Diary of a mad black woman movie#

'I felt a huge responsibility for her, for Whitney herself,' he said on Oprah's Next Chapter in 2013. Perry and Houston actually became close friends in real life, and he tried to help her as she struggled with the addictions that eventually contributed her death by accidental drowning in 2012. You can hear a woman who's supposed to be Whitney Houston scream off-camera, 'Bobby! Bobby, I love you!' 'Sit down, Ms. After the arraignment scene where Helen makes bail and Madea gets house arrest after they show up at Helen's former home in an attempt to collect some of what's hers, the judge is seen calling up her next case-'repeat offender' Bobby Brown. It just showed me how amazing she is.'Īnd so, Helen doesn't turn her back on Charles after he's paralyzed in a shooting-though she does look after herself in the end, too, and pursues a new life with the hunky Orlando, played by Shamar Moore.ġ0. 'She said, 'I can't let him change me.' She nursed him back to health, she was there for him, she held his hand all the way through it.

'She taught me something that day,' Perry said. And she would have to depend upon the kindness of strangers to help her get into the hospital.' Three months later, his father was temporarily blinded in an accidental explosion, and his mom duly took care of him. 'And my father, being true to his character, would take her to the hospital and drop her at the corner and drive off, and leave her there. Talking about what inspired Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Perry recalled in 2005 on The Oprah Winfrey Show a time when his mother, suffering complications from diabetes, was blinded for about three months after eye surgery. 'Then I get a call from Lions Gate, and they're like, 'What do we need to do to be in business with you?'' he recalled. Once he felt assured that his creative wishes would be fairly considered, 'it was, 'Good, let's do it.''Ħ. I went to another studio and started getting all these notes on my script-change this, change that.' Finally, Perry said, he decided he'd finance the production himself and put it on DVD.

Diary of a mad black woman movie#

'I met one studio,' Perry told the Los Angeles Times in 2005, 'and the guy told me, 'Black people go to church, they don't go to movies.' And I thought, I'm not going to be able to do this movie here, and I left.

He heard 'no' more than a few times before Lions Gate Films bought the script in 2004.

In 2001 he started shopping the play Diary of a Mad Black Woman to Hollywood studios for a possible film adaptation. Tyler Perry's first play, a gospel musical about adult victims of child abuse inspired by his own life called I Know I've Been Changed, finally took off in Atlanta in 1998, six lean years after its first staging, some of which he spent living in his car.