Producer builds pipeline for Black talent
After blazing unlikely path to Hollywood, Datari Turner is on a mission to change it
LOS ANGELES — Growing up in Oakland, Datari Turner had two passions: football and movies.
“Only one I thought was a viable career, and that was sports,” said Turner, who got a scholarship to play football at Oklahoma State University. Although Hollywood was just 360 miles away, Turner thought, “It may as well have been Dubai.”
But plans and dreams have a strange habit of collapsing and manifesting themselves in unexpected ways.
Today, Turner, 41, is a prolific independent producer with credits on some 30 feature films, including “Uncorked” “Ten Thousand Saints” and the successful TV franchise “Growing Up Hip-Hop” — largely focusing on stories that reflect his experiences and that of his community. He’s had six films premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Recently, Turner joined forces with actor Jamie Foxx to form a production company that has more than 10 projects in development.
“I love stories, but at the same time, I want to make an impact,” said Turner.
While blazing his own unlikely path to Hollywood, Turner quickly stumbled onto an uncomfortable truth: “This business wasn’t built by people that look like me,” he said. “It wasn’t designed by people like me to tell our stories.”
Despite numerous discussions and initiatives, the levers of power in Hollywood remain predominately white.
“It’s very simple; things are never going to change until we have Black people in positions to greenlight movies.”
Turner is on a mission to make that happen.
He is in advanced talks to establish an endowed producing program at the cinema, television, emerging media studies (CTEMS) program at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Turner is on the board of the Blackhouse Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at amplifying Black creatives and executives in the industry.
Given his own experience, he knew that the dearth of people of color occupying the upper echelons of the entertainment industry wasn’t due to a lack of talent or ambition but of access to opportunities — on top of socioeconomic barriers. “The only way to change things is to change them at the root, and we’re creating a pipeline of people of color to be able to rise up the ranks,” Turner said.
The child of an electrical engineer father and a board of education mother, Turner did not plan a career in film. An injury put his football aspirations on hold.
When he wasn’t playing football, Turner could usually be found in a movie theater.
“I would watch three or four movies in a day. The movies shaped my life. A lot of the movies I liked weren’t Black movies; they were ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘The Breakfast Club.’ I’ve always just been a fan.”
Turner knew that he didn’t want to be an actor. It was the language of film, the imagery and storytelling that he was drawn to. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll give this screenwriting thing a shot,’ ” he said.
Turner bought books on screenwriting and in two weeks had a draft of his first screenplay, “Video Girl,” which examined the dark side of ’90s music video vixens.
In 2002, draft in hand, Turner returned to California to launch his career as a writer. He gave the script of his first movie, “Video Girl,” to actress Meagan Good. “I called him after I finished it, and I was like, ‘Dude, this is dope,’ ” Good said.
Developing the movie took seven years and cemented a working relationship with Good, with whom he has made six films. The experience on the low-budget indie “Video Girl” began to shape Turner’s understanding of the Hollywood machinery.
Without the benefit of film school or connections, Turner taught himself the business and culture of movies. He devoured every book on such Hollywood moguls as David Geffen and Lew Wasserman.
He began researching the people behind the blockbuster films he watched growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, such as “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Flashdance” and “Top Gun.”
“Jerry Bruckheimer began to be a guide. I sort of looked at him as the gold standard of producers,” Turner said.
Turner wanted autonomy to tell the stories he was interested in. He concluded that the most powerful people in entertainment were the producers.
He was going to be a producer.
A few years ago when Prentice Penny, the showrunner of HBO’s “Insecure,” was trying to direct his first film, “Uncorked,” which he also wrote, he recalled how Turner had his back.
“Not a lot of people were looking to make a movie about a Black brother set in the world of wine,” he said.
The movie, a father-son dramedy about a young man who wanted to eschew his family’s barbecue joint in Memphis and become a master sommelier, was the kind of story that Turner wanted to see on the screen.
Turner, said Penny, “liked that Black people get to be in places like Paris and England in the movies the way that white people get to travel the world. It was just up his alley.”
Among the projects Foxx and Turner are working on is a docuseries for Apple.
“The art of producing itself is one of the most marvelous things in the business. He has the knack,” said Foxx. “He knows how to get the best and get the best out of people. And that is a rare and golden entity that a person possesses.”
The idea for the Morehouse project took shape about five years ago.
It wasn’t lost on Turner that any number of successful power players were graduates of the Peter Stark Producing Program, an MFA track at USC. He likened it to a farm team for Hollywood’s golden triangle of power: producers, studio heads and talent agency partners. “The selection process is brutal,” Turner said. “Most kids, especially of color, can’t afford the program.”
About a year and a half ago, Turner began a conversation with Stephane Dunn, a founding member and the director at
Morehouse’s CTEMS program.
Dunn calls the program they are hoping to launch “actual pipeline building.”
For Turner, this nascent program is his biggest production yet.
“I love movies, and I love helping artists tell their stories,” he said.
“My dad always told me, ‘You have to give just as much as you receive.’ You know? Sometimes more. For me, that’s always been my statement, to really pay it forward.”