'Dear White People' Director Justin Simien Talks Viral Marketing, Online Haters, and More

As far as first-time filmmakers go, Justin Simien’s story has played out like a fantasy. He had a great idea for a story — four black college students navigating a predominantly white Ivy League campus, culminating in the brouhaha over a “ghetto”-themed party. And he had an attention-grabbing title: Dear White People. After five years of working on the script, he made a concept trailer for the film, and it went viral. His movie was fully financed as a result, and the finished product would premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it would win Simien a major award. Two months later, the film was acquired for national release and is out in select theaters now.

As the incendiary but still even-handed satire continues riding a strong wave of buzz as it expands into theaters nationwide, Simien, 31, told us all about his perfectly scripted journey.

The seeds of ‘Dear White People’ were planted early.
A native of Houston, Simien went west for college, attending Chapman University in Orange County, CA. It was a culture shock: “There was a lot of ignorance about people who were different,“ he says. Simien, who is gay, experienced homophobia. The diner he and his friends frequented had a Confederate flag on the wall. And at one point, a blond, blue-eyed suite-mate challenged him by saying he was "blacker” than Simien because he could “Crip Walk,” while Simien listened to jazz and watched Star Trek.

Simien got an early education in viral marketing.
After college, Simien got a jobas a film publicist, and eventually worked on Paramount’s hugely successful “Demand It” viral marketing campaign for Paranormal Activity. It wasn’t always easy for the aspiring auteur to have to champion films that he found sub-par. “That was really tough,” Simien says. “But I think that’s also what made me good at my job, because I never even attempted to fake it… I don’t think I gave the impression to many people that I drank the Kool-Aid. Even though we were all involved in mixing the Kool-Aid and serving the Kool-Aid to the masses.”

The title Dear White People started as a rant against Beyoncé homages.
Simien began writing the script for Dear White People in 2006, under the title Two Percent — a reference to the proportion of black students at the Ivy League university where it would be set. The Dear White People name got its start in an IM thread Simien was having with a friend, in which he was railing against the ubiquitous YouTube videos of groups of (mostly white) people recreating Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video. “I was like ‘Dear white America, you have ruined the ‘Single Ladies’ dance. Please stop.’ My friend, who is white, is like, ‘LOL, LOL, LOL. I agree.’” Simien then began to thread pleas like this into his writing project, and also started a @DearWhitePeople handle on Twitter to test-drive the idea further.

Simien initially thought the offensive frat party wasn’t believable enough for a movie.
He even deleted it from a later draft, saying, “I felt like I was pushing it a bit too far.” But in February 2010, students at the University of California, San Diego made headlines for hosting a “Compton Cookout” party. “It was almost plot point-by-plot point exactly what [I’d depicted] in my screenplay, but took out,” Simien says. “That’s when I started to research these things, and started to see how common they were.” Dear White People actually shows snapshots from several real-life “black” or “ghetto”-themed college parties during its closing credits. “It’s happened twice since then,” Simien says. “The week we started shooting, it happened at Dartmouth. The week we premiered at Sundance, it happened at Arizona State.”

Simien put all that publicity training to good use.
Knowing “there was no interest for this kind of project at the studio level,” he took his tax return (about $5,000) and used it to create a concept trailer, which he shot over two days. That clip, buoyed by pickup from the Indiewire blog Shadow and Act, quickly went viral, racking up a cool 100,000 views. Simien simultaneously launched a crowd-sourced financing campaign on Indiegogo, with a target of $25,000. (He’d pass $40,000 in no time.) “So the goals that I thought, ‘Maybe we’d get in a year,’ we got in three days,” Simien says. “That’s when I was like, ‘Maybe this is going to be a thing.’” The video ultimately passed over a million views, and Simien left his job working in publicity.

He’s seen plenty of blowback online because of that attention-grabbing title.
Simien’s had to deal with his fair share of uproar from people, nearly all of whom, the director notes, haven’t seen the movie. He says the negative comments range from “We don’t need a movie like this” to “N——-r go home. Go back to Africa.” As he explains, “People are just offended on the surface by the idea that someone would ever have a criticism against white people as a whole, which is sort of the tongue-in-cheek joke. Obviously, white people are not monolithic.” Simien is torn when it comes to attacks on the film, understanding as he does the old adage that “any PR is good PR.” He mentions that after the conservative-leaning Drudge Report called out the film, the movie’s user ratings on IMDb plummeted. “The publicist in me recognizes that [the negative attention] actually helps the film, but to a certain degree, for the human being in me, it’s just sad.”

He’s got even bigger plans for Dear White People.
In addition to the film, Simien has also released a complimentary tongue-in-cheek book with the same title, billed as “A Guide to Inter-racial Harmony in ‘Post-Racial’ America.’” Simien also wants to bring the world he’s created to the small screen. “I really think Dear White People should be on TV,” he says. “I think we need a show like Dear White People to really get into the conversation that the movie begins. I’d like to continue that conversation on a weekly basis.”

Photos: AP, Lionsgate