Hollywood Shuffle (1987)

Writer/director Robert Townsend stars as Bobby, a young African-American acting hopeful has a boss who thinks he's hopeless, a grandmother who wants him to work in the post office, a girlfriend who gives him blind faith, and the chance to play idiotic and insulting roles in terrible movies. He finds his budding career run aground by white producers guilty of perpetrating and perpetuating negative racial stereotypes. He has a series of comic fantasies about Hollywood's cruel history of image-making, stretching from shuffling happy slaves to clownish buffoons to gun-toting pimps. As the actor suffers through a series of often-demeaning auditions--and an even more demeaning part, once he's hired--he begins to question if he really wants to be a part of the business. A dead-on send-up of Hollywood's interminable parade of ethnic stereotypes.