We just watched an absolute treasure on Netflix – Dolemite is my Name, starring Eddie Murphy, Wesley Snipes, Keegan Key, and an utterly stunning cast of brilliant performers. This movie honors an early pioneer in blaxploitation films of the Seventies – Rudy Ray Moore. I like and recommend this movie, but more importantly, I think Rudy Ray Moore can teach us all about a singular vision and succeeding without the blessing of mainstream accolades and media deals. This is an inspiration in perseverance, risk and connection to your audience that will always prevail, no matter what “everyone” says.
Rudy Ray Moore was a highly creative person, who left his father’s sharecropping farm in Arkansas in his teens, come to LA, and expected to make it big. He tried music, comedy, even dancing, but after ten years was still working in a record store. His “interim” gig was all he had. Until he happened into a character that put him on stages and filled theaters – Dolemite. 
Dolemite was a rhyming, self-important, mighty black man of considerable sexual prowess. Rudy Ray Moore couldn’t get anyone to produce the Dolemite records, so he borrowed money from his aunty and produced his own record. Bec of their language and content, he had to sell them from behind the counter, and the trunk of his car. Before long his clear popularity caught the attention of a record company, and they began producing and distributing his material.
The movie Dolemite is my Name tells the story of Rudy Ray Moore in a loving bio-pic, as this determined artist put everything he’d earned and everything he’d ever earn to make a Dolemite movie – recruiting everyone he could, to assure his success. Once again, he was forced to self-produce and self-distribute in the beginning, until ticket sales could not be ignored and he earned a distribution deal.
This movie comes from the same people as Ed Wood (1994) about the low-budget sci-fi/horror cult filmmaker, and Big Eyes (2014), the biopic about artist Margaret Keane, famous for paintings of children with cartoonishly big eyes.
These two prior movies underscore what I find so exciting about Dolemite. They each focus admiringly on people who had a unique – if not critically acclaimed – art that they pursued, promoted and put out there.
This is how you do it people! Perseverance, peculiarity and connection to your work and your audience is what’s on my mind this week in the FB Group.
Come on over and put in your two-cents. What’s your peculiar vision? Will it fly? Do you require critical acclaim or is being a hit with audiences what you seek? How well do you understand your audience?