Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
["City, Country, City" by War plays]
[Elvis Mitchell] For me, the most exciting period
in the history of film
is when movies with the word "black" in the title went from this…
to this.
[song becomes funky]
My excitement was not just because there was finally truth in advertising
but because I got to see a first in the movies,
a procession of assured Black talent.
Pam Grier aglow in Friday Foster,
an early comics adaptation.
Max Julien's contemporary take on film noir in The Mack.
Charlie Russell's 1969 play Five on the Black Hand Side
would hit the big screen four years later.
I ain't givin' up nothin' but bubble gum and hard times!
And I'm fresh outta bubble gum.
-[all laughing] -Oh!
[Mitchell] And I wasn't alone in responding this way.
-[announcer] Hell Up in Harlem. [announcer 2] The Black Godfather.
[Mitchell] So, if this burst of freedom and fulfillment was so well-received
and the thirst never really went away,
why did these Black films stop getting made?
[song fades]
[indistinct conversations]
[Mitchell] My grandmother told me that movies changed the way she dreamed.
She hailed from Mississippi.
She said that movies turned her dreams into something resembling stories…
[bats screeching]
…and that first film she saw that embedded in her subconscious
was Dracula.
And its gothic chills and mezzo-operatic tone
made her afraid to sleep for a week.
I am Dracula.
Evil spirits?! Good gracious me! Well, there is evil spirits around here?
Why sure, the place is crawling with 'em. And that ain't all.
What? There's more?
[Mitchell] But movies that showed African Americans facing fear
brought that to the screen in a way that was dehumanizing and surreal.
Who is they?! Who is they?!
[dramatic music playing]
-Zombies. -[exclaims in fear]
[Mitchell] This also demonstrates that, way more often than should happen,
films regarded as classics had a way of letting Black people down.
At some point,
you're likely to be assaulted by a cringe-worthy moment
in something from the canon by one of the masters.
Tossed-off stereotypes from the Master of Suspense,
and one of film's most highly regarded dramatists,
and the premier actor-director of musicals
continue to leave a mark.
[mellow jazz playing]
Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, giants in theater and the movies,
slathered on blackface and benign superiority
to take on Othello.
A closet lock and key of villainous secrets.
[music ends]
[Mitchell] I have never been able to see Mickey Mouse in those gloves
or Bugs Bunny, for that matter, and not think of minstrel shows.
What else were we to assume? They were dressing for the Harvard Club?
-Did you ever see an elephant fly? -[chuckles] Well, I seen a horsefly.
[exclaims] I seen a dragonfly.
-I seen a housefly. -[audience laughs]
[crow] See, I seen all that…
[Mitchell] These were probably some of the scenes
that made their way into my grandmother's subconscious,
fragments that she had to fight from overtaking her image of herself,
along with the way she was treated as a young woman of color in Mississippi.
Her awareness of images was such that, when we visited her in Hattiesburg,
she wouldn't let us watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show.
She would say,
"There's no Black people in that Southern town."
"What do you think happened to them?"
All this can sure make it hard for me to love the movies.
For me, it's been a lifetime of watching, and thinking, and writing about movies.
I keep coming back,
despite the waves of disregard they keep hitting me with.
The diminution can feel like a mountain.
Maybe the simplest way to explain representation is this.
If you were a white actor,
formal wear implied preparing for a night on the town
and all the pleasures life had to offer.
If you were a Black actor, a black bow tie wasn't putting on the ritz.
It meant you were going to work. It was your uniform.
Now, I like a well-assembled ensemble as much as the next person,
probably more so,
but I've never really been a fan of tuxedos.
Maybe that's why.
♪ Ol' man river ♪
♪ That ol' man river ♪
♪ He must know somethin' ♪
♪ But don't say nothin'… ♪
[Mitchell] Rather than seek out and develop new roles for Black actors,
the tired tropes of Show Boat functioned as a way
to showcase Black talent through recycling.
The on-screen crushing of Black hope was institutional,
from saying there were barely any roles for Black men
to an unreal standard of beauty
that guaranteed decades of self-hatred for Black women.
Here she comes.
This is the part I really like.
This is when she does that shit with her hair.
[Mitchell] This role wasn't written for a Black actor
but oddly made an inadvertent comment
about the most desirable kind of hair…
[all cheering]
…a lesson Black women are still dealing with.
[Martin Luther King Jr] Well, in my, uh, days in Atlanta as a child,
there was a pretty strict system of segregation.
I could not attend any of the theaters.
Only, uh… There were one or two Negro theaters.
Uh, they were very small,
but, uh, they did not get the main pictures.
If they got them, they were two years later, three years late.
So that, uh, by and large, there was a very strict system of segregation.
My Saturdays was basically spent in the movies.
-[pleasant music playing] -We would watch serialized Westerns,
like, you know, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers,
stuff like that, or Buck Rogers, you know, some outer space stuff.
[Suzanne De Passe] I was very interested in Westerns.
For some reason, I loved Westerns.
Gene Autry and Johnny Mack Brown and Roy Rogers…
[chuckling] …and all these cowboy shows.
So I'd go to the Los Angeles Theatre. It was this big palace like the old days,
and it was still kept in great shape.
And so I'd just kick back, sometimes be the only one there,
and I had this big old theater all to myself.
All that stuff by John Ford, Monument Valley, all that kind of stuff.
I think those things sort of… sort of grew on me.
I'd seen really good… good stories.
I am going to the movies with my father,
and he is taking me to see the movies that he likes.
Movies that have people like John Wayne in them and Steve McQueen.
I remember Band of Angels…
[laughs] …you know, 'cause I remember when Sidney Poitier slapped her.
[dramatic music rises, stops]
The film cut out, and you came back. She was standing there holding her face.
We were like, "What just happened?" My mom said, "He slapped her."
"What?! For real?"
[mutters]
"They can't show that, but he slapped her."
If you're a movie lover, you go to the movies you're interested in seeing.
And it's not until after you get into the middle of the movie do you realize,
"Oh, there's no Black people in this movie." [laughs]
You're just munching the popcorn, and it's like,
"Did you-- Have-- Is it me, or is there no Black people in this movie?"
"There's no Black people in the movie." "Oh, okay."
[Mitchell] We wanna see ourselves…
…some kinda way, you know.
Uh, yeah, 'cause, like I said, when… when I was a "kid" kid,
the Black people in the movies… We had Stepin Fetchit…
What are you looking for?
[mutters]
Where'd you learn to be a barber?
[Jackson] …Willie Best,
Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Stymie…
but I still wanted to be them!
Hiya, Buckwheat.
[Jackson] I didn't know any Black kid that played with white kids,
let alone hung out with 'em,
you know, and, you know, went to their houses,
or they came to their houses and did stuff, so…
Our Gang was like… totally like,
"Wow! Where the… Where the hell do they live?"
I mean, I grew up in segregation,
so from the time I could talk, walk, see, make sense of things,
the world was separate.
[gentle music playing]
But when I went to the movies… The movies is the stuff of fantasies.
You know?
When I went to the movies, I came home, and I wanted to be that pirate that I saw.
But…
I needed a Black cowboy.
[Zendaya] We have so many stories to tell.
We just wanna see more of us existing in all different forms,
and I think that is a common frustration, I think, amongst my peers.
We just wanna see us just being kids or, like, in sci-fi, whatever.
[Fishburne] I think, like most people,
I engage with the movies in the way that you engage with your dreams.
While enjoying those pictures that I was seeing,
I was also projecting
and trying to visualize myself on the screen, maybe.
[Margaret Avery] As a little girl,
all I saw in the movies were people that didn't look like me.
So I didn't really believe that I could ever become an actress.
Until I saw Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones.
And when I saw them, I said, "Oh wow!"
"Maybe I could become an actress."
[Mitchell] Dorothy Dandridge was paired three times
with a figure who became a star in every arena
except for the one that he was most qualified,
movies.
That was Harry Belafonte.
Dandridge matched Belafonte in talent and temperament.
Only the towering presence of racism could blind anyone
to their adaptable charisma.
That kept them from more on-screen pairings.
♪ My Lord, what a morning ♪
[Mitchell] Belafonte's success as a singer sprang from his training as an actor.
He brought the deportment of a storyteller to music.
His extraordinary presence, he had the physical arrogance of an athlete,
and an emotional immersion in character,
signaled his on-screen gifts immediately.
But he bristled against a system that not only had no idea how to use him
but was so afraid of him
that his singing voice wasn't used in Carmen Jones.
♪ I saw it fade and lose its bloom ♪
[Mitchell] So in 1959,
he responded by producing a project that brought in director Robert Wise,
actor Ed Begley, who both won Oscars a few years later,
blacklisted screenwriter Abe Polonsky,
and the Modern Jazz Quartet.
[dramatic jazz music playing]
Odds Against Tomorrow was just a remarkable thing for its day,
and, uh, the fact that I was given the opportunity
to make that kind of film
really meant a lot to me.
♪ What's the matter, pretty baby? ♪
♪ Tell me, what's your daddy done? ♪
["My Baby's Not Around" continues]
Hi, baby. What's shaking?
Bacco wants to buy you a drink.
And I wanna buy you a shiny new car.
[Mitchell] Odds Against Tomorrow was an unforgettable film.
The last film noir of its era
that was also ahead of its time with an honest look at race,
which means, of course, it was ignored.
Opportunities came Belafonte's way,
but the projects he was offered didn't remotely interest him.
[Belafonte] Sidney Poitier, up until then,
had been the most popular Black figure in the universe,
but he was Sidney Poitier.
He was not Sidney Poitier in a Black environment,
in a Black circumstance.
He was Sidney Poitier playing a Black person in an all-white movie.
First thing I ask myself is, "What is a Black man,
came from nothing, going nowhere,
all of a sudden in the middle of seven Nazi nuns?"
I… I turned it down.
And they offered it to Sidney, and Sidney took it.
-The winner is Sidney Poitier… -[applause]
[gentle music playing]
[Mitchell] Rather than submit himself to material
that didn't depict the Black community in a meaningful way,
or at all, for that matter,
Harry Belafonte chose not to appear in movies from 1959 until 1970.
To my mind, that made him the Muhammad Ali of the film world,
forced in his prime away from the arena in which he belonged.
[Belafonte] Not one picture I turned down did I regret not doing.
Mm-mm. Wasn't in my… wasn't in my turf.
I didn't resent any of them.
I'm glad others got an opportunity and went off and did it, but my initial…
First and foremost, I'm an artist.
I'm an actor.
And I came out of a school with Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau,
Rod Steiger, Tony Curtis,
with a director that gave us no quarter.
I'm not gonna do anything other than what I think is worthy of being done.
And fortunately for me, I was a runaway success
in the world at large
because I had a globe so passionately approving
of my presence in their midst
that nobody could dismiss the fact
that that thing on the horizon called Belafonte
could really not be fucked with.
Because anytime anybody came up and gave me an ultimatum,
I said, "Fuck you. I'm going to Paris."
"I'll probably live there if I like, but I… I have a destination
that answers your… your denial of what I could be."
Just me.
I'm here.
[Mitchell] Belafonte's resolve literally took him out of the picture.
But as frustration mounted
for people of color demanding redress and civil rights,
movies lagged behind.
To use a Langston Hughes quote that inspired a play and a movie,
"What happens to a dream deferred?"
"Does it dry up… [chuckles] …like a raisin in the sun?"
"Maybe it just sags like a heavy load."
"Or does it explode?"
[explosion]
-[guns firing] -[exciting '60s rock music playing]
[man] We've been beaten and getting beat and getting beat,
and we've just decided to do something about it now!
[Mitchell] Decades of punishing mistreatment of people of color
made the 20th century an epoch of revolt.
The 1960s body politic suffered through civil eruptions almost every year.
1965 saw one sweep through Los Angeles.
[Burnett] The thing about the Watts Riot is that you could have anticipated it.
It was clear that was gonna happen. There was gonna be an explosion.
Police were killing people.
They've always been killing people, been terrorizing the community.
[sirens wailing]
If I went to a show at night,
I knew I was gonna get stopped at one point by the police.
It's just a thing where our lives
didn't matter, it seemed, you know.
[Mitchell] By 1968, America was in free fall.
There had been over 20 riots, with over half happening in 1967,
including my hometown.
Law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan.
[reporter] This is a shot along Linwood.
The flames and the feelings were running hotter
than either the mayor or the governor anticipated.
[Mitchell] Revolt broke out in movies too,
in the independent film world.
There, Black life didn't exist
only in the periphery of the white man's gaze,
and there was often room for more than one Black person on-screen.
And two of those Black talents on-screen
simultaneously gave movie-star performances
that did not lead to movie stardom.
Well, what you doin' with a cat like me in a joint like this?
[pleasant jazz music playing]
You don't think much of yourself, do you?
[Mitchell] In a more just world,
the heat and tension sparked by Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln
in Nothing But a Man
would have been a catalyst for larger careers and recognition.
♪ So alone that I… ♪
[Mitchell] Davis, with his abundant talents
as singer, actor, and showman,
was certainly capable of it.
He showed a velvet control as a mercurial, pleasure-seeking ego trip
in 1966's A Man Called Adam.
He acted along with Cicely Tyson, Ja'Net DuBois,
and in a silent tiny role, Morgan Freeman,
who'd have to wait nearly 20 years to get a role to show power
and the ability to speak.
Davis holds the movie in his clenched fist until the last act
in which he basically apologizes for all the damage his character wreaked.
All right, I was wrong, okay?
I shoulda waited to find out what it was all about,
maybe let her break your head with a bottle.
Honey, all I saw
was that old chick's hands on that toodle doddle--
Adam.
[mellow jazz music playing]
[Mitchell] Van Peebles insertion of Black life without self-pity
into the art-house world was a fresh, new breeze.
Studio movies were trapped in their old-fashioned patriarchal need
to shape the culture
rather than respond to it.
The corpses of misguided musicals for all ages,
such as this, um… [questioningly] …awesome Best Picture nominee.
But the best news of '68 was Sidney Poitier's graduation
from self-sacrifice for miscast white movie stars
to world domination.
Both Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night
went wide release in 1968, the year of their Best Picture nominations,
where his white costars gazed at his magnificent intensity.
Don't misunderstand me.
I love your daughter. There is nothing I wouldn't do
to try to keep her as happy as she was the day I met her.
But it seems to me, without your approval, we will make no sense at all.
[Mitchell] As Mark Harris wrote in his book, Pictures at a Revolution,
"Poitier is the top box office star in America."
[mellow funk music playing]
Unfortunately, he's also an example of the entertainment industry's reaction
to success by people of color.
No one seems to think that if Sidney Poitier can draw audiences,
then surely one other Black man or woman might possibly be able to do so.
This is a time when a Black person talking to a white person on-screen
was considered adult entertainment.
[ominous music playing]
Black success in media
is often treated as the equivalent of finding a $100 bill on the subway,
a non-repeatable phenomenon.
When movies were first being built around, God help us, Elvis Presley
or The Beatles,
whose first releases in the US were on a Black-owned record label,
why wasn't anyone seeking out these women rock pioneers
for careers in the movies?
[playing rock song]
["If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up" playing]
♪ I said if I'm in luck I just might get picked up ♪
[Mitchell] It wouldn't be long for a new day, or night, to drop
for where Black talent was most likely to be recognized,
the independent film world.
Writer-director George Romero created a new kind of action hero
by putting a movie and a gun in the hand of Duane Jones, a Black actor,
in one of the most influential films of all time.
-I think you should just calm down. -[woman groans]
Oh! I screamed, "Johnny! Johnny, help me!"
[Mitchell] Romero also breaks with tradition
by never having the hero's race mentioned
because the role wasn't written for a Black actor.
I'll be back to reinforce the windows and doors later.
But you'll be all right for now, okay?
[sweeping string music playing]
Okay?
You want the Black guy with you.
[chuckles] You want the Black guy with you.
'Cause he's gonna help you get out.
See, if you kill him off, you're dead.
See, we know how to get out.
We know how to get away from the zombies.
We know how to get away from the, you know, killing plants,
anything that's coming to get you, 'cause we're used to…
We know how to get outta the way.
We know how to get outta the way and let… let other stuff happen.
[Mitchell] The depiction of the undead stalking potential victims
and windows boarded up to keep them away
reminded me of TV riot footage.
Never has a film been as loaded with allegory and metaphor,
intentional and inadvertent, as Night of the Living Dead.
-[solemn music playing] -[guns firing]
All right, hit him in the head, right between the eyes.
[gunshot]
[Mitchell] Because Jones dies, picked off after fighting to save whites,
Night of the Living Dead was embraced by militant African Americans.
They felt it was a metaphor for not staying with your race.
This was a sentiment I heard voiced by the boyfriends of my older sisters.
Good shot! Okay, he's dead.
Let's go get him. That's another one for the fire.
[Mitchell] And in an end as chilling as the movie itself,
he's killed and tossed onto a pile of corpses.
[flames crackling]
[Robert F. Kennedy] I have some very sad news for all of you,
and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight
-in Memphis, Tennessee. -[crowd screaming]
[Mitchell] Coming in the year of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination
and only a few years after the murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X,
this movie death had larger implications
than this writer and director ever imagined.
[ominous sting plays]
Living Dead's success should have been confirmation
of mainstream interest in Black actors.
In the year that includes Peter Sellers playing a character of Indian descent
in the movie biz satire The Party,
1968 was also a year with Yul Brynner as Pancho Villa,
and unfortunately, Woody Strode as an Apache.
[TV host] American feature films have always been directed by white men,
even when the films dealt with Black life and used Black actors.
Black directors are excluded,
although Blacks now make up 30% of the total moviegoing audience.
And my associate, William Greaves, has just finished producing and directing
his first feature film, Take One and Take Two.
It's in the final stages of editing.
Hello, just to set the record straight,
there've been a number of films of Black… by Black feature-film directors
in the '40s, like Powell Lindsay, Oscar Micheaux, and Bill Alexander.
These directors were denied access to Hollywood,
and their films were seen only
in the Black communities across the country.
[Mitchell] One of the myths that did constantly resurface
during 1968 through '78,
when a handful of Black directors finally got to step behind the camera,
was that this was the first time Black directors got such chances.
In fact, because they had to,
African Americans often wrote and directed
back when one person writing and directing was rare
and discouraged by the studios.
But the Black press supported these theaters and movies,
even as they were ignored by the mainstream.
And, getting his start in the silent era,
was writer, director, and occasional actor Oscar Micheaux.
He made films for the circuit of Black theaters,
many of which were not in very good shape
because there was not a consistent flow of Black films
despite the consistency of Black audiences.
[mellow jazz music playing]
Keep in mind, many studios were afraid to offend Germany
and risk losing that business,
until they were kicked out by the Nazis in 1942.
But African-American money wasn't good enough for them.
Many of those Black theaters were buildings and rooms
that were converted into movie theaters.
On very small budgets, Micheaux and other filmmakers,
even some whites, created original material
and adapted popular books they couldn't afford to pay much for,
but the authors went along
because they wanted their books turned into movies.
[upbeat music playing]
Astaire often played master-servant relationships in his films,
exaggerated in scenes where he's tapping in front of a bunch of Black actors.
As the studios continued to hammer out a crude mythology about African Americans,
director Alice Guy-Blaché decided to do something else entirely.
In 1912, she directed A Fool and His Money,
what's said to be the first film with an all-African-American cast.
Her artistry showed a playful clarity and did not diminish those actors.
[jaunty piano music playing]
She was successful enough in those days that studios sought her out,
and given the care she used to make her art,
it was only logical that she turned down the chance
to make the first Tarzan movie.
The Black filmmakers of that era were hustling, driven cinema lovers
who worked an early version of independent film.
Back in this day, "independent film" didn't mean
being a cool, desirable outsider
whose success got you access to incredible resources.
It meant you were locked out of the theaters
by the studios who owned them.
You were left to invent ways to get your product to audiences.
Micheaux and his like-minded spirits
were making dramas, comedies, musicals, and murder mysteries.
Sometimes smashing the genres together into a single film
because their resources were limited
even though their ambitions were not.
Because, for most of the history of the movies,
studios have been content to leave Black money on the table,
and Black enterprise has responded, creating, as it always has,
a de facto underground economy and culture.
♪ I got shoes ♪
♪ When I get to Heaven Gonna put on my shoes ♪
♪ Gonna walk all over that Heaven ♪
[Mitchell] Though we wouldn't see evidence of it until later,
actor-turned-filmmaker William Greaves used the medium
in a way that feels novelistic now.
After losing interest in acting
because of the simplistic uplift he'd been cast in…
Well, now, Aunt Hattie, everything moves fast in war.
Even our religious services had to be speeded up.
…he begins production on a pioneering effort,
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
[sniffles]
No, I said, "Don't touch me, please." Don't ever touch me ever again, ever.
[Mitchell] Symbiopsychotaxiplasm's ambitions, both formal and freewheeling,
were as big as its title.
It plays with time in every way possible.
The director, Bill Greaves,
he is so far in… into, you know, making the film,
that he has no perspective.
And if you ask him, "What is the film about?" you know,
he just gives you some answer that's just vaguer than the question.
[Louise Greaves] I think he was kind of torn.
He wanted to see the scene well-done.
He wanted his actors to be inspired in some way.
So I think he was being both pushed and pulled in both directions.
That's my theory, anyway.
[Mitchell] For decades, people would tie themselves up into knots
trying to describe Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
It's now a kind of film so common that it's become its own genre,
the innovative, social satire, prank film.
[dramatic music playing]
Director Jules Dassin, who had been, if you'll pardon the expression,
blacklisted, brought race politics to a studio thriller
in Uptight, which he wrote for the film's Black costars.
Dassin, Dee, and Mayfield were shrewd, earnest, and shameless,
enfolding the world-gone-wrong impact of Dr. King's death into a genre film.
[Fishburne] Martin Luther King was assassinated in '68.
My mother dropped everything and went to the funeral.
She didn't know this man,
but she dropped everything and put on her best clothes and left.
And that was, like, "Oh, so this is important?"
Like, this guy was important.
What he was doing was important. What he was talking about was important.
[sad string music playing]
We are important.
Our voices, our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations,
all that stuff, that's important.
[Martin Luther King] We hold these truths to be self-evident.
[Mitchell] Uptight depicted the shaky anguish
and free-floating fury of a society desperate for answers,
the heart of genre film.
[Jackson] The day after Dr. King got killed,
we got on a plane in Atlanta, from Morehouse Spelman,
and flew to Memphis and marched with the garbage workers.
And we had those "I am a man" signs. We used to have them in the house.
[music continues]
[music fades]
[Mitchell] In an audacious turn on the heist genre,
a group of revolutionaries is out to stage a robbery
while Cleveland reels after Dr. King's assassination.
A key member of the team,
at loose ends because of the chaos spilling from King's death,
has a crisis of conscience.
I've never felt so bad in all my life.
Uptight is a contemporary version of a 1935 John Ford movie
and begins a cycle where Black concerns are folded into remakes.
[Jackson] Is that the one that's like a remake of The Informer?
I knew what The Informer was,
so when I saw that, I knew exactly what it was.
So, you look at it, and everybody had a thing
about, you know, certain kinds of people was just the police.
If you're at a party, and you're passing a joint around,
and a dude don't take the joint and hands it to somebody else…
[muttering] …it's like, "Oh man, he's the police." You know?
Or… or somebody is acting strange, you know, around the group when y'all…
you know, when we was revolutionaries,
when you had a revolutionary cadre of your own, uh,
there was always somebody who was suspect.
So having that movie be that was, you know, like that.
[Mitchell] In his autobiography, Booker T. Jones, who composed the score,
said some called Uptight the first blaxploitation film.
On another continent, from another culture,
was a studio film from Italy,
and, like many movies that changed the medium,
it was from a genre dismissed as second-rate,
in this case, the spaghetti western.
[footsteps running]
[dramatic music plays]
A little later in the movie,
this scene was something the director wanted to use
to drive a stake through the heart of audience expectation.
Making Henry Fonda cold-blooded was shattering.
He was America's big-screen moral compass.
But Isaac Hayes, in need of a hit,
was inspired by seeing Leone's perverse use of Fonda,
who belonged on the movie Mount Rushmore of white decency
with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Shirley Temple.
[bullet ricochets]
So moved that producer-performer Hayes created this piece of music.
["Walk On By" by Isaac Hayes playing]
Hayes told me that he would escape the malfunctioning air-conditioning
at Stax Studios by going to see this movie,
which he caught at least ten times.
Woody Strode's towering presence convinced Hayes
that he could one day be a movie star,
and in a genre where Black inclusion was marginal at best, the Western.
More importantly, Once Upon a Time also motivated Hayes to create this
for his Hot Buttered Soul album.
["Walk On By" continues playing]
When Gordon Parks adapted his semi-autobiographical novel,
The Learning Tree, in 1969,
he made the first studio-financed film by an African-American director.
Warner Bros. got its money's worth from the photographer-turned-filmmaker.
He wrote, directed, produced, and composed the score.
He joked to me that the only reason he didn't star in it
was because he was too tall.
Learning Tree follows Newt, a 12-year-old, over the course of a summer.
One incident carries a resonance that the movie can't shake.
Run, Tuck, run!
A moment so potent it seems surreal and way too real,
a beat that didn't get it's due at the time.
-[man] Stop, damn it! I'll shoot! -[gun fires]
[eerie music playing]
[somber music playing]
You didn't have to shoot Tuck.
Now you can see what happens to criminals.
[Mitchell] The type of scene we all knew about
but never expected to see in a movie.
And Parks also told me he packed as much as he could into the film,
such as this glorious image claiming the Western for Black audiences,
because he didn't know
if he'd ever get a chance to make another one.
1969 took us from the hyperreal to the unreal.
The wildness flowered in full force
in writer-director Robert Downey Sr.'s revolutionary comedy about revolution,
the advertising satire Putney Swope.
You can't eat an air conditioner.
[Mitchell] Here, a Black man, Putney Swope,
is suddenly made the head of an advertising agency…
You're gonna make a great chairman.
…and immediately upends the way the agency does business.
I have a feeling that there's a lot of untapped talent around here.
I didn't do it!
Then what are you doing? Taking her temperature?
Boss, don't fire me. I got a wife, three kids, and a Shetland pony.
You can get more said with comedy than you can get said straight,
and I think that's what Blacks had to survive.
You had to, uh, make 'em laugh under the subtext.
Downey saw an opening
where we could play and be cutting and biting.
And I don't use words like "genius," but it was a stroke of something.
[Mitchell] Unhappy with the performance of his star, actor Arnold Johnson,
director Downey dubbed his own voice for his lead Black character…
Truth and Soul!
-[man] TS, baby. -That's right!
…a move that surely later influenced
his son's Oscar-nominated role in Tropic Thunder.
'Cause I'm trying to come up a little, but it's just… it's tough.
-No, you look good. -Any tips?
[Mitchell] 1969 was a watershed period in Black film,
in which stories took a harsher and more realistic look
at Black life in the past,
such as with the first American films to deal, in somewhat stark terms,
with slavery.
The movie was called Slaves,
which both starred Dionne Warwick
and offered her singing about a different kind of hurt
than one might have expected from her.
Ossie Davis plays a slave attempting to hold onto logic
in a system that has none.
Twelve hundred twice. Anyone else?
[Mitchell] Davis's regal slow burn doesn't hide his despair.
In fact, it magnifies this.
-[tense music playing] -[camera shutter clicks]
The historic tumult continues when Rupert Crosse becomes
the first Black actor to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor
for The Reivers.
[car horn honks]
[chuckling]
How do you start this thing?
[Mitchell] Crosse's sunny fluidity frees McQueen from his laconic narcissism.
He pays attention to Crosse
and allows us to honor Crosse in the same way.
Ten years earlier, Crosse was featured in Shadows,
John Cassavetes' 1959 race drama that was, of course, independently made.
You like that one about the rabbit and the tree?
I don't know that one.
You know that one about the rabbit that fell on out the tree and says,
"Man, that lovemaking's for the birds."
[laughs]
[Mitchell] Director Mark Rydell,
who knew Crosse from the Actors Studio, brought him into The Reivers.
[Rydell] Rupert Crosse was 6 foot 5 inches tall,
and I knew he was right for the part to play opposite Steve.
It was awesome to drive up to Steve McQueen's house
because there were maybe ten garages
with all kinds of cars, Ferraris and, uh, Aston Martins
and racing motorcycles.
An enormous piece of property, a courtyard.
It was… it was very lavish.
And Rupert had never seen anything like that before,
and I must tell you, I hadn't either till I met Steve.
I lived a little bit more modestly but certainly better than Rupert,
who had no… no money and was living like a young actor.
Well, we walked into the house, and Rupert met Steve,
and, uh, Steve looked up at this giant, and we sat down in his kind of library,
and Steve began to talk about, uh, tae kwon do.
You know, he was a master of those fighting disciplines,
and, uh, he was showing Rupert some moves, and Rupert said,
"No, you're off-balance," said Rupert from his chair.
[chuckles]
And I saw-- And Steve looked at him, he said, "Oh?"
He said, "Yes, you're off-balance, you know."
"It's wrong, the way you're standing." So Steve said, "Show me."
And Rupert uncoiled and stood up at his height,
and they faced one another, and in two seconds,
Steve was flying through the air
under the billiard table in the-- Actually, the next room.
So-- And I thought, "Well, the picture's over."
"You know, there goes Rupert."
But the truth of the matter is Steve was thrilled, you know,
that, uh… that this guy was not afraid of him.
[Mitchell] Among the curious and forward-thinking artists
that populated LA's film world,
which included Jack Nicholson and screenwriter Robert Towne,
Rupert Crosse was a charismatic figure, admired for his talent.
As Jim Brown and Rupert Crosse
were presenting a new type of Black masculinity,
Brown, who was simultaneously courtly and impatient,
and Crosse's smiling insolence,
Muhammad Ali, who was for me the second Black public figure
to be the same with Black audiences as with white audiences,
had his version of courtliness and insolence displayed
in the 1970 documentary a.k.a. Cassius Clay.
[narrator] He was paying lawyers to keep him out of jail,
paying alimony to his first wife,
supporting his current wife and child.
[Mitchell] This unusual documentary caught Ali at the crossroads of who he was
and who he would become.
Important because it shows the self-possession
that will be the core of Black film.
And the first such Black figure to break through in the same way as Ali,
not trying to hide from the mainstream gaze,
was Jack Johnson, whose struggles were depicted in the play
and now the movie The Great White Hope,
where James Earl Jones would become the second Black man
to get a Best Actor nomination.
[woman screaming]
[Mitchell] James Earl Jones rose to the occasion
as a lean sexual presence
for one of the few times in his on-screen career.
-No, no! I'm-- -Put your clothes on, Miss Bachman.
-We'll take you into town. -Jake!
Don't you fret now. Just get dressed.
[Mitchell] Interracial sexuality and the unease it created
whipped up waves of anxiety in film in 1970.
The Great White Hope reminded viewers
that those relationships were based on appetites.
The changes left at least one esteemed filmmaker at a loss,
director William Wyler, whose ability to depict societal shift
can be seen in films such as The Best Years of Our Lives.
And Wyler set a template
with his 1965 proto-stalker film, The Collector.
His last film was The Liberation of L.B. Jones,
and his power to coherently translate up-to-the-minute drama failed him
with this hysterical fetishizing of Black female flesh.
[melancholy organ music playing]
-You fancy goin' to lawyers? -Sugar boy, you bustin' my arm.
You fancy goin' to lawyers! You think they wouldn't warn a white man?
I seen fools, but you take the sap-suckin' prize.
[Mitchell] After directing the documentary King: A Filmed Record,
Sidney Lumet turned to something that sounded tantalizing,
a Gore Vidal script adapted from a Tennessee Williams play
dealing with race and sex
with James Coburn, Robert Hooks, and Lynn Redgrave.
The desperate-to-be-lurid result was Last of the Mobile Hotshots,
which got an X rating,
apparently because a Black man might have sex with a white woman.
The oven door's broke, the roof leaks, the toilet runs all day,
and you awful cute to be a landlord.
[Mitchell] Diana Sands' ability to enchant was evident in 1970's The Landlord,
and this early story of the turmoil caused by an overprivileged white man
gentrifying an all-Black Brooklyn street continued the trend,
that of a Black writer, Bill Gunn, adapting a novel
by a Black writer, Kristin Hunter.
This actor's earthy commonsense command was made for the screen.
Sands could convey as much with a chuckle and a smile
as most actors could with pages of dialogue.
[chuckles softly]
[Glynn Turman] Diana Sands was just the perfect auntie
because she knew how to be a big kid.
She was such a… a giving person,
such a joy, uh, to be around.
[Mitchell] 1970 brought Chester Himes to the screen
in a way that finally made sense.
In his directorial debut,
Ossie Davis spins the long-standing myth of the emotional Black sexpot on its head
by using a scene right from Himes' novel.
In his book, Himes adds a hint of bitterness
to this turn-the-tables anecdote about a Black woman luring a white cop
into sexual humiliation.
Please, baby.
[romantic music playing]
Please.
[Mitchell] The film adaptation cranked the glee
of an audience bored by Black degradation
and revels in Davis's flipping the script under a proscenium arch.
-[man] Halt in the name of the law! -[gun fires]
-Halt in the name of the law! -[funk music playing]
[Mitchell] The Davis take on Himes' Old Testament avenger Harlem cops
was a playful and Afrocentric fable that introduced the concept of high style,
scored by Hair composer Galt MacDermot, to Black action.
[tires skidding]
The beautifully dressed detectives,
played by the wry Godfrey Cambridge and quick-tempered Raymond St. Jacques,
were part of an eager group of Black stage actors Davis put together.
-What is it? -Look at this.
[Fishburne] Oh my God, those blue shirts he was wearing,
that suit he was wearing,
the way he had his mustache manicured, he was clean as a motherfucker, man.
You saw that white joker. Did you identify him?
I don't know, Lieutenant. Maybe yes, maybe no.
All those kinda people look alike to me.
[Mitchell] As a stage actor himself, Davis knew that audiences would respond
to the warmth of Black actors basking in their comrades' glory,
an aspect he probably wanted movie audiences to experience.
There's a lot of fantasy going on in Cotton Comes to Harlem.
It's a fairy tale.
But what's great is
Ossie Davis uses Harlem
in a way that I don't think we'd ever seen it before.
It's totally authentic.
It is totally itself.
And he's got this fantasy playing out in the midst of the reality of Harlem.
[Mitchell] Davis took a mantra from Black revolutionaries
and made it a call-and-response song…
-["Black Enough" by Melba Moore playing] -♪ Black enough for me ♪
[Mitchell] …of looking forward to the day when Black pride will be celebrated
by society at large rather than viewed as a demand for change.
Which it was, by the way, but the song gives it a lilt.
♪ Black enough for me ♪
It's that one line that repeats itself throughout,
which is fantastic.
Am I Black enough for you?!
[Fishburne] Calvin Lockhart and his way of using it when he preaches,
and then Godfrey Cambridge and his way of using it.
Is that Black enough for you?
It changes. It morphs. It has several meanings.
Is that Black enough for you?
It ain't, but it's gonna be.
[chuckles]
That still resonates.
[Mitchell] Though Davis recognized the need to make the composer
part of the storytelling
by including MacDermot on Cotton Comes to Harlem,
it took Melvin Van Peebles to make the music communicate
the shocking nature of the Black experience.
His 1970 Watermelon Man is a satire
in which a liberal white man wakes up one day to find out he's Black.
[screaming]
Illustrating the bone-deep horror of being Black for whites,
Godfrey Cambridge shifts the tone from openly broad and comedic…
[both scream]
Jeff! Jeff! Jeff! There's a Negro in your shower!
[Mitchell] …to acting the richly observed and deeper character transformed
by being soaked in empathy,
an evolution Van Peebles wanted audiences to feel.
When we got married, I had no idea it was going to be an interracial thing.
-You never told me. -Well, I just got wind of it myself.
[Mitchell] Van Peebles engulfs a slight and sleight-of-hand plot
by blending sketch-comedy concepts rendered in big glossy movie terms
to meticulously make a film
about the power of dawning Black awareness and responsibility.
Where do you think you're going?
-I'm lunching with Clark Dunwoody. -Not in here, you're not.
[Mitchell] In a pandemic world,
Watermelon Man has gained a new timeliness,
as whites now understand the concept of living on borrowed time
the moment you step outside your front door,
as African Americans always have.
Like Gordon Parks on The Learning Tree the year before,
Van Peebles composed music for his studio directing debut.
When my father did Watermelon Man, and they were trying to decide
whether Watermelon Man should come out theatrically,
they were having a little screening, and all the bigwigs were comin' in,
and they're all white guys,
and there's a guy, a brother named Willy, who would sweep up in the screening room.
And my dad had talked to Willy and gave him a couple of bucks
and said, "When they screen my movie, you make sure you like it."
So Willy's screening the movie,
they screen, uh, Watermelon Man, Willy start…
[chuckling] "Look at that! Oh!"
"That sure is fun--"
[laughs]
And they were looking at him, "Well, Willy likes it."
And Willy, "Oh, boss, that sure is good. Look at that." [chuckles]
"Willy, is this funny to you?"
"Oh yeah, I can't wait to see this. When is it coming out?"
Well, theatrical release. That was their one-man focus group.
So my dad just did racial jujitsu and flipped it against them.
[Mitchell] Gordon Parks, making a second studio film in 1971,
fully incorporated the marriage of music and film,
a defiant break from the classically influenced European scores
of studio fare.
With this movie, Parks follows up on his plan to include Isaac Hayes.
["Theme from Shaft" by Isaac Hayes playing]
Shaft wasn't just a debut. It was an announcement.
In the same way that movies such as Easy Rider screamed,
"This is the '60s,"
Shaft laid down a count of funk and urban panache that said
this was the 1970s.
That a private eye didn't have to look like he slept in his clothes
or hid from view.
The newness and audacity of a camera following a Black man
in a leather coat through Manhattan.
A private eye, dressed like a combination
of a revolutionary and director Gordon Parks,
as the sizzle of the hi-hat cranked up the audience.
The camera wasn't spying on the star.
It was staring at him.
This combination forever altered the course of movies,
right down to coming from a studio
that was long known for delivering product about an ideal America
that framed straight hair and blue eyes as the standard of beauty.
Shaft, "sex machine for all the chicks," ain't nobody said that about a brother.
[mellow music playing]
You all right?
Baby, are you all right?
I got to feeling like a machine.
That's no way to feel.
[Mitchell] In 1971, Van Peebles chose to make a movie
about the unremitting terror Black Americans are subject to,
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.
The title alone made the movie part of the revolution
that would not be televised.
In those days, networks would never run such a title
or the incendiary movie that it accompanied.
-[women chuckling] -What is it?
[lively music playing]
[Mitchell] In the days before porn was unavoidable
and when Black sexuality was still a punch line,
Sweetback showed its nerve by turning Black sex into a show
and refusing to blink or turn away.
It's a Van Peebles brick-by-brick construction,
a device to make the audience understand what it's like to be objectified.
[indistinct chatter and encouragement]
[mellow music playing]
[Mitchell] Making "badass" a part of the title
was such a badass move
that it virtually guaranteed the movie an X rating,
which Sweetback eventually got.
Melvin Van Peebles used the perks of exploitation
and a new liberalism in movie culture to his advantage.
He loved the sheer effrontery of being a Black man
with facial hair, smoking a cigar.
A pop-culture gesture
as eternal as Elvis Presley's smirk and Megan Thee Stallion's fingernails.
Sweetback came at a time when the X rating was just invented,
and porn moved from sleazy downtown theaters
to the suburbs.
Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film
to win the Best Picture Oscar.
The only one.
Stanley Kubrick made Clockwork Orange and got an X.
And Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci
would be nominated for Oscars for the X-rated Last Tango in Paris.
And there was the Black attempt at X-rated social commentary, Lialeh,
with a score by funk legend Bernard Purdie.
Even if the Motion Picture Association offered me a G for the film,
I don't give them the right to, uh…
to decide G or X, uh, for the Black destiny.
[Mitchell] But Van Peebles inadvertently opened a floodgate
by hijacking the X-rating.
It's rumored he self-applied the X-rating
because it was the only symbol not copyrighted by the ratings board,
which let everyone know the X was theirs for the taking,
and the brave new world of the double X and triple X was born.
After all, you've never heard of a double R or a triple PG-13.
As with Watermelon Man, Sweetback opens with running
but not for comic effect in this case.
Sweetback is on the run for his life.
Movement is what seems to keep him alive,
as much of the film is about forward motion.
Van Peebles chose musicians not just to supply music.
He made Earth, Wind & Fire his coconspirators.
He had a secretary who I had a crush on.
I think everyone had a crush on Priscilla, his secretary.
She had a Afro like a halo, baby. I'd be like, "God, look at Priscilla."
"Just-- What's she wearing--"
"What's the Priscilla outfit du jour gonna be?"
But Priscilla had a boyfriend who was a little, you know, possessive.
She wanted to act in the movie,
but her boyfriend said, "You can't act in the movie."
But he happened to have a new band called Earth, Wind & Fire.
So he said, "You can't act with Melvin. However, I wanna do the music."
[chuckles]
[Mitchell] And their contribution added to the sweaty paranoia of Sweetback.
[jarring jazz music playing]
Unlike the sweet and muscular R&B
we'd later instantly recognize as Earth, Wind & Fire,
their Sweetback score is discordant, ribbons of screeching avant-garde jazz
with a pounding layer of percussion underneath.
The music exists to make us aware
we're being plunged into a world the movies shied away from.
It combined genres swiftly,
with reflexes as keen as those of director Van Peebles.
♪ Run, Sweetback! ♪
[sprinklers swishing]
-♪ Run, motherfucker! ♪ -[gospel beat playing]
♪ They bled your sister! But they won't bleed me! ♪
♪ Run, Sweetback! ♪
♪ Run, motherfucker! ♪
♪ They bled your mama! ♪
♪ They bled your papa But they won't bleed me! ♪
[imitates screeching]
[mellow funk music playing]
My dad would actually have me talk to people in the lobby.
He'd say, "What d'you think?" And I'd tell him. He'd say,
"I'm not interested in what you think. I wanna find out later."
"Go talk to those folks in the lobby and get an idea of how they saw the movie,
how they heard about the movie, and what did they think of the film."
[exciting music playing]
[Mitchell] It took an auteur and showman and salesman, such as Melvin,
to understand that by making the composer a creative partner on the project,
rather than just an employee,
the director was investing in the movie's future.
Melvin saw that future in a way that would eventually start
a new direction in the movie business.
First, he made the story
of the selling of the movie, its marketing.
Otherwise, he'd have a Black movie that would get little or no attention.
More importantly, he had the soundtrack released first,
counting on enhanced visibility as a sales tool.
He was an artist-entrepreneur.
It didn't matter if it was art if no one saw it.
[music fades]
Gordon Parks changed who the Black movie protagonist could be.
Sweetback and Shaft followed Muhammad Ali
into an era of Black figures no longer asking for permission to be.
Their scenes were staged to present them as assertive
rather than inviting,
a chill attitude breaking with lowered-head likability.
A flinty and ironic distance that forced the viewer to understand
rather than have all explained.
Listen to what I'm telling you, man. I'm here to help you.
I am an angel of God.
[Mitchell] Harry Belafonte brought his silken intensity
back to the big screen for The Angel Levine,
an experimental drama he produced.
Ending his self-imposed exile in this existential comedy
that added a twist to the dilemma posed by Ralph Ellison
in his novel Invisible Man.
"What did I do to be so Black, blue, and heaven-sent?"
I am an angel.
Have you come to take me away?
No.
I've come to give you life.
[Mitchell] As a more divine and New Testament parallel,
Sidney Poitier starred as Brother John.
In this fantasy, Poitier is a modest stranger
dropped into a conflict zone, withholding approval and judgment
as a taciturn angel of death torn between the past and the present.
This well-meaning fable serves to reflect Poitier's own plight.
Ossie Davis followed up Cotton Comes to Harlem
with a drama that focused on the tensions of generations of Black women
in a single household.
Dear Lord, if you help me get this house for my mother,
I'll never ask you for anything else, amen.
[Mitchell] His young woman protagonist fighting to be heard and for her future,
a subject much closer to landlocked reality
than his previous film.
Writer-director Ousmane Sembène once said that,
"Between the on-screen families in Sounder and Black Girl,
there was a complete universe."
"That's the kind of film I'd like to make."
And the film universe he saw inspired him to spend much of his career
dramatizing the impact on households of absent Black masculinity.
Now, there's a line of reasoning that contends
that 1939 was the best year in movie history.
But it is axiomatic that 1939 affirmed America's movie stature
as mythmaker for the world.
No period that includes Gone with the Wind will ever have that kind of appeal to me.
The men who ran the studios created a pop culture mythology
that gave them the chance to run as far as they could from their origins.
And they could will a hubristic version of America into being,
an America that never existed
but much of this country believes still did.
Probably most of the world still does.
1939 let the studios churn out
what they considered to be moral and literary
and catered to mainstream audiences with whitewashed myths.
I know, Huck. I'm her slave.
But sometimes, I can't help wondering if it's right.
[Mitchell] It's a step past appropriation to cultural colonialism.
White actors can do a much better job with your culture, Latinx actors,
Pacific Islanders…
-[applause] -Miss Dorothy March,
in her impersonation of Bill Robinson,
the King of Harlem.
[Mitchell] …Black people.
A body blow meant as a compliment.
[bell tolling]
Most importantly, there was a handoff in 1939
that cemented the power of a central and debilitating myth
about the place of Blacks in society.
Quittin' time!
-Who says it's quittin' time? -I said it's quittin' time.
I's the foreman. I's the one says when it's quittin' time at Tara.
-Quittin' time! Quittin' time! -[gentle, dreamy music playing]
[Mitchell] They were both adaptations of books.
The number-one grossing film of all time until 1925
was D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.
An even bigger hit was 1939's Gone with the Wind,
which remained the biggest box-office sensation until 1965
and became champ again in 1971.
1972 should have been the year for Rupert Crosse's career to flower.
His fans Jack Nicholson, Robert Towne, and director Hal Ashby
created a role for Crosse in the adaptation of The Last Detail.
But Crosse was diagnosed with leukemia before shooting began.
Filming was delayed in hopes he'd be able to participate,
but Crosse died before filming started.
In an Esquire magazine article,
Ashby reflected on Crosse's humor and grace in the face of mortality.
The phrase "corrosive lyricism" was coined
to summarize Ashby's style and inspired by Crosse's outlook.
[gentle piano music playing]
["Theme from Shaft" by Isaac Hayes playing]
Isaac Hayes used his performance at the 1972 Oscars,
when he became the first Black Best Song winner,
to show his Hot Buttered Soul grandeur to the entire planet.
For me, watching at home, and thrilled
by watching Hayes turn slave chains into superstar chain mail,
it felt like a comet crashing into the Earth,
an alteration of the atmosphere,
letting us know things would never be the same.
It was a dizzying, thrilling mix
that introduced an element that made Black film culture more attractive
than films from the so-called mainstream.
That element was heroism.
Now, cockroach, let's run that shit down from the top again.
[Mitchell] Unlike their white counterparts,
who wore their misery like runway accessories,
Black actors played these antiheroes with a confidence that bordered on heroism
and then crossed that border.
You gonna drop back in. Yeah.
'Cause you didn't do nothin' but talk that brotherhood love and peace.
You didn't change nothin', which means work
and making that talk, talk, talk happen.
But we can't drop into nothin'
'cause we never had nothin' to drop out of.
[Mitchell] In the wake of Shaft, there were bronze remakes of films noir.
Hit Man, a new take on Get Carter.
You are a real superstar, baby.
[Mitchell] And Cool Breeze, yet another remake of The Asphalt Jungle
that made that term more literal
than the nouvelle vague could ever have dreamed possible.
In these films, protagonists stepped into the frame
with a swagger that'd never been allowed in films above the lower depths.
I hate to say this,
but I am such a pretty motherfucker.
[laughs]
Yeah!
[Mitchell] This peak year in Black film moved so many boundaries
that movies were changed forever.
For the first time, two Black women were nominated for Best Actress.
Diana Ross for her first leading role
and the divine Cicely Tyson for Sounder…
Cropping season is a long way off, Mr. Perkins.
By that time, Nathan ought to be home.
If he ain't, believe me, the children and me will do the croppin'.
I never got the… the chance to meet Miss Cicely Tyson.
She always reminded me of my grandmother.
She just kind of personified this… this elegance
and this regal air of--
Just the way she moved and spoke.
No.
I'm fixin' to bake a cake for David Lee to take to your daddy this time.
Good to see Cicely. 'Cause I grew up watching Cicely Tyson.
It was good to see us.
These movies were about us.
Son, don't get too used to this place,
'cause wherever you is, I'm gonna love you.
[Mitchell] …which also got a Best Actor nomination for her costar, Paul Winfield.
I didn't find myself, as a child, attracted to movies where we were victims,
where we were powerless.
I didn't want that as a kid.
I saw Sounder again recently, and I appreciate it much more as an adult.
I saw layers in it that I just didn't see as a kid.
[keys rattling]
[Mitchell] And Diana Ross was nominated for Best Actress
for her first leading role, in the first film about Billie Holiday,
the Motown-produced Lady Sings the Blues.
[door clangs]
[keys rattling]
[melancholy music playing]
It wasn't a movie, as so many are, about being Black.
It was about being talented.
It was Bob Mackie costumes… [chuckles] …and Diana Ross's glamour
and Billy Dee Williams, well, hell, you know. [chuckles]
[chuckles softly]
[De Passe] Frank Yablans was running Paramount.
He told Berry Gordy, after seeing a rough cut of the film,
that they weren't gonna put any more money in it.
And Berry Gordy said to Frank,
"We're not finished. We've got so much more to do."
And Frank said…
I won't go into the story… [chuckling] …of what Frank really said,
but he basically said it's like you've got the clap, and now you wanna give it to me.
Because we've never spent more than this amount of money
on a quote-unquote Black film before.
And he said, "Well, Frank, what can I do?"
He said, "Write me a check for $2 million, and you can do anything you wanna do."
And he did.
[Mitchell] Lady Sings the Blues was an early, all-out glam show,
a gleaming establishment of Black glamour in the movies.
When I think of Diana Ross, I also think of fashion
and how many references I've used of her
for red carpet events or for photo shoots
or for these different characters that I guess I build.
The fingers and the hair and the whole thing
is just like, "Oh my God!"
And then she can act.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Mitchell] Not just for Ross but her costar,
a literal embodiment of tall, dark, and handsome,
Billy Dee Williams.
[lively music playing]
When Billy Dee Williams came on, every woman in Hollywood just hollered…
[screams hysterically]
And I'm… I'm saying, "Oh my God!"
"What… what the…"
[laughing] "What's goin' on?!"
First of all, when I walked down those stairs, I fell in love with myself.
[laughs]
I said, "My goodness gracious!"
I mean, I was smitten.
[man] Do you want my arm to fall off?
[Williams] Even that scene, you know, "Do you want my arm to fall off?"
I mean, couldn't contain myself.
I kept laughing because I was getting special lighting.
You know, it was like the old movie days.
[chuckling]
I was in hysterics.
I had to contain myself. [laughing]
Oh, it was… it was very funny for me because it was like something
that never happened to me before,
you know, in all of the experiences I had doing cinema.
[romantic music playing]
[Mitchell] '72 was a breakthrough year for Black talent.
Playwright Lonne Elder III was nominated for the Sounder screenplay,
and more importantly, it was the year
that the first Black woman was nominated for screenwriting,
Suzanne De Passe, part of the script team for Lady Sings the Blues.
It was a singular achievement until Dee Rees was nominated in 2017
for her script for Mudbound, which makes her
only the second Black woman to be nominated for screenwriting.
[De Passe] Mr. Gordy handed me the script. And he said,
"Read this and tell me what you think."
And I was, like, horrified
because I felt it was very stereotypical.
The perception of… who we are
as opposed to who we are and can be.
And so I began working with Sidney Furie. Then Chris Clark was added.
She was an artist on the label, really bright woman.
She and I became a team.
[Mitchell] The seeds are planted here
for what becomes the most important story of the era.
It's the contribution by women that becomes dominant.
In addition to the accolades, the class of '72 was also action-packed.
[bullets ricochet]
The Western, Buck and the Preacher, directed by Sidney Poitier
and also starring him and Harry Belafonte.
Belafonte had hopes for the film that were never fulfilled.
[Belafonte] The big blow was to find that the Black community didn't support it.
That sent me into a place where I felt betrayed.
I felt like, "Why didn't the Black community support this film
the way the whites would've supported Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?"
"This is our version of the same thing." But they didn't.
And, uh, then I knew I had several adversaries,
Black perception of itself
and Black perception as the world saw us.
[Mitchell] Fred Williamson starred in the revenge-slave Western
The Legend of Nigger Charley,
a title that was cheeky and outrageous even then.
And by the way, the title no longer exists.
The movie is now The Legend of Black Charley.
This brazen poster,
featuring a slight turn on the daguerreotype, said it all.
"Somebody warn the West. Nigger Charley ain't running no more."
Black was also finally added to the horror film in a serious way,
with a commanding William Marshall starring as the tragic vampire Blacula.
Slavery has merit, I believe.
"Merit"?
You find "merit" in barbarity?
[Mitchell] I'd always thought
that the good thing about the institutional racism
that kept Black people from being central figures in horror films was,
for African Americans, the implicit understanding
that no supernatural force or threat of possession
could be more monstrous than slavery
or the Tuskegee Experiment,
or Emmett Till, a real-life Black innocent,
who was the victim of monsters even the movies were afraid of,
when they weren't glamorizing them.
With the Black press forcing the mainstream media
to cover Emmett Till's death with an unblinking gaze
and movies stepping up to recount Black horrors
such as slavery and institutional cruelty,
a film take on the chaos caused by the death of Emmett Till
was the moment Black audiences were waiting for.
That it never happened was a subtle hint of where the real power was in Hollywood.
[tense music playing]
[Burnett] I remember the thing that woke me up, really woke me up,
was the Emmett Till picture on the Jet magazine.
I mean, talking about someone, grew up, the next day, a different person.
I still have the images I saw in Jet magazine about Emmett Till.
From that day on, I was aware of what his mother must have felt like.
[tragic string music playing]
[Fargas] I remember as a kid,
looking at Jet magazine and seeing Emmett Till's body,
and that impacted me.
In some ways, we've been worn down to where we see pain and misery,
and it does nothing,
and it does nothing to us,
or it's onto the next one because we know it's gonna happen again.
But it's getting more personal.
It's getting closer and closer to…
to just humanity, man's inhumanity to man.
[Mitchell] That ongoing terror was beautifully defined
with the release of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.
He was the first to sing social protest as a seducer
rather than being declamatory.
And Gaye released another epical album in '72.
This time a soundtrack
that gave him the opportunity to return to his jazz roots.
-["Trouble Man" by Marvin Gaye playing] -♪ I come up hard, but now I'm cool ♪
♪ I didn't make it, baby Playin' by the rules… ♪
[Mitchell] Black film soundtracks had so often taken their cues
from What's Going On,
one of the most gorgeous and honestly revolutionary acts of Black pop culture,
so it made sense for Marvin Gaye to do the same.
He submitted the state of African-American affairs
and picked up his musical autobiography with his Trouble Man score
where he left off at What's Going On.
[suspenseful music playing]
And the movie music that would follow in its wake
continued to assess the collateral damage of oppression
that he spelled out earlier.
["Pusherman" by Curtis Mayfield playing]
♪ I'm your pusherman… ♪
[Mitchell] But ironically, the most sublime of these scores
came from an artist whose influence was evident
on Marvin Gaye's break from old-time pop-soul.
It, too, included a honeyed falsetto
rendering the struggle of Black American life.
♪ Ain't I clean? Bad machine Super cool, super mean ♪
♪ Dealin' good for the Man Super fly, here I stand ♪
♪ Secret stash… ♪
[Mitchell] Curtis Mayfield's lyric summaries of social conditions
and a militant refusal to surrender to institutional inertia
can be heard throughout his entire solo career.
Mayfield's musical output for this decade spanned 20 albums,
among them five soundtracks.
His sinewy intimacy and piercing songwriting
set the tone in Black film from then on,
starting with Super Fly, as an example for many of his fellow musicians.
And Mayfield took his lead from Melvin Van Peebles
with the unusual tactic of releasing the Super Fly score
before the movie came out.
Because it was an immediate sensation,
the Super Fly soundtrack served as an invitation to the movie.
John Calley, who ran Warner Bros. in the 1970s,
told me he thought Super Fly started a trend,
using the soundtracks to create excitement about the movies
prior to theatrical release.
The textures of Mayfield's score,
dramatizing and commenting on the life of the protagonist,
was reflected in the down and dirty accomplishment
of cinematographer James Signorelli.
One of the best foot-chase scenes in movies, with no stuntmen,
was caught in the film's guerilla shooting style by Signorelli.
[Signorelli] He had to have a route of escape.
Jimmy was the guy he was chasing.
[exciting funk music playing]
We were standing around, and Ron said, "I can jump that fence."
And that was all there was to it. That was all the rehearsal.
It certainly wasn't more than one take, I'll tell you that.
It was definitely a combination of the two aesthetics.
One was the documentary photography that people had been doing,
particularly Leacock, Pennebaker, you know, Maysles, all those guys,
myself included, you know, Bob Elfstrom.
The stuff that we were all doing was bleeding into the technique
of shooting feature films,
particularly where the environment was a third party.
[Mitchell] Signorelli's improvisational approach was applied
to other kinds of action in Super Fly,
such as the scene with Sheila Frazier and star Ron O'Neal
that was frank and passionate about Black love.
I can feel from you what it's like out there.
I see what it does to you,
and I know… I know how dope helps hold your head together.
I don't want your privacy, baby.
All I wanna do is help you share the weight.
-[sensual funk music playing] -[Frazier] I said, "Once the suds go away,
we have to stop it and refill the suds because I don't wanna be seen."
I don't know what I was thinking about. It was pretty hard not to be seen.
[laughs]
I would not know that at the premiere of that movie
that they put that scene in slow motion.
[Signorelli] And I believe at one point, Judith Crist said,
"It was the most tasteful and erotic scene in cinema history."
[Frazier] Richard Roundtree was the one who helped me get the audition.
Richard said, "You've gotta walk in like it's yours."
I said, "Okay, all right."
So I walked in, and I put my feet up on the desk,
on Sig Shore's desk, and I said, "You know what,
you don't have to see another person because the film is mine."
Gordon said, "You've got this!"
Well, after Gordon told me I had it, and I was so ecstatic,
then he had to call me and apologize and say,
"I'm so sorry, but Sig Shore wanted a different look."
"He wanted a very voluptuous woman."
It was so devastating, I just changed all--
I had two telephones.
I changed both… both numbers,
so I would never have to speak to anybody again.
About three months later,
this guy walks up to me, you know, and he's like,
"I'm a producer." I'm like, "Good for you."
So he says, "Well, what's your name?"
So I gave him my name. He says, "Oh my God!"
"We've been trying to find you for three months."
"We've been trying to find you." I'm saying, "Who's 'we'?"
So he says, "Well, I'm a producer on a movie called Super Fly."
I said, "Eh-eh."
And as soon as I got home, the phone was ringing off the hook.
[Mitchell] The result, John Calley told me, was that Super Fly,
an independently made project that Warner Bros. bought for $150,000,
a pittance by even 1972 standards,
went on to gross around $30 million.
[Ron O'Neal] Super Fly has played to an awful lot of white people.
It's the only way you can do 19, 20 million dollars.
We've been in Boston 17 weeks.
We ran out of Black people in three weeks… [chuckling] …in Boston, you know?
[male reporter] Super Fly, slang for cocaine among users,
is the story of a Black New York City narcotics dealer.
Strong objections to the film were raised today by R.L. Livingston
of the Better Influence Association in Fort Worth.
I don't know what this council can do, but I'm bringing it to your attention
because you are the city council of Fort Worth,
and you represent the problem-solving division here,
and I hope that we can do this thing here without the citizens going up on their own
to boycott such trash and filth in our community.
How do you see your role in Super Fly, as a positive force or a negative one?
Obviously, I consider it a positive one, or I never would have done the film.
When we made Super Fly,
we made it about the way things actually are,
and we hoped it would be judged and criticized on that basis.
Uh, but my… from my observation, you know,
Super Fly has been largely criticized from some…
[inhales deeply]
…some, you know, some sphere,
some… some plane, some plateau, you know, that has no bearing on the film.
[Bobby Seale] They use the Black community to make the movies in the first place.
Uh, we're tired of these white producers coming in and making Black movies
and then, in turn, are exploiting the Black community.
Also, the Black extras who live in Oakland and Berkeley and around the area
are only getting $10 a day.
They should be getting $50 a day.
-[chanting] -[feet stomping]
I think all the artists, since I know them personally,
uh, you know, are responsible people
who are concerned about what is happening in the Black communities.
We are, of course, uh, not able to make a motion picture alone.
Many other elements go into the making of a motion picture,
most important of which, I suppose, initially, would be huge sums of money.
[Mitchell] The footballers-turned-movie stars
Jim Brown and Fred Williamson
came through that year with two films each,
with impatient titles that are both synonyms and descriptors.
Like Shaft, whose sequel, Shaft's Big Score,
sounds like it could be an athlete-turned-actor adventure.
[mellow funk music playing]
And these films were all solidly tattooed with the label "blaxploitation,"
a brand that offered acknowledgment and dismissal simultaneously.
Though these films coursed through the bloodstream of American social
and popular culture,
they were seldom addressed in mainstream media,
except, of course, to provoke panic.
When I think of the word "blaxploitation," I think of the commodifying of Blackness.
"How do we package and sell Blackness?"
"Exploitation" because they were white writers, white producers,
white director,
and then they took it to the Black community,
and the Black community ate it up, made them a lot of money,
but not us.
Is that not exploitation?
[Mitchell] Though the blaxploitation brand so often provoked debate and condemnation,
the films quite often generated appeal and profit.
Mainstream movies now regarded as classic
feature white stars, bored with heroism,
becoming antiheroes as a way of wrestling with that issue
and frustrating audiences in the bargain.
[intriguing music playing]
The Black stars, and one wonders why that wasn't a film title from the era,
made audiences beneficiaries of another natural evolution,
swag in their own beauty
and reveling in being in the center of the frame.
Certainly, in the Five Families scene from The Godfather,
Francis Coppola showed the thoughtlessness of these characters in this scene,
clearly meant to be an indictment of them and not an approval of their thoughts.
In my city, we would keep the trafficking to dark people, the colored.
They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.
[Mitchell] Still, even understanding what the film's intent was,
that sentiment can be a little hard to hear.
But it did ask a question answered by many Black films,
which showed the rot left by drugs.
No! No! For God's sake!
["People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul" by James Brown playing]
[Mitchell] Black films created a warrior class
where there hadn't been one before.
Black audiences no longer had to sift through stories to find subtext
that explained why Black characters hovered in the margins.
They now inhabited center frame by natural right.
And at a time when the only mainstream movie hero
was Bond, James Bond,
who, in 1973, saw Roger Moore's 007 go nose-to-false-nose
with the series' first and, to date, only Black big bad,
played by Yaphet Kotto,
in this ever-changing world in which Bond lived.
Quite revealing.
[Mitchell] Black movies were portraying the dilemmas of the inner city,
the ravages of crime, and the drug war.
Only, in these films, African-American leads were fighting back.
It was understood that cops wouldn't help.
They were often as indifferent as they were corrupt.
Jim Brown reprised Slaughter, his verb-as-surname character,
in Slaughter's Big Rip-Off,
complemented by the singular two-fisted funk
of an early James Brown score.
[song ends]
In Hit!, Billy Dee Williams was a CIA agent
who recruits an unlikely group of walking wounded
in his personal fight against international drug dealers.
He lost his daughter to drugs.
What's it gonna do for you to kill me, man?
I'm just a worker.
It really required a kind of a… a mentality
that he was capable of using whatever, uh, he needed to use
in order to accomplish his mission.
-[seagulls squawking] -[solemn piano music playing]
That's very interesting.
And, in a way that, for… uh, little brown-skinned boys like me
never had the opportunity to do that kind of stuff.
And the fact that Sidney wanted me to play that character,
felt I was right for that character,
I tried to use it in the best way that I could.
Again, it was an opportunity
to show a side that you normally would not see on-screen.
I think that adds to the vulnerability. I was thinking about vulnerability.
It makes the character a little bit more than just a ruthless kind of individual.
[Mitchell] Gordon's War featured a group of Black Vietnam vets
using their skills to return fire against drug dealers.
It featured a couple of startlingly original visual high points
that have been quoted in films ever since.
New Jack City, to name just one,
scored by Angelo Badalamenti, who would later work with David Lynch.
Got a light?
This MacGyver-like action moment with an aerosol can,
which could be seen as a metaphor for its environmental danger,
has made its way into innumerable action films.
[screaming]
[Mitchell] Audiences of all colors came out to see these movies
because they could feel the adrenaline in the actors,
many of whom came from the stage, and those actors' exhilaration in working.
-[upbeat funk music playing] Second runner-up, Pretty Tony!
[Mitchell] In The Mack, for example, Dick Anthony Williams as Pretty Tony
is as compelling as any figure in a '30s gangster movie.
He told me his improvisations came out of wanting to portray
an inner-city version of Edward G. Robinson
brought up-to-date with turns of phrases he heard growing up.
Nigga, next time you hear grown folks talkin',
shut the fuck up. Hear?
[Mitchell] The impact of that kind of concise hypermasculinity
would be felt decades later, in lines that seem to be written for Black actors,
if not spoken by them.
-Want me to shoot this guy? -Shit.
[man chuckles]
You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.
[chuckles]
[mellow funk music playing]
[Mitchell] There was a more specific realization
of Edward G. Robinson to come in Black Caesar.
They never look at me. They never look at my face, my nose, my lame foot.
All they know is that I'm Black.
[dramatic drumbeat playing]
[Mitchell] Imagine if the man who inspired Cohen to write Black Caesar,
Sammy Davis Jr., got to star in the work he set into motion,
but Cohen ended up with Fred Williamson as Black Caesar.
When he asked the studio head to account for the size difference
between Williamson and Davis,
the studio head thought for a moment and said,
"Give Fred a limp."
[upbeat Motown music playing]
A 1973 concert documentary, Save the Children,
filmed at the 1972 Operation PUSH rally,
had appearances that ranged from Jesse Jackson to The Jackson 5,
from Nancy Wilson to Zulema,
and put music and progressive politics together.
It was a massive enterprise to assemble.
We started with the Motown acts.
So once we'd booked Marvin Gaye,
Temptations,
Gladys Knight & the Pips, you know, folks like that,
it started to be this thing about people wanted to do it.
And then, Clarence had a record company, so he got Bill Withers and Nancy Wilson
and Sammy Davis Jr.
Quincy was already involved so he got Roberta Flack,
and he put together a house band that was an all-star band.
And so this thing sort of turned into this amazing gathering
of some of the best musicians that were available at that time.
It was big. It was huge.
And it was a… a huge success,
'cause all of those musicians brought their best game.
♪ Tonight ♪
♪ I gave the greatest performance Of my life ♪
It got to a point where the level of artistry was off the roof.
It was crazy.
[funk music playing]
[Mitchell] Black female characters determined to be recognized
not merely because of their proximity to a man.
No longer compliant arm candy,
they also threw down against a battalion of stuntmen.
It was the final frontier for Black actresses
and established a definition of heroism
that allowed for directness rather than martyrdom.
Before this, movies often conflated Black femininity
with romanticized masochism.
What audiences were getting was something entirely new.
Black films are just, like… It's an evolution.
It's not something that's gonna come and pop automatically,
and everything will happen immediately because nothing happens that way,
and things will take time.
Progress has to be a slow thing
in order for it to be definite, you know, and beneficial, I think,
so it's gonna take a little while.
There's so many different areas that haven't been… been realized yet
as far as Black actors are concerned.
And, uh, it's all new to me. I'm… I'm a new actress, as you know,
and, uh, I've just begun to work,
and there's so many areas of work I haven't touched yet.
I have a lot more training that I have to get
before I can really call myself an actress.
[Mitchell] Laurence Olivier once said,
"When you're young, you're too bashful to play a hero."
"You debunk it."
"It's only when you're older
that you understand the pictorial beauty of heroism."
Black actors not only understood that beauty, they embraced it
because of the communal thirst we had for heroes.
America, in the throes of uncertainty, embraced those Black heroes
who were played onto the screens with dynamic and celebratory music scores.
Remember, it was Shaft that saved MGM from bankruptcy.
And the newest arrival to this extraordinary league
that redefined accomplishment and glory in the movies was Pam Grier.
From 1970 until 1973, she appeared in seven films,
with each role giving her more screen time.
A 1970s Esquire magazine article
on rising stars that would go on to change the movies,
a group that included Steven Spielberg, who was just finishing Jaws,
and George Lucas, fighting to start something called The Star Wars,
Pam Grier was one of the few actors mentioned,
described as, "One of three actresses whose movies consistently make money."
"The other two are named Barbra and Liza."
Grier said, "I'm the only lady in movies nowadays who isn't a victim."
"Determination was key working roles such as a half-panther madwoman,"
as the article says.
In '73, she was also in Scream Blacula Scream…
Now, with such a lovely guide,
I'm afraid I'd lose my concentration on the artwork.
How about that?
[Mitchell] …and Black Mama White Mama.
You can stick that up your ass. Now, let's go!
[gun fires]
[birds chirping]
[Mitchell] But it was in Coffy that she proved herself a movie star.
Toni Morrison once told me, "It was a dismissal
to call Grier's characters, such as Coffy, 'a badass.'"
"It diminished her as an actress."
And more importantly, she thought Grier's performance
dealt with the moral complexities demanded of Black women.
The toll of maintaining her equilibrium
while taking the law into her own hands and dealing with betrayal
showed in her performance as she avenges her sister's death,
a metaphor for Black women juggling roles
such as protectors and nurturers simultaneously.
-Now, come on. -[woman] Howie, what are you doing?
Come back to bed--
[unsettling music playing]
[gasps]
Coffy, baby. You gotta understand. I… I thought you were dead!
-[groans] -[screams]
[Mitchell] But often, and finally, alone.
Still, moving on. Hopefully, towards community.
She'd be an archangel
delivering her people from the end of the world.
Always around the corner for African Americans.
Coffy allows Grier a final moment of respite
in a new version of a picture-postcard shot.
In 1973, we were in the midst of botched opportunities,
such as Shaft in Africa, and responses to Black action films,
such as the adaptation of the play Five on the Black Hand Side,
which starred a young Glynn Turman.
What does that feel like?
Feels like a lifetime ago, tell you the truth.
It's amazing that all of that was happening then,
and, uh, that I got to work
with such wonderful, wonderful, iconic people,
you know.
And it, uh…
It's a history, man, that…
You don't go into it thinking that it's going to have any import.
It was just, like, uh,
survival.
You're young.
You know, you're trying to get started in the business.
You're trying to put your foot down
and make a mark for yourself in the business.
[Mitchell] There also came a film that was like the answer to a riddle.
What would you get if you gave the star
of a terrible and ghastly World War II sitcom
and the editor of that show a chance to make a movie?
Ivan Dixon, who quit Hogan's Heroes, and Michael Kahn, that show's editor,
first worked together on Trouble Man.
But Dixon's dream project was an adaptation
of Sam Greenlee's agitprop satiric novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door,
in which a Black man, recruited by the CIA,
takes the agency's tactics to the streets and creates a revolution.
Dixon's years of struggle to get this project completed
could be a movie.
Finally raising the money to make half the movie
and showing action sequences to get studio interest,
a bidding war, won by United Artists, got him the other half.
According to Dixon, the studio was appalled by a film
they feared might cause actual riots and lawsuits
instead of a riot at the box office.
It included a line that I thought belonged in the annals of film history,
alongside "an offer he couldn't refuse."
[man] Remember,
a Black man with a mop, tray, or broom in his hand
can go damn near anywhere in this country.
And a smiling Black man
is invisible.
[Mitchell] This line brought down the house when I saw the movie
in Detroit in 1973,
and it continues to set off fireworks and inspiration decades later.
[Nipsey Hussle] I'mma name my last album The Spook That Sat by the Door.
Basically, he used their agenda,
which was to have a token nigga in the CIA for political reasons.
-You know, we gonna speak blunt. Fuck it. -[woman] Right.
Um, he used it against 'em.
[gun fires]
[Mitchell] Dixon told me that when Spook ended its theatrical run,
United Artists called him in for a meeting and told him
the movie was being tracked by US Intelligence,
which means there's a photo of me
and my high-school friends somewhere in Langley.
This movie created such a furor
that Dixon felt
his theatrical moviemaking career was finished.
A film about insurrection was being treated
as if it were the act itself.
Don't quit
until you either win,
or you die.
[Mitchell] The Spook Who Sat by the Door infused a genre film, the spy thriller,
with a Black perspective
and forced audiences to reexamine how narrow that genre had been.
Ganja & Hess finds visuals, either poetic or realistic and harsh,
to keep its emotional fluidity constant.
-[unsettling music playing] -[screams]
[Mitchell] Duane Jones, steely and determined
as the monster killer in Night of the Living Dead,
is cast as the monster here, and his resolve to keep his soul alive
as the movie shifts from dreamscape to bloody reality
became a metaphor for the life of Bill Gunn,
the film's writer, director, and costar.
Real-life horror played out for Gunn,
who witnessed his triumph edited into different versions,
each badly titled recut worse than the previous one,
transforming his art into something monstrous.
[melancholy string music playing]
Gunn fought to work in the movies
even after his directorial debut titled Stop!
Ishmael Reed writes,
"Warner Bros. was so upset with Stop! that it buried the film
and got Gunn to return his writing and directing fees."
-[siren wails] -[funk music playing]
1974 was another seismic movement of the needle for Black film.
[men] The Black 6.
[Mitchell] A jolt courtesy of Diahann Carroll
as a weary but determined mother of six in Claudine.
[woman on phone] Sorry, that number's been disconnected.
"Disconnected"?!
[Mitchell] Diahann Carroll, whose beauty was deepened by a core of calm,
was one of those who seized the opportunity to be free
of her civilized smoothness.
What is that--
Please, Francis! Don't do that! You'll electrocute yourself!
[Mitchell] As the titular character in this drama,
Claudine fought the welfare system
and the streets of Chicago for the souls of her children.
And she won, in that her kids were still alive at the end.
For her efforts, Carroll got a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Claudine also benefited from being one of the five scores
that Curtis Mayfield wrote.
It was a song cycle in which all the songs came
from the perspectives of the characters, sung by Gladys Knight & the Pips.
Including one that, in the song,
precisely outlined a centuries-old fear faced by people of color.
["To Be Invisible" by Gladys Knight & the Pips playing]
♪ To be invisible ♪
♪ Will be my claim to fame ♪
♪ A girl with no name ♪
I actually was cast in Claudine
when Diana Sands was cast to play Claudine.
And then she passed away.
And so they, you know… they reshuffled the deck,
and they found another bunch of actors.
I mean, they had…
I had auditioned, uh,
for the second-youngest son,
but I wound up not being cast in it after that.
You know, they… they recast it.
[upbeat music playing]
[Mitchell] An intriguing piece of editorial in action-leather camouflage
was Three the Hard Way, which teamed Jim Brown
and Fred Williamson
with martial artist Jim Kelly's Afro.
Three cities and three of us.
[Mitchell] They take on a neo-Nazi organization,
which develops a poison that only kills African Americans
and will be dumped into the water supplies of LA, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.,
all of which look suspiciously like Los Angeles.
I thought it was the most laughable thing I'd ever seen
until my father explained the Tuskegee Experiment to me,
and Three the Hard Way was suddenly a meditation on justifiable paranoia,
the scientific term for which is "African American," I believe.
1974 follows that film with a heartbreaking footnote,
one of the final film performances of Diana Sands.
Honeybaby, Honeybaby was a messy cocktail with a splash of spy caper,
a twist of action melodrama, a zest of character comedy,
and so insecure it begins with the movie describing itself to you.
Hey, how you doin'?
My name is J. Eric Bell, and I just got back from Beirut, Lebanon,
while filming a movie, Honeybaby, Honeybaby, on location.
[Mitchell] '74 was bookended with Sands.
Another of her last film appearances is in Willie Dynamite,
which starred stage actor Roscoe Orman, who is now better known for another role.
[Orman] I used to joke when Willie finally left after that last scene,
he turned the corner, and there was this big yellow bird on the street.
[laughing]
But it was true.
I mean, within… within that year following Willie Dynamite,
there I was as Gordon on Sesame Street.
[intriguing funk music playing]
[exhales]
Looking for work?
[Mitchell] The light in Orman's eyes, as Willie Dynamite,
signaled his eagerness to work with an acting partner
whose radiant toughness matched up with his coldhearted savvy.
[Orman] I had the incredible good fortune of working with,
you know, one of the great actors of all time.
Diana, she was so well-grounded and educated
in terms of the art of… of, uh, performance,
you know, and, uh…
Of course she and Lorraine Hansberry were close friends,
and Sidney and Ruby and Ossie and all of 'em, you know.
I mean, these were all my mentors as well.
[jaunty piano music playing]
Willie was a performer, and those courthouse steps,
you know, that was like Baryshnikov.
Platform shoes, high-heeled platform shoe--
[laughing]
I'd probably break every bone in my body now.
[music ends]
[Mitchell] Three the Hard Way director Gordon Parks Jr.
had another film that year, Thomasine & Bushrod,
an Afrocentric and bucolic Western
that braided a Black twist into Bonnie and Clyde with its pairing
of two of the most beautiful people in the American West,
Vonetta McGee and Max Julien, on the run.
Their scenes together toyed with a movie-star version
of their own real-life chemistry.
How you doin', Mr. Bushrod?
I do fine, Thomasine. I do fine. I just never thought I'd see you again.
Here I am.
-[romantic music playing] -And you look good. Damn, you look good.
[Mitchell] It showcased the languorous, easy score by Arthur Lee
and the script by its star, Max Julien.
[Turman] Thomasine & Bushrod was so much fun. Uh…
Max Julien was such a great guy
and such an innovative guy and a daring guy.
He produced that movie. He wrote it, produced it, you know.
He was-- He called the shots.
So, of all those motion pictures
that came out of the "Black exploitation," quote, period,
Max was one of the few Blacks who controlled his own product.
I knew one thing.
I knew that Max and Vonetta were revolutionary.
Max would just say, you know, "I'm not gonna take this shit."
[laughs]
And he didn't, you know, and, uh…
"Let's do our own, man. We'll just do our own."
[mysterious music playing]
[Mitchell] In the adaptation of the autobiographical book
The Education of Sonny Carson,
the young protagonist is subjected to extremes of Black masculinity,
in a film that floats between the brutal and the poetic.
This time, director Michael Campus, who also made The Mack,
tells a story about a Black hero
who can't outwit the prison-industrial complex
and is nearly suffocated by incarceration.
For Sonny, the antidote is moving from one urban tribe to another
to prove his worth.
One of its most harrowing scenes shows the adolescent Sonny
running the literal gauntlet to be jumped into a gang.
-[blows thudding] -[unsettling music playing]
[grunting]
You wanna deal with the Lords, you deal with us later, you understand?
[Mitchell] Clanton's charged, fully felt acting proves his understanding
of Sonny's psychic scar tissue from a lifetime of violence.
[Jackson] He just so opposite of who that dude was.
He was not that guy.
He was acting.
You know. You coulda--
They… they coulda found that out the same way I did.
Just by saying, "Come in this room and talk to us."
[Mitchell] If the decade 1968 through 1978 was about talent seizing opportunity,
there's no better tribute to that motivation
than the reinvention of Sidney Poitier,
who turned himself into a blue-collar straight man
in Uptown Saturday Night.
You all right, baby?
I'm fine.
I love… Sidney's comedy.
Gentlemen.
[Fishburne] He is incredibly funny in it.
And I love that it is a depiction of Black life
in a normalized way.
[Mitchell] Such was Poitier's physical command
that he made himself visibly uncomfortable in a suit,
the kind of thing that he usually wore like a second skin.
Audiences were giddy
that he could satirize his own stylish earnestness,
and he was a movie star once more in one of his biggest hits ever.
And if Poitier could make himself bigger than life in the movies
in an entirely new way, then anything was possible.
["Can't Seem to Find Him" by The Love Unlimited Orchestra playing]
Perhaps the greatest legacy of this era,
during a time of strain and reassessment in the mainstream,
and such moments being reflected in most movies,
is the joy that Black performers took in being before the camera.
["Can't Seem to Find Him" continues]
There are probably more entrances given protagonists of Black films
than in all the movies of the 1930s put together.
In some cases, the actors got multiple entrances,
and the soundtracks ushered them onto the screen.
The engagement these movies demanded from audiences
often played like the moments in musicals before a dance number erupts,
and the air is charged.
["Can't Seem to Find Him" continues]
It was this decade's movies that gave notice,
careers, and new leases on life to Black talent.
The industry would squander that potential for them.
For example, Cleavon Little…
Hey, where the white women at?
[Mitchell] …whose quicksilver straight-man verve was as responsible
for the success of Blazing Saddles as anything else.
What did you expect?
"Welcome, sonny"?
[Mitchell] Cleavon Little never found another leading role
to showcase his abilities,
unlike his costar, Gene Wilder.
[playing "That's the Way of the World"]
♪ That's the way of the world ♪
[Mitchell] That surge of musical endorphins informed a film
with probably the best-selling Black soundtrack of the period,
directed by the producer of Super Fly.
It's a musical so undercooked the band doesn't bother to speak.
Some might say the film's music was so transporting they don't need to.
And the spiritual wallop of songs such as "That's the Way of the World"
proved that point.
♪ Hey, yeah ♪
[Mitchell] The first major studio version of a slave narrative,
the adaptation of Mandingo,
slaps onto the screen with its gaudy inhumanity intact.
This decades-old literary sensation
was adapted by Oscar-nominee Norman Wexler,
with a cast that includes James Mason and his florid accent…
Get down there.
All right.
[Mitchell] …which seems less crazy after the trashy parade of racism.
The movie's obsession with Black sexuality
and ridiculing white fear of it
inspired the body-worshipping photography of Robert Mapplethorpe.
That's proof Black Jesus was the revenant's cousin too.
[Mitchell] But Black film continues to explode through one genre after another
with writer-director Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin,
a combination of live action and animation that stars Barry White,
actor-playwright Charles Gordone, and Philip Michael Thomas,
who would later star in Miami Vice and coin the acronym EGOT.
Starting with its assaultive title, Bakshi's experiment packs in
much commentary on race and its cinematic treatment.
From parodying Br'er Rabbit
to sending up Krazy Kat.
Night after night, Malcolm remains cool.
[Mitchell] Conceptually, Coonskin stirred up so much turmoil
that it scandalized as well as entertained,
which was its point.
-[bullets ricocheting] -[frantic drumbeat playing]
This load is getting too heavy to tote.
[Mitchell] For good or ill, there's still nothing else like it.
Random and abrupt police intrusion in Black life
played on as part of Black film.
In Cornbread, Earl and Me,
a young Black life ended by a cop's bullet is the center of the story,
back when such a thing still drew a gasp because it was so rarely dramatized
but got knowing nods from Black audiences.
-[police shouting] -[gunshot]
[chorus vocalizing dramatically]
[Mitchell] The spill of orange soda in the climactic scene
crudely but imaginatively worked as a stand-in for bloodshed
and still sends a chill through me.
Cornbread!
That movie, for me, is the original Boyz n the Hood.
[shot echoes]
Cornbread, Earl and Me is a tragic story.
And Boyz n the Hood is also a tragic story.
And those things are almost 20-something years apart.
[all] We do not enter public transportation illegally.
[Mitchell] From the high-flying Shaft and athletes-turned-adventurers,
action downshifted into something drawn like real life.
Cooley High, a Black inner-city version of American Graffiti,
with the ups and downs of a coming-of-age story emerged.
And the story was given a resident lift from Motown songs,
which would have been the soundtrack of the characters' lives in 1964
when Cooley High was set.
The heady perfume of nostalgia washed over Black audiences,
-who welcomed it. [Motown music playing]
That's Motown music.
And it's the backdrop of Black people's lives…
[inhales]
…on film.
That's nice. That's… that's a nice change.
[laughing]
[Motown music playing]
[Turman] One of the first scenes I remember shooting
is the scene running for the bus.
That was exactly how I grew up in Manhattan.
That's what we did. That's what me and my crew did.
We ran and jumped on the back of the bus going down 7th Avenue.
I'll never forget it. But here was the thing…
[laughing] …when we did that going down 7th Avenue,
we jumped on the bus, and 7th Avenue was cobblestone,
so you held on for dear life!
Can I have a hot dog, please?
[Mitchell] Turman plays the big comedic moments and the reality
so that he becomes an important ingredient in Cooley High
rather than overwhelm it with his spice.
-Could I have ketchup on it? -We don't have any ketchup.
-You ain't got no ketchup? -That's right.
[man] Got some relish? Can I have relish on it, please?
[woman] I don't have relish.
-[man] You got no relish? -[woman] No relish.
-[man] What you got? -[woman] Mustard.
-Mustard?! -[woman] That's it.
You mean, a big establishment like this, and all you got is mustard?
-That's right. -I don't like mustard. Do you?
Yeah, I like mustard.
Oh yeah? Well then, here. You eat the hot dog.
And along that road,
you hit certain spots that make you go, "Whoa! Yeah, this is-- Yeah!"
All of a sudden, a call comes from nowhere.
Doesn't even come from my agent. It comes from some strange other place.
"Glynn, Ingmar Bergman is looking for you."
I said, "I'm in no mood to play. I'm sitting here in the fucking dark."
"My kids are hungry. I'm-- We're eating potatoes."
And I hung up the phone.
And the call came. He said, "No, for real, Glynn."
He was looking for me.
And he'd seen Cooley High
and, you know, said he knew right then that I was the one to be in his movie.
So… so you go from pockets of that kind of disaster to
euphoria.
And then, so it's a ride that--
It's… unbelievable ride.
[laughs] You are outrageous, you know that?
[Mitchell] Old-school glamour, as portrayed again
by Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams,
still proved potent in the 1975 romantic melodrama Mahogany.
You gotta give 'em some pizzazz. Show 'em your charm. Ow!
I always feel like, sometimes Black men always feel like they have to…
Maybe there's a good reason for it. There are obvious reasons for it, I guess.
But, uh, always this need to show their strength.
Vulnerability is a wonderful thing to use.
It's a wonderful tool when you're playing a character.
[sentimental music playing]
I've missed you too.
[Williams] But that's me. I'm that kind of person.
I mean, I'm not afraid to display
my, uh… or convey my feelings about,
uh, something if I… if I feel strongly.
Play it, Sam.
♪ We're on the rock 'n' roll choo choo Headed for Hollywood… ♪
[Mitchell] The pop-soul group Bloodstone, whose big hit was "Natural High,"
were said to have invested their own money to produce
the touching and sweetly odd musical
Train Ride to Hollywood, a pastiche of 1940s movie clichés,
and inserted themselves into the mix.
[playing "Rock 'n' Roll Choo Choo"]
[Mitchell] Among Richard Pryor's gifts was pinpoint cultural criticism,
as he proved with his 1976 comedy album Bicentennial Nigger
and his take on Logan's Run,
a 1976 Lego-colored, pre-Star Wars sci-fi fantasy.
[Pryor] I went to see Logan's Run, right?
They had a movie of the future called Logan's Run.
Ain't no niggas in it.
I said, "Well, white folks ain't planning for us to be here."
[crowd laughing, cheering]
[Pryor] That's why we gotta make movies. Then we'll be in the picture.
[crowd cheering]
People don't ever want to-- And… and please forgive me.
People never want to offend white folks.
They want to be able to keep white folks on their side
so that they will be allowed to make these movies.
[exciting music playing]
[Mitchell] By 1976,
after Black films redeemed the ideal of heroic protagonists,
mainstream movies once again saw their worth.
Smile, you son of a…
[Mitchell] The Sting and Jaws, which returned the thrill of victory
to white male movie stars, were massive hits.
In fact, both Jaws and The Sting
were made by the same producers that did Willie Dynamite.
The Sting's plot could have been lifted from the novel Trick Baby, also a film.
And, by 1976's end, Rocky Balboa,
a hero who could have stepped out of a Black action movie,
was pitted against a clumsy and mocking Muhammad Ali archetype.
And though Rocky didn't win the fight,
he got the Best Picture Oscar and the box office success to go with it.
He looks like a big flag.
[Mitchell] Rocky featured a Black heavyweight champ
who was a parody of the all-beef persona Ali brought to the ring.
But Ali used humor as a mind game on his opponents,
who all tried to glare him into submission.
He wasn't a clown.
In fact, Ali knew he could pretend to take things lightly
because his skills would prove his indomitability,
including a willingness to take a punch,
which may have accelerated his slide into Parkinson's.
Stallone's savvy had him lift cleverly from Black culture
such ideas as pounding beef in the meat locker
and running up the museum steps, which Joe Frazier did first,
as the book Ghosts of Manila reminds us.
As Rocky's foe, Apollo Creed,
Carl Weathers bent himself into a pretzel to bring himself down to Stallone's size.
I needed a chiropractor after watching Weathers fold himself
to the level of Rocky's fists.
By 1976, the notion of using the power of musicals to capture audience attention
was no longer lost on mainstream filmmakers.
["Car Wash" by Rose Royce playing]
With Car Wash, composer Norman Whitfield was primed to outdo Shaft and Super Fly,
with a theme of hard-hitting funk bounce sutured to a social context.
And it worked.
["Something He Can Feel" playing]
This song, "Something He Can Feel,"
was Curtis Mayfield's take on Motown girl-group simmer.
Mayfield wrote it for the proto-Dreamgirls,
Black showbiz melodrama, Sparkle…
♪ …I'm too young to let you know Just where I'm coming from ♪
…which should have ignited the career of star Lonette McKee
and been more than a footnote for Irene Cara and Philip Michael Thomas.
Sparkle was screenwriter Joel Schumacher's follow-up
to Car Wash,
and he wrote it to hypnotize audiences and direct himself.
It ended up dazzling the handful who saw it
but not with Schumacher behind the camera.
[upbeat music playing]
Like the potential crowd-pleaser
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings,
this story of the Negro Leagues
also functioned as a metaphor for the amount of effort
Blacks had to put into entertaining audiences.
The players had to give a show on the way to the stadium
and still played nine innings of baseball.
I loved it. I really wanted to do Bingo
'cause Bingo was a really fun kind of character.
I mean, the man is guaranteeing us $200.
If you slice that 11 ways, that comes out to about, uh…
Uh…
Uh, uh…
A lot of money!
[Mitchell] Bingo is all the things Williams is.
He's physical. He has an appetite for life.
Full of crap, you know.
[laughs]
[man 1] Who you got, man?
[man 2] A real foxy lady.
[Mitchell] The 1977 film Brothers was a peculiar and rare attempt
at Black political melodrama.
With its haunted Taj Mahal score,
it was a romance of ideals with Bernie Casey and Vonetta McGee
as characters based on George Jackson and Angela Davis.
But pretty much all this movie did was gape at their bone structure.
Before Marvel and DC dropped faithful movie adaptations
of their universes on regular schedules, the well-meaning street superhero story
Abar: the First Black Superman hit screens.
This film celebrates the Watts Tower on-screen,
giving it a sense of place in the Black world.
-Commence firing! -[whooshing]
[Mitchell] And, in an early version of sampling,
it used Captain America's origin story as a serving suggestion.
As a Black race, let's get ourselves together,
in every respect.
For that, I'll sacrifice anything short of murder.
Well, uh, suppose I could, uh, make you indestructible.
[Mitchell] The cycle of Black film was slowly winding down,
as the sure-bet returns on Black films of a certain type
were diminishing at a rate that seemed exponential.
So, there was no place for a peculiar high point of the 1970s,
a biopic about a real-life boxer,
with a theme song that initially provoked unintentional laughs.
♪ I believe the children are our future ♪
♪ Teach them well And let them lead the way ♪
♪ Show them all the beauty They possess inside ♪
[Mitchell] Houston's chart-topping claiming of this song
lifted it from ode to self-absorption to self-empowerment hymn.
This embrace of "The Greatest Love of All" was a generational shift.
Following the lead of actors from 1968 adopting Ali's bravado,
it signaled the change in mainstream perception of Ali,
from showboat to "The Greatest Love of All."
[exciting funk music playing]
Prior to this 1968 through '78 era,
movie soundtracks didn't matter to the studios
because they didn't consistently sell much,
and usually came out months after the movies were released.
Black '70s film ignored that example.
The scores weren't just textures but detonations of thought and sound.
Their boldness transformed movie music and mainstream music forever.
Suddenly, movie music was a commercial consideration.
Black film soundtracks multiplied,
composed and performed by R&B singers, jazz artists,
classically trained musicians, who made a fusion of classical and modern.
Master session drummer Bernard Purdie
was out to show the true definition of funk
in the Black X-rated film Lialeh,
where he's on camera playing the score he composed for the movie.
Eventually, the movies would have to take notice
because too many hits were coming out of these Black movie scores.
[mellow funk music playing]
Robert Stigwood was producing a movie
about the white middle-class being consumed by disco.
You know, Black music.
Because Stigwood also owned a record label,
he made sure to use a film soundtrack featuring his biggest artists,
the Bee Gees, to sell the movie
and help his potential audience get over its fear of a Black planet.
Soon, soundtracks would come to dominate the pop charts
and be expected to because of the Black film example.
It's one of the many lasting and unheralded achievements
of Black film of this era.
["Stayin' Alive" by Bee Gees playing]
In 1977, the most attractive points of Black film,
the entrance, the confidence, the propulsive theme to announce the star,
like this, finally received its homage in a mainstream movie.
♪ Music loud and women warm ♪
♪ I've been kicked around Since I was born ♪
[muffled] ♪ And now it's all right It's okay… ♪
[Mitchell] Which is to say, every generation
gets its own Elvis or Eminem.
♪ The New York Times' effect on man ♪
John Travolta was another note in the decades-long symphony of swagger,
an off-white take on Black cool,
the next best thing.
Travolta, as Tony Manero,
may not have been the first to use Black beats of stylization,
but he embraced it with a bone-deep flair for expropriation.
His intensity and intent
became a truly realized cultural phenomenon,
the biggest ever.
By 1978, Richard Pryor had appeared in 20 movies.
With the exception of a handful of turns,
his live standup, and Wattstax, none consistently made use of his talent.
Wanna buy a radio?
My locker's been busted for six months now, man,
and the company ain't did shit to fix it.
Now I have to stick my finger in some tiny-ass hole.
I cut my finger, man, two weeks ago, and it ain't healed yet.
[Mitchell] In '78, he costarred in what would be a most demanding role.
He played a volatile and miserable autoworker in Blue Collar,
which would also remain his own favorite acting work.
You a redneck, peckerwood motherfucker, you know that?
That's it, you're through. I've had your bullshit.
I'mma kill a motherfucker! You understand that?
[Mitchell] It was a film whose atmosphere was so combative,
you could make a great movie about the making of Blue Collar.
It would be the following year
that Pryor would release himself from fur-lined handcuffs
in his most complex and remarkable role,
himself.
I don't wanna never see no more police in my life.
[crowd laughing, cheering]
At my house. [chuckles]
[Mitchell] To witness Pryor's startling, jazz-drummer control
in the film Live in Concert
is to see he was the Tony Williams of comedians.
It only highlighted how the studios made movies,
such as The Wiz, that squandered his blistering truth.
Phony!
[Mitchell] At this point, it feels like only one thing
can save Black film from oblivion.
The Wiz is out! He's not here!
I'm on my way to find The Wiz.
He's gonna get me back home.
Well, that's nice.
[Mitchell] Was it an all-stops-out musical from one of the most respected directors,
with a film debut of a performer destined to become
the biggest pop music phenomenon of the next decade
and a budget that could possibly equal what was spent
to make all the Black films produced in 1968?
A good thought in the abstract but probably not in real life.
The director was someone whose best work
was tense, gritty movies, such as Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.
The star's about 20 years too old for the part,
and the expressionism
and gospel-flavor intimacy of the stage show
is replaced by hundreds of extras trying not to bump into each other
in outfits that still seem to have shiny price tags hanging off them.
The Wiz is said to have cost between 25 and 40 million dollars to make,
as much as Super Fly grossed.
It lacked the infectious aplomb and winning brio
of the Black movies that did succeed.
It only made about a third of its costs back.
Sure, it may have got bad reviews,
but so did most of the films that did extraordinary business.
The simple fact is The Wiz lost money.
So much that it gave the movie industry the reason it had been looking for
to withdraw from the Black movie business
and handed movie executives the chance to say things like,
"Black people don't wanna see themselves in movies anymore."
Or something I actually heard from one,
"Black people don't see themselves in historical dramas anyway."
It was in 1978
that the white male movie star reaccepted the mantle of hero
after rejecting it to embody the tormented antihero for over a decade,
the sure and steely-eyed hero archetype…
[announcer] Burt Reynolds is Hooper.
And Hooper is a real hero.
[Mitchell] …and finally absorbed the lesson
that these Black films understood early on.
The biggest myth that the movies promoted,
going back to D.W. Griffith and even before,
is that we want to be saved.
But it's often a satisfying lie,
a chili cheeseburger, poisonous but so good.
All right…
[Mitchell] Warren Beatty ascended from impotent bank robber to the heavens.
Heaven Can Wait could be viewed as the closing of a circle,
because a '70s remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan
began its life in the hands of a Black performer
working with Francis Coppola.
[Coppola] It was a really funny script because he's this white guy
who dies and comes back as Bill Cosby,
but everyone sees him as white.
He liked-- I don't know why it was never done.
[Mitchell] Robert De Niro employed his movie-star concentration
to play an old-school avenger.
Clint Eastwood put down his .44 Magnum to hang with the apes.
And the rocket that was launched from the planet Krypton by DC Comics
in 1938
finally deposited its contents on the movie screen.
["This Bitter Earth" by Dinah Washington playing]
But by 1978, the crowning achievement of the decade came into focus,
a work of art that had been playing since the end of the previous year.
This film took the director much of the decade
to complete and release,
though, to be fair, it was a thesis project.
It used music deftly to illustrate character and setting
and showed an alluring command of the medium
and would be imitated into the next century.
♪ Within me cries ♪
♪ I'm sure someone may answer my call ♪
♪ And this bitter earth ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
♪ May not… ♪
[Mitchell] Burnett borrowed Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth"
for its delicate heartache.
And Martin Scorsese paid tribute to the scene in both image and music.
[song continues]
[song fades]
-[child] I'll catch you! -Can't get me, Janice!
These people I grew up with, I really admired them, you know,
the fathers who, you know…
Unlike Hollywood films, that they…
Everyone's a prostitute or doing something or leaving the family,
and a mother to take care, a single parent,
these parents and fathers were working hard, you know,
and I tried to be like 'em.
And I grew up in a community
that I really respected the people and liked 'em because I saw who they were,
and those are the kinds of people I didn't see represented in stories.
'Cause they were working-class people. Watts was a really interesting place.
When I first went to UCLA,
they had this end-of-the-quarter screening called Royce Hall Screenings.
And they showed all the best films that were shown at…
in the film department that year.
And I was taking a class with… The teacher was Basil Wright.
He was a documentary filmmaker who did Song of Ceylon, things like that.
I was so lucky to get in his class.
And I remember going to the screenings at Royce Hall,
and I couldn't understand a word of what was going on.
I… I didn't identify--
I mean, it was a time when the flower children was a big thing.
You know, nudity, you know,
going up to… going up to Topanga Canyon,
you know, and the guys are getting weed and all this kind of stuff
and just finding themselves,
rediscovering themselves and their sexuality.
And, I mean, those weren't the issues in my community.
[pleasant orchestral music playing]
[Mitchell] Killer of Sheep demonstrated the potential of the medium
by a poet finding beauty in his own neighborhood.
And, of course, he was ignored by the mainstream press.
There was no takeaway from it,
even as filmmakers made entire careers out of copying it.
And Black film was left to wither and die.
But it refused to.
In every decade since 1978, there's been a rise and fall
for gifted Black filmmakers who won't give up.
Is the lesson that those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to keep remaking Shaft?
There's much talk of the pride that came out of the period, but again,
I think of something my grandmother said, "You don't want pride. It's a trap."
"That means you want someone to see your chest swelled up."
"It's a selfish thing."
"Instead, take pleasure in what you do. That belongs to you."
"It's something you want others to share in with you."
It's what I got from those films.
The pleasure those talents took in making the movies,
they passed on to me and to others,
and it's a living thing.
["It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" by Boyz II Men playing]
♪ It's so hard ♪
♪ To say goodbye to yesterday ♪
[song ends]
[shoes scrape on ground]
[sniffles, breathes deeply]
For the dudes who ain't here, huh?
In addition to being a repository of hope, they were empirical proof
that we were here, that we exist,
that we create culture,
that our community is a viable community,
is an important community,
that we have voices, and that we will be heard.
-[popping] -[men cheering]
[Mitchell] A final note,
one person symbolized all the ups and downs of the period.
Going from number one at the box office to irrelevance
to being one of the last left standing.
Sidney Poitier,
who shifted his trajectory but didn't slow a step.
He trusted his compact with Black audiences would remain intact.
-[shot booms] -[yelps]
[Mitchell] From 1968 through '78, he directed and starred in five films…
I put my faith in the good book.
…all of which centered on characters pretending to be something they're not.
Damn, man, we trusted you! I mean, why us?!
Why not you, brother?
[Mitchell] I once asked him about this
one of the handful of times I spoke to him,
all ending with him turning me down for an interview.
When I mentioned that his five directing efforts
were all about imposture…
Open your eyes.
…he laughed and said,
"Young man, I already have a therapist. I don't need another one."
You are capable of great feats of strength and courage.
Strength and courage.
You can beat any fighter in the world. You will win the championship.
[gasps]
-I will? -Yes!
[Mitchell] But being Black in America is often about remembering
that what you think you are isn't what other people see
and figuring out the distance between those two perceptions.
I think it's something my grandmother would have agreed with.
[pleasant music playing]