Baadasssss Cinema (2002) - full transcript
Filmmaker Isaac Julien uses film clips and interviews to illustrate the history of the so-called "blaxploitation" genre.
Blaxploitation cinema
Really offered something that
hadn't existed before
They got into areas that other movies
didn't but crime novels did
If there were more than
five blacks on a corner
They considered it a riot so
they'd bring out the dogs
And they'd turn the water hoses on,
all this stuff was still happening in the 70s, man
And if you fought back
you went straight to jail
The only way we could get away with it
was on the screen
The fear was that black powers might have to come
from the barrel of a gun
this is...
Baadaasss...
Cinema
like a black hollywood
My first exposure to blaxploitation films
Downtown L.A, in that whole Broadway area with all
the old theaters and everything
that was like a black Hollywood
Now all those big theaters
up and down the street
Every film was a Blaxploitation film
They had a big thing there with "Hitman"
with a picture of Bernie Casey on it
And "The Mack" you know, a picture of
Max Julien on the marquee
I felt like I was in a black world
every theater was a Blaxploitation film
It's like going to this theater and
Everybody is talking through it and they're making fun of it buddy.
They're like, oh suck my dick...
Fuck you motherfucker.
All right, all this shit is going on to me
I've never been to the theater
This was going on before - ma'am how old am I?
I'm in third grade
okay, maybe less and um, like wow,
this is really kind of cool and
then
Black gun started and then everyone shut up
Blaxploitation -
1. a commercial - minded film of the seventies
for black audiences
It just meant that they found a way to
Tap into a black audience
and we exploit the dollars
that they have
by making movies for them by them
that are about them
It didn't mean that they were exploiting our sensibilities
or anything else
it was just trying to make a dollar
in the mid 70s the early 70s
when whites and when mainstream
cinema was about
defeat
Its the Nixon era it was Watergate people
didn't feel empowered
Feminism was making men to have
to rethink the relationship
to romance and sexuality on screen
black movies and heroes one
people that could affect change
they were funny they were people
but these actors who are
Bursting with charisma and ambition laying
claim to the screen for the first time
They were not affected by the kind
of defeatist attitude
That had taken this place in pop culture.
They were about winning.
My son Tupac was greatly influenced
By the films of the of the seventies
he actually by the time he died
had amassed a collection of all of those films
he watched them as a kid and
he watched 'em over and over again
what he watched
As a kid was these films
and Bruce Lee's films and all of the martial arts films
and that was his basic culture
It's just kind of what happens with time...
Kill Niggers
Stop now, why are you having integrity
of a race of people?
We needed something to make us
feel better about ourselves
you watch the news every day
people were being beat down
things weren't progressing the way we wanted to
Martin Luther King was asking us to do one thing
Stokely Carmichael and
Rap Brown asking us to
do another thing.
The Panthers are doing their thing.
Revolution has come
Its time to pick up the guns!
I believe that the Black Power movement
influenced every single aspect of culture
in the 60s and the 70s
It's odd that people don't realize it now
It's just kind of what happens with time
but I think that there is no question that that is so
We're gonna walk on this racist power structure
and we're gonna say to the whole damn government
Stick them up motherfucker.
This is a hold up we come for what's ours?
a lot of those movies were made because of the...
I don't want to say power of the Black Power movement
cause we actually had we had perceived power.
We had no real power, but
whatever
Concept of power it was I think
that we had enough to apply pressure
he got away!
The two films that really marked
the takeoff of blaxploitation
"Our sweet sweetback's badass song"
by Melvin Van Peebles and
"Shaft" by Gordon Parks
The Van Peeble's film
really pointed out
The whole formula for making
a success in Hollywood
in defining this new short cycle
You know the way I got into films I
Just got I had a grudge growing and growing and
going against what I kept seeing on the screen and I said well
Shit, I can do better than that
The cause that I had was...
Giving Black folkes a sense of self
which had been stolen from us.
So that's how I made sweet back
You got a sweet
Sweet Sweetback
The color intelligencia were not
too happy about it, and
The
The Nationalists were not too happy about it
Now you see the Panthers now the Panthers stood up for the film
and made it required viewing for all of their members
Then Peebles defined it as a revolutionary movie
and the Black Panther Party
Backed that position and so the debate
was on was Sweetback truly
Revolutionary or was it just purely?
exploitation
It's an X rated movie and
It had depictions of sexual activity that at the time
those were quite provocative and bold
And
That's why people went
Very few people actually picked up
on the political message
in Sweet Sweet Back, and there is a very strong one
Okay, what should I make him a clerk?
Hmm
musician
Mm-hmm. What's something everybody's interested in
without poontang? Shit...
Everybody's interested in sex. So I said, okay.
I'll make him a sexual animal
That's how it came about, what
Van Peebles really love to do
He's an instigator, which is I think what a lot of again
a lot of artists great artists want to do especially in this country
is to just provoke people and it was
Obviously purely from a commercial impulse
to get as many, you know, Afros in the theaters
seemed really possible
There is no sense of the word conventional narrative
And in fact there seems to have no interest in that,
it's just always offhanded stories
Which I thought was one of the most revolutionary things
I've ever seen in a movie
Certainly, I think this wave ranks with Godard
because if it broke down the expectations
that black audiences had about movies
Well, I go into the theater and the theaters packed
And not a sound, you could have heard
a rat pissing on cotton
Its toward the end of the movie and
Sweetback is out in the desert.
I said now, there's an old black lady and she said
Oh Lord, let him die
Just don't let him kill him. Let him die out here on his own
It was off her chart. that a negro, a colored,
a black and african-american
one of us would ever make it to the
To the end of the movie, so we didn't make it
to the end of the movie, huh?
She knew he was gonna die, but she leads it more to white folks to kill him
The thing about Sweetback is that he got away and
that never happened in a movie before
there's never been a movie where the police or
Someone was running after a black man
and the black man escaped
Without the Black Power movement there would
not that would not have been allowed
when Sweetback
Got away, It was a stunned silence
and then the place exploded
World Premier - Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet...
It was the largest grossing
independent film up to that time
I think its importance is that it
demonstrated that there was a black audience there
and that you could make
black films for that audience
and not only
Gather your audience and focus them
in a certain kind of way
and make money in the process without
being totally
trapped in the system
he did it for the money and
Academia and cultural criticism and all this stuff
has come along afterwards to try to give
this kind of deep and profound
Spin to it and it doesn't it doesn't mean that it may not have deep
and profound implications
But let's face it
The foundation of why this film was made and
why it was a success was all about money
What Hollywood did,
they suppress the political message
added caricature
And Blaxploitation was born
Action
I didn't introduce myself to you,
my name is John Shaft
Freeze
everything we always wanted to be
Five out of six, Hollywood
Blockbusters were failing right in that period
at the end of the 60s, so
They weren't making any money in the box office,
a couple of big studios went into receivership
So when they started to see
These things in the black independent films
that were really successful
Hey, they put out their own product line
that was good
The Shaft was really made for a white cast
But when they saw all of these things,
of rising expectations of a new black audience
This black energy about self-definition
and the new black politics
and they saw something that was immediately
Exploitable they changed chef's to a black film
The first time I saw it it was awesome
He was ike everything
we'd always wanted to be
he was like cool he talked tough
He looked great
He was kind of fearless he was a hero
He was already a neighborhood icon
when he showed up in the movie,
even though we didn't know him
We knew him, you know, we felt him
There are these moments that
kind of
signals the black audience that white people
just sort of scratch their heads about
"Hey Taxi!"
The scene where at the start of the picture can't get a cab
"What the hell is this?"
You know white mother
Sort of like there was this this underground code
That's the black filmmakers and the actors
brought their own experience
It's a movies in a way that we had never seen before
"listen snow white"
"Me and you gonna tangle sooner or later,"
"why don't you stop playing with yourself
Willie you ain't gonna do shit"
That huge
ripple that created half a splash onto the shores
of popular culture at some point
and just the idea of Shaft saving the studio that -
-was literally pawning Judy Garland's ruby slippers
for twenty thousand dollars to keep the doors open.
It was just a wonderful thing
It was a hit combination.
It's kind of a black macho detective in New York City
black girlfriends white girlfriends mediating between
the mob and
The police looking for a kidnapped
gangsters daughter
high adventure and
Isaac Hayes with the score was well
Hey, that was a high cultural moment
the sequence we saw this morning Times Square and none of the
Skyscrapers along 42nd Street over the marquees and
when Shaft pops up out of that subway
That's when they should really come on.
That should be a driving
savage beat, you know so that
we right with him all the time
Lets take it
1..2...
Hollywood seemed to have missed the entire advent
of rock and roll and soul music
and then with the appearance of the Shaft theme
Its as if Hollywood finally woke up
to it many years later
"Up Yours"
"Get out of the way!"
That theme song was so exciting to hear
and still is exciting to hear that it and
It came at the very beginning of the movie
It's sort of kicked the movie sky high
(Song) "Who's the black private dick
That's a sex machine to all the chicks?"
"Shaft!"
"Damn right"
If you're a fan of the genre
the music is great, is fantastic
as a filmmaker I'm semi-frustrated
that it wasn't utilized better
"You see this cat Shaft is a bad mother (Shut your mouth)"
"Talking about Shaft"
If I had the theme to shaft
to open up my movie
I'd open up my damn Mov...
kung fu films have used the score to
Shaft better than Shaft has
In 1971 for sure blaxploitation was
poised for a big takeoff
and then after that boom
the explosion happened
Most of the Blaxploitation heroes
were anti-heroes.
They were you know pimps
and drug dealers
and guys coming home from the war who lived
on the other side of the law
Ex-gangbangers or whatever and they were gangsters,
but they were all fighting against the man
"The only game 'the man' left for us to play"
Super Fly
Superfly capitalized on the insights of
both of Shaft and Sweetback
It had an absolutely brilliant soundtrack
by Curtis Mayfield
but it also had the
Transgressive bad hero in it.
And that is a coke dealer named priest who was
at the height of fashion
But this guy also
Fits into what black people call the life
a kind of hustling, pimping, underworld
and this is taken up
when Carl Lee
Eddie and Superfly tells
Superfly
Hey, so it's the only game the man
is left for us to play.
"Priest all I do sell coke"
Hey, I don't do no violence.
Dont mess with no fun
Iisten don't argue with me
I'm trying to give you a chance
You don't get my money tonight
I'm gonna put that younger
Leo's out of whores role.
Listen that my wife
you're talking about
So What?
it was the first time that
we looked at the issue of
Drug sales and drug abuse and
looked at the outside
Influences that control those drugs
you're gonna work for me
until I tell you to quit
You don't own me pig and no motherfucker
tells me when I can split
Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?
It's a movie about a guy wants
make a big dope score and
and the soundtrack
refutes every single thing in the movie
I mean you couldn't ask for a better
object lesson than Superfly
which has a
Performance by an actor, a brawling actor Ron O'Neill
who was itching for a chance to be a movie star
kind of savoir faire
Tigerish grace that maybe want to be him
at the same time everything that Curtis Mayfield
is doing on that soundtrack
It's all seduction as he's saying no
and thunder to everything
this movie is representing
"Hey Priest"
Look here, this is Priest
Curtis Mayfield approached that movie as a chance to make
a serious statement about that condition and
He was able to do it in
Superfly even though the film
Ethically went in one direction and
Mayfield went in the other
Part of the problem with Blaxploitation
has always been
that they degraded the political needs
of the black audience
Black audience in the 70s was indeed a politically conscious audience
but too often going to those movies you were
encouraged to simply forget the politics and
Indulge the pleasure of the sex
the clothes the cars the drugs
it was where the reaction against
Blaxploitation started to really pick up
Fight Blaxploitation in Pix
The Hollywood
Beverly Hills branch of the NAACP
pretty much rigorously denouncing
Superfly, Jesse Jackson
A number of people coming out and saying "hey..."
I don't know if this is exactly the direction
we want to go in
If you see Jim Brown or Carl Stokes on TV
You can rather safely assume
that they are not going to suffer
any indignity on the television
They feel a little freer
and
Maybe feel a little more powerful
but they are not actually any more powerful
because they have not turned Groove
Into an organism.
There were a number of people that
reacted to the film
And we can start to see then the seeds of a kind
of a critical dialectical reversal
Superfly is made by black people
In the black ghetto like it is and taken out
to the money affluent people
We have to be very thoughtful
Of what we do in say on film
the stereotypes that we have are often
what we perpetuated ourselves
I broke them,
but I also created some
because everyone thought a black woman
is a whoopie or a sister all the time
No, that's not true. You know,
we create a lot of that mess ourselves
"When Foxy Brown comes to town
All the Brothers gather around...
Because she can really shake him down"
"Foxy Lady"
I thought it was like doing "Gone With the Wind",
I was going for the Oscar
You tell me what you want done
and I'll do the hell out of it
That's how I
Approached everything in my life
is just be the best
"have no fear, Pam Grier is here"
Pam Grier to me was like a superhero.
I mean look at the body
on this woman, I mean
With the film "Coffy", "Sheba, Baby"
Foxy Brown, you know
She was basically a superhero
almost like the ultimate girl.
You didn't quite want a girl that was that tough
But you didn't want a girl that was you know,
that tall had a big fro
You don't want your girlfriend actually
be able to kick your ass
"All right, everybody out"
He says anything
Coffy was my mom
Foxy Brown was my aunt and they were women
who were very demonstrative
But yet had very feminine and
know how to use sexuality
"Hey you big man, why don't you turn out the light?"
This is the end of your rotten life you
motherfucking dope picture
Women of the 70s had to do a lot of
things because of the wars
They did a lot of things that men
were supposed to do
if you didn't have a man at home
You did it. So I also
brought that into the film
Coffy, Foxy Brown and Sheba were independent woman
that did things because there wasn't a man around
"My name is Coffy. LuBelle Coffy is my little sister"
Her whole life is gone!
She can never get it back,
and you're living real good
It ain't right, so go on and take the shot.
- I can't. That'd kill me
Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But if it do,
you're gonna fly through the Pearly Gates
with the biggest fuckin' smile St Peter's ever seen.
The level of violence was
pretty great in those films
now even in Coffy and all this that
she had razor blade stuck in her hair
women grab by hand
She's a wild animal
You've got to have that girl
Tonight
I thought it was the
The moment where we could really live out
The freedoms won by the 50s 40s 50s and 60s
political gains
Where we could come out here and
go to Beverly Hills
and the doors are open for me to go
to nightclubs and restaurants
And be treated very equal when
I remember, you know
Walking with my mom in the south my little brother
We would go shopping to bring food
and things back home
and the bus's city buses wouldn't stop to pick us up
Because we were black
Hundred and ten in the shade humidity
bugs and they go right by us
It could be up to ten miles.
It's like walking from here to downtown, you know
LA
So from knowing what that was and to be able
to really experience a freedom
One in the 70s was was very different
What is it you really want?
Justice.
-For whom, your brother?
Why not?
It could be your brother too
Or your sister, or your children
I want justice for all of them
And I want justice for all the other people
whose lives are bought and sold
So that a few big shots can climb up
on their backs and laugh at the law
Sister, I think what you're asking for is revenge
also, the the sexual movement was
Raging through the streets,
shorts were getting - you know -
skirts were getting shorter,
men's pants are getting tighter
People were throwing underwear and bra
out the window,
you know type of thing. We had Woodstock.
He loved your body naked peace and love
So all of that was about who we were too -
and you can see that in the film
By 1975 the industry was rocking
and then other actresses said,
"you know, I think I'ma kick some butt too
and make some money like Pam"
So there were other actresses entering,
from Tamara Dobson
To Gloria Hindry
'Do those dishes or something'
They're done
It was just exploding
It was fun, I mean it was fashion
'He's a Pusher'
Blaxploitation films brought to
The screen for the first time
in many ways working class and poor black people's
obsessions with style
Jim for gentle party.
Look I want you to meet somebody this here is...
Mystique
What people really remember basically is the clothes that
the pimps wore, the hustlers, you know
That was the stuff that really stood out
The self-expression
they wanted to be out there
they wanted to shine
put the light on me,
you know flamboyant peacocks
I can remember,
you know going to see The Mac and
Everybody wanted to be 'Goldie'.
You know, he had this white monkey fur coat on, its like
everybody emulated this
This was the shift from the
Self-sacrificing 'we' generation of the civil rights movement
and its aftermath
and the 'me' consumer generation
that was starting to rise
Energy that up until about
72', 73', was very militant
starts to get displaced into
a sartorial display, fashion
The afro was out
Guys, that were wearing berets
and black leather jackets
suddenly started showing up
with big gold chains
with coke spoons on them
and crushed velvet
With the big floppy hats
it was bad
It was you know, it was fun.
I mean it was fashion
You wanted to be like these people that you saw on the screen
and that's what some people say
a lot of the negativity came from I
Told you before, okay, you got your game
and I got mine
Okay, I got ten in the finest hoes in the world working for me.
I'm getting $100 a day from each one. Okay?
Goldie get off my ass with
a penny-ante pussies games
The people with the funny hats and the noisemakers
they've gone home early
the party's over baby. It's dawn
It's reality
Oh My God we should show pimps to a white America,
that this is who we are in our community
they'll think we're all like this
and that was the problem
of storytelling
because everyone will generalize one black man on TV
and on the news all black people are like that, you know
So that was a part of a lot
of the dialogue and
oh my god, you know,
can we do other films?
Yeah, but no one will come
and see them, you know, so
So you like the music you like the fashions you like the culture,
you like this and you like that? Okay
well, those are also
the stereotypes too
Somebody's a junkie. Somebody's a pimp has to be involved
about crime has to be involved in the ghetto
White cops are all evil
so now
put into a social fabric framework
what all we are pimps all we are cops
all we are detectives all we are are
Pushers or bounty hunters or
these kind of things.
No, but at the same time,
it's crime cinema
So the only real argument coming
from the other side is like,
you know black shouldn't
be doing crime films
some black attractions
I think frankly the
white directors are gonna
Step in and take over the bonanza
black directors are
Continually beaten over the head
or doing what they call
black film
I was making old
Warner Brothers gangster movies
like Public Enemy and
And Little Caesar and just
putting black actors into it
Larry Cohen's one of the underappreciated
near geniuses of American film making
A man, who is always
socially and politically conscious
And comes up with kind of lowdown,
but ingenious ways of expressing
political issues and problems
After I had done a picture called
"Bone' with Yaphet Kotto
I was summoned to Sam Arkoff's office
he said we want to make some black attractions
You really know how to direct those black actors
and I said, well Sam there's only one black actor in the picture,
Yaphet Kotto and I agree he was good, but
directing a black actor is
no different than directing anybody else
But I said as long as you're interested
I have to have something in the trunk of the car
you might like to read and
And we ran down and got the treatment for "Black Caesar".
Well, we weren't out of the office before we had a deal
A man will grow up with nothing and
clawed his way up to the top.
He's trying to live in the white man's world
Playing by the white man's rules and
forgets his true identity know himself
and is basically brought down by the fact
that he doesn't know himself
It's a classic tragic story
"Jesus Christ!"
Sauce look like it needed a little more meat
"What the hell are you doing, who are you?
there are a number of these action-adventure films
which started to liberate
the black image and and started
to bring out this kind of
Physical black macho this expression of black violence.
We were tired of seeing
the righteous black man
and all of a sudden we had guys who were us
Or guys who did the things
we wanted those guys to do.
We wanted the guys kill the man
Don't talk to him don't think
of some elaborate scheme.
You know, I'm gonna leave you here
and let the dogs eat you
No! shoot him and get on with your life, you know and guys like
Fred Williamson and Jim Brown
And Ron O'Neal and all these guys did that stuff
Jim Kelly Jim Brown
Fred Williamson, all these black athletes were getting
into action adventure and being black heroes
my nickname when I played professional football
was 'The Hammer'
I wanted to do a black gangster movie
and I wanted to be like Edward G Robinson
and where you rob from the rich
and give to the poor
Casting is 75% of directing
Fred was beautiful
Let's face it he was gorgeous
with Fred Williamson you could say
he was the black Burt Reynolds
I can walk down any street in any part
of the city and any ghetto
Wherever it's rough wherever it's tough.
I walk by three or four guys man.
And as I walk by they go
that's 'The Hammer' man. Yeah, yeah he's a bad dude,
man. Hammers bad
I'm walking this way and the guys walking
that way and it's Fred Williamson
And just as I'm passed, I'm like,
oh my god. That's the hammer
and so I just say, 'are you Fred williamson?'
he goes you got it
Somebody to stand up and say
hey when the smoke clears and the guns are all fired
We're the ones left standing, you know, don't kill me and go have him
- Stallone, avenge my death
kill Stallone, let me avenge Stallone's death
'Who's there?'
I came out to California
just for a look around.
I got an agent just like that
he said 'Gloria I want you to come over to this set with me'
They're looking for an actress.
It was black Caesar
I walked in they looked at me
and Fred was standing on the side
just observing
and Larry started talking to me.
He said look and they were in the middle of shooting.
He said look
How do you feel about nudity?
First of all, I'm a bunny
So nudity to me was not a big deal
Since I have no problem with it
as long as it's done with taste
he said well the feature feature film calls for it
so I left and next thing I knew
the following day my
Agency said I got the part
I had it, I've had it up to here
with pinching my ass
And thinking I'm a prostitute.
O baby please
Sit down, you didn't play a couple of tunes for me.
Now let's just sit down and play a couple of tunes
What do you want to hear?
- Doesn't matter, just make it loud
Then James Brown was brought in
They sent me the music
James done a wonderful thing,
he thought
which was if the scene was three minutes long
James wrote seven minutes of music for it
if a scene was a minute and a half
James wrote three minutes of music for it
I said to Bobby who was his assistant.
I got a two man scene. He wrote four minutes of music
He says to me,
well the man gave you more than you need.
I said Charles it doesn't work that way
the music has got to fit the scene
Picture opened - it was a blockbuster
'Who the hell are you?'
- Did you know that man's beard keeps on growing
even after he's... dead?
Then once you get through that
vicarious thrill to see a black man
Beat up a white man on the screen
you go back and you face the same evil system
that you faced before you went there
We should always deal with
the reality and not fantasy.
I did not like that climate during that time
these organizations fail to understand
that the community was really in need of
Their own heroes and black movies
The NAACP and core they're the ones
who created this terminology
Black Exploitation,
so that has to be clear on the record book
It came from them and didn't come from
the white press it came from them.
I didn't like the term
Especially during that time
I went what is that?
How dare you pigeonhole us?
who was being exploited?
All the black actors were getting paid.
They had a job they were going to work
The audience wasn't being exploited.
They were getting to see things on their screen
that they had longed for over the years
So I don't really understand
where this terminology fits
The NAACP never tried to go out and
Get enough money to make a movie that they wanted to see,
you know, and that was always my beef
You know, if you have a problem
with this particular film
then get some money and
make the film you want us to see
Genres come and go
There are so many of these movies,
I mean
there was the Black Six and the Black Gestapo
and Black Shampoo and
Blackenstein and Count Chocula,
well, that's a cereal
but it might as well been
a blaxploitation movie
I curse you with my name
You shall be.... Blacula
Blacula Dracula's soul brother
Deadlier even than he
You know you give strange...
They made a lot of
bad movies under the guise of
Blaxploitation pictures just like
most movies are bad
But I think that they abused the privilege
Genres come and go
and the Blaxploitation genre
Had a... I think had was
so popular for so long and
they made so many movies of it
It had a firmer hold then say the biker films
alright, or
Slasher movies or
something like that.
It wasn't just connected to exploitation
when the critics started to really turn against
blaxploitation and,
and just the the
formula that was produced
after the few brilliant moments
It all started to head in
these interesting directions
Kung-fu was one of those directions
Black people read it just as an anti colonial
impulse just straight-up
vs. martial art like that has been
perfected and practiced by Asians
and you run around kicking and whipping
a lot of people with this
Great skill so they were into
that from the beginning
There was something very 70s about those
kung-fu films that it's a different 70s, but
blacks made it their own
by their acceptance of that genre
You crazy
I had done at least six or seven films back to back from
72 to 74 that was exhausting
When I look back on that period you can see a lot of us
working a whole lot we were all very tired
If anything I got... I got opposition
From people insane and you know putting me down
for doing movies like that. I mean, I I was I was beaten
Mentally, emotionally not physically because
you don't know what's going on
All you know is that
there's a force out there
That's doing you in and you're going under
and you don't know why all you know is just spinning
It wasn't white Hollywood so much that was against it
they were very happy to make these films
$700,000/800,000 budget
10 million dollar gross back to them
Hey, they were very happy then all of a sudden
here comes this terminology black exploitation
Then they say well listen if the black audiences
and the blacks don't like these movies
Maybe we better jump off the bandwagon
when Hollywood saw that
like clearly
One-fourth to one-third of their audience
for the Exorcist and The Godfather was black
They just all looked at each other and said hey,
why are we making black movies?
It was a vicious time when everything was cut off
and you don't know it's cut off
Until you start falling and
you're putting your hands out
You can't grab a hold of anything
and I was grabbing
Making phone calls and grabing while I was falling
and I couldn't get a hold of anything
there was nothing
I saw our demise,
I saw our death
I saw the actors producers
production companies,
directors etc. I saw us dead
Black films saved Hollywood and when they got
through with us around 75 or 76
They dropped us,
the door slammed
Not very many people survived...
Pam Grier survived
Richard Roundtree made $13,000 for shaft
as a film that made tens of millions of dollars
we're not dead yet!...
It's only been in the last six years
That all these actors who were associated those movies
that can actually talk proudly about them
They always had to kind of like almost apologize
for them because they took such heat
I wanted to give all the actors their chance again
to show how good we all look
that we do have a marketplace
that we're not dead yet
I had three rules in Hollywood
that they didn't want to adhere to
One: you can't kill me
Two: I have to win all my fights and
Three: I get the girl at the end of the
movie if I want her
So they would not adhere
to these three rules
So fine, I could make my own movie
and I damn sure these three things
gonna happen in my movie
I said to my wife.
Well, this is never gonna happen
You know, he's never going to get
four million dollars to make this picture
So I'll be happy to tell him I'm doing it
because I'm never gonna have to do it
I went to Cannes, I went to MIFED,
and I saw two point eight million dollars in advance sales
Brought the contract back to a bank
Loan the money put my
two million dollars on the table
or Ryan mastered two million
and we made Original Gangsters
Starring Me, Jim Brown, Pam Grier,
Richard Roundtree, Ron O'neal
You lookin good my man
Never felt better
Sure feels good
All those rebels back together again,
but damn who's gonna go first
We all are
All right, let's go
I filmed it very well and from that the actors
got noticed they went on to work again
'What?'
Jackie Brown
that sounds like pam grier
You had the chance, unemployed now,
to walk away with a half million dollars
Would you take it?
When I first read the book
and I thought about doing it
I just started thinking about well,
what actresses would be good to play this
she's gotta be in her mid 40s
She's got to look really good and she's gonna look
like maybe she's in her mid to late 30s
But awesome. I also wanted you to look
like a woman who's lived a life
And there is a really good aspect
in casting older actors
You know
they got as many stories and they've had as many ups
and downs as circus performers or
Cops or this or any other kind of
wild weather beaten profession
and she had to look
like she could handle anything
And then once I put all those things together like well,
that's sounds like Pam Grier
How you doing Mrs. Jackie?
- come on in
I don't know if I was the right one,
but he thought I was so I knew I had to live up to
His image or what he thought of
A woman who was survivor
you want to see some motherfucking silly if I have to tell you
to shut up one more time
I'm gonna shut you up.
I just came over here to talk to you
- to talk?
The way I see, you and me got one motherfucking
thing to talk about, one thing
And that's what you are willing to do for me
I think that that's one of the the more meaningful images
resisting images of a black female
that's come out of contemporary film
and it's important that
Resisting image begins with Coffy
It doesn't begin in the
Quentin Tarantino imagination
He has the capacity and ability
through love I think through love of the image itself
to love of this character,
to take that image of the strong and powerful woman
and bring it into
a new generation,
a new time in a sense
He erases the earlier pornography of Coffy.
'Come On! Crawl over here...
Crawl Nigger!
You want me to crawl
Right motherfucker!
she's not gonna be Coffy.
She's gonna be more like a real woman.
Alright, she's gonna have more problems
she ain't gonna just be able to take a shotgun
and drive through the wall
Whip a derringer out of her afro,
super bad
And shoot the evil white woman,
all right
'Why don't you kill me too?'
That is too easy for you bitch,
so I did miss those elements
a lot of the political issues that
Were the foundation of those characters
and films in those times
Have been resolved and aren't as necessary
and the politicalness of Jackie Brown
I think we all loved Jackie Brown
Cause Jackie Brown was the bomb!
she was brilliant, she was gutsy
And she was gorgeous you know
But she wasn't, she didn't think that the most important
thing in her life was her looks
'How you doin?
- Fine
'Yes you are'
Damn I bet you come in here
on Saturday night you need
Nigger Repellent to keep them off your ass
I do okay
- bullshit Jackie?
You're one fine motherfucker.
I bet you do a damn sight
better than okay
Tarantino took the swagger of blaxploitation
without the political context
niggers used the word carelessly
in those pictures and it becomes
Sort of unmoored from the kind
of political context
and I think there's a danger in that people think
we just say it and it doesn't mean anything
Or its just this aping Tarantino
It's much more than that.
I think maybe much more dangerous than that
the whole controversy about Jackie Brown
and the number times the word nigger
was used in the movie was like
it was kind of like how silly
is that as a controversy
his overuse of the word
and I quote nigger is
interesting. I mean even when you look at the
blaxploitation films of that period the
the word wasn't
Really that overused or popular.
It was used in a kind of a familiar
affectionate sense, but it wasn't nostalgiasized
and rarified in quite the same way
Yeah, my nigga!
my dialogue
It's not poetry but it's close.
It's not rap music, but it's close
It's not song writing, but it's close,
you know, it is what it is,
but it's it's related to all those
'I don't know what to say,
thank you thank you'
'Who was there for your ass?
- You were
Got damn, right? That's how that shit works
you get you ass in trouble. I get your ass out
That's my motherfucking job, and I don't mind
telling you nigger, it's steady work
My character is you know larger than life and
he does have an interesting way of dressing
he does have an interesting hairstyle and
he does have an interesting way of carrying himself and speaking
so it becomes a Blaxploitation movie
in that respect.
I think it's just a homage to the 70s and
Everybody who had the courage
to step out and take platforms and
Just be heard
hey, what is home is what is that?
You can buy that for 25 cents somewhere man
and uh and then after you know,
They say see me laying
on the street on the curb
Right and they step over me
and I was like Fred Wilson man.
Yeah, I used to be him and they keep moving right?
Is that homage? Okay, what is that good for?
black hollywood
yeah....right!
On the shoulders of
Fred Williamson Jim Brown Jim Kelly
The Paula Kellys, Rosalind Cash,
Vonetta McGee, Tamara Dobson, Markie Bays
The Ruby Dees, Dorothy Dandridge,
Lena Horne's, Eartha Kitt
Dinah Washington, shall I go on?
These kids stand today.
It's a whole legacy there
Blaxploitation didn't really make
that much money for black people
All right. It was a great cultural moment.
A lot of good music a lot of good films were made
But in terms of production itself and getting a foot
in the Hollywood industry
This was only a moment
or an inner loop
It came it died it went before
it really had a chance to grow
Where could we be today,
we might be in another level
Even today if that community
was still alive
Black Hollywood yeah right...
sure in somebody's mind maybe
but it don't exist man. No, no