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Later, under Dewey Hughes’s ownership, and then under that of his former wife Cathy Hughes and her son Alfred Liggins III, WOL-AM would become the flagship of Radio One, the nation’s largest African American owned media conglomerate. But Talk to Me is not about the business of radio.

The film may initially strike screen goers as comedic—in fact its initial promotional trailers focused primarily on Greene’s more outrageous exploits. And though there might be too many comical scenes at the beginning of the film, Talk to Me eventually gives way to its much more dramatic core—a tale of ambition, male relationships, culture clashes, the media, and, to some extent, filmmaking itself.

Lisa Monroe and Susan Monroe , DEVOTION publisher and editor, respectively, and Bea Dozier Taylor, proprietor of A Walk In Truth Christian Books, discussed their initial reactions to Talk to Me soon after its release. Part of their conversation is transcribed below.

Bea Dozier-Taylor I would recommend the film for nostalgia reasons, and mostly because I would want to hear the conversation around this.

SM: What do you imagine, what kind of conversations would you expect to hear?

BDT: Well, it brings back memories. And of course everybody is going to take in something a little different, and there are a number of ways people will discuss it. You can skate on top of it and talk about the times, the humor, the remarks, or you can really go very deep, and I think when you cut through some of the visuals and style, and what we like about ourselves, our own personal creativity, I think when you take all of that in and enjoy it for a moment or two, there are some other things that strike me.

SM: I think I have to agree that you can look at it very superficially by just looking at the styles, but there is something deeper and it might even be generational. Would people today, twenty-five and under really get a lot of what was going on, read it in the same way. That could be said of any film, of course, but for this one in particular, the nostalgia, how do you expect people who aren’t middle aged to be nostalgic. And how often, for Blacks, do we see this period depicted on film.

BDT: I think that there are a lot of cheap shots out there. Whether you are looking at television, or something else, number of cheap shots. I have this glut of movies that I have seen and I am disappointed.

Lisa Monroe: When you say cheap, I think you mean a broad way that people refer this period because it’s the Sixties, and partly the Seventies, and in many ways it is still here. We’re still listening to the music. We still reference a lot of it. And then it’s also because there are such a large number of baby boomers. We all share some of the common connections to how our culture changed.

So it’s referential in our culture, and you’re right—young people today, I don’t know how well they can read the film. They can’t really read any more than someone my age can read the twenties very well.

SM: Well, I think it is a little different. Young people today have a narrower vision [or] understanding of history than we might have of what went on in the Forties or Thirties. As we grew up, the popular culture of the previous generation was ever-present in a different way. We were much more steeped in the foundations laid down thirty years prior. Popular culture today is quick and fleeting, and young people can barely recall what happened ten years ago.

BDT: I do think that there is a difference. If I were watching a movie made back in the Twenties, I could relate to it mostly because it was well made; whereas, young people today might miss out on some things in this movie because of the cheap shots.

I think there is this really important scene in there, and I’ll admit to it, I did cry, when the announcement was made that King was assassinated, that he died, and I thought that they captured that moment so well. But I didn’t like all of the cheap stuff that led up to it.

SM: Now when you say “cheap shots” are you talking about assumptions the film makes, short cuts it takes?

BDT: In this very important part of the movie you have Petey’s girlfriend who goes in and has sex with another deejay, and she’s coming out, all of that took away, and I don’t know that it needed so much to go there, well, it didn’t. I just thought that was very cheap.

There’s when Petey first applies for the job—is it reasonable for someone to think that you can just come out of jail and go in…? I just think that there are things like that that happen, but I think that it was just played out too much because it was almost like, “don’t hire him.”

How are you going to go in [for a job] with your girl? She did play the part, I give her that, but the lack of not even knowing that there is a difference. I felt that that was cheap.

It was cheapened because—can our children today identify these individuals? Yes, I’m sure it looks like their aunt, their momma. I don’t think they have to look too far to identify a number of these characters. I think you can really see them, but to me it cheapens the characters.

SM: You are suggesting that it’s not believable.

BDT: I think it’s comical. You know, put it on the comedy hour, the Last Comic Standing.

LM: The first part of the movie is really silly. It wasn’t the Wayans brothers’ territory, but it almost crossed that line of being slapstick. And I don’t know why she directed the movie that way. It was really silly.

SM: People were laughing in the theater.

LM: They laughed at the jokes and maybe some of that kind of thing, but some of the mannerisms of the characters….

It does take a turn with the King assassination. It was really never visually presented. It allowed, if you can remember it, your own memory to come forward, because that’s what you had to bring to make it complete. I think that is what evoked so much. It is almost as if you can feel the movie turn dramatically, and its depth, like a submarine, it went twelve hundred feet below because everything, even the scenes outside, the turmoil, was staged, but I recognized all the paper [and debris on the streets] and people. I recognized the terror, the chaos, the feelings everybody had. Many people acted and reacted.

I think that was a great accomplishment and I don’t mind what happened just before in terms of the girlfriend and the deejay. Before we all knew [of Dr. King assassination], we were all involved in something. I think it shows the contrast that everything changed in our lives at that moment and whatever we were doing.

SM: That is the point in the film to me that the girlfriend and the deejay and the fighting going on was a metaphor for “Look what we are involved in, and look at just what happened. We’re not serious and on point here.” And it may be more a reflection of what we are doing today, what we are wrapped up in instead of really paying attention to something that’s important.

LM: Any great catastrophe, personal or collective, is going to do that.

But I don’t think I answered the question of whether or not I would recommend it. I recommended it to Beatrice [Dozier –Taylor] because I think it’s fantastic. I think there’s so much there—the characters’ personas, and personal ambition, and self-determination. The film may not be that credible, but Petey came out of prison saying, “I do want a job.”

And day after day after day it must have been on his mind, “I am going to get out of here and go to WOL and get my job.” And he shows up.

And it wasn’t just that he showed up and said [to Dewey Hughes] “You said I could get a job.” But when Hughes says, “What are you talking about?” he says, “You know what, I’m going to get a job and when I get one I’m going to come back and shove it in your face.” He said, “I’m out here. I am going to get a job. It may not be from you.”

I was really impressed with that. He was very focused and directed. I think that that spoke to what he knew he could contribute—legally [laugh]. And that’s what he dedicated himself to and what he accomplished in terms of helping that station become successful.

Certainly that night, in terms of the chaos with Dr. King, I think that it can be easily forgotten, and it’s a small person at a small time, but he reached people. He reached the pinnacle for what he was supposed to do, and I think that’s pretty tremendous even with him saying “my mother is serving thirty years here and my father serving how ever many years at the same time,” he accomplished what he was supposed to do. He did great things.

I also look at it in terms of how important media is in our community to our unity, to our [accessing] information, to our self-determination and action. He filled a void, the unlikely character sitting behind that microphone.

SM: In terms of media, it also raises the questions, “Who do we want speaking for us? and Who has the authority?” Do we have to make distinctions between people in terms of who is allowed to speak for us? Even though Dewey Hughes introduced Petey on the radio, the guys in the bar scene said [of Hughes] “Who was that White guy?”

Who are we reaching, what are we saying, and can everybody relate? It’s the same kind of thing with…who’s that guy in the morning?

LM: Tom Joyner.

SM: Yeah, who is he trying to reach? And it brings up the issue of class distinctions. I think the film, to some extent, reveals some of the origins of contemporary class distinctions. I think it shows how we are divided on a number of levels.

LM: I think definitely there is a tension between Dewey and Petey, but also between Petey and the institution, or industry, because he walks into a business and the Black secretary [at the station] looks at him like, “Who are you?”

It was a station that was trying to appeal to a Black audience, and he might have thought that it was hip and cool and he could have walked in that way, but he walked into a very traditional, mainstream office all the more evident in that setting because there were Whites and Blacks who were very mainstream.

I think it’s part of our community that we don’t see portrayed or certainly not credited. We don’t see that. I think Kasi Lemmons really showed a number of things that we don’t often look at, and as you say, who are we allowing to talk, and what are they actually saying?

Petey was a very vulgar, street character. The things he said to the secretary were just outrageous, and I can’t believe some of them made it into the movie. But a lot of his discussion probably was along those lines.

So how important overall is what he said, I don’t know, but he did awaken a Black audience. He made a Black audience more marketable because then everyone understood that people would listen. He helped to define more clearly or, at least, amass a kind of audience that stations could compete for.

BDT: And the reason that I would recommend it is what we can get from it. This movie gives us an opportunity to really look in on ourselves. But that will always be our challenge, looking at ourselves, the perception out there, one that is raw.

How much of a value is it when our kids go out and they’re just imitating the popular person on the street, the hip guy. Everything was dated. An individual might want to be like Petey, but all of that is dated. What happened, I imagine, is that he died because of his drinking. So I think there are many pieces there you can use to open up conversation about the characters that are very very real, but they have, like all of us, limits.

The fact is that on one hand, Petey thought large, but one man’s ceiling is another man’s basement. For him [Petey], he couldn’t get out of what for Dewey was the basement. It took Dewey a while to figure that one out.

So, I just see the characters there as a risk because I know that is [real]. Those folks do represent in my community. And our community will continue, but I think we have a responsibility to hold it up and say, “This can’t be it.”

Petey was afraid of life. On one hand you want to see him as determined, get that radio job, but can you say you really want that radio job and you go in like that? And then his first day on the job, he falls apart upchucking. He was facing his fears, but really what did it take? It took Dewey, which I thought was outrageous, blocking the door so Petey could stay on the air. I just wish it was done in a way that you could see, but they made it cartoonish.

But Dewey had to, and its an important part of our history, we had to, we still have to, bang down doors, and we do have to reach out and help the other brother and pull the other brother up, but I’m sure that day that he did that, there was a lot of sneaking, there was a lot they did to actually make that a reality, if it really happened.

And I think it’s much more value in the truth there than this thing that they made up which is too comical. It didn’t’ work for me because it was something that Dewey did and an important decision that he made, and he was risking everything on that. He was willing to risk everything on Petey getting on the air.

SM: In terms of what they really did when it comes to depicting black biography on film, do you think about taking license? Obviously, you don’t like that scene very much, but characters have to be composites, we have license. Do we have to show what really happened? Because as much as I see it as a film documenting Petey’s life, I also see it as a tour de force performance by Don Cheadle because it was such a good character, and it was all about his performance as an actor as well as his depiction of this guy’s real life.

I read the references to film within the film, to Scorsese’s King of Comedy, for instance. Can we allow art for arts sake or do we say, “now we still have to fall in line with what really happened”?

LM: There is something uneven in the moviemaking here. For as good a job as Kasi Lemmons did, I wonder, in part, if she wasn’t trying to react to the backlash of Eve’s Bayou [Lemmons previous film] by loosening up a bit.

Her style reminds me of The Five Heartbeats style, Robert Townsend, and I think it’s so horrendous the way he directed that movie—

BDT: What The Five Heartbeats? Are you kidding?

LM: The young girls, the sister running around back and forth in the bedroom writing the songs on the curtains and on the ceiling. It’s the same thing as blocking people from coming into the studio. It doesn’t happen. It’s not comical…it’s not funny!

BDT: It’s “Broadway!”

LM: It’s Broadway out of context.

BDT: I thought you would have appreciated it.

LM: No. I thought it was horrible. Of all the terrible things that happened that was the worst, and a couple of early scenes in this movie were like that. They were just comical, not funny, but comical and cartoonish.

SM: Kind of awkward and amateurish storytelling.

LM: Yes.

SM: I thought one thing she did do very well was planting the influence of Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show on Dewey Hughes. Dewey Hughes, early on in the film, watched the show and only later he says “This man taught me everything, you know, how to talk and walk.” Even when he goes to the Tonight Show set he’s wearing his Johnny Carson outfit, remember Johnny Carson had his own line of clothes?

And in comparison to Petey and his girlfriend, you can just tell that. I thought that was done very well.

LM: I had no idea that Johnny Carson would be that influential. Even in getting Dewey there, I didn’t know until Petey’s girlfriend comes to Hughes’s office.

BDT: I liked Dewey saying that because it opens the world for our children to look through. To see something beyond their neighborhoods and I just thought that he did it so well.

Kids that look and say, “I want something more than is out here, and this [television] is my portal to look through, to emulate.” I think that is just great, and I would like young people to see the movie and even for adults to understand that’s a part of how it all happens. We all need something to look through and to emulate.

Our kids, right now, don’t see beyond the barbershop, beauty parlor, nail salon, liquor store. So I think there is something wonderful, something very real that I liked [there.]

There are characters that are in our families that are very real, but you never want to see them up on the stage. You don’t want to see “Uncle Bob up there on the stage. That’s the wonderful thing when you think about Richard Pryor and the wonderful Black comedians.

LM: Dick Gregory.

SM: Godfrey Cambridge.

BDT: And Nipsey Russell. They showed you our world, our relatives. And it was funny. But that’s their gift.

But today we have all of those folks that are…our relatives are up on the stage. No talent. Somebody has to have a gift to get you to look in on yourself and a kind of appreciation, and they can still like you, but you don’t need to be up on the stage.

SM: Why? Because we’re showing our dirty laundry?

BDT: It requires skill, a gift. Being raw… why would I then love this person? Somebody that otherwise everybody talks about, laughs about, but you don’t want that person on stage because it’s too raw.

LM: And it’s proliferated. There is a whole bunch of Black people doing that.

SM: What do you think about the costuming in this film? I just saw the documentary on the Stax record label on PBS, and it showed the crowd gathered on Monterey I think it was around the early Seventies. Very much from the same time period—Afros, and all—and, Talk to Me takes you back.

I did see an actual picture of Petey Greene sitting in his whicker chair, and he has the sideburns, and it looks very much like that, very full.

BDT: But they do a more convincing job with White folks. We have all of the curls, and it’s easier to mix that in. I’ve seen White folks with [less obvious] rugs.

I have no complaints about the girlfriend. She was very insightful. She knows this man, this woman was with him, according to the movie, from beginning to end, so something was just missing in there. You don’t make the woman out to be a floozy and then show her as really insightful.

LM: I did read some reference to how the film treated Petey and his life, all of the women and children that did actually surround him in his life. Evidently he had a number of women and a number of children, and he was surrounded by domestic turmoil.

BDT: Why make the movie?

SM: I don’t think it was about debauchery, I think it was about ambition, about his fear about class, and not very much about race, ironically enough, moving from Point A to Point B.

What does it take to transform that fear that you have? Why couldn’t he be himself on the Tonight Show. He had shucked and jived to get other places, why couldn’t he shuck and jive on the Johnny Carson show.

LM: But he said “I speak truth. I have to tell it like it is.” And to be on the Johnny Carson show he would have to become the performer, and he wasn’t going to tell the “nigger jokes” as he said to make it on the Johnny Carson show.

BDT: Dewey should have known whether or not this guy was capable of going on the Johnny Carson show.

LM: But he didn’t.

BDT: Now, he watched Johnny Carson. If I’m watching Johnny Carson, and I know what he brings through there, and I meet somebody like Petey, I would think, “I might not get to Johnny Carson with you, but through you I’m going to find a lot more talent.”

LM: I don’t think the question was whether or not his material was suitable enough for the nighttime audience. That might have been a part of it, but I think Petey was saying, “I’m not going to sit here and prostitute myself and talk about race and smile and laugh.”

BDT: He was a prostitute.

LM: But he would have to go back to his community. He was saying to the White audience, “You’ll be laughing at me and not with me.”

When I talk to my people about our issues, we’re bearing our souls, we’re laughing together. But you people can only laugh at me, and that’s not what I do.

SM: But he had to be doing something very similar to that for the Tonight Show to invite him in the first place. I mean, the Tonight Show didn’t see him on stage “telling it like it is” and say, “Oh, that’s for us.

He’s going to come on and tell us what racist pigs we are.”

There was difference between Dick Gregory in a nightclub and Dick Gregory on the Tonight Show. The same thing with Richard Pryor, everybody made the turn. He [Petey] had a moment of revelation right then and there.

BDT: An epiphany.

SM: Just when he got there I felt he had that.

BDT: This is what is very telling. At the time when Dr. King was killed, he was willing to end up on that stage drunk, and I don’t like that scene, but when he spoke to that D.C. audience, he was intoxicated. So you know that he has the same kinds of stage fright issues that Sir Laurence Olivier had, its more of a norm than not.

SM: But that wasn’t stage fright; that was him drinking the night before.

BDT: No, no. He had stage fright. You could put him in that little room with the little old microphone, and the whole world opened up for him. But on statge….

SM: I think it always had to do with what Dewey said to him early on in the pool hall, “You have good talk, but you can’t sink the nine ball.”

BDT: If there’s somebody I respect, and they’re up on the stage intoxicated when you’re talking about Dr. King being assassinated, you know, brother, show some love. You’re trying to tell me to show some love, and that’s the best you can do? So, for me, that was just done in a way that they could have scratched that, or he didn’t have to be that drunk.

Individuals like Petey are for me what I would call our poets, which is why I don’t like poetry so much. Because our poets just fail us miserably.

SM: For me it just brings up the questions again of who is speaking and who are they speaking to, and what kind of rapport do you build with people?

I think a lot of people listened to Petey Greene [on the radio], but not everybody listened to Petey Greene. Maybe there was another station, a Baltimore station that was an alternative. He appealed to the type pf person who would say [if he was drunk on the stage] “That’s okay, man, that’s okay, you’re drunk, but it’s okay. We accept you.”

You’re saying be a little more accountable, but there is a whole other group of people saying, “That’s all right. You came—that’s enough.” That’s who he was appealing to.

BDT: And what he did that moment in history, I am not saying he was credited with more than he should have been. Thank God that there was a voice that people responded to, but in that moment, what did Petey Greene know about and take from Dr. King that he went in there and took that mike and said what needed to be said or what he said changed [people]’s behavior]? So there is something he did know about. There is a standard that he understood, and it’s where we’ve got to reach. We’ve got to come up from our basement, our instincts that would just take us out there and have us burning that city down.

I’m being facetious here, but I’m looking at a people who rise up and become well known in our community, and I think I would give an award to an individual like Petey what I would call a “hood ornament.” And just like you’ve got your status of cars, you’ve got your status of ornaments, so he’s a hood ornament.

If he is a hood ornament what is someone like Dr. King? What is someone like Malcolm X. I can’t put him in that same category.

SM: Or Dewey Hughes who was his contemporary in the film.

BDT: Another hood ornament.

Well, no. Because I think a person has to really be true, and, of course, I’m being sarcastic here, but there are people that rise up to that level, and we elevate people in our community to that all of the time. And there is a travesty in terms of what we do to people in our community. He had a moment in time, there’s something that he did—I would certainly like to hear what his truth was. What was that truth that he kept saying?

SM: Unfortunately, I hear that much of his tapes were taped over or destroyed not anticipating his legacy or this film. It was just the technology of the time. No one thought to preserve them.

BDT: Even after that moment in time. If he saved the city—and that’s why I say, when people just want to reduce you to begin a hood ornament—if it were a white person that did that, we’d have those tapes. At least half of them, at least three quarters of them, in his case, we ain’t got nothing. Something is wrong.

And as I look at him, this portrayal of Petey Green outside of the movie, I really don’t know the character Petey Greene, but everything that I saw in the movie, and he’s nothing more than a male whore, just sleeping with women, making babies. I just can’t be impressed.

But I’m glad he had that moment in time [the night Dr. King was assassinated.] God has a purpose for each and every one of us, and here he has this moment in time. And that’s where I have to say that, God, there was someone there you could use for that moment because we were terrorizing ourselves at that moment, not just White folks concerned about their property, but Black folks concerned about their lives. There was so much terror that was taking place in that moment.

So he had this moment in time, but I would certainly like to hear what his truth was. Richard Pryor had a truth, that’s what he did when he went on stage. It was his gift. I know he brought a truth. Eddie Murphy has that same gift. I liked him in the beginning, now, you know, I’m not talking about the commercial [Eddie.] I’m talking about in the beginning the brother was butter. That’s the kind of butter you churn. It was the real deal. But I don’t know what Petey’s truth was.

SM: He was certainly very forthright. The first thing he did on the radio show was to call Berry Gordy a pimp. And they showed him on his TV show calling someone, a politician, a crook. He even references Tricky Dick, I think.

He just called everybody a liar. I don’t know that he had anything so profound to say, except that the truth is that they’re telling you isn’t true.

LM: He was political, even intellectual, for the community. He helped people think. And he spoke to ideas.

SM: I don’t know if it was emotional or intellectual, but to me I imagine it was probably pretty more emotional than anything.

LM: Even so I think that he spoke to it, and nobody else was doing it.

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