“I’m gonna be a designer!”

Sweet baby Jesus, this is it.

The backstory for Berry Gordy’s Mahogany is probably more captivating than the final product. From the firing and/or death of multiple directors, to the bunch of not-so-veiled references to star Diana Ross’ relationship with producer/suitcase pimp Gordy, to the signals that point to co-star Anthony Perkins’ offscreen struggle with homosexuality - if all that were the case, it would make for an extraordinary case of Unintentional Metafuckery.

Still.

Movie’s supposed to be a mishmash between two semi-genres, “good girl gone bad” and “rags to mega riches”, and the video trailer is pretty straightforward on both counts: premise (check), clothes (check), fame (check), creepy dude (check), palace of excess (check), big redemption (check).

If this montage is to be believed, the overall look of the picture is aptly represented too.

Italian fans are sweet on the car crash scene (check), which presents an empty Rome tangenziale at dawn as the death pit of doom.

Following Dreamgirls’ release, Mahogany was maybe made available on DVD, but not a single seed is to be found on torrents. So I guess I’ll never know.

Blogger and single mom Dolores Point Five has seen the whole thing, says that it’s “wack as fuck”.

As Chris Rock put it, “yeah, man, New Jack City was a loooooong time ago”.

One wonders - exactly which type of audience were they after?

The trailer manages to swing both ways: it looks like a straight-to-video genre effort and a Serious Issues message picture.

Bizarre choice of music - the street corner beat followed by one of the faster cuts that dominate the soundtrack followed again by the corner beat - frames the action as if it were a videoclip, which might enforce the “let’s appeal to the MTV crowd” option. Also, Ice-T’s presence is prominently showcased - and rightly so, given that a) he does play a main character and b) he was shaping up to be a star rapper.

On the other hand, Wesley Snipes is the first face/name popping up (and will go on to swallow the whole film, giving it the coveted cool-by-association Tony Montana vibe), but the rest of the trailer presents him as just one element in an ensemble, gunning for the “what’s happening in our society at large” slant.

(And while we’re on the subject - it’s a bit hard to believe that Tracy Camilla Johns was a box office draw, five years after Nola Darling - but then again, neither was Judd Nelson.)

Still, the Van Peebles aesthetic is quite alive throughout the thing: camera angles askew and all that haven’t aged well, but they anchor the film to what would eventually become the main “urban” shooting trend. At least for a few years.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “am I my brother’s keeper lol”.