Director And Writer Of Classic ‘Love Jones’ Never Got Another Chance: 13 Things To Know

In 1997, young Black filmmaker Theodore Witcher debuted his first movie, “Love Jones,” a small film that explored Black love and failed as a blockbuster hit but went on to become a cult classic.

Featuring two well-liked and attractive lead actors, Nia Long and actor Larenz Tate, the refined love story did not take Hollywood by storm. However, it hit a solid nerve with critics and Black audiences who were craving a realistic, smart film featuring Black stars and centered on a non-hood lifestyle.

Released by New Line Cinema — known at the time for innovative films — “Love Jones” was made on an estimated budget of $10,000,000 and went on to gross $12.7 million worldwide.

It turned out to be Witcher’s one and only feature film, but “Love Jones” has a lasting legacy. Here are 13 things to know.

1. About ‘Love Jones’

The movie tells the story of slam poet and wanna-be novelist Darius Lovehall (Tate) who falls for photographer Nina Moseley (Nia Long), 20-something creatives based in Chicago.

Their romance is played out through deep connections over Black photographer-filmmaker Gordon Parks, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, singer Prince, and poet-playwright Amiri Baraka. And their love story is entrenched in hip-hop culture — a combination that is magical, critics raved. It is a complex yet fun love story between two young Black people that hadn’t been developed for film prior to this. “Love Jones” was quietly groundbreaking.

Hollywood was full of profitable hood genre films, but “Love Jones” didn’t fit into this Hollywood box.

The film’s ensemble cast also features Isaiah Washington and Bill Bellamy.

“I didn’t want to write a bourgeois fantasy like ‘Boomerang,'” Witcher told Pop Matters. “Nor did I want to write something in the ‘hood genre. All of my friends exist in between those worlds. We’re not bourgeois, nor are we ‘hood rats. We are a combination, and I was interested in making a movie about that group of people who never get to see movies about themselves.” 

2. Critically acclaimed, ‘Love Jones” not a box office hit

The critics loved “Love Jones” but the box office didn’t.

“I was optimistic because we had done well at Sundance, and I had tried to make the film accessible to as much of a mass audience as it was going to be. But we never quite cracked its marketing, and it didn’t really perform at the box office, even though the soundtrack was a hit,” Witcher told The New York Times.

“But my recollection is that the critical response was good. Then it didn’t do a tremendous amount of business, which was surprising. They [initially] put the movie out during the spring, and the soundtrack record became a hit. So, between the studio and the record company, they scratched some money together and decided to do a re-release. They put it back out that summer, I believe, on four hundred screens. It still didn’t perform. I couldn’t figure out why — nobody could figure out why. I just moved on. But even from the beginning, people were coming up to me on the street and would say positive things. That continued on for years, to this day. So, I never got the sense that the audience didn’t like the movie. It had its acolytes,” he told the Village Voice. 

The lack of a mass audience appeal didn’t fare well for Witcher’s future film prospects, and he knew it, but still he didn’t cave to Hollywood’s expectation of a Black filmmaker.

“Then I made maybe a mistake because instead of retrenching and trying to do something similar, I tried to push further. I walk into a room — I don’t feel any sort of inferiority whatsoever. But they look at the numbers and go, ‘Who is this guy with this attitude with these numbers? Your movie made $12 million. Why are you even in my office today?'” said Witcher, admitting to attending these meetings with an “attitude.”

“I conducted myself like a Hollywood movie director, which is what I was at that point. But I didn’t understand that it wasn’t necessarily about the creative achievement of the film or even whether you win any trophies for it. It’s about numbers,” he told The New York Times.

3. Hollywood career stalled

Witcher did write another film that went to the box office — “Body Count” — but he never got another shot to do something unconventional like “Love Jones,” and he hasn’t directed.

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“Body Count” had a star-studded cast that included David Caruso, Linda Fiorentino, John Leguizamo, Ving Rhames, Donnie Wahlberg, and Forest Whitaker. The 1998 flick was a crime comedy film.

4. ‘Love Jones’ became a cult classic

Considered a charming movie with “understated performances,” today “Love Jones” stands as a “cornerstone of Black narrative in cinema,” Pop Matters reported. It also propelled the acting career of Larenz Tate, who gained prominence in the 1994 violent hood drama “Menace II Society,” into a leading man of romantic dramas.

5. What Witcher wanted

Witcher told Pop Matters he wanted to create a Black narrative that did not involve drugs or violence when he wrote “Love Jones.”

6. Praise for ‘Love Jones’

There was a flood of critical praise heaped on “Love Jones.” Pop Matters, for example,” compared it to the French new wave dramas of screenwriter-director Claude Sautet.

“Many love stories contrive to get their characters together at the end. This one contrives, not to keep them apart, but to bring them to a bittersweet awareness that is above simple love,” said famed film critic Roger Ebert.

7. The ‘Love Jones’ soundtrack

While the movie didn’t charm the box office, the film’s soundtrack was a hit.

“Love Jones: The Music” was released on March 11, 1997, via Sony Music. It included a mix of contemporary artists and music legends, a mix of R&B, soul and jazz, and tracks by Lauryn Hill, Dionne Farris, Leon Ware, Amel Larrieux, Minnie Riperton, Cassandra Wilson, Siedah Garrett, Kenny Lattimore, Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine, among others.

“Sound, though minimal, is important for a film like this. Indeed, it is a talky film, but there are moments accented with the sounds of hip-hop, jazz, and R&B; apropos for a cast of characters in which such music is the soundtrack of their working personal lives. The audio is crisp and clear,” Witcher explained to the Village Voice.

The soundtrack peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top R&B-Hip-Hop Albums and at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 chart.

8. The legacy of ‘Love Jones’

“Love Jones” has become a film on many must-see lists.

“Despite the fact that it didn’t make any money, the longevity of it has been gratifying. We’ve had some retrospective screenings over the last few years,” Witcher told the Village Voice. The film often runs on TV, especially for Valentine’s Day.

9. Why Witcher didn’t follow up

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.

10. Why Witcher loves filmmaking

“If you’re a gadget person, right, or a gear person, and there’s a lot of kids who are gear people—they like toys and mechanical things you can manipulate with your hands, stuff with knobs and buttons on them—then there’s a tactile component to the equipment, which is just very pleasing to a kid. When you make a film, even when you’re 12, and you’re making Super 8 movies, you have cameras, and then you have to edit the film. It’s like the Orson Welles quote where he says: A movie set is the greatest train set in the world.’ There’s a lot of truth to that even to this day,” he told RogerEbert.com.

Witcher said his love of filmmaking deepened as he matured. “As I got older and got on with it, it remained tremendously exciting. Because the thing that doesn’t leave you as you get older is how film encompasses so many different disciplines and so many different avenues of creative expression.

“There’s the story; there’s writing; there’s acting; there’s the design, and there’s the lighting, and the photography and composition. And then there’s music and sound. It’s sort of like the modern version of opera in a way, where over 120 years ago, opera was the thing that brought all of these artistic disciplines under one roof to create a thing. Cinema eventually supplanted that. Right. And so what became exciting about it was the more I got into everything else, the more I saw how it all fed into trying to create a movie. It’s never stale,” he added.

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11. How ‘Love Jones’ originated

After attending college, Witcher started working at NBC tower, at Chicago TV station WMAQ. He later joined the staff of “The Jerry Springer Show.”

“So I was working in television while trying to figure out how I was going to crack getting into the movie business. And simultaneously, since I wasn’t really writing anything, the only sort of avenue of creative expression I had at the time was I fell into this world of underground poetry in Chicago. That world was very inspirational to me,” he recalled to RogerEbert.com.

12. Chicago had a role in ‘Love Jones’

Witcher told RogerEbert.com that he hadn’t initially thought of the role Chicago played in the film.

“I hadn’t even considered any of that, other than I wanted to excavate as many cultural details of Black Chicago as I could to bring the film to life. It had a vivid three-dimensionality to it. I would’ve done that no matter where the movie was set. But I wanted to set it in Chicago only because I knew it, and I wanted to return to make good. But even when we were budgeting the movie, there were other conversations that were being had at the studio about it maybe being cheaper in New York or San Francisco,” he explained.

He added, “I sorta restricted it to a city where there was some kind of Black Bohemia or Black artistic scene that would make sense for the story. Right. So I guess you could do a version of this movie in San Francisco or in New York in Brooklyn. I think Atlanta came up as an option as well. But I held to my guns, even though it was a little bit more expensive than what they wanted. I just felt like Chicago was the right place for it.”

13. ‘Love Jones’ is what was missing in Black film

“There’s a humanity that’s been missing from a lot of these black films, despite their realness,” Witcher, told the Los Angeles Times in 1997.  “I’ve seen a lot of types and a lot of caricatures, but none of the people I’ve ever known hung out or partied with. Nothing that has reflected my experiences as a young, black man in America.”

Witcher stressed the “Love Jones” reflected his life experience.

“This film is my reality. I don’t live in a castle on top of a hill, so if it’s realistic to me, it has to seem realistic to some other people out there,” he said.

Photo: “Love Jones,” movie