28 Days of Black Movies: I wonder if ‘Hav Plenty’ would be as popular as it is if it were released today (I doubt it)
OPINION: The charming, fun, low-budget, semi-autobiographical rom-com has achieved cult status but has straight-to-streaming written all over it.
Hav Plenty, the 1998 rom-com produced, written, directed, edited and starring Christopher Scott Cherot, has always fascinated me. For starters, Tyler Perry clearly owes his whole career to this movie since Perry literally does damn near everything on his own, though in Cherot’s case, it was out of necessity; Perry just might be a sadist.
But Hav Plenty is a cult classic; there are Hav Plenty brunches, and if you want to talk about classic Black movies, somebody will always bring up this movie. The soundtrack is amazing, owing to the movie’s association with Babyface and his wife, Tracey Edmonds. It comes on the heels of Love Jones (1997) but before we started getting middle-class Black cinema like The Wood and The Best Man (both 1999) or films like Love & Basketball (2000) or Brown Sugar (2002). And according to Cherot, this film was hanging out for years before it reached audiences; he couldn’t afford to even finish the film until over a year after principal photography wrapped.
I like Hav Plenty, a lot actually. It’s a Black movie about unrequited love, allegedly owing its plot to true events in the life of Cherot and his love at the time, Drew Dixon, the music executive at the center of the controversial 2020 documentary On the Record, which details Dixon’s rape allegations against Rusell Simmons. In the movie, Cherot plays Lee Plenty, who is house-sitting for Haviland “Hav” Savage (played by Chenoa Maxwell) in New York City, but she invites him down to Washington, D.C., for New Year’s Eve. He comes down and meets Hav’s family, including her sister Leigh (Robinne Lee), who is fighting with her husband, Felix (Reginald James), about a job offer in New York City with Hav and her best friend, Caroline (Tammi Katherine Jones).
Over the course of the two days Lee is in D.C., both Caroline and Leigh make a pass at him, and Hav’s grandmother tells her that she will marry Lee. Hav, by the way, is the ex-fiancee of R&B star Michael Simmons (Hill Harper), whose single “40 Ounces of Love” is a song I want to hear so badly. She’s still hung up on Simmons though it seems like she does consider being with Lee. By the end of the trip and upon returning to New York, they go their separate ways though Lee pours out his feelings for her in a beautiful letter he slips under her apartment door. A year later, he’s produced an indy film about his weekend that lands him a deal for major distribution, which, again, is true to life.
There’s plenty out there about this film and its inception. Dixon is even from Washington, D.C.—her mother is a former mayor—so maybe it did mostly happen this way. There’s a nod to that a few times in the film; in one scene, Hav looks at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and says, “Remember, this is a true story.” Cherot apparently made this whole film for $65,000, and it made over $2 million at the box office. By all accounts, it’s a success. Just rereading the synopsis that I wrote sounds like an amazing film, and it makes me wonder how awesome it would have been with a real budget.
The thing is, it didn’t—$65,000 isn’t a lot of money. And it felt like it. It makes me wonder how this movie would be received today, given its aesthetic, etc. It doesn’t even feel like there was much of a script. I cringed SEVERAL times at the dialogue, largely from Hav. She says at one point early in the film—after Lee remarks that all she has in her fridge is fruit punch—“You know what they call me, the fruit punch b—.” I literally cringed with my entire soul. And I’ll bet Maxwell does, too, whenever (if ever) she watches it.
Hav Plenty looks and feels A LOT like movies I watch that folks tell me all the time are terrible movies. The script needs work; it looks like it was filmed with the 1998 version of an iPhone (if they existed back then). There is a lot of tremendous insight in the movie, which is why I think it resonates still today, but you have to get through random, stilted scenes and convos that are odd, though mildly entertaining. Even watching Haviland—in response to her grandmother’s declaration that Lee is her husband (the movie more or less leaves it open-ended, in a more optimistic way than real life worked out)—imagine that life, putting her feet in his shoes and looking through his books, etc. It invokes a sense of romantic possibility. But then she flips the script with her whole power trip that Lee hilariously remarks on. It’s great stuff; it just feels like it could be so much better.
I get the charm, and it exists in spades. I end up rooting for Lee and Hav even though I kind of can’t stand Haviland as a human. The movie, though, feels mad bootleg (it essentially was), and I wonder if a movie like this in 2022, with so much heart that also seems like an Amazon Prime special, could reach cult status because we’re so much more critical of such things, perhaps because we have access to more. I don’t think Hav Plenty makes its way out of the “I only watched this because there were Black people” phase of existence.
I suppose it’s the gift and curse of having plenty of options. I know you see what I did there. I’ll see myself out.
Love, 40.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio. He writes very Black things and drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
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