What kind of gun does madea have

Years passed. He lived in his car and in pay-by-the-week hotels until he understood what had gone wrong and who his audience should be.

In , he saw that he had to take a more direct approach. The audience that he wanted to attract—poor and lower-middle-class Christian blacks like him—thought of theatregoing as a luxury. Churchgoing, on the other hand, was a necessity.

Perry resolved to turn his performances into an extension of their faith. He was personable, presentable, and religious; and his play, he made clear, delivered a Christian message—Jesus forgives everything, even poverty and blackness—through characters and situations that audience members would recognize from their own social, cultural, and economic worlds. Perry offered them something akin to what their preachers offered: entertainment for hardworking black Christians who wanted, at least for a couple of hours, to be distracted from the truth about their failure to advance in their own country.

Touring, Perry built up the money and the reputation that eventually supported his film studio and his television series. He also started selling paraphernalia at his shows and online; ever mindful of his audience, he allows his fans to buy his DVDs or his book by filling out a form and mailing in a money order, rather than assuming that they all have credit cards. In his pragmatism, he understood the intimacy of film and television, and the access they offer to those who are less inclined to join in the community aspect of theatre.

Communities may crumble and fracture, but everybody goes to the movies. It cost eleven and a half million dollars to make both films. Each opened at No.

Perry has released eight movies in the past four years, many of them reworkings of the themes and titles of his plays from his days as a live performer. And they almost all follow the basic rules of melodrama. Someone—usually a woman—is in distress. Madea, who sometimes runs into trouble with the law of the land, has no trouble imposing her own interpretation of the laws of the Lord on her charges.

Mixed in with all this are some craven relatives—along with Madea, they provide the comic highlights—and one or two rousing gospel numbers. Perry keeps his plots moving inexorably toward the payoff—which is to show us that black people who live outside the precincts of the white world can still find fulfillment. In , Perry opened Tyler Perry Studios, which sits on thirty acres in a primarily black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta. The seventy-five-thousand-square-foot building was once the property of Delta Airlines, and had been empty for more than a decade when Perry purchased the lot.

It includes five soundstages, a three-hundred-seat theatre, thirty dressing rooms, editing facilities, a gym, and a duck pond. The series takes certain tropes from his plays and films: a working-class, multigenerational Atlanta family muddles through life under one roof. But, instead of Madea, a man, Curtis Pops Payne, is at the center of the conflict. Payne LaVan Davis works as a fireman and grumbles about all the biscuits his greedy relatives consume.

After Perry spent five million dollars of his own money to produce the first ten episodes of the series, TBS picked up the show in a deal said to be worth two hundred million. Perry still oversees every aspect of the production. Although he deals with such miseries as domestic abuse, broken homes, alcoholism, and rape, he virtually always shows these obstacles being overcome or defeated by religious feeling. Responsible adults enforce strict boundaries. His message of uplift leaves little room, for instance, for a truthful portrayal of black-white relations in this country.

The elements of real life that Perry does underscore are often the comforting ones: the Madeas of the world, mouthy, matriarchal, sexless black women who raised and counselled many of his loyal fans, setting the moral barometer at home, and not only feeding the children but earning the money to do so. One wonders, though, how many of the real women are as taken with camp irony as Madea is. Madea, running around taking care of people like a zealous Louise Beavers, is a cartoon version of the real thing, but that is part of the point.

He writes, for instance:. I remember a guy on the corner of my neighborhood who wanted to be a Madea. He would come out of his house every morning with curlers in his hair and a bandanna and just look around and see what the kids were doing. He would then run and tell their parents. But he was kind of illegitimate. In his movies, however, things are far more cut and dried. The hometown hero inspired a rock-star welcome.

I had to come to New Orleans. So, for the next minutes, just take your mind off of everything. Sit back, relax, laugh hard. This movie is stupid — stupid funny. Before the screenings, Perry spoke to a gaggle of reporters along a red carpet. Hosting an advance screening for one of his movies in his hometown was a rare and special occasion for him.

To have it come home on a big screen and do a premiere, that makes me feel really good. Willie Maxine Campbell Perry was an inspiration for Madea. Before Perry became a great American success story, he grew up poor in an abusive household Uptown.

The talk-show star spoke of the cathartic effect writing can offer. Perry wrote his first play at Perry moved to Atlanta in Perry has since produced 19 more plays, 17 movies and seven television series. I love to see them laughing and smiling. But to be honest with you, my favorite character is Joe.