Yet each of those recent success stories was an independent production, with origins outside the clubby confines of Hollywood studios. Making film and television is an expensive gamble, and when the people making the wagers all come from a single demographic, the only certainty is that their own point of view will always be well represented. “It think it’s pretty simple,” says the ICM agent Andrea Nelson Meigs, whose clients include Beyoncé and Quvenzhané Wallis. “People buy what they relate to. People buy what they’re familiar with. If the person behind the desk doesn’t relate to the experience of the person in front of it, it’s 50-50.” She illustrated this with a story from her own office, where she was surprised to learn that of several young assistants, only one, an African-American woman, was aware of the iconic activist Angela Davis, the subject of a potential biopic. “If that’s the room we’re pitching,” Nelson Meigs says, “that story doesn’t get made.”

It doesn’t help that Hollywood relies on tweaking proven formulas, meaning any filmmaker without successful antecedents they can use to back up their ideas will face high hurdles. The one area where African-Americans have found relatively consistent recent success in the industry has been the popular work of directors like Lee Daniels, F. Gary Gray or Tyler Perry, to which audiences flock for the same reason whole neighborhoods once gathered around the television: because they will see themselves on the screen, and because they know they will not feel insulted by what they see. It has not been easy to secure even that much, let alone opportunities to make more psychologically and artistically ambitious films. “When I started it was the age of Spike Lee,” says Poppy Hanks, Macro’s senior vice president for production, who attended the University of Southern California at the same time as John Singleton, and whose early career coincided with the commercial success of movies like “Soul Food” (which she worked on) and “Waiting to Exhale.” “There was just a wave that gave us a sense it was all possible.” As she made her way into the business, though, she saw how difficult it could be to push such films through the industry. “It’s always shocking to them when something succeeds,” she says. “Not to us, but to them.”

King’s career has spanned both reliable franchises like the “Barbershop” movies and more ambitious films like “Fruitvale Station.” He understands what pleases crowds, but he also understands the narrowness of current cinema and the pent-up creative energies outside it. “The specific message I want to resonate,” he says, “is people of color have stories to tell.” Part of this conviction comes from his youth, when he watched his mother try to publish the novel she worked on every day after coming home, only to be met with rejection by industry gatekeepers. “I remember the impact that had on her,” he says. “It made her question whether she was a gifted writer, and she was.” He does not say it, but it is clear in his tone that he still thinks the rejections had less to do with merit than with other forces. The business of culture is one of the most subjective in American society, and its executive suites are all filled with unintentional, unexamined biases. Added together, those biases can still accomplish nearly the same ends as the outright aggression directed at people of color a century ago. There was no animus toward King’s mother. They simply couldn’t see her, or her story.

Charles David King was born in Harlem in 1969, when his father was a pediatrics resident at Harlem Hospital. After stints in North Carolina and Atlanta, the family settled in suburban Decatur, Ga., among the first African-Americans in an area that soon fell into a pattern of white flight. When I asked him, over lunch one afternoon, the first time he remembers being treated differently, he had to think only a moment before replying, “Third grade.” His family had just arrived in Georgia, and when he started school, “it was the height of being bused. They tried to put me on a lower learning track.” To compensate, “I just did what we always do, you know. Work twice as hard.” As a young African-American male, however bourgeois, he remembers being accosted by the police in malls or on campus at Vanderbilt University, where he studied political science and communications.

After Vanderbilt, King enrolled at the historically black Howard University for law school. It was a summer internship at MTV that gave him his first real exposure to the media industry, and it was while living in 1990s New York that he met Stacey Walker, a 22-year-old recent Duke graduate. She recalls their first meeting as anything but fateful: She was leaving a party with friends, and King and his friends were on their way in, an encounter he claimed not to remember when they ran into each other again shortly afterward. Nonetheless, they were soon dating seriously. He moved to Los Angeles a year later; after a year and half, Stacey joined him. They’ve been together some 20 years.

Before heading West, at the suggestion of a mentor in New York, King wrote what he describes as “hundreds of Unabomber letters,” which yielded dozens of informational interviews and, ultimately, four job offers, one of them a coveted spot in the William Morris mailroom. He turned out to be the only African-American trainee in film and television. The William Morris Agency was founded in 1898 as William Morris, Vaudeville Agent; it’s so old that its original client list included Charlie Chaplin and Mae West. Its mailroom is actually an extremely competitive internship program, offering trainees an opportunity to learn the business and prove themselves from the inside. As with many such programs, privilege, connections and nepotism were often at least as important as ability. “I don’t think there had been an African-American trainee there in years,” King says, shaking his head with grim bemusement. To celebrate his new role, he invited Stacey to dinner at Spago, one of Hollywood’s old-school watering holes. As they waited in line for their table, Stacey learned for the first time how much he was making. She told him she didn’t feel well. “We left,” she says, smiling mischievously. “We never ate together at Spago Hollywood.”