Photo: "Love Jones," movie
Witcher admits “Love Jones” and its lackluster box office didn’t help his career. “White people get more bites of the apple. That’s just true. You can fail three, four times and still have a career. But if you’re black, you really can only fail once,” he told The New York Times.
It’s not that Witcher wasn’t trying to continue his directorial career. Hollywood, however, wasn’t listening.
“I’ve been working off-and-on over the years,” Witcher said. “It was challenging to get other material like that through the system. It’s hard for anybody who’s trying to do anything that is off the beaten track. I’ve been in the business, out of the business, came back into it. Jobs would come along, and I would take them.”
Witcher earned a film degree in 2018 from Columbia College in Chicago.
“I’ve always been working on my own stuff,” he continued, “but now, because of the disruption of some of these big [digital] players — Amazon, Apple, Netflix — and also the cultural disruption, where now, finally, I think the push to include other kinds of … I won’t even say other kinds of movies, but other kinds of people in the movies … I think that’s actually taken hold.
“I have to be honest with you — not to seem too Pollyannaish about it — but I feel more optimistic now, in the last year or two, about continuing on to make other films in the vein of ‘Love Jones’ than I have in the last 20. I’m looking forward to making another film at some point soon, hopefully,” Witcher said in a February 2018 interview with Village Voice.
