With ‘Blindspotting,’ Oakland’s Film Scene Takes Center Stage

Long before he won a Tony Award for “Hamilton,” Daveed Diggs was living in Oakland, California — his hometown — and watching in alarm as white tech-industry workers moved in, driving up rents and displacing black residents. Around the same time in 2009, a white officer fatally shot an unarmed black man in the back three blocks from Diggs’ apartment.

“We were all dealing with lots of complicated issues and feelings all at once,” Diggs recalled in a recent interview.

He and a friend, Rafael Casal, ended up channeling their emotions — rage, frustration, confusion, anxiety — into a screenplay. The resulting film, “Blindspotting,” arrives Friday after a nine-year gestation. Lionsgate plans to release the movie in about 475 theaters nationwide after it generated solid ticket sales in a 14-theater trial run last weekend and received an A grade from audiences in CinemaScore exit polls.

For the first time in Oakland’s long history as a cultural hotbed, major film artists are surfacing in rapid succession, a development that reflects a shift in Hollywood regarding what kind of stories and storytellers receive support. “Blindspotting,” which stars Casal and Diggs and grapples with racial profiling and gentrification, follows “Sorry to Bother You,” a racial satire written and directed by Boots Riley, an Oakland artist-activist. (It has collected $10 million at the box office since July 6, a good result for an indie film.) Leading the pack has been Ryan Coogler, whose “Black Panther” was partly set in Oakland and took in $1.3 billion worldwide earlier this year.

“The thread that connects them is a sense of place,” said Eric Arnold, a journalist who has written extensively about Bay Area artists, including on the blog Oakulture.

To have three films in the cultural firmament at once, he added, is “a game changer” for Oakland’s film scene. (There is already Oscar and other awards chatter in Hollywood around all three movies.)

Whether or not “Blindspotting” hooks a wide audience remains to be seen. But the film has already succeeded in one aspect: Diggs and Casal are now firmly on studio radar screens.

“Oh, man, yeah, you wouldn’t believe it,” Diggs said. “There are already so many things in the works.”