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For the first time in a long time, things seemed to be changing in Hollywood. Black filmmakers were making inroads where their white counterparts had long been parked, bringing with them an array of perspectives and experiences seldom recognized by mainstream American production companies. The bad old days — of blackface and white saviors, of “colorblind” studio executives and all-white Oscar nominees — grew, for a while, hazy and remote, suddenly incongruous with the diverse new landscape.

“Just about every studio in town has a project in development with a black director … or wants to,” read an article in this newspaper, headlined “In Hollywood, Black Is In

It wasn’t 2019, but 1990, more than two decades before #OscarsSoWhite and the industry’s continuing reckoning over the representation of African-Americans in front of and behind the camera. Then as now, a string of hit movies by black directors — Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” the Hudlin brothers’ “House Party,” John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood” and Mario Van Peebles’s “New Jack City” — inspired optimism that Hollywood, despite overwhelmingly white executive leadership, had awakened to the moral and financial benefits of empowering minority artists.

Speaking for a 1991 story titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” — from aNew York Times Magazine issue that featured the aforementioned black filmmakers on its cover — the director Charles Lane was one of many who foresaw permanent change: “The Berlin Wall, having been pulled down, will not be re-erected.”