Party,” says Grillo, now a filmmaker and film professor at New York University. “I was very impressed. The talent just jumped off the screen and it was also personal. He came in to meet and actually had a very long treatment or rough first draft of a completely different script that was about a teenage band. We sort of played around with that for a couple of weeks and it just wasn’t happening, so I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just make House Party as a feature?’”

“One executive was like, ‘You know what no one wants to see? Black movies or teen movies. You have a black, teen movie.’”

Reginald Hudlin

According to Hudlin, they moved forward with New Line Cinema around 1988 because every other studio turned them down, citing the scope of the project. “I remember one executive was like, ‘You know what no one wants to see? Black movies or teen movies. You have a black, teen movie.’” Grillo, though, was keenly aware of the obstacles marginalized people face in Hollywood. “As someone who wasn’t able to create my stories because nobody gave a hoot about women telling stories until the last 10 years, I well understood the importance, necessity, and difficulty for people who are not mainstream, white, male, and heterosexual to get access to storytelling,” she explains. It was highly unlikely that Grillo would be able to secure distribution money for a first-time black director, but she pledged to develop the script with Hudlin and ultimately pitch it to her superiors—which she did, as a “black John Hughes film.” 

At the time, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise was New Line Cinema’s most successful venture. Those films changed the company’s trajectory, though even as the studio forced its way into the mainstream, the studio continued to target the sort of niche projects on which it found its success. New Line was looking for new ways to best accommodate underserved audiences, Grillo says, and House Party was it. The film had an earnestness similar to that of the 1975 blaxploitation-era classic Cooley High, minus the tragedy. “I said this was a different way to reach our audience,” says Grillo. “We’ve been looking at gangster films, we’ve been looking at obviously horror movies, but this is a totally different way to serve them—and it’s fresh.”

Hudlin, who was a fan of American Graffiti, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and Risky Business, admired Hughes’s films, but wanted to show the world black America’s version. “It wasn’t so much, ‘Oh, where’s the black character in those movies?’ I just thought, ‘We have those experiences too,’” he says. “My whole career has been focused on showing sides of black life that aren’t normally seen. I was really interested in doing something different and, at the time, there were a lot of very explicitly political films being made. Which is great, but I thought the best way to say something political is to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re sending a message at all.”

Hip-hop was written into House Party’s script, but it went over the heads of many studio executives. Although the genre was rising in popularity during the late ’80s, and hip-hop-centric films like 1983’s Wild Style, 1984’s Beat Street, and 1985’s Krush Groove had become cult favorites, it still wasn’t on the average exec’s radar. Grillo says the staff at New Line’s New York office was well aware of hip-hop’s rising influence because they rode the subways and walked the streets, unlike their Los Angeles counterparts. “They were going from their houses, to their cars, to their screening rooms, to their offices and back, so there was no real understanding of this emerging thrum of culture,” she says. To remedy this, Grillo sent a copy of House Party’s script along with a xeroxed copy of an article detailing the rise of hip-hop to New Line’s Los Angeles office. The gimmick worked, and in 1988, New Line officially agreed to fund the production of House Party.

When it came to casting the two best friends at the center of the movie, New Line had its eyes on two budding stars, Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff—because of their popularity and the fact that New Line had them in a legal bind over an uncleared sample. “When [Smith] was The Fresh Prince, he made this song, ‘A Nightmare on My Street,’” Grillo recalls. “He failed to get the rights from us for that. In the lawsuit, we gave him the option: Either you pay us money or you appear in one of our movies.” Hudlin, however, didn’t want Smith simply because he’d lost a lawsuit. “I don’t want him to not be into it, I only want him to do it because he likes it,” he remembers.

“I remember reading the original script, and we had been approached before by people trying to do movies with us, but this was the best thing I’d read.”

Christopher Reid (Kid)

In the late ’80s, Hudlin had directed videos for Uptown Records (original home of both Jodeci and Mary J. Blige) artists such as Heavy D and the Boyz. Through Uptown founder Andre Harrell, he came across the New York–based hip-hop trio Groove B. Chill (Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, Gene “Groove” Allen, and Belal “DJ Belal” Miller), whom he considered for top billing. “They saw me and Groove always cutting up, so they realized we had character,” says Mitchell of the Hudlin brothers. Mitchell adds that certain elements of the story—Lawrence’s character, also a DJ, being named “Bilal” after DJ Belal; being late to pick up the irritable Bilal for the party and damaging his equipment in the process; Belal yelling at Chill for bumping the table while he’s DJing—are based on some of their real-life experiences. However, New Line wanted more star power, though Groove B. Chill still appeared in the film. “They explained the scenario—they had to get a bigger name to get the movie made,” says Mitchell. “And that’s when they got Kid ’n Play.” 

By 1989, Kid ’n Play’s debut album, 2 Hype, was certified gold and the duo, Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, had a hit single with “Rollin With Kid ’n Play.” Hudlin came across their videos on the New York–based television show Video Music Box, which earned acclaim for its early embrace of hip-hop culture, and was impressed by their style, charm, and dancing ability. After meeting Reid in a New York City club and bumping into him a few more times, Hudlin eventually got him to read the script. “It was kind of my job in the crew to read stuff,” says Reid. “I remember reading the original script, and we had been approached before by people trying to do movies with us, but this was the best thing I’d read.” Kid ’n Play had booked a tour and stood to lose money if they opted to do the movie, fueling apprehension from an already uninterested Martin. “When you’ve got rap kingpins like Run-DMC doing a movie that a lot of people don’t remember or know like Tougher Than Leather, I was like, ‘If those guys can’t do a movie, then who are we to think we could achieve such a thing?’” says Martin.

But Martin was outvoted—Reid was in, and so was their manager Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. “To this day, I’m glad that’s an argument that I lost,” Martin admits.

House Party was filmed over the course of 30 days in Los Angeles in 1989. Most of the cast was green. Campbell—whom Hudlin loved in 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors and 1988’s School Daze and who was cast as Sidney (the girl Kid ends up with)—was probably the most experienced. “Whatever technical question you had, she had the answer,” Mitchell remembers. AJ Johnson was cast as Sharane, who spends the bulk of House Party stringing Kid along, because she and Campbell were already friends. “That girlfriend energy just felt really right,” Hudlin says of their chemistry. Lawrence, who appeared in What’s Happening Now!! and had a small role in Do the Right Thing, also impressed Hudlin through his stand-up comedy. Watching stand-up also led Hudlin to Harris (whom he’d honor by writing and co-producing 1992’s Bébé’s Kids, which is based on one of Harris’s best-known comedy routines), who also appeared in Do the Right Thing and stole every scene with his legendary shit-talking. Hudlin dismissed objections to casting Harris. “People were like, ‘Oh, you can’t cast him because people can’t understand what he’s saying,’” he says. “‘Oh, you’re saying his accent is too black? Oh hell yeah, we’re casting him!’”

John Witherspoon, already a legend in Hudlin’s eyes, was cast off his work in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Hollywood Shuffle, and The Richard Pryor Show. And Hudlin, a huge Parliament-Funkadelic fan, wrote a role specifically for George Clinton—the funk deity has a cameo as a fast-talking DJ at a bougie affair—so he might have the chance to meet him. Full Force, who were already known for their own music as well as writing and producing for Kurtis Blow and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, wound up in House Party as the bullies because the script already included descriptions of them. “It said something like, They get accosted by three bullies with great physiques and Jheri curls, somebody like Full Force,” says singer Lou “Bowlegged Lou” George, who played Pee-Wee. 

Full Force completely rewrote their characters’ dialogue (adding their catchphrases, of course) so they didn’t come across like the archetypal bullies Brian “B-Fine” George and Paul “Paul Anthony” George played in Krush Groove. “I said look, if [the Hudlin brothers] don’t like it, I’ll go back to the original script—as boring and bland as it may be,” George remembers, explaining how he improvised to make the trio feel three-dimensional. “And as soon as they saw us do it, they gave us the thumbs up.” Hudlin gave the rest of the cast similar latitude. “To Reggie’s credit, he was like, ‘We just gotta get there. It doesn’t matter how we get there, but I want to get there in your voice,’” Reid says. 

Unsurprisingly, giving Harris carte blanche unleashed his trademark brazen, acid-tongued humor. “We were using tape and not digital, so you couldn’t be wasting film, and Reggie and them would say ‘Action!’ and tell [the camera people] don’t roll the camera because they knew we were gonna laugh when we weren’t supposed to because Robin Harris would keep coming up with something different each time,” says Mitchell. “He’d have the dude holding the boom mic laughing and then the boom would dip into the shot,” Reid adds with a laugh. The comedy didn’t stop with Harris. “Martin Lawrence was hilarious, he used to make fun of Kid ’n Play,” George says. “His favorite Full Force song was ‘Temporary Love Thing’ and he’d start singing it on set.” That atmosphere made it easier to film some of the more labor-intensive scenes, such as House Party’s most famous offering: the dance-off.

What began with Chill pressing Kid to show him a particular maneuver turned into the scene that defined the entire movie. It’s impromptu, transitioning quickly from a sequestered kitchen exchange to the heart of the party. The scene pits Kid ’n Play’s brash, free-form style against Campbell and Johnson’s fluid, Soul Train–esque method. “I think what we were able to accomplish was an abstract tribute to different forms of music,” says Martin. It was the product of intense choreography and sweat in a dance studio that, due to the cast and crew’s bond, never felt like a chore. “That was just a walk in the park for us,” says Reid, adding that those were moves they sharpened through live performance. “Those girls are awesome,” Reid says of Campbell and Johnson. “They’re my homegirls, but we smoked them.” (Neither Campbell nor Johnson could be reached for comment.) All parties brought their A-game, so the audience is the true winner.

As wonderfully random as the scene is, it’s the type of moment—a jolt of euphoria—a teenager would absolutely sneak out of the house for. Roger Ebert described House Party as “a musical” in his review, and Hudlin, a proud fan of the genre, still considers filming the scene a top-five day in his life, up there with the birth of his children. “I’ve come to realize that it’s like that Nicholas brothers scene from Stormy Weather or one of those Gene Kelly scenes from Singin’ in the Rain,” he says. “It’s one of the most famous dance scenes in a movie that has ever existed.” Reid agrees, adding that the payoff was more than worth the hours poured into making it: “It was one big, long day. But at the end of it, it’s like, ‘We got paid for that?!’”

It’s a fantastic musical cue in a film filled with them. There’s a perfect callback to the song that inspired House Party, “Bad Boy/Having a Party,” at the very beginning of the film. There’s the rap battle where Kid gets to shine, and for which Reid wrote both his and Martin’s lyrics (“Reggie used to tell me, ‘You’re supposed to win, but let’s get there in a certain way,’” he recalls). There’s the slow dance to Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.” There’s even Kid’s surreal jailhouse rap, which Hudlin now regrets for its homophobia (“There’s nothing worse than offending people who you don’t mean to offend,” he says). But what makes the dance-off stand out is the buoyant “Ain’t My Type of Hype.” The song, originally included on Full Force’s 1989 album, Smoove, blew up due to the movie. “The Hudlin brothers loved that song, and to this day, because of House Party, ‘Ain’t My Type of Hype’ is our most popular song ever,” says George.

Longevity wasn’t on anyone’s mind, even as the set drew notable visitors at random. “Laurence Fishburne was shooting Pee-wee’s Playhouse; he’d stop by,” says Mitchell. “We saw Sylvester Stallone—he popped his head in because we were doing it. To see him out there, it was like, ‘Damn, that’s Sly Stallone.’ So many actors would come by the set. Then when we did the wrap party, Denzel [Washington] came because it was a big deal.”

Still, no one involved with House Party realized the film was about to change their lives.

It took just one weekend at the box office for House Party to recoup its budget—and then some. House Party succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations, and the response at early screenings revealed that the film was special. “A lot of movie makers of this type of film still look at House Party, business-wise, as a level to reach,” says Martin. 

Most importantly, however, House Party repudiated Hollywood’s unfounded yet closely held belief that no one cared about black teen movies. “There was a screening on this lot of 20th Century Fox. We’re driving to the lot, and there was all this traffic, and we got nervous about being late to our own test screening because of it,” Hudlin says. “Then we realized the traffic was people coming to the test screening of House Party. We were causing a traffic jam.”

When the Hudlins took the film to the Sundance Film Festival, it debuted at midnight to a packed theater. Hudlin says that two people from the almost exclusively white crowd approached him afterward with praise. “One was Michael Moore, the filmmaker who did Roger & Me and all those movies, and he was like, ‘Man, I love this movie!’” he says. “And then there was an executive from Warner Bros. who was like, ‘I read your script. I didn’t get it, but I get it now. We’ll buy this movie from New Line. I love this movie.’” 

Mitchell realized he was part of a phenomenon when the since-demolished Commack theater in Long Island, New York, sold out of tickets for House Party, which was showing in only one theater. “We got in there and I saw people sitting on the floor in the aisles,” he says. “Security was trying to get them to move and they’d just get up and go to another spot. Girls were sitting on dudes’ laps that they didn’t even know. And when we hit that screen, the noise that came out of that movie theater, yo, I was like, ‘Oh my God …’”

The widespread appeal of House Party became even clearer when the film was released on home video. “This guy who owned a video store in Orange County was like, ‘I can’t keep House Party on my shelf,’” says Hudlin. “‘Don’t let anyone tell you that white people aren’t watching this movie because my customers love it.’”

“It wasn’t just a black movie. I’m sure New Line thought it was—but it transcended that.”

Christopher Reid (Kid)

“It wasn’t just a black movie,” says Reid. “I’m sure New Line thought it was—but it transcended that.” Still, there were specific moments that exhibited what it’s like being black, for better and for worse. The Full Force trio threaten Kid at every turn, but the violent and almost comically racist police antagonize everyone throughout the movie. There are consequences for the characters in House Party—simply for existing—that the likes of Ferris Bueller didn’t have to consider. “This was a teen movie like all of the John Hughes movies and all that,” says Reid. “But look what we had to navigate. The white dude doesn’t have to deal with half of this, all he has to do is wake up and shit is lovely. We have obstacles. But Reggie did it in a way that wasn’t overbearing or heavy-handed.”

House Party’s commercial triumph yielded more opportunities for its cast and crew. After getting offers from every studio in town, Hudlin’s big hit came following a phone call from Eddie Murphy. 1992’s Boomerang, which grossed $131 million globally against a $42 million budget, proved House Party was no fluke. A number of familiar faces from House Party were part of the ensemble cast: Lawrence, Witherspoon, Bebe Drake, Campbell, and Mitchell. House Party’s success funneled most of its cast into steady work (Mitchell has worked consistently as an actor since) or starring roles (Lawrence and Campbell landed the Fox sitcom Martin, in 1992). It spawned four sequels—two of which starred Kid ’n Play, who also secured a short-lived NBC cartoon in 1990 and a Marvel comic book series in 1992, the same year they starred in Class Act. 

House Party’s resonance has now spanned generations. People re-create the dance-off at weddings, while a torrent of GIFs have preserved the scene on hallowed social media ground. While white executives at the time may have brushed House Party off because it seemed too impractical to succeed, there’s now entire generations who grew up on the movie. “To hear Method Man’s story of how he took this girl that he was really feeling on a date to go see House Party,” Martin says, “it just blew my mind that someone like Method Man was telling me this hilarious story about a coming-of-age moment in his life where House Party played such an important role.” Reid remembers being accosted by a child who recognized him from the film. “I was in Atlanta a few years ago and this little girl, like 6 years old, ran up on me,” he says. “She said, ‘You got a whoopin’ from your pops.’ I was like, ‘How’d you know I got a whoopin’ from my pops?’ She said, ‘My auntie watches that movie all the time.’ They’re passing it down.” George still enjoys reciting his signature lines. “Thirty years later, I’m still saying, ‘I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ assss,’ because people are still asking me to say it all the time,” he says with proud laughter.

“Thirty years later, I’m still saying, ‘I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ assss,’ because people are still asking me to say it all the time.”

“Lou Bowlegged Lou” George

There’s a good chance House Party’s influence may never fade. In February 2018, LeBron James and his SpringHill Entertainment partner Maverick Carter announced that they’d be co-producing a modern take on the film with a script written by Stephen Glover and Jamal Olori, most notably of FX’s Atlanta. Both Reid and Martin are eager to see how the concept translates in the modern era and for the new handlers to succeed at that. “Let’s get a new crew of young’uns up in there to tell it their way,” says Reid. 

“I’m honored they think that much of it to try and make it happen,” Martin adds. 

What can’t get lost in all of this is how House Party helped broaden the depictions of black people in cinema at a crucial time. “This is the best time in history to be a black filmmaker,” Hudlin told The New York Times in 1990. Numerous black films were released the following year: John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City, Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Lee’s Jungle Fever, Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats, Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem, Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn, and George Jackson and Doug McHenry’s House Party 2, just to name a few. Although Hollywood’s interest in black stories and filmmakers dissipated heading into the 2000s, the 2010s marked another upswing. Directors like Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, and now Jordan Peele are currently thriving while telling very different black stories. “The truth is that it’s a cycle, but every cycle gets bigger and better,” Hudlin says. “The movies are bigger—bigger budgets, global reach, better filmmaking.”

“Black people are not a monolith” is a refrain that will likely (and unfortunately) be repeated until the end of time, but House Party’s immediate success and lasting impact are hard evidence that it’s true. “It widened the industry’s perception and understanding of who black audiences are and what they want,” Grillo says of its legacy. “And created a bridge to widen the understanding and perception of black culture to the rest of us.”

Julian Kimble has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Undefeated, GQ, Billboard, Pitchfork, The Fader, SB Nation, and many more.

HOUSE PARTY AND THE ART OF THE DANCE-OFF

Upon its 30th anniversary, the dance-off in Reginald and Warrington Hudlin’s teen comedy offers a rosetta stone for the rest of the film’s enduring charms.

Arriving at the end of the decade in which teen movie conventions were minted, House Party made a handful of notable – even essential – changes to genre conventions. Written, directed by and starring black performers, it lent an overdue authenticity to the notion than teenage experiences on screen were universal – the idea that black kids wanted the same things and struggled with the same problems as their white counterparts. It also added a lot of little details that of course distinguished the trouble (or even appearance of trouble) that black high schoolers got into as well, and added a sharper cultural context that, quite frankly, virtually none of its predecessors touched upon, including the likes of The Breakfast Club or Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

But Reginald Hudlin’s debut feature earned its place among top-tier teen comedies by using all of those specificities as a foundation while being just as irreverent, raucous and fun as the ones it followed. That’s exactly why 30 years later, House Party remains as vibrant and thrilling today, encapsulated in a centerpiece dance scene that (1) holds up as a benchmark even among classic musicals and (2) elevates Hudlin’s vision to something truly enduring and essentially cinematic.

The basic details are sort of delightfully unremarkable: after getting into a fight with a high school bully Stab (“Paul Anthony” George), the eraser-headed Kid (Christopher Reid) sneaks out against his father Pop’s (Robin Harris) wishes to attend the party of his best friend and sometime competitor Play (Christopher Martin). Trouble ensues when Stab and his pals decide to exact revenge, even as Kid awkwardly attempts to navigate flirtations with both Sharane (A.J. Johnson) and Sydney (Tisha Campbell), classmates who aren’t entirely sure if they like him or Play better. Their evenings converge at Play’s party, where the four of them finally begin to start pairing off after a dance-off clears the floor.

Rewatching this scene recently left me in tears: it’s such a wonderfully joyful moment that highlights the skill of all four performers, while injecting some playful, unique energy into their courtship that, again, few other teen comedies accomplished with such brio. It begins when social rival Groove (Gene Allen) enlists Kid to teach him a dance move, exposing him to embarrassment by Sharane and Sydney. But Kid fearlessly challenges both to a dance-off, and when Groove can’t keep up, Play steps in. What happens from there is pure, exhilarating movement:

The showdown is truly a stand-off in the end, as Hudlin and his choreographer give the actresses moves that equal and sometimes even surpass their male counterparts. The fact that they’re all good is what distinguishes the scene from so many others: in a scene that’s supposed to not just be energetic but funny, what they’re doing only amplifies the humor, and the sexual tension. And at the same time, none of the choreography is explicit or raunchy. Given Kid and Play’s off screen relationship as halves of a hip-hop duo, it’s clear they have a comfortable and well-established rapport, boiled down to a move that rightfully has earned the name “the kid ‘n play.” But Sharene and Sydney know themselves and each other just as well, and it makes them ideal partners for these slick but goofy teenagers trying to impress their classmates with cool they can’t fully wear confidently.

But what the movie does so well from there is explore the dynamics between these two sets of friends in a socioeconomic context – Kid, baby-faced, light-skinned and lower-income opposite Play, darker-skinned, more affluent and suave, while Sharane is the “hood chick” to Sydney’s wholesome suburbanite. Both of the girls initially think Kid is cute, but their approaches to flirtation are markedly different; conversely, Play leans into the pretense of being a lothario, while Kid charms them less convincingly. These are all elements that Hudlin doesn’t foreground, but he’s clearly tapping into some of the same ideas that Spike Lee broached two years prior in School Daze, not just utilizing a few of the same actors but in juxtaposing black characters with different shades of skin coming from different economic classes against each other. The kids here are meant to be just a little bit younger – maybe not quite aware of those differences on a conscious level – but Hudlin establishes how they play out even in communities where they’re not focused upon.

Kid and Play – or more accurately, Kid and Pops – additionally reckon with another intrusive and inescapable force in their community, the police, after two cops corner them one at a time while walking at night on the sidewalk. Harris’ Pop is suitably disrespectful in return for their profiling, but their repeated appearance even in a community that within the film is primarily black offers a reminder that getting in trouble or just doing some of the really ordinary things that white teenagers might in a comedy must be treated differently to be authentic. What’s really terrific is how even different social strata in this black community react to disruptive black kids versus police, even when those police are to whatever extent responding as their job demands.

During a detour from the party to escape Stab and his buddies, Kid escapes another beatdown when cops show up and try to arrest all four of them at a reunion party attended by wealthy black alumni. Even irritated by the kids, they immediately stick up for all four of them when the cops announce plans to run them off to jail. There’s an understated solidarity that points out how the individuals in their community stick together against the presumably (and as the movie shows, demonstrably) more oppressive forces that patrol and monitor it from the outside.

But for a black teen comedy where among other misadventures, one of the main characters ends up in jail, House Party remains a delightfully wholesome, well-intentioned slice of fun. These teenagers are horny, clever (but not always smart), awkward, and misguided in consistently charming ways. Kid’s plea to win Sydney’s affection doesn’t sound like a ploy, it feels sincere. Play’s skill preparing his house for the party – removing fine glassware and furniture to prevent damage – and then his anxiety after someone breaks the toilet all feels real and believable, and probably a bit smarter than, say, Wyatt and Gary as they mount their shindig in Weird Science(even with Lisa’s magic to fix all the damage afterward).

Robin Harris, so fantastically filthy in both this and Mo’ Better Blues in the same year, unfortunately passed away far too soon, but for a comedian seldom known on screen for sentimentality, he delivers a performance that conveys both authority and sincere love for his son. Martin Lawrence shines as Bilal, their long-suffering friend and DJ, testing that boundary he explored often later in his career as both annoying and appealing.  Meanwhile, Kid and Play – evidently chosen after the original plan to cast Will Smith and Jeff Townes, a/k/a Jazzy Jeff, fell through, exude charm and charisma, definitely more than enough to sustain this franchise through two more installments (and two more without them).

After a decade of teen movies about white kids navigating high school, love, sex, bullies and both good and bad social choices, Hudlin’s film felt like a breath of fresh air because its focus was on all of the same challenges, just with kids who looked a little different than the genre’s fans may have expected. The longevity that House Partypossesses today comes precisely from that combination of archetypes universal and narrowly specific, enabling more viewers than ever to see something unique and transcendent in that familiar story that they never had before – namely, themselves. And then and now, it’s a welcome a reminder that dancing is a really fun way to meet and connect with other people (much less potential romantic partners), especially if you’re good at it.

‘HOUSE PARTY’ IS A CLASSIC COMEDY THAT SHOWED BLACK KIDS BEING THEMSELVES

Reggie Hudlin’s classic comedy’s enduring appeal lies in its specific cultural voice.

It’s been 30 years since the release of House Party, the enduring Reginald Hudlin-directed teen rap comedy starring Kid ‘N Play. In those three decades, the popular movie has spawned an entire franchise (with an expected reboot on the way), turned Kid ‘N Play into pop culture superstars (remember the cartoon?), led to some cast reunions and retrospectives, and made it a fixture on most lists celebrating classic Black movies. It’s uniquely timeless: a movie draped in Black culture, an ode to Black teendom and a film that celebrates the universal, youthful release that hip-hop has always been able to provide.

The film was born of a 1983 short that was shot and produced by Hudlin while he was still a student at Harvard. In 1987, brothers Reggie and Warrington Hudlin turned the short into a full feature script, presenting it to New Line Cinema, the movie studio then predominantly known for the Nightmare On Elm Street horror series. Looking to hop on the post-Spike Lee Black film wave, the studio greenlit the movie. Initially written for Grammy-winning pop-rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, the starring roles instead went to their contemporaries Kid ‘N Play, a pair of fleet-footed rhymers from Queens who’d enjoyed a string of rap hits helmed by superproducer Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. A virtually unknown Martin Lawrence soon joined the cast as Kid ‘N Play’s hapless buddy, Bilal—fresh off his first big screen appearance in Lee’s 1989 classic Do The Right Thing.

As the film’s two female leads, Sidney (Tisha Campbell) and Sharane (A.J. Johnson) are at the center of both the film’s romantic conflicts and their own semi-rivalry. The two actresses already knew each other when House Party began casting.

“I was just coming out of In Living Color,” Johnson recalls to VIBE. “[My attorney] was also the attorney for Reggie and Warrington Hudlin. He told me there was a film he was representing that I was perfect for. They were looking for a brown-skinned dancer, high energy, attitude, fun loving–and that’s kind of where it began. By the time he set up my audition, it was actually a pairing for the Sidney and Sharane roles. At the time, Tisha was my friend but more my mentor. Because at that time, I was a dancer. I’d done little bits of acting, but more so dancing. She said ‘I’ve got an audition for a movie called House Party!’ I said ‘Me too!,’ and she was like ‘omigod! Let’s go at the same time!”

On-set, Johnson admits that she didn’t get the movie initially. But she focused on the bond between she and Campbell’s characters.

“Not at all!” she says with a laugh when asked if she knew at the time that this project was special. “I didn’t get the humor. I didn’t live in the projects, so I [didn’t] understand half these lines and jokes. [But] Tisha and I were creating this friendship. So because Tisha was the thespian between the two of us, she was very strong in saying ‘Let’s create a friendship that other sisters will want to emulate.’”

The soul of House Party was the late comedy legend Robin Harris. As “Pop,” Harris was the grumpy-but-hilarious dad–attempting to catch his wayward son, Kid, after the teenager sneaks out to attend the shindig at Play’s house. It would be Harris’ biggest role, and sadly, his last. He died of a massive heart attack just days after the film hit theaters. But the movie became a major part of a legacy that has continued in the decades since his death. The late John Witherspoon also makes a memorable appearance as an angry neighbor—one of many scene-stealing appearances he would have in classic Black comedies throughout the 1990s.

A box office hit in the spring of 1990, House Party was a trailblazer. After a decade of classic 80s teen movies like Weird Science and Pretty In Pink, films that mined the angst of coming of age but from a decidedly white perspective, here was a film telling a story of Black teenage culture at the dawn of the 1990s. Critics raved, and took note of House Party’s uniquely African-American lens.

In 1990, the Los Angeles Times wrote:

“Shot for $2.5 million with a nearly all-black cast and a crew the Hudlins tabulate as 65% African-American, the film is loaded to the max with specific references–jokes, fashion, dance, music, language, products, politics–to the black teen-age hip-hop subculture. Combined with the film’s ethnic wit and edge, and its raucous energy, it adds up to a cultural richness rarely found in standard teen comedies.”

The then-28-year-old Reggie Hudlin believed that authenticity is what resonates universally. “The theory we’ve always believed…is that if you can make a film that is culturally uncompromised, it will still have broad appeal. And, in fact, by diluting the (ethnic content of) the film, it becomes less interesting for all audiences.”

In making the film, both Hudlin and the cast tapped into a wealth of experiences. The movie’s iconic dance scene was the brainchild of Johnson, who’d attended Spelman College in Atlanta and felt no party could be a party without a dance battle. “I was coming from a dance battle environment,” she explains. “I was at an HBCU. I pledged Delta Sigma Theta Incorporated. So between stepping in a sorority and being at Spelman, all I knew at parties were dance battles. When I got to the script and there was no dance battle, I said to Reggie ‘I don’t know how to party without a dance battle!’ And he said ‘Well–let’s see what that looks like.’”

Part of why House Party resonated then and continues to now is that kind of warm authenticity. Sure, its R-rating is earned—there is no shortage of raunchy jokes—but it feels true to Black teenage experience in a way that audiences hadn’t seen in a major film since Cooley High. These were young Black people who aren’t sanitized—they face issues like cop harassment, after all—but who also aren’t “at-risk” necessarily, and whose lives aren’t neatly divided into stereotypical boxes. The movie shows you Black kids from the projects and from middle-class suburbia—and they don’t seem all that far away from each other, geographically or culturally. It was shot in L.A. but never looks or feels like the same backdrop as Boyz N the Hood or Colors; it feels like this story could be anywhere in Black America.

“For that to be my first true starring theatrical role, it spoiled me,” says Johnson. “It was hard to do anything less than the collaborative energy that Reggie gave. It was very respectful and he honored each of our talents: he honored the comedy in Martin; the comedic timing in [co-star] Daryl ‘Chill’ Mitchell; he honored the camaraderie and teenage female energy between Tisha and I; he honored what Kid N Play had already established as Kid N Play even offscreen, and then he honored what he was watching as we moved through the film. He’d witnessed all of it. He was just basically there to nurture more chemistry and more good times. After that, it was hard for me to work with other directors who are not as collaborative.

“It’s almost like Reggie gave me the permission to be the true artist I was. A lot of directors, they tell you your mark, they tell you how to say a line—and that’s ok, that’s the director’s style. But because my first experience as a lead in a film was Reggie Hudlin, it was hard for me to work with another director that was more constricting.”

In 2016, Lawrence told Collider: “Well I was just young and I was new to the game and I was so excited to be part of all that. I was just very happy and eager to get my career going and people to know who I was. You know, just deliver. Become somebody to be reckoned with and that’s why I was so excited about that time.”

It’s not hard to understand why House Party still resonates. Everything from the clothes to the music speaks to its era in a way that honors that moment in time; and with its honest depictions of youthful Black exuberance, every generation of teenagers finds themselves relating to the antics onscreen. Beyond just teens, it feels like a love letter to Black pop culture; it references everything from Dolemite routines to the Hey Love R&B compilation commercials (“No, my brother—you got ta buy ya own”) to P-Funk chants, with a kinetic soundtrack that features R&B and hip-hop from the likes of Full Force (who also famously appear as high school bullies in the film) and Public Enemy. This was a movie unafraid to be as Black as it could possibly be, and it helped to announce the wave of Black cinema that would define the early 1990s.