Robert Townsend is a man of a thousand voices; when we meet him he is "doing" a cowed black street hood who sounds strangely like Blanche Dubois. Being one of Hollywood's consummate black character actors, Townsend can run the gamut of stereotypes, from butler to slave to pimp. That is the point of Hollywood Shuffle-the film with which he both satirizes his plight and escapes it, proving himself to be a gifted comic and an energetic director. A loose plot about one Bobby Taylor, aspiring actor, holds together a series of skits lambasting the treatment of black actors in Hollywood. An employee at a ghetto hot-dog stand enduring the further ignominy of his umteenth blacksploitation audition, Bobby's fantasy world provides the film with its comic fodder: he invents a black Sam Spade, two hilarious homeboy film critics (they give really bad films the finger), and the head of a training school where blacks learn useful moves-like the Hollywood Shuffle. Made on a shoestring (and a credit card), Hollywood Shuffle is rough in the manner of early Woody Allen-its set-ups are obvious and funnier for it-and smooth in the manner of Townsend himself, a man who's perfected his own moves in spite of it all.