With Sinners, Ryan Coogler Makes a Good Deal at the Crossroads

Ryan Coogler's mesmerizing Sinners is gloriously steeped in the blues: Among the most obvious nods to the form are the names of Smoke and Stack, the twins played by Michael B. Jordan, who share a name with Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning." But the deepest debt may be to Robert Johnson's "Crossroad."

Johnson, a bluesman, is sometimes considered the first rock star. He lived from 1911 to 1938, when he died of poisoning at the very rock star age of 27. He is best known for his song "Crossroad," aka "Cross Word Blues," and for the myth that it spawned: One night he went to a crossroad, got down on his knees, and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical fame.

It's a myth attributed to many rock stars since, through the era of playing records backwards in search of Satanic messages — and it's a compelling part of Sinners.

The film follows Sammie Moore (Miles Canton), a son of a preacher man who can't resist the lure of his blues guitar. His father pleads with him not to take it out to play at juke joints like the ones the twins are opening, warning his son that they're sinful places where people waste their lives. But Sammie takes the twins' money — and the possibility of fame — and goes out into the world.

Sinners leaves wide open the possibility that Sammie's decision is what invites in the hell that follows. Without giving too much away, one could come away from the film concluding that Sammie has made his own deal at the crossroad.

Much has been made of Ryan Coogler's deal with Warner Bros. to make Sinners, in which he will retain the rights to the film in 25 years. One anonymous executive told Vulture that Coogler's deal could be "the end of the studio system" since studios build so much wealth around exploiting old IP.

How did Coogler get his Sinners deal? It doesn't hurt that the Creed and Black Panther franchises, both of which he launched with Jordan, are huge hits. Black Panther was the No. 2 movie of 2018, and helped make it the biggest year ever for domestic box office.

Though Quentin Tarantino made a similar deal for the eventual rights to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's rare for any creative to retain control of their creation. And it's especially rare for a Black artist like Coogler.

Anyone who lives in America knows a story as old as the blues: White people making money on the work of Black artists, just as white Americans built centuries of wealth on the labor of enslaved African-Americans. Legions of producers and executives, most of whose names we will never know, have quietly screwed countless Black artists out of fees and royalties.

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More complicatedly, many perhaps well-meaning white artists have built up careers by riding the legacies of Black artists.

Take Johnson's "Crossroad," aka "Cross Road Blues." Eric Clapton's Cream recorded its louder, faster, electrified version, called "Crossroads," in 1966, helping lead a wave of British and American artists, from Led Zeppelin to Aerosmith, who have covered songs created decades earlier by Black blues musicians.

In some cases, no doubt, the white rock stars' versions of these songs refract some of their popularity to their blues predecessors, giving them long-overdue shine from the public — and perhaps even money for surviving Black artists, or at least their estates.

But in the worst-case scenario — the all-too common scenario — the original Black blues artists or their beneficiaries get nothing. The white artists, meanwhile, get to associate themselves with the art of the blues, but not the suffering that created it.

The latter phenomenon is smartly exemplified in a scene from 2001's Ghost World, in which Steve Buscemi's blues-lover character goes to a bar to see a bluesman he loves, and is mortified by the opening band — a bunch of white pretty boys called Blues Hammer who sing about "pickin' cotton all day long":

Down to the Crossroad

The story of Robert Johnson and "Crossroad" was so popular in the hair-metal '80s that it helped spawn a little-remembered 1986 Walter Hill film called Crossroads, in which Ralph Macchio plays a young guitarist who seeks out an authentic bluesman, Willie Brown, to teach him the ways of the blues. (The film is almost invisible to Google, unless you seek it out, because of a 2002 Britney Spears movie of the same name.)

Crossroads was Macchio's second time playing a young white Italian-American who embraces another culture and thrives in it — it came out just two years after he mastered martial arts in The Karate Kid.

In a curious, very '80s conclusion, Crossroads ends with Macchio and another guitarist, played by Italian-American Steve Vai, battling it out for blues guitar supremacy before a mostly Black audience in a juke joint like the one the twins open in Sinners. It's like 8 Mile, 20 years before 8 Mile, and with blues.

You can make the case that The Karate Kid and Crossroad exploited Asian and Black cultures, respectively, by centering a white protagonist. Or you can make the case that neither movie would have been made in the 1980s without a young white star. Or both.

There's a similar question with The Blues Brothers: Is it a story of white comedians milking Black culture? Or of white people helping Black music cross over further to white audiences? Or both? How often did any of us hear of the blues, prior to Sinners, aside from the House of Blues chain co-founded by white Canadian Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd?

Also, have you noticed that all the examples of blues-related films and businesses referenced so far have involved white creators?

Why do you think that is?

The Rights to 'Crossroad'

Questions of cultural and financial appropriation can get very messy, as they do with the story of Robert Johnson's "Crossroad."

In the early 1970s, after British and American rock stars embraced Robert Johnson as a spiritual father, blues fan and researcher Stephen C. LaVere sought out Johnson's survivors and made a deal for his unreleased music.

Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, a boxed set released in August 1990, earned Johnson a posthumous Grammy for Best Historical Album Grammy and sold more than a million copies. Author Robert Gordon wrote a detailed piece, first published in LA Weekly in 1991, questioning how well the deal worked out for Johnson's heirs.

The article reported that LaVere struck his deal with Johnson's half-sister, Carrie Thompson, and that the copyright on Johnson's works went to him after Johnson's death.

"Now that she is gone I have an obligation to pay her heirs, and when I’m gone, my heirs have to pay her heirs. And it goes on, as long as money is collected, money will be paid,” Gordon quoted LaVere as saying.

LaVere died a decade ago, but not before giving an interview in which he said he thought his legacy would be bringing Robert Johnson's work to the wider world: "I think that the good will overshadow the bad," he said.

Ryan Coogler Offers Questions and Answers in Sinners

Sinners takes a provocative approach to questions of cultural appropriation: One standout, magnificent scene connects ancient African drumming to funk, modern hip-hop and even Chinese opera, showing how music can seamlessly connect generations and even continents. The main white characters in the film keep saying they just wanted to enjoy the juke joint's music — though they're withholding some key information. The film's composer is the Swedish Ludwig Göransson, who also composed the music for Coogler's Creed and Black Panther, among many other projects. (He won an Oscar for both Black Panther and Oppenheimer.)

The film suggests that cultures, continents and centuries can come together — beautifully, uncomplicatedly — on a dance floor.

Behind the till is another story. Smoke and Stack spend a good section of Sinners worrying over real money, wooden nickels, and gold. The movie starts with a business deal with a white man with the worst of intentions.

But Coogler's deal with Warner Bros. seems like a good deal for everyone: The film had made more than $71 million as of Tuesday, blowing past industry expectations.

The film ends with a scene that hints at how the story could go on. Perhaps Sinners will become more valuable in the decades to come, just like "Crossroads."