Drug dealers, pimps, muggers, slaves, and servants--these were the roles actor and filmmaker Robert Townsend feared he would play for his entire career. Rather than give in to a system that tended to stereotype non-white actors in a narrow range of possibilities, Townsend took matters into his own hands: he wrote, directed, and starred in Hollywood Shuffle, an independent film that poked fun at the very experiences he and his friends were having. Embraced by the studios and the public, Hollywood Shuffle put him on the map and gave him the freedom to take on many subsequent film and television projects. As a director, actor, writer, and producer, Townsend has sought to expand the panorama of options for black characters, using his work to show that skin color is the least descriptive aspect of character, that only by eroding the standard categories will all actors have the same...