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Who among us hasn’t dreamed of being in the movies? Of having our faces immortalized on celluloid, larger than life? Of seeing our own stories splashily told on the big screen?
Hollywood and the movies it produces have taken a firm hold on the American imagination—indeed, on the human psyche—because they are a response to a basic request we’ve been making of each other for centuries: “Tell me a story.”
Yet black women’s stories are rarely told on film, even today, and African-American women remain woefully underrepresented behind the cameras. Black women are an afterthought, at best, even when individual actors or directors want to take progressive steps. Angela Bassett—who won raves and an Oscar nomination for her incandescent performance in the 1993 Tina Turner biopic, What’s Love Got to Do With It—tells a story that illustrates the point. When she read with Sean Connery for the 1999 romantic thriller Entrapment, she walked away thinking the part was hers. “Sean told me he would love what our being in the film would mean across the board for black and white,” Bassett recalls. “I remember him saying how beautiful our skin would look next to each other’s, and how I was perfect.” A few weeks later, she got a call from her agent: the part had been given to “a lesser-known actress at the time”—one whose name is now virtually a household word, Catherine Zeta-Jones. “I guess,” Bassett sums up, “Hollywood wasn’t as progressive as Connery thought.”
These ugly facts of Hollywood life, however, are rarely discussed on Entertainment Tonight or in  Premiere magazine; indeed, the mainstream media has largely ignored the story of black women’s struggle for visibility in the movies.
Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood will tell this long-neglected tale, chronicling the battle for inclusiveness that African-American women have waged over the years. Decade by decade, from the 1920s to the present, this landmark study will examine how numerous women—mostly as actresses, but later also as writers, directors and producers—have challenged and changed the movie capital of the world, and how others have been devoured by it.
Packed with fresh anecdotes and observations and peppered with more than 50 vintage and contemporary photographs, this book will serve as both a cultural history and a collective biography of the most significant black women in American cinema. Drawing from unpublished memoirs, personal correspondence and interviews with those who’ve lived the story, Spirits in the Dark will explore the experiences of black women in Hollywood in the context of their times.
 A vibrant social history, Spirits in the Dark will appeal to a wide range of readers—black women and men interested in the history of African-Americans in entertainment; students of substantive literature on both Hollywood culture and women’s studies; and media junkies of all colors.
Given Halle Berry’s historic 2002 Academy Award victory, and the industry’s persistent indifference to African-American moviegoers’ interests, even in the Obama Era, now is the perfect time to explore how far black women have come in Hollywood—and how far they’ve yet to go.
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