Tyler Perry Says He Doesn’t Need A Writer’s Room…Again
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Tyler Perry has built one of the nation’s only Black-owned film production studios, he’s helped finance numerous African-Americans in need, including this couple, and he’s a successful self-made mogul. So he doesn’t need your advice about what it takes to be successful, including adding writer’s rooms to his varied film and TV projects.
During the promotional run for his new Netflix movie Six Triple Eight starring Kerry Washington and Ebony Obsidian (who also stars on Perry’s BET show Sistas) Perry once again expressed why he doesn’t have or need a writer’s room. Instead, he writes most of the scripts for his shows and movies himself.
In 2020, he told Essence that he was open to having writer’s rooms but that ratings for his shows declined when he opened them up.
“What people don’t know is that early on, I had a writer’s room and it was a nightmare for me.” He continued, “Not only that, they were turning in scripts that didn’t speak to my audience and my ratings took a dip. My audience knows my voice. They want to hear from me. They want to hear what I’m saying. I don’t know what people are complaining about because I am writing specifically for my audience…specifically for them.”
However, he also told Keke Palmer in July that he does use writer’s rooms on certain shows.
“Over the last two years now, I’ve brought in writers’ rooms and we’ve had them on other, on the sitcoms, but now I’ve brought them in on other shows,” he said on a episode of her podcast, Baby This is Keke Palmer. “I’ve trained enough young directors to be able to understand how to edit and shoot. So they’re able to do a huge page count like I can. I’ve trained them how to watch for waste and time, but it’s very important to know when to let go.”
This year, he said that his distaste for sharing the writing load was due to an unspecified incident with the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents film and TV writers. They were part of the overall Hollywood strike in 2023 that also saw the Screen Actors Guild on the picket lines.
“I don’t take in the criticism,” Perry, 55, told USA Today.
“Because if people understood why there was no writers or if they understood what I had to deal with, if they understood what I had to endure, the racism that brought me to the place where I didn’t have a writer’s room,” he said. “It was a racist moment with the WGA that brought me to that place, that I had to fight my way through, that made me stand in my own strength to be able to write all of those shows.”
You can’t say it’s not working out for him. His new Netflix movie Six Triple Eight earned mixed reviews but the public loves it. It’s the #2 movie on Netflix right now. Kerry Washington plays real-life ‘hidden figure,’ Major Charity Adams, who led the 6888th in World War II, the Army’s only Black female battalion. The women were charged with sorting and delivering 17 million pieces of lost and misplaced mail to the troops and their families during the Battle of the Bulge. They were given six months to do the daunting job and accomplished the goal in 90 days.
Watch the trailer below:
