‘Welcome to’ Blackman’s singing and dancing Harlem

While Occupy Wall Street-ers bemoan unemployment rates, Harlem resident and recent Cornell grad Mark Blackman goes to show that sometimes being fired is a good thing. Two years after being dropped from the payroll of a headhunting firm, Blackman is about to release “Welcome to Harlem,” a musical-comedy film that he wrote and starred in, at the Apollo Theater (253 W. 125th St., between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and Seventh Avenue). The premiere is Saturday, Nov. 19, at 8 p.m.

Blackman graduated from Cornell in 2006 with a degree in electrical and computer engineering but knew he didn’t want to enter that field. He had been in Cornell’s improv group, the Whistling Shrimp—and in “Welcome to Harlem” wears one of its shirts—so he moved to New York City to try out being a comedian. “That would get tough doing comedy like three nights a week … till 2, 3 in the morning and then having to work the next day, so my work started to slack,” Blackman said. Eventually he was fired from his day job headhunting—and said it “turned out to be one of the most wonderful things that ever happened, because I’ve lived on unemployment benefits for many years since.”

Blackman had to move to cheaper housing, though, and found a building on 151st Street that ended up inspiring the screenplay for “Welcome to Harlem.” “It has a tremendous garden rooftop and lots of young people—artists, student, social-working, ah, I don’t want to say poor, but poor types,” Blackman said.

Based on his own experiences, Blackman wrote the movie about a character named Marty Blackstein (played by Blackman) who moves to a Harlem building and there finds a girl and a family of friends. Two other romances are featured in the story line—one couple has just broken up and is trying to remain friends. The other has yet to come together, and the issue appears to be, as Blackman said, a “white-black thing, poor-rich.” A group conflict against rising rents underlies the trio of romances.

This is the second screenplay Blackman has written and the first to be realized. He knew from the outset that he wanted to make Harlem a central feature of the film. “I found this place that was actually really, really cool—that everybody said was supposed to be scary but was in fact über-friendly and warm,” Blackman said.

When he first started writing the script, Blackman didn’t expect the program to come to fruition as quickly as it did, but a string of connections in his building made it happen. Adam Brown, a downstairs neighbor, was the first person looped in to help write the music. Former neighbor Stefan Reed helped further put the wheels in motion, offering to direct. By spring 2010, Blackman had a team of around seven people and a business plan.

It ultimately fell short of its $1 million fundraising goal but came up with $250,000. Blackman supplied half the funds himself through a combination of an inheritance from his grandfather, personal savings, and, as he said, “a whole bunch of debt.” Blackman described this with the utmost calm—adding that they still need to sell several hundred tickets in the week-and-a-half before the premiere to pay for the Apollo.

In December of 2010, Blackman and his co-creators held downtown auditions to cast the film’s main roles. Everyone else in the movie is from Harlem. “That’s what it’s about, where it takes place,” Blackman said. “Neighborhood auditions were totally outrageous. Some of the craziest people and performances you’ll ever dream of. … Biker Alex or Princess Billy—you can’t act that.” Blackman found a place for a few of these crazy acts within the film.

The amount of community support his team received surprised even Blackman. “Here we are right in the middle of everybody’s space, on the street and on the sidewalk every day for a month and a half, and people were not complaining,” he said. “People were trying to help in any way they could.”

They shot the movie during March and April of 2011. Blackman’s favorite part of filming was the night they did a continuous pan of the block he lives on. “It like felt like you’re on a giant movie set,” Blackman said. “Here we are, these fucking kids who live up the street, are broke all the time … shooting a giant film and everybody’s gonna be in it. People, the neighborhood, had a lot of fun that night, and it just really pumped everybody up.”

Of the final product, Blackman said, “Movie’s fucking crazy. Some people will be mildly offended at the comedy. I am okay with that as a comedian.” Case in point: During a song and dance scene between the two characters about to get together, the camera slides over to a man presumably getting a blow job against the side of a building (no nudity is actually shown).

Whether students decide to show up for the movie or not, perhaps they can take a cue from Blackman’s mindset toward life. “I’m very anti-job,” he said. “Not that people shouldn’t have jobs—most people should for society to work well—but just as an option. You don’t have to do whatever it is that you think you’re supposed to be doing.”

Of both his personal story and that in the film, Blackman said, “The hope is that it inspires people and opens the doors a little bit.”