30 years ago, 'Waiting to Exhale' was the blockbuster Hollywood didn't anticipate

Review Movies 30 years ago, 'Waiting to Exhale' was the blockbuster Hollywood didn't anticipate Loretta Devine, Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett and Lela Rochon. Merie W. Wallace/20th Century Fox hide caption toggle caption Many (predominantly white) critics weren't impressed with the movie Waiting to Exhale when it opened in 1995, but moviegoers turned up in droves , making it one of the year's most profitable blockbusters. In a year in review, The Los Angeles Times dubbed the film a " social phenomenon ," and the NAACP lavished it with Image Awards for outstanding motion picture, lead actress and more. Ten years after the acclaim and controversy of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and long before Girlfriends and Girls Trip , the Black women's ensemble feature was a rarity on American screens - until this modestly-budgeted, big studio adaptation of Terry McMillan's popular novel made its splashy debut. Before Sex and the City delved into the sex lives and pitfalls of urban daters, audiences thrilled to the sight of Waiting to Exhale foregrounding the romantic lives and misadventures of four successful, single Black women, not just struggling to survive but striving for more. "I haven't gotten to the point where I'll take whatever I can get," Savannah (Whitney Houston) observes in the movie as she refuses to settle and moves from Denver to Phoenix. "There's a big difference between being thirsty and being dehydrated." Her words apply to people craving better representation just as they do women seeking a love connection. In the 1990s, even as Black women were often let down while longing to see themselves depicted fully and lovingly as the center of stories, they kept seeking, often practicing what cultural scholars like Stuart Hall called negotiated reading . As scholar Jacqueline Bobo wrote in 1988 about Black women's reception of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of The Color Purple , "we understand that mainstream media has never rendered our segment of the population faithfully ... out of habit, as readers of mainstream texts, we have learnt to ferret out the beneficial and put up blinders against the rest." A humane and cheeky comedy, Waiting to Exhale exceeded expectations. So women showed up for this movie, surprising even executives at 20th Century Fox , who should have known better given the book's fans, who swamped readings by the thousands. They gathered. They laughed. They talked. And they cried. And many saw themselves in these four women, regardless of whether they had the wardrobes and lifestyles. They knew the pain of working hard and successfully building a life, when all your family can see is that you don't have the thing that was still so prized and validating in women's lives - a socially approved, church-sanctified partner. The resonance was so deep that, for years to come, the story's reception and impact would be studied by cultural scholars. When Jacqueline Bobo published her book-length study of Black Women as Cultural Readers , Waiting to Exhale was a recurring reference point. And when Black...

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