Episode 1390 - Elvis Mitchell
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Clearly, this is not the studio, but I am in a room, a hotel room.
Marc:I went ahead and threw for the nice room because I'm here tonight in New York City to tape my special.
Marc:Now,
Marc:Those of you who've been kind of hanging out with me during this process of building towards this know that I'm riding a fine line, that there seems to be a way I prepare for this stuff that I'm always surprised that it happens.
Marc:There's no healthy way for me to get ready for an event like this.
Marc:And I've done many specials.
Marc:There's a lot of things that go through my head.
Marc:There's a lot of things that that I'm doing to try to maintain some sort of, you know, groundedness.
Marc:But none of them are great, but none of them are terrible.
Marc:You know, I'm a relatively healthy person in terms of physically.
Marc:But for the past month or so, as many of you know, who have been listening, I've been unable to eat well.
Marc:Sorry, New York City.
Marc:And I'm on the 18th floor, yet it still comes up through the windows.
Marc:You probably can't hear it.
Marc:But, you know, I've been choking down these cigars to get that nicotine thing.
Marc:It's I'm recording this at 1030 in the morning and I've already drank three large cups of coffee and smoked a medium sized cigar and my brain is on fire.
Marc:But this is old school me.
Marc:You know, it's just the way back when I did radio with Brendan and the fellas, I used to just sit there and drink, you know, literally a quart of Dunkin Donuts coffee and eat a bag of M&Ms and just get lit.
Marc:But now I just seem to be...
Marc:And focusing, trying to focus and stay with the process of making this special as good as I can make it.
Marc:I should tell you before I continue rambling that Elvis Mitchell is on the show today.
Marc:I've kind of known Elvis for years.
Marc:He's a writer, a professor, a film critic and the host of the radio show and podcast The Treatment.
Marc:But we've certainly hung around in the same places before.
Marc:We've talked to each other for years.
Marc:I've known this guy.
Marc:And now he's got to film out.
Marc:He's a documentary filmmaker now.
Marc:And he just made the movie Is That Black Enough For You?
Marc:about black cinema from the 70s.
Marc:And it's great.
Marc:It's a great movie.
Marc:And I have to confess my ignorance because
Marc:Now, look, I sometimes say things that I don't think through and that may seem generalizing or off-putting or uninformed because I kind of fly with the streaming consciousness.
Marc:But I am certainly willing to learn and adjust and reflect on
Marc:on my my ignorance or my mistakes in terms of, you know, how and what I say.
Marc:I mean, I've been doing this a long time.
Marc:I mean, doesn't mean I'll stop saying things, but I will think about it.
Marc:And if I am wrong or incorrect, I can admit it and I can own it for sure.
Marc:But this situation with black cinema, I didn't know the history.
Marc:And for some reason, in my mind, a lot of the blaxploitation movies, I never saw them because I thought they were campy somehow.
Marc:I thought that people watched them, some of them anyways.
Marc:I've seen some Dolomite movies.
Marc:I've seen Shaft.
Marc:I've seen some movies.
Marc:But I thought, by and large, that a lot of them were sort of campy.
Marc:But I was educated, man.
Marc:I was schooled.
Marc:By Elvis's movie.
Marc:And it was enlightening and exciting to watch the film and make note of the films that he talks about, which are in the and there must be over 100.
Marc:He goes really through the entire history of black cinema and black independent cinema, which goes back to the silent era.
Marc:But I watched Coffee for the first time with with Pam Greer for the first time a few weeks ago.
Marc:And on some level, as a guy who likes film, that seems to be, you know, almost a criminal oversight.
Marc:I wouldn't say criminal, but ignorant.
Marc:And it just got me engaged with this history that I didn't know about.
Marc:And along with.
Marc:A few weeks ago when I talked to Henry Louis Gates about the black community building from the early 1900s or post-Reconstruction, there's just so much I don't know and I'm excited to learn.
Marc:And this movie was spectacular.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I was very excited to talk to Elvis about these movies as a guy who should know.
Marc:And I believe that I should know as somebody who pays attention to movies about this chunk of film history.
Marc:And because of his documentary, I now know it.
Marc:But I've started watching a lot of the films and coffee.
Marc:as a fan of 70s films, was raw and sort of unlike any movie I've ever seen in its depiction of drug use from the era and just power dynamics within the criminal world to a certain degree.
Marc:And also the story of a female heroine, which was totally compelling.
Marc:But Elvis really goes into a lot about black history in film and also about the appropriation of it, obviously, not unlike almost every art form.
Marc:uh that the white cinema took from it so i highly recommend it and and i will talk to him in a few minutes but i'm excited about it but i don't know if anything is going to be as exciting as last night i went to a screening of to leslie we did a q a me and andrea riceborough michael morris and uh brooke shields was in the audience brooke shields was in the audience and i could not even take it
Marc:Look, Brooke Shields is Brooke Shields.
Marc:Everybody in the world knows Brooke Shields.
Marc:I feel like I grew up with Brooke Shields.
Marc:Now, you know from this podcast that I have a certain familiarity with people based on their public-facing beings.
Marc:And sometimes there's no boundary there.
Marc:I approach them, like some of you approach me, with complete sense of familiarity.
Marc:And Deborah Winger was there, another person who is one of my Instagram ladies, but I've never met her.
Marc:And I didn't recognize her at first.
Marc:And it was sort of awkward when I finally realized she didn't know this.
Marc:But when I finally realized, I'm like, oh my God, it's Deborah Winger.
Marc:There was a moment there.
Marc:I was like, who's this amazing woman talking to me?
Marc:And then I just sort of like, it took me a second to realize she was there with her son.
Marc:So I got to meet her and talk to her, which was great.
Marc:But I saw Brooke Shields.
Marc:And as everyone was walking out to go to this after party thing, I just said,
Marc:How are you, Brooke Shields?
Marc:And she says, I'm good.
Marc:Good job.
Marc:And she was walking out.
Marc:But she went to the thing, and I got to meet her and talk to her.
Marc:And I got to say, it was a life highlight.
Marc:I don't even, I can't explain it.
Marc:But I feel like I grew up with Brooke Shields.
Marc:We're roughly the same age.
Marc:And I remember her from the beginning of her Brooke Shields-ness.
Marc:And it was just really, she's really sweet and funny.
Marc:And it was fun to meet her.
Marc:I can't really explain it.
Marc:But I don't know that anything's going to top me meeting Brooke Shields.
Marc:And I don't even know why that is.
Marc:But it is.
Marc:So after tonight, my special will be taped and my tour will be done.
Marc:That's more than a year of being on the road hammering this set.
Marc:It's a long time.
Marc:And something I've been wondering about for a while is what exactly I can do for fun after this.
Marc:Do I even know how to have fun?
Marc:This is a big question in my life.
Marc:And
Marc:And I don't know, but I now I have some time on my hands and I should be able to find this out.
Marc:And I've been hopefully be able to discover the fun.
Marc:I've been talking about this with my producer, Brendan.
Marc:In fact, we are thinking about making a separate series about it.
Marc:Me trying to have fun.
Marc:We thought of maybe doing it with Marvel movies or some other kind of pop culture distraction, but nothing was really sticking with me.
Marc:So we got on the mics last week and talked about it again because Brendan had an idea.
Guest:This got me thinking about something.
Guest:I'll tell you exactly where I was thinking about it.
Guest:In fact, I'll show you where I was thinking about it.
Guest:Do you have your phone with you?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I just texted you something.
Guest:See if it comes through.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So that's a video from a televised pay-per-view from two Saturdays ago.
Guest:And if you play it, you'll see a guy standing next to a professional wrestler, like cheering out of his mind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A guy with a blue mask and glasses.
Guest:That's you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When was this?
Guest:Like two weeks ago.
Guest:Who is that guy?
Guest:Yeah, who is that?
Guest:Who is who?
Guest:The guy cheering?
Guest:That was me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The guy I was cheering for was the champion of AEW, which is all elite wrestling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went to it in New Jersey with our friend Chris Lopresto, who used to work on Morning Sedition with us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a sold out show at a hockey arena, about 12,000 people.
Guest:And I was standing there going like, this is just amazing.
Guest:I used to go to this stuff as a little kid.
Guest:I've had time in my life where I've totally ignored it.
Guest:But the sense memory was there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:to immediately get locked back into it and i really have with especially with this promotion because the the things that they're doing with it are very recognizable to me as exactly why i started enjoying it in the first place well over the years you know because we've worked together for so long you know i've i've had to learn from wrestlers because you your interest in wrestlers has brought a lot of wrestlers around i mean i've interviewed several big wrestlers
Guest:And I think people wonder, you probably even wondered it for a time, like, well, it's stupid if you know it's fake.
Guest:What's the point then?
Guest:Why do you care about it?
Guest:And, you know, it's very easy to answer that for me, especially now having, you know, lived most of my life dealing with entertainment is...
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:There's nothing about it that I'm even worried.
Guest:I'm not even concerning myself with artifice.
Guest:In fact, it's very real from the sense that does the guy or woman who's playing the role and trying to get something across through this tremendously athletic, difficult performance, do they deliver it?
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's this amazing guy right now that's at the top of that promotion, AEW.
Guest:His name is MJF.
Guest:He's a
Guest:It stands for Maxwell Jacob Friedman.
Guest:And his gimmick is just like, he's this Jewish kid from Long Island who thinks he's better than you.
Guest:That's even his catchphrase.
Guest:I'm better than you, and I know it.
Guest:And I'm better than you, and you know it.
Guest:And he did this whole bit that he was angry with the promotion, because they weren't taking him seriously enough, and he left.
Guest:And they played it off this way.
Guest:They let him leave for three months.
Guest:And he was gone.
Guest:He was off TV.
Guest:Then he comes back, and he's going to challenge for the title.
Guest:Because now he's back, and he's got the rights to challenge for the title.
Guest:And he goes to a guy who's managing the champion.
Guest:And he's like, I'm doing this because of you.
Guest:Because you used to work for WWE.
Guest:And you did not hire me.
Guest:And in fact, you sent me these emails encouraging me to keep sending you tapes and to keep in touch and try to get a job with you.
Guest:And then sent me this email.
Guest:And he reads this email in the ring to this guy saying, you're not right for us.
Guest:Please stop sending us emails.
Guest:And WWE hires world-class athletes.
Guest:Maybe someday you'll be one.
Guest:You're not one.
Guest:And he's like, that email made me want to kill myself.
Guest:And every day I've lived my life thinking I'm going to stick it to you, right?
Guest:And this guy is supposed to be the heel, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the manager, he says to him, look, I...
Guest:I'm glad you feel that way.
Guest:Like, frankly, when I send an email like that to you or anybody else, I'm trying to light a fire under you.
Guest:He's like, I used to work on the carnival circuit.
Guest:I would get my face beat in every night by these guys when I was 17.
Guest:And I'd be crying in my bed, bleeding.
Guest:Like, if you're worried about an email, you've had an easy life.
Guest:And he's like, stop taking shortcuts.
Guest:Stop doing all these things.
Guest:You come out, you cheat.
Guest:You claim you're better than people and that.
Guest:Just try to do it, earn it, right?
Guest:And so they set this up.
Guest:He finally says, I'm going to fight.
Guest:I'm going to do it all.
Guest:I'm going to throw away the things I used to cheat.
Guest:I'm not going to hit people with foreign objects and that.
Guest:I'm going to do it for real.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm going to this show.
Guest:This was the show that Chris and I went to.
Guest:And Chris and I are both like, well, he's got to cheat to win, right?
Guest:And in fact, what would be the best thing is if he is going to cheat
Guest:and then doesn't.
Guest:And the manager realizes he did the right thing.
Guest:And so the manager turns on his own guy and cheats for him, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That would be the best story that the manager finally sees in him what he wanted to see in him.
Guest:Well, sure enough, that is exactly what happened.
Guest:The guy gets down to the ring, he's gonna hit him with, he has a giant ring, he's gonna put the ring on the finger, the manager says, like, pointing at him, you're not gonna do that, he takes the ring off, he throws it away, but now the guy, the champion, puts him in the sleeper hold, and he's fucked, right?
Guest:The ref is knocked down, and the manager says, go wake up the ref.
Guest:You've got to wake him up so that he can see you've got this guy in a sleeper hold.
Guest:As he turns to go get the ref, the manager slips him a pair of brass knucks to MJF, who gets up, uses him.
Guest:He becomes the champion.
Guest:I was so thrilled that the story played out like that.
Guest:It was not that I wanted it to be real.
Guest:It was that I wanted them to really tell the story that made the most emotional sense, that could go on the most ups and downs.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's a script thing.
Guest:Yes, but here's the other thing.
Guest:When you really look into what it is, they're not scripting it from the perspective of they're writing it down on a piece of paper, and here's you guys' roles and what you're supposed to do.
Guest:At least that's not what these guys are.
Guest:WWE does that to an extent.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:This is all improv, right?
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:These guys sit and they talk about, much like you and I did when we had Mick Foley on, here's what's going to happen.
Guest:Ultimately, we're trying to get to here.
Guest:It's up to you to perform your part so we can get there, right?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Nobody said to you, Mark, here's everything you have to say.
Marc:Yeah, I've done movies like that.
Guest:Exactly, right.
Guest:It's very, very close to a long-form improv.
Guest:All of this is to say, this is leading up to the fact that...
Guest:You and I are going to go enjoy this the way I just did, live and in person, out in Los Angeles on January 11th.
Guest:They're going to be out there at the LA Forum.
Guest:You're flying out?
Guest:And I have tickets for us.
Guest:Yes, I'm flying out.
Marc:And we're going to go to AEW wrestling.
Marc:I'm in.
Marc:I'm ready.
Marc:I mean, I got choked up.
Marc:You telling me the story about the kid.
Guest:Well, you know, this will be a good test, too, to see, like, what the type of character that someone does as a wrestler, particularly not a cartoonish wrestler.
Guest:Like, all these wrestlers in this AEW are just generally people, and they're not playing a cartoon.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I'm going to be interested to see what you wind up latching on to.
Marc:Exciting.
Marc:Good plan.
Marc:We got a fun field trip coming up.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:That's a tease of a longer episode we just put up for Full Marin subscribers where we listen to an old wrestling angle we did on the radio with pro wrestler Mick Foley.
Marc:But it's also a tease of this wrestling field trip Brendan and I are going to do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And we're going to document all of it with some clips here on the show and full episodes on WTF+.
Marc:So if you wanna subscribe to that, go to the link in the episode description or click on WTF Plus over at WTFPod.com.
Marc:I'm gonna be a wrestling guy.
Marc:Well, I'm gonna go to the wrestling thing.
Marc:I'm gonna see if it clicks.
Marc:Is it ever too late to lock in with the excitement and drama
Marc:and energy of professional wrestling.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:We will find out.
Marc:I am sort of, I would be amazed and somewhat disturbed, but excited to become like an all-in wrestling fan at 59 years old.
Marc:It's possible.
Marc:Brendan has liked wrestling, loved wrestling since he was a kid.
Marc:So I'm definitely going with the right guy.
Marc:so look elvis mitchell is here uh his documentary is that black enough for you is now streaming on netflix and uh i i was thrilled and uh grateful in in a way to watch it and and be you know educated through this curated experience that elvis put together and we talk about it now
Marc:I feel like I need some background because I watched the doc twice.
Marc:You watched it twice?
Marc:Yeah, it's a lot in there, dude.
Marc:It should have been two or three episodes.
Marc:You know that.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Didn't you?
Guest:The Fincher said when we went to talk, he goes, no, this has to be five or six hours because you can't get this in two hours.
Marc:It's true.
Marc:I do, man.
Marc:It was like taking a, you know, it was like almost like a whole semester.
Marc:Good.
Marc:I wanted to be compared to education.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Oh, it was like taking a class.
Marc:It was like Harold Ramis.
Marc:No, but I mean, you are educating.
Marc:I mean, that's, you know, the thing is, I'm, you know, if anybody's your audience, I am.
Marc:I'm a relatively smart guy that didn't know half that shit or three quarters of it even.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:That's shocking to me.
Marc:Is it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I don't... You know, I'm not a total film nerd.
Guest:I would never accuse you of that, but you're a student of popular culture.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:But, like, it was just sort of this... Not unlike, I guess, many primarily white people, it was sort of a blind spot.
Marc:You know, I would have had to go back, and obviously I went back at some point and kind of re-watched the 70s anti-hero movies, which, you know, you sort of use in this movie to make an example, using your doc to make an example of how the...
Marc:Black filmmakers handled that and what they did with that and how they shifted that dialogue around the antihero.
Marc:But no one was leading me that way.
Guest:But that's the point of the doc, because nobody was leading you that way.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:But that's what I'm saying.
Marc:But to my...
Marc:like my fault in not knowing it is that I didn't take it upon myself to go watch all those movies.
Marc:Because again, I didn't really have guidance.
Marc:And I think that if anything, like I was wondering if you had a book.
Marc:Like I asked the publicist, I said, can you give me a list of every movie that's in this doc?
Marc:165 movies.
Marc:Well, that's what I got.
Marc:They said it's 165.
Marc:Here's 12th.
Marc:But how are you going to do that?
Marc:I mean, people always ask me that shit.
Marc:You should have some sort of primer that goes with it.
Guest:Well, what we have is the ability to pause and write stuff down now.
Guest:It used to be, if you saw this, the kind of thing you rented or whatever.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I almost did that.
Guest:Yeah, so now I'm going to have to... I have no issue with people pause and write things down.
Guest:I mean, I wish you'd had a chance to see it theatrically, just because... Oh, that stuff looks so good.
Guest:But it's just, this stuff was made for movies, and to see that shot of Billy Dee Williams leaning into the frame, you can start, before his face turns on.
Guest:And Lady Sings the Blues?
Guest:Yes, you can see his manicure just light up.
Marc:He's like Marlene Dietrich.
Marc:Right, yeah, and he was so excited about that.
Marc:You talked to him.
Marc:It was good to see him.
Marc:I didn't know he was still alive.
Marc:Oh, God, and the greatest guy and completely self-effacing.
Marc:Seems like a great guy.
Guest:I mean, giggling 50 years later like he's still 15 years old.
Marc:Yeah, it was hilarious.
Marc:And I just saw Glenn Termin in that Del Toro sort of series.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The horror anthology.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Still working a lot.
Guest:Still working.
Guest:But again, another great guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's so much you got left out.
Guest:We could have talked about the fact that he was one of the three people up for the role.
Marc:of of han solo yeah star wars oh really well that's the point that's the thing i'm saying is that there was so much in there i had i had to watch it twice i i watched it twice because i missed things like there there were certain departures within the narrative of the doc that could have been their own half hour 45 minutes
Marc:You know, look, what are you thinking?
Marc:Well, I mean, well, just more of the music and the power of soundtracks and also just recording that.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:OK.
Marc:And just and also the, you know, the the two kind of like because it seems that you're making you're contextualizing something, but you're also making an argument in this movie in a way.
Marc:Oh, completely amazing.
Guest:That's the point is to make an argument just because so much of this, and again, you as well as anybody, a really smart consumer of pop culture know that there becomes this kind of binary way that black culture is viewed.
Guest:It's either this or that.
Guest:It's black exploitation or not.
Guest:No, it's more than that.
Guest:And so what I wanted to do is, first of all,
Guest:to do this thing that you never see with black movies where you see a compendium like for the Oscars, the greatest clips of all time.
Guest:There's a bunch of clips like Godfather, whatever.
Guest:And then there's always, they call me Mr. Tips.
Guest:It's always the same black clip.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:The one black clip.
Guest:It's like as if there's nothing else.
Guest:And I thought...
Guest:If nothing else, I want to make a movie that could be its own compendium of the greatest clips of all times that were never included.
Guest:Just seeing, again, Billy Dee Williams lean into the frame, and he's actually giggling because he can't believe himself.
Guest:He can't even stay in character.
Marc:That he's getting that kind of attention.
Marc:He's so tickled.
Marc:But how long did it take you, like, what I was going to do is, like, fill in some backstory in terms of, I mean, you've been a movie critic for a long time.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But this is, where'd you start?
Marc:The New York Times?
Marc:Golly, no, I started, gee, where'd I start?
Marc:At the L.A.
Marc:Weekly.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:But where'd you get your education around film?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Watching movies.
Marc:Just watching movies.
Marc:I mean, did you study film or anything?
Guest:No, that's for SAP, studying film.
Guest:Except for the people that take your classes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Poor kids, dear God in heaven.
Guest:But it's a... No, I got my degree in English literature.
Guest:Right, of course.
Guest:Don't you already speak English?
Guest:Yeah, what are you going to do with that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I qualified to drive the Uber that brought me here.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I should have done that.
Guest:We've been here on time.
Guest:But I always watched movies, and as we get into the documentary, had this weird kind of foundation laid by my grandmother, who would say stuff like, the Andy Griffith show was on.
Guest:There are no black people in that show.
Guest:I love that quote.
Guest:Where do you think you are?
Guest:There are no black people in that show.
Guest:Where do you think they are?
Guest:And I'm like, I'm six.
Guest:What are you doing to me?
Guest:But it's also this thing, too, because also we're roughly the same issue.
Guest:Remember that time when if you saw a white person and a black person in something, it was adult entertainment?
Guest:They'd just be talking.
Guest:Yeah, I don't know if I ever registered that, but I guess that's true.
Guest:If you're a black person, you kind of go, whoa.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This movie has TV members as a kid.
Guest:My Sweet Charlie with Al Freeman-Jumman and Patty Duke.
Guest:She was pregnant.
Guest:He was some draft dodger who was trying to help her out.
Guest:There's nothing remotely sexual between them.
Guest:Because she's pregnant and he's there, it's adult entertainment.
Guest:These things always struck me as being completely insane or this double standard where...
Guest:In movies, you know, during the Hays Code era, obviously, when there's a married couple, they would be twin beds.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:As a kid, I watched this and think, wow, white people are crazy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because you never saw married black people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Therefore, you thought white people lived different than we did.
Marc:Well, I think you touched on so much stuff in, you know, sometimes in passing, you know, like that quote from your grandmother is great, but also the idea that, you know, the...
Marc:The group of Jewish immigrants that started the motion pictures, you know, that Neil Gabler sort of argument of creating a facsimile or an idealized America through the films that they could pass in or that they could, you know, that they could manufacture a place where they could live.
Guest:There's a fascinating thing about this, Mark.
Guest:So much of this is built on this weird self-hatred or self-abnegation.
Guest:This idea that these people creating myths.
Guest:And there's a myth in American movies that really doesn't exist in any other place where they're about heroism and about standing up and taking this kind of stand.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, we'll have that clip in the movie, this weird thing, this freesale in my head.
Guest:Which clip?
Guest:Watching The Shawshank Redemption.
Marc:Oh, yeah, right, right.
Guest:Watching Rita Hayworth.
Guest:Watching Rita Hayworth.
Guest:And the part wasn't written for a black person.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In fact, everybody in Hollywood wanted that part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Charlie Sheen, everybody who was hot wanted that role.
Guest:When Charlie Sheen was hot, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:That could be its own separate documentary.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But Morgan Freeman gets it, and he says, I love when she does that shit with her hair.
Guest:You kind of go...
Guest:Wow, that's about black men having been indoctrinated to see straight hair like this.
Guest:You also think, too, that Rita Hayworth was a Latina who had basically her skin bleached and had her hair dyed.
Guest:I mean, so there's so many different levels of reality being denied that they're touched on.
Marc:And you explore that pretty thoroughly in terms of people doing all types of brownface.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, in in Hollywood that there's an idea in the movie that you kind of you kind of blow through, which is that the entitlement of of white culture thinking they could do it better.
Marc:Like in that I'd never heard it framed like that.
Marc:I mean, I always assumed that it was an idea of sort of just what we do.
Marc:But I didn't think of, you know, the the superiority thing, you know, that we can mimic it.
Marc:Oh, sure.
Guest:I mean, it's just... I was close to Pauline Cahill, who was a film critic in The New Yorker.
Guest:And every once in a while, we have this conversation about Olivier and Othello.
Guest:And one of her intimations was that he could do it better than a black actor.
Guest:I don't think that's true.
Guest:I'm pretty sure he can't be a black person better than a black person.
Guest:I'm not going to argue with you that he's talented.
Guest:So that becomes this kind of generational thing, too, which is why I wanted to include both Olivier and Orson Welles doing that.
Marc:Doing Othello.
Marc:But don't you, like, isn't there any sort of pass given for tradition and Shakespearean theater?
Marc:That's not the question.
Guest:I mean, the question is, there is this kind of entitlement that comes in this.
Guest:And then there's also this kind of regard for that, too.
Guest:Well, you know, he's doing Othello.
Guest:And, of course, he can bring something to it.
Guest:The fact is, for all that kind of tradition, it also became this kind of de facto segregation where black actors weren't allowed to do it.
Marc:So that's the other side of the coin.
Marc:Well, that's the thread through the entire thing that initially in film, blacks were depicted as clowns or slaves.
Marc:In blackface.
Marc:Even blacks playing those.
Guest:And then that leads us to Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse wearing those gloves, which clearly come from blackface.
Marc:From minstrelsy.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:But what was interesting and telling was that that lasted forever.
Marc:For decades and decades, right?
Marc:But the counter story that I didn't know about was the history of black cinema, even starting in the silence.
Marc:I just talked to Henry Louis Gates about his documentary, about the rise of black cities, black towns, black banks, black fraternal orders that were sort of put together as a sort of reflection of white culture in order to have their own communities, right?
Marc:Because we were segregated from other communities.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:What was interesting was that you were able to find and really kind of put into context these early independent black filmmakers who were directors during the silence.
Guest:Not just directors, but directors, producers, writers, actors, and had to book the theaters.
Guest:I mean, in effect, it's a black film version of the Negro Leagues where you have to do all this work that certainly no white director ever had to do.
Marc:Well, I think that my point was that was probably in just collusion with...
Marc:if that's the word, with the sort of burgeoning black business world and the burgeoning black communities where they were like, well, why can't we have this business too?
Guest:But also there's this thing where black people want to see movies.
Guest:It's as simple as that.
Guest:In addition to creating this parallel universe,
Guest:where you have this thriving black middle class that grows in Chicago that creates Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine because you're never going to get into Time or Newsweek.
Guest:And then because of Ebony and Jet, there's the exposure of the Emmett Till picture because the white press isn't going to cover that.
Marc:That was powerful in the doc.
Marc:You really packed it in, that doc, because those moments of that really landing something for black people was a moment I didn't really know about.
Guest:I think in some weird way, it's like I've been waiting my entire life to do this.
Guest:Yeah, it seems like it.
Guest:Like back and forth, you mentioned Skip Gates.
Guest:And when I met him, I did the Alain Locke lectures at Harvard about 20 years ago now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in a way, the lectures I gave, a lot of this material is in those lectures.
Guest:Just thinking about that, because there's often so much sort of rage in characterization.
Guest:If you see, step and fetch it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You can feel the anger in a performance that's directed into this other kind of physicality that becomes sort of subtext.
Guest:And what I wanted to do was to make a film, or a project rather, about all those displaced emotions,
Guest:What happens to them finally?
Guest:So then they get to explode in this decade from 68 to 78.
Guest:What was that quote about what happens to those emotions?
Guest:It was from Ralph Ellison?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:The Dream Deferved.
Guest:That's from Raising the Sun.
Guest:Oh, Raising the Sun.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's the play.
Guest:It's the line that leads to Raising the Sun from the poem.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What happens to the Dream Deferved?
Guest:But it's...
Guest:It led to raising the son, but it also led to these, I mean, you think about, I mean, as a kid, I remember seeing, in fact, we just had a screening at AFI Fest, and my sisters were there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they remember, oh, yeah, you remember what our boyfriends were saying to you about Night of the Living Dead?
Guest:I went, vividly.
Marc:You see, that's another context that I didn't know about, you know, that you put it into this historical frame.
Marc:But, you know, kind of moving, like, let me try to keep it in some sort of, you know, timeline.
Marc:Because you sort of do this by putting into historical context, you know, you kind of take it up through a quick introduction of all the movies of how black, the word black and black actors and...
Marc:performers were represented, that everything shifted for you in the 60s.
Marc:But all that leading up to it was a very sort of quick indictment and the groundwork for really how Hollywood sees black people.
Marc:And you have these actors like Fishburne and- Sam Jackson?
Marc:Yeah, Sam Jackson.
Marc:You're talking about their experiences about interacting with movies and having no real black role models, but then having to, as you said, kind of adapt to the possibility that movies were for everybody and that they wanted to still be in the movies, but it was erased for them, that they never had representation.
Guest:Oh, God, it's this thing that I was really very careful about doing this.
Guest:If you notice, a number of people, Sam Jackson and Fishburne and Charles Burnett and Suzanne DePass, talk about, I wish I had a black cowboy.
Guest:I wanted a black Western.
Guest:Now, it's not that there weren't black Westerns, but because you're in the era where Michelle was making films, you have a Western that would also be a murder mystery and a screwball comedy.
Guest:Those were the silence, right?
Guest:No, no, these were soundies.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But all these things would be crammed into one venue or one film because that's what you did.
Guest:You thought, I may never get a chance to make another movie.
Guest:I'm going to pack in as much as I can.
Guest:Kind of what I did with this, actually.
Guest:But what you never had was that sort of thing.
Guest:Like all these people, Sam Jackson, Fish I know.
Guest:A lot of people, like me, you grew up in the South or you had relatives in the South.
Guest:So you saw working farms.
Guest:My grandmother had a working farm, which is to say you saw a black person on a horse.
Guest:And seeing a black person on a horse, what does that tell you?
Guest:At the very least, they can control the direction that they want to go in.
Guest:They may be stopped, but they have that control.
Guest:So just being denied that kind of image in a movie, what does that say to you?
Guest:What does that do to you?
Guest:Black people in Westerns are basically standing on the porch wearing a bow tie, passing out drinks, or waiting to be sent home from the fields instead of being on a horse.
Guest:That gives agency.
Guest:That gives power.
Guest:And that takes it to me, and I mentioned this a couple times before, but when I heard Paul Thomas Anderson talking about Buckswope,
Guest:In Boogie Nights, he said, I thought it would be kind of funny and absurd to have a black cowboy.
Guest:I thought, why is that absurd?
Guest:And this is somebody who's grown up in movies and knows movies, but that's the message even he got from the movies, that the idea of a black cowboy is absurd.
Guest:And even that word is kind of basically an epithet.
Guest:I mean, nobody was called a cowboy as a compliment.
Guest:It was something that we used for black ranch hands.
Marc:And also, as time has gone on, there was an entire rodeo.
Marc:There's a clip in the movie from Black Rodeo.
Guest:This movie from 1972.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And there were many black cowboys.
Marc:Oh my God, of course there were.
Marc:But we never saw them in the movies.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Because the mythology of the cowboy in the movies was something different.
Marc:than the real experience.
Guest:But also, again, it connotes power and agency.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:It is the original kind of movie myth, right?
Guest:Except if you take that away from black people who are just as responsible for this creation as anything else.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You take that away from them, you're saying...
Guest:The message is, the subliminal message is that black people don't belong doing that kind of thing.
Guest:It would be absurd to have a black person on a horse.
Guest:That's what movies were telling us until the 60s.
Guest:Right.
Marc:That it was an insane idea, a black person on a horse.
Marc:It's a long time.
Marc:And it's still a conversation, and it's still not right.
Marc:It's not correct.
Marc:Representation is not correct yet.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:And I tried to figure it out.
Guest:I'm glad we're talking about this in this way.
Guest:Because I tried to figure out the way to phrase that.
Guest:Because so often when the word representation comes up, it becomes this kind of buzz where the people kind of fling away.
Guest:Oh, it makes people uncomfortable.
Guest:Oh, how am I going to be judged?
Guest:So how do I say this in a way?
Guest:So I had two tracks.
Guest:One was that idea of bringing up the Western phrase.
Guest:So you could be playing it somehow.
Guest:Well, there weren't many black cowboys.
Guest:Why weren't there that?
Guest:So it's a question you get to answer yourself rather than have me pose it for you.
Guest:But the other way to offer that question up was for me to say, what's the best way for me to summarize what representation was?
Guest:If you're a black person, you're wearing a bow tie, you're there to deliver something.
Guest:You're not there to go dance with Ginger Rogers, or maybe you get to lead the band in a short, or you get to dance and leave, but you don't get to, again,
Guest:I grew up loving screwball comedies.
Guest:There's probably no bigger admirer of Preston Sturgis than me.
Guest:He not only made these comedies about that sort of madcap life, but also they were judgments about class and wealth because he bounced back and forth between being poor and being a creature of society.
Guest:And so for his movies to basically reduce
Guest:As soon as you saw a black person in Preston Sturges movie, there was that ridiculous dialect that no black person actually spoke.
Guest:I have family from the South.
Guest:Nobody talked like that.
Marc:Well, I think what's sad about the idea and the reality of truly institutionalized racism is that, you know, because it must make you ask, like, of this guy that you respected, is he fundamentally a racist person?
Marc:Was that just what people did?
Right.
Guest:Certainly, it's this thing that's both, isn't it?
Guest:It's people, if you don't have the, I don't know, the wherewithal to bucket, then what happens to you?
Guest:Who are you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and it's worse than institutionalized.
Guest:It just becomes inertia.
Guest:It's easier not to try to move it away.
Guest:But isn't all of that inertia?
Guest:I mean, I'm just trying to come up with other trigger words, but it's certainly that.
Guest:And what starts to happen, and I was starting to talk about this, my grandmother is that she would say, in effect, what critical thinkers say.
Marc:What is not there?
Marc:Some of the things that resonate with me around certainly the line about tuxedos that you had, then you're able to sort of answer that with Ivan Dixon's movie.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So in Ivan Dixon, I'm looking at him like, how do I know him?
Marc:I only know him from Hogan's Heroes.
Marc:And he made this movie.
Marc:What's it called?
Marc:Spook who sat by the door.
Marc:That caused such, what's the word I want?
Marc:Controversy.
Marc:An impact that it was seen as almost a criminal by the FBI, right?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I met him.
Guest:One of the thrills of my life was I got to meet him.
Guest:Because here's the great thing about this story, right?
Guest:I showed that clip from that movie, Nothing But a Man, which he did before Hogan's Heroes.
Guest:from 1964.
Guest:It's Abby Lincoln and Ivan Dixon, like movie stars.
Marc:Yeah, that was great.
Marc:What's her name, that woman?
Marc:Abby Lincoln.
Guest:Great.
Guest:She was a jazz singer and an actor.
Guest:Beautiful, beautiful clip.
Guest:But also two people who look in that clip like movie stars.
Guest:Should be, yeah.
Guest:And by the way, a movie from 1964 with an all-Motown soundtrack in it.
Guest:You could make that movie today.
Guest:But anyway, so he makes that movie.
Guest:All this Ivan Dixon stuff, for me, that sort of came to a hit when I asked him.
Guest:I said, so...
Guest:I noticed as a kid watching Hogan's Heroes that the editor of Hogan's Heroes was Michael Kahn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who later went on to edit all of Steven Spielberg's movies.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:For the last 40 years, he's been Spielberg's editor.
Marc:No kidding.
Guest:His first two movie jobs, or among his first two movie jobs, are Trouble Man and The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Ivan would tell me that we would sit
Guest:We'd be invited Al Reddy, who was the creator of Hogan's Heroes and later produced The Godfather.
Guest:I had him here.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:And a great storyteller.
Guest:He would have these Academy screenings at his house.
Guest:So Ivan Dixon and Michael Kahn was sitting in the back row and I would go, I can't do this anymore.
Guest:This is making me ill.
Guest:I know I have to support my family, but I can't play this guy who sits by the radio in the basement and never leaves the prison camp.
Guest:And Michael goes, listen, when you direct your movie, you let me know and I'll edit it for you.
Guest:So that's how this bond is forged.
Guest:So this guy who goes on to do, basically to be part of Steven Spielberg's aesthetic, got to start working with Ivan Dixon.
Guest:Because everything shifted in what, 68, you think?
Guest:For me, that's the point, just because it becomes, I didn't want to do one of these things that's a hundred years of black film, because I think it's a fool's errand.
Marc:I thought it was interesting that you stopped it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You said this is when it ended.
Guest:It does kind of end there because when the whiz fails.
Guest:Yeah, but that's later.
Guest:But so 68.
Guest:But 78 is when it ends.
Guest:Yeah, for me.
Guest:But 68 is just this point where after Night of the Living Dead, you sort of can't deny it anymore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's a black action.
Marc:Well, that's like, you know, I didn't ever read it like that because I didn't read the papers.
Marc:I'm not in the black community.
Marc:I didn't read the criticism of it that, you know, post Watts and post riots that, you know, the way that the Night of the Living Dead was received.
Marc:by the black community was twofold, right?
Marc:But also that Romero, whether he knew it or not, was really making a profound social statement.
Marc:Do you think that he was conscious of all that?
Guest:I think he was trying to solve a problem.
Guest:Then he realized what he had because the actor just didn't show up and he had to do something.
Guest:And Dwayne Jones just stepped in.
Guest:It wasn't cast as a black guy.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:It wasn't written because when you watch the movie, you realize his race is never mentioned.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ever.
Guest:I know.
Guest:You've noticed that.
Guest:What was your response to it when you saw it as a kid?
Guest:What do you remember about it?
Marc:I remember noticing that.
Marc:that this is just a guy, and he's the only black guy in it, and he's the hero of this thing, but you don't have no backstory, and no one ever mentions it.
Marc:And there was, just by nature of historic training, it was awkward.
Marc:Like you felt the white woman, who's hysterical, and she's having to put her trust in this guy who's being decent.
Marc:It kind of goes against all the tropes, right?
Guest:It's a vast thing.
Guest:It's almost this joke about, what would Sidney Poitier do if he was surrounded by zombies?
Guest:This kind of question, you thought, well, what would... He tried to charm them first.
Guest:Maybe, but, you know, he knows.
Guest:I mean, because he's always the most able person in any situation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And lose the feel.
Guest:He fixes everything.
Guest:It's like, what can't this guy do?
Guest:Oh...
Guest:Touch one of these women.
Guest:That's what he can't do.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:But in Night of the Living Dead, he's not treated like any kind of specialty case.
Guest:He's the most efficient person.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:He's kind of like pissed off.
Guest:They used to do everything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because he realizes that there's so much kind of ineptitude, hysteria around him.
Guest:He's got to just step up.
Guest:But again, he's not treated as this exceptional black man.
Guest:He's just the guy who's doing the job that needs to be done.
Guest:But there's no way to read that ending.
Marc:uh other than a black man let me ask you when you saw that the word how did it impact you do you remember yeah i i i do i i remember that it became uh an indictment of of sort of southern white culture to me that you know that because the way they portrayed those guys with their hats and their guns and it was a standard kind of uh lynch mob looking bunch sure
Marc:that there was no way to read it other than this was a lesson about racism.
Guest:Well, for me, it wasn't just Southern whites.
Guest:I mean, growing up in Detroit, and this movie comes out the year after the riots, you can go, oh, this could be any place.
Guest:This could be Los Angeles.
Guest:And Charles Burnett certainly makes the case about you.
Guest:Well, I was young.
Guest:I don't know if I knew everything.
Guest:Well, I was a kid, but I was a black kid, so probably had a little different perspective than you did.
Guest:Sure, you saw different things.
Guest:Yeah, but Charles Burnett talks about being a kid in L.A.
Guest:in the 60s, and if you're out walking at night, you knew you were going to be stopped by the police.
Guest:And you felt like you didn't matter.
Guest:Your life didn't matter.
Guest:Oh, completely.
Guest:And the movie said that about you, too, that your life didn't matter.
Marc:Well, I thought that was like putting that into context with the sort of climate of the country, that movie, and then being able to say that some parts of the radical black community thought it was a lesson to not...
Marc:Trust or hang around with white people.
Guest:No, this is the lesson.
Guest:If you try to be better than this, you try to show them you'll be a part of this or you want to integrate, this is what's going to happen to you.
Guest:You're going to go down like this.
Guest:You'll be thrown on top of a pile of burning bodies.
Guest:You could not take that lesson after Malcolm X and Dr. King and Medgar Evers.
Guest:There was too much collateral damage to think anything other than that.
Marc:But they locked into it.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And the same with that Ivan Dixon movie, which was about a guy who got trained by the CIA and then starts a black nationalist movement, that the CIA and the FBI took it as an instigator and that he was to be watched.
Guest:He told me, he said that movie ended his career.
Guest:He told me that United Artists, after 18 months, came to him and said, here, here's your negative.
Guest:Why don't you just take this back?
Guest:This is yours.
Guest:They gave him this movie back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When does that happen?
Marc:Well, I mean, the struggle of black filmmakers at that time when they were given opportunities, it was this sort of low stakes gamble most of the time.
Guest:But it wasn't given opportunities.
Guest:It was seizing opportunities.
Guest:Because if you're waiting to be given an opportunity, you'd still be waiting.
Guest:That's what he did.
Guest:He walked away from a guaranteed job, staying on this TV show, making pretty good money, being a black face on TV, because he couldn't do it anymore.
Guest:The same thing happens for Melvin Van Peebles.
Guest:This is all about seizing opportunities.
Guest:Same with Harry Belfonti.
Guest:Earlier.
Guest:Because he produced all those early movies, and then when he saw there wasn't anything for him to do.
Guest:To me, that's the great story of this.
Guest:That's the story I wanted to tell.
Guest:This guy who walked away from this thing that he was built to do, that he trained as an actor.
Guest:When you hear him sing, he's basically performing those songs as if they're monologues.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As if he's acting out those songs.
Guest:So for him to walk away from this thing that he was, I can't think of anybody.
Marc:To stop acting.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I mean, and he also had this great understanding of what a character does.
Guest:I have this clip in the movie.
Guest:from Islands in the Sun, Island in the Sun, rather, where he's wearing this big brown suit that's two sizes too big for him, clearly.
Guest:Because in those days, even poor people were beautifully dressed.
Guest:And Harry said, no, I want this suit to look like it's a hand-me-down.
Guest:It's maybe his father's suit and uncle's suit that doesn't belong on him.
Guest:So we see him, we think, something's wrong, what is it?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, his tone around not compromising his integrity in terms of how black people are represented was it was interesting, you know, because it's not it's not bitter, but it's angry.
Marc:And and, you know, the it was hard to really sort of decipher his real feelings about Sidney.
Guest:I think it's interesting because clearly they love each other.
Guest:But they took two different paths.
Guest:Harry said, I'm not going to do this.
Guest:But if Sidney hadn't done those movies, they wouldn't have got made.
Guest:Is the world better off for those movies not having been made?
Guest:It is not.
Guest:So my point is I think you can see both sides.
Guest:So that by the end of the movie, because I wrestle with how to deal with Sidney Poitier.
Guest:because there's been so much said about him, and it's kind of this undercurrent for me.
Guest:There are two themes.
Guest:One is a wasted opportunity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That all these, you know, Rupert Cross, who never got to do what he should have done, or dying.
Guest:Was he the one, the leukemia guy?
Guest:Yeah, the one who was supposed to be in The Last Detail, who Bob Towne told me that
Guest:He was like this incredibly charismatic figure that women loved and men admired.
Guest:They weren't even jealous because they thought, we can't even do what he does.
Guest:He was just kind of unbelievable.
Marc:That's a great movie, too.
Guest:Yeah, and they were supposedly co-stars.
Guest:Everybody realized in the 1950s, Rupert Cross is a 6'4 Jamaican.
Guest:He's never going to get hired.
Guest:He's never going to be a movie star.
Guest:Cassavetes use him.
Guest:Cassavetes, not only that, if you listen to Jack Nicholson's voice, you listen to that kind of snarl, that kind of empty laugh of his, I think he's doing Rupert Cross.
Guest:You can hear that he's absorbed what Cross did as an actor.
Guest:I've always believed this.
Marc:Well, I like those kind of connections that you make as a film critic in this movie because you can't help yourself.
Marc:That's why I had to watch it twice, too, is that there's so many little kind of connections you make that just kind of blow by and you're kind of like, wait a minute.
Marc:because you can't help yourself.
Marc:But that's sort of the reason why I think it should have been longer.
Marc:But also, it makes it sort of dense, the connection between Robert Downey Sr., Robert Downey Jr., Robert Downey Sr.
Marc:making Putney Swope, which had a tremendous impact on independent film and an impact on how blacks were represented in movies, but yet he didn't have the confidence to let his lead speak for himself.
Marc:So Robert Downey Sr.,
Marc:does the ADR and talks for the main black character who is the center of the goddamn thing.
Marc:And then you kind of connect it to Tropic Thunder with Downey's award-nominated performance where he's basically doing blackface.
Marc:And that goes right by.
Marc:I mean, that's 20 seconds.
Guest:But I could have done more because if you listen to Putney Swope, you can hear clearly Downey doing a lot of voices in it.
Guest:But how do you feel about that?
Guest:Again, I feel like this is somebody who wanted to get his movie made and didn't trust his performance.
Guest:And I asked Antonio about it, he goes, there's a kind of power that I think that he said he thought that Downey was looking for, Downey Sr.
Guest:had, that Arnold just wasn't that kind of actor.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That Arnold had the look, but he didn't have the sound.
Marc:Oh, the lead, Putney.
Guest:Yeah, this actor, Arnold Young.
Marc:So let's go back to like 68.
Marc:So now, like, because this opens a door.
Marc:Like, so whether you, you know, however you're conflicted about Sidney Poitier, those two movies, and I read that the Mark Harris book, you know, which I thought was great.
Marc:Absolutely great.
Marc:And I mean, it definitely informed a lot of what, you know, some of what you were doing.
Marc:It's one of the reasons I thought this could be a book, because I thought... It should be a book.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Why isn't it a book?
Guest:Because everybody turned it down.
Guest:Everybody turned it down twice, I should say.
Guest:Because how is it not a book?
Guest:Because...
Guest:All right, I get it.
Guest:Because, yeah, I pitched it with Toni Morrison writing an introduction.
Guest:She offered those lines.
Guest:You couldn't get a university press to fucking take it?
Marc:Nobody wanted this thing.
Marc:Jesus Christ.
Marc:That seems criminal.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But-
Marc:All right.
Marc:So Harris and you both sort of posit this idea that those two movies, that was the beginning of a lot of things.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Black representation in a different way, but also black money-making possibility at the box office, and then in some ways opened the door for black artists to take place.
Guest:It should have, because you look at 1968 as going from Night of the Living Dead to these two Sidney Poitier movies being Oscar nominees.
Guest:Same year.
Guest:In the same year, these events are at the same time, and Sidney Poitier is now the number one box office star in the world.
Guest:If these two examples shouldn't say, we were wrong to be racist.
Guest:The thing you always hear, and believe me, I've written these pieces, is
Guest:every once in a while you write this piece about why is there more black representation in hollywood and they go i don't care you know i if somebody's green or blue or orange i just want their money but that's not true right it's clearly not true right i have to tell you a couple years ago uh after george floyd and all these sort of people were impeneling themselves yeah i started getting all these calls
Guest:So, we're going to put together this Blue Ribbon Commission, and we just feel so torn about what's going on now.
Guest:We just wondered, could you join our commission and help us figure out what to do?
Guest:I went, no.
Guest:I don't have the time, and here's my answer.
Guest:Hire black people.
Guest:Hire two.
Guest:Not one, because there's one.
Guest:That person has to represent everybody.
Guest:Two, so they're two different points of view, and you see that it's not monolithic.
Guest:Hire two black people.
Guest:You must get asked to do that shit all the time.
Guest:I just started saying no to it because it's ridiculous.
Guest:It's not a hard problem to solve.
Guest:That's why I say in 1968, you've got In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner on one hand and Night of the Living Dead on the other.
Guest:This isn't proof that there is box office power in having black stars.
Guest:Two studio films to an independent film that was so underestimated they didn't even bother to copyright it.
Guest:They forgot to do that.
Guest:So it's public domain.
Guest:So between these three movies, there is so much box office generated.
Guest:Shouldn't that be the fulcrum that makes you go, let's push racism out of the way and start to integrate?
Guest:And it still doesn't happen.
Guest:It still becomes about people seizing opportunity.
Guest:It's about Melvin going from Watermelon Man to going, I can't do this again, to making Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song.
Guest:And that clip we have, which is still mind-blowing to me, with the police cars on fire, and somebody walks up and opens the door.
Guest:You go, oh my God, that door.
Guest:It's a hot metal.
Guest:And he just grabs it and opens the door.
Guest:You kind of go.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Again, that clip shouldn't be any some compendium of the greatest film clips of all time.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I mean, but so the turn, you know, you kind of hang it on Gordon Parks and Van Peebles as the big sort of shifters of the paradigm a little bit, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:With their movies.
Guest:Because Gordon Parks, but again, Gordon Parks has proven himself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:as this incredible talent.
Guest:And so when he gets to do his studio movie, the first studio movie directed by an African American, he has to write, direct, produce, and he composes a score.
Guest:Right.
Marc:I mean, that's crazy.
Marc:It's crazy, but it's honest representation.
Guest:What I also think is Park's thing, too, that I'm going to do all these things because it's a thing he said to me.
Guest:I thought I was going to never direct another movie again.
Guest:I thought they'd take this chance on me.
Guest:If it fails, no black person's going to get another studio movie.
Guest:So I'm going to do everything I ever wanted to do.
Guest:Like that great shot of getting back to Westerns, of those horses silhouetted by that sunrise.
Guest:And those kids getting on.
Guest:It's mind-blowing.
Guest:What's that movie called again?
Guest:That's The Learning Tree.
Yeah.
Marc:The thing that was sort of, I think, new for me outside of all of it, thank you for doing what you did, the label of blaxploitation of those films from the 70s.
Marc:I think what that was in my mind was something campy.
Marc:So I didn't pay attention to it because I thought it was a sort of people liked it because it represented something goofy, not something real.
Marc:So I'm the guy who watches your documentary two nights ago, the first time, and I got to watch Coffee for the first time.
Marc:For the first time.
Guest:Because of that blaxploitation epithet you kind of dismissed as being jokey.
Marc:Right, because your movie, your documentary, and it's my fault, because I like Pam Grier.
Marc:I've seen her in a few things, but I contextualized the Raging Bull Easy Rider thing, the white guys hijacking Hollywood and doing the antihero thing.
Marc:But I watched Coffee for the first time, and it's grittier than any of that shit, and it's more real life.
Marc:It's raw shit, man.
Guest:It's what Toni Morrison said.
Guest:It's the quotes that Toni Morrison said that I have in the movie.
Guest:It's also this thing, too, where you hear, oh, coffee, she's badass.
Guest:And Toni Morrison would go, I hate that, because what that does is it's just so reductive.
Guest:It is reductive.
Guest:And it's basically saying she's not acting.
Guest:It's not a movie that's about, in this way, metaphorically, about black women having to be nurturers and protectors.
Guest:And to see the burden that that puts on her in performance terms.
Guest:And that she delivers in a way that generally you didn't expect to see in an action film.
Marc:Dude, in that one scene where she fucking cons that dealer to take her to the house where she's going to kill the main dealer.
Marc:And when that guy pulls away to go shoot up in the kitchen...
Marc:That moment, it's like you don't see that shit.
Marc:And the integrity of it as a passing moment, as being something gritty and fucking horrible, before she blows the guy away, was kind of mind-blowing to me.
Marc:Because none of those, maybe Panic in Needle Park, maybe, but none of those 70s movies were that graphic and that visceral and that menacing.
Guest:But even Panic in Newark Park is about the antihero circling the drain before he goes down.
Marc:Sure, but I'm just talking about graphic heroine.
Guest:I know what you're talking about too, but I'm also trying to make that parallel between what those movies did and what those movies left behind.
Guest:Because that's an important point to make.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:That those movies sacrifice heroism because it was a luxury that white actors had.
Guest:They played heroes since the beginning of movies.
Guest:So they could say, well, we're not going to play heroes anymore because we're going to try to wrestle with the Vietnam War and the impotence this country feels.
Guest:But these movies can't be about Vietnam because then exhibitors won't book them.
Guest:So instead, we'll internalize all that kind of impotence and make these characters who can't manage their way through a single day and they turn to heroin.
Guest:I'm not saying these things aren't issues.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But the fact is that, you know- Or Five Easy Pieces, where he just gets in a truck.
Marc:He jumps in the back of the truck and plays the piano.
Marc:Yeah, and then he's in an oil field, the scion of some rich, creative family.
Guest:I mean, that becomes kind of metaphorical for the whole thing, doesn't it?
Guest:I mean, he leaves privilege behind to slum, and then he goes back to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, I mean, that's the reason I wanted to make this point was that this heroism that American movies have always been about, that's often been the myth since the beginning.
Guest:People affecting change and changing things for the better.
Guest:When mainstream movies left that behind, and I'm as big an admirer of that golden age as anybody, the fact is a lot of these movies didn't make money.
Guest:And John Kelly, who read Warner Brothers in the 70s,
Guest:I was off the job at Sony Pictures in the early 2000s, so I met with him, and I said to him- Did you take the job?
Guest:No.
Guest:What was it?
Guest:Development executive, and he's like, no, I can sleep at night, and I don't have to say no to people who I'd rather be in business with, because the studio didn't want to be in business with them.
Guest:But I said to him, so, I have to ask you what you guys paid to make Superfly.
Guest:You must get this question all the time, and he goes.
Guest:Nobody's ever asked me that question.
Guest:And it was like $150,000.
Guest:He said, I could have written the check myself.
Guest:In retrospect, I probably should have bought it myself and released it.
Guest:And he said, in terms of return on investment, Superfly was the biggest profit maker he had during his time at Warner Brothers.
Guest:This is a guy who was there when they made The Exorcist, for God's sake.
Guest:But, you know, $150,000, back to about $25 million.
Guest:And he said to me, this is one of the things that kept bouncing around in my head and led to this getting done.
Guest:The dirty secret of the American cinema of the 1970s is that black movies financed it.
Guest:He said, don't forget MGM was saved from bankruptcy by Shaft.
Guest:And a lot of these movies made money.
Guest:And he said also, and there's other things in the movie, too, that I wanted to try to make.
Guest:Because they were floundering.
Guest:Yeah, and also because if you're an American moviegoer and you've been raised on a myth of heroes and you're going to see The Panic in Needle Park, you're like, what the hell is this?
Marc:I can step over this in my neighborhood.
Marc:I don't need to go see the movies.
Marc:Right, so that was the argument that Harris made, that Doolittle was kind of the end of it.
Marc:You know, that they couldn't pick a winner anymore.
Marc:Even Doolittle wasn't a winner.
Guest:No, that's what I mean.
Guest:And the point that he made, too, is that it's ballot stuffing the reason they got nominated.
Guest:It wasn't even an honest nomination for his picture.
Guest:It's just that the system was corrupt enough that you could create a block of studio votes to get an Oscar nomination.
Marc:Can I ask you an aside real quick?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Don't you want to see a movie about the making of Doolittle?
Marc:Did you read that shit?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Isn't it unbelievable?
Guest:Crazy, dude.
Guest:But I asked Pache about it.
Guest:He goes, I don't think that's what happened with me.
Guest:He didn't remember the way Mark has it in the book, but that's okay.
Marc:Well, just on that island with the bugs, you know, trying to get that thing done with drunk Rex Harrison.
Marc:It's fucking crazy.
Marc:Drunk, angry Rex Harrison.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his ex-girlfriend.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It really is like a restoration comedy.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And a disaster movie simultaneously.
Marc:Unbelievable.
Marc:So, with Superflying Shaft.
Marc:Now, what you say, the argument you're making, which I think is great...
Marc:is that the shift from the anti-hero, the reaction to the anti-hero was visually and literally black confidence.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:And those characters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Even in the case of Superfly, where he's an anti-hero, he plays it like a hero.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:And got a little criticism for that.
Guest:Got a ton of criticism for that.
Guest:And it's this thing, too, going almost back to the Sidney Poitier thing, where a lot of these movies are criticized by people who didn't see them.
Guest:And you understand that people are asking for, you know, all kinds of roles to be played.
Guest:But as so many actors have said during that period, if we aren't making these movies, no movies are being made.
Guest:And 1978 proves it.
Guest:You know, suddenly there are no black movies being made anymore because they stopped making the black action films.
Guest:But what I was going to say, too, is that...
Guest:Getting back to John Kelly's point, you know, and even Ron O'Neill says in the movie, we played for 20 weeks in Boston and we ran out of black people in three weeks.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So this was, you know, a totally new world.
Marc:Well, I guess the point is to me that blackploitation is in itself as a heading reductive.
Guest:Completely that.
Guest:And I don't have an issue with it as a term.
Guest:It's just that...
Guest:you know, what it invites people to think.
Guest:Like, for you, and so many people, you know, they think it's all, these movies are parody movies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they weren't.
Guest:Or over the top.
Guest:They were over the top, but that's okay.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:I mean, you know, is a James Bond movie not over the top?
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:I mean, is...
Guest:Is a Marvel movie not over the top?
Guest:And they're all money makers.
Guest:But these are also movies that are saying in the movie that are about concerns in the cities.
Guest:How do you deal with being overrun by angry landlords or drugs or crime, black on black crime, because the police aren't going to come help you.
Guest:And these movies are attempting to answer those questions in these ways that really are about a kind of American tradition of myth of heroes stepping up.
Guest:But the other advantage they had, too, and this is by sheer inadvertence, is these soundtracks being released first.
Marc:Yeah, that was, to me, the seizing of and creating a new business model.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But the thing that was really provocative and great to know was the connection you made, which I guess Isaac Hayes made, was that he was inspired by that Sergio Leone film where Henry Fonda plays a heavy for the first time in his career, which was at Once Upon a Time in the West.
Guest:I remember all these building blocks that made this movie.
Guest:I go to Sundance for the first time in 99.
Guest:I never wanted to go to Sundance.
Guest:I didn't care less.
Guest:But I'm invited to be on the jury, so I go, I'll do that.
Guest:And so I get dragged shanghaied into, dragooned into this dinner.
Guest:Not this dinner, but Filmmaker's Lunchtime.
Guest:And the Hughes brothers are there with their film American Pimp.
Guest:And I'd always wanted to meet them.
Guest:And it turns out they're from Detroit.
Guest:And so we left talking.
Guest:And I say...
Guest:What I really liked about Dead President is that use of walk-on-bye by Isaac Hayes because I'd always thought, and then Albert Hughes says with me, we say in unison, it was stolen from once upon a time in the West.
Guest:And I thought, I'm not the only person who thinks like this.
Guest:To have that kind of thing visited upon you.
Guest:Oh, so it's not just me.
Guest:It's other people.
Guest:And that's why I thought,
Guest:there had to be an audience for this as a book because I felt there were too many connections like this that... So you're saying that you could hear it in Isaac's song.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:It's like Enio's soundtrack.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:I got to ask... The unfortunate thing about this taking so long is that so many people died.
Guest:Isaac Hayes said he wanted to do it.
Guest:And I asked him about this when I met him.
Guest:He goes, oh my God.
Guest:He said, and I wish we could have gotten him saying this, I think we were eight notes shy of being actionable.
Guest:I thought it was hilarious, but he knew what he was doing.
Guest:But I said, but also, that feels like the baton being passed.
Guest:He goes, absolutely.
Guest:He said, if I hadn't done Walk On By, Gordon Parks doesn't hear that song and think, that sounds like a piece of movie music.
Guest:I'm going to get this guy to do Shaft.
Guest:Which then becomes this other whole kind of thing where that opening of Shaft is so revolutionary.
Guest:And one of the things I was hoping I could do with this
Guest:is to sort of let people know what it was like when all these drums were being dropped one after another.
Guest:That's why for me, and you tell me if I succeeded in this, I want every five minutes of the movie for you to go, what?
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:What?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because otherwise it's just...
Guest:It's just a history.
Marc:Well, that was the big turn was, you know, the argument for these black leads are as a reaction to the antiheroes, you know, in terms of their.
Marc:But then again,
Marc:But I distracted you from the conversation about how releasing the soundtracks first became publicity for the movie, and the artists like Mayfield and Earth, Wind & Fire and Aretha Franklin and the others were already established artists, so it was kind of the new business model.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:A business model that changes the movies, because then we go from that to Saturday Night Fever, which is also released early.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I remember that in high school.
Guest:The soundtrack came out early.
Marc:But this is sort of interesting, because it's always been the issue.
Marc:And most of the doc is sort of indicting it.
Marc:But again, after you talk about, after the arc of the 70s, and you were able to source...
Marc:Tony Gennaro's, you know, is that his last name?
Marc:To Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever walking down the street.
Marc:Tony Manero.
Marc:Tony Manero, you know, walking down the street as being a direct sort of lift of Richard Roundtree in the first Shaft movie that, you know, that they co-opted the confidence of these black leads who were working against the antihero and appropriated it, all of it, the whole model for Saturday Night Fever.
Marc:That's new information.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Again, to me, it's just maybe this is like the proto moment of being the Hughes brothers in Sundance.
Guest:I've seen this movie and my friends and we kind of look at each other and go, isn't this Shaft?
Guest:If you're a black person, Shaft had only been six years early.
Guest:You can't look and they go, isn't this Shaft?
Marc:Isn't this like the same key?
Marc:But then he takes these white guys who played disco music who weren't even disco music before that.
Marc:And the whole thing is exactly the problem in a way, but yet you love the movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Listen, I think that, of course I do.
Guest:And the point I try to make in the movie is that
Guest:If you're a black person, a person of color, it's hard to love pop culture if it doesn't love you back.
Guest:But that's kind of the story about being a black person in America, isn't it?
Guest:Right, okay.
Guest:But that business model does become the way of the world.
Guest:I mean, by the 80s, the soundtrack is the way the movie is sold.
Guest:That's part of the rise of MTV, is these music videos that are songs from the soundtrack.
Guest:Oh, that's true.
Guest:With bits from the movies.
Guest:God.
Guest:Yes, absolutely.
Guest:And major artists doing these songs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That becomes the way that movies are sold for a long time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this all started in the 70s.
Guest:And I'm just like, I've got to draw attention to this.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Because it feels crazy to me that it hasn't been.
Guest:But again, it's this reduction of black culture.
Guest:And what I say in the film is that...
Guest:a de facto underground economy and cultural movement.
Guest:Because it wasn't successful, it just wasn't being covered.
Guest:And then when it was being covered, it was like all these sort of pieces about blaxploitation and what that was doing.
Marc:It fucked my head up.
Marc:Like it framed it improperly to me, to the point where I didn't investigate more because I thought it was, because I don't love camp.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:And I think a lot of people sort of thought that these movies probably felt not dissimilar to the ways that African Americans had been treated in film before, which is they turned into a joke.
Guest:So why go?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you see the opening of Shaft, and I just did a thing at Indy Memphis where Willie Hall lives, who's the drummer in the bar case.
Guest:So that's him doing those 16ths and Shaft.
Guest:And I said, it always felt to me like you guys are doing a little bit of Peter Gunn, but also a little bit of Norman Whitfield.
Guest:He goes, it's exactly that.
Guest:I said, but also, too, you can hear the backbeat.
Guest:You can hear the bass drum.
Guest:You can hear the snare.
Guest:Whenever there's a footfall by Richard Roundtree, it's following.
Guest:He goes, absolutely.
Guest:He said, Isaac Hayes bought me a metronome.
Guest:and put it in my hotel room so I would fall asleep at night seeing the clicking for click track.
Guest:And so he said, by the time we got to the studio, I didn't get to look up.
Guest:I could hear the click and know exactly where the... And Isaac said, don't look at that screen, just play, because if you're following the click, you're playing along to his footfalls.
Guest:And that's the same thing that's happening in Saturday Night Fever.
Guest:In fact, when I saw that Bee Gees documentary earlier, I went, how do you not mention this?
Guest:How do you not say this?
Guest:Yeah, because you had to.
Guest:You're the guy.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you for my documentary that's going up against Wakanda forever so nobody's going to see it.
Marc:Well, look, man, I mean, being the guy that makes the connections and sort of presents, reframes history, I mean, this is an issue, like I talked to Gates about this too, that you're literally, with Gates' documentary on PBS about the black business community,
Marc:And not unlike you, sadly, these are lessons that are actually being recontextualized and banned in schools in red states.
Marc:It's black history that should be human history that we all should sort of understand and know.
Marc:And we're living in a time where if you're in the arts and you're not fighting the good fight, then it's all lost.
Marc:Whether it's Wakanda Forever or not, you know, Wakanda Forever doesn't exist without what you're talking about in your documentary.
Marc:They should be showing it first at the theater.
Guest:Speak louder.
Guest:No, I mean, my hope is that if people get tired of seeing Wakanda Forever for the 19th time that weekend, because probably everybody's going to go out this weekend, you come home and you turn on Netflix and you go, oh.
Guest:Oh, oh, because in fact I had a show on Epix and I would go around to towns with the filmmakers and I did one with Brian Coogler.
Guest:And I showed him the beginning of The Learning Tree and all the things we were talking about here, I was saying to him, he goes, oh my God, I didn't know any of this stuff.
Marc:But I also like there's just so many moments in the doc where your reaction as a younger person to Isaac Hayes on the Academy Awards playing that song with those chains and you realizing that he's owning these things and fuck you-ing them.
Guest:I mean, for me, the moment I mentioned this in the doc, and I'm glad you brought this up, to see Isaac Hayes wearing chains not around his wrist but around his torso,
Guest:And to be playing that song, for me, I just thought- As a look.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:He had that look with the seat on national television.
Guest:The fact that Shaft's success made that Isaac Hayes inescapable.
Guest:And I thought, this is the beginning of a new world.
Guest:And that's the year of Superfly.
Guest:And Lady Sings the Blues.
Guest:And Sounder.
Guest:And I was just thinking, oh, my God.
Guest:Because-
Guest:I would compare Curtis Mayfield to John Williams.
Guest:He did five scores during that period.
Guest:In addition to doing 15 other albums, he made 20 records.
Guest:But the soundtracks he made are Let's Do It Again, Claudine, Sparkle, and Superfly.
Guest:Almost all those songs live on one way or another.
Guest:In fact, John Kelly said to me, the great thing about the Superfly soundtrack is that every single that came off of that was a hit.
Guest:So it kept the movie alive.
Guest:In addition to it coming out the month before.
Guest:It wasn't just a song was a hit.
Guest:You know, there's Give Me Your Love, there's Freddy's Dead, there's Superfly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:These things, that album generated so many hit singles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It kept the movie a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That had never happened before.
Guest:You might have the case of, and I make this at this point, of a Noah's Tresley movie or a Beatles movie, but those people were...
Guest:acts, pop acts, and that didn't translate into the entire culture.
Guest:And oftentimes, people go see the movies and roll their eyes.
Guest:You have this thing that Curtis Mayfield did as a composer and a songwriter, where he would write in character.
Guest:You may have had this thing happen to you, too.
Guest:I know so many people who've heard a Superfly soundtrack who've never seen the movie, who've imagined the movie based on the songs.
Guest:Sure, and the cover of the album.
Guest:The cover of the album, but also the song.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Each song has a different tempo, a different feel to it.
Guest:They're all about these states of mind these characters are experiencing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Deep.
Guest:Freddie's dead or Eddie, you should know better.
Guest:Each one of these songs has a feel that has the emotional weight of character expression to it.
Guest:Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Guest:And that had not really been done before.
Guest:I can't think of another person who composed a soundtrack.
Guest:in that way it's also this thing too where before he started doing these soundtracks it's clearly curtis mayfield has the impact and influence on marvin gay who turns into this this social activist yeah songwriter they've been singing in the song register they're both singing falsetto yeah and then so certainly you could go from curtis mayfield to marvin gay what's going on then to superfly then to marvin gay doing the trouble man sound that's interesting because marvin really wasn't doing falsetto before that was he
Guest:And that was his natural register.
Guest:But Barry Gordy told him it wasn't masculine, so he didn't sing it.
Guest:And that took Marvin hearing, I don't know, who knows this to be a fact.
Marc:But then after these 70s movies, you kind of point out, which were the later 70s, that there was definitely mainstream movies, Ladies in the Blues, Mahogany, Cooley High, the one you just mentioned with the singers that didn't really do that well.
Marc:Oh, Sparkle, which is basically Dreamgirls before Dreamgirls.
Marc:And so that becomes sort of Bingo Long and Traveling All-Stars, which I remember.
Marc:The Belafonte, Bill Cosby movies, which I remember.
Marc:There was a few of those.
Guest:Well, those are movies that saved Sidney Poitier's career.
Guest:And this is the most amazing thing.
Guest:Like I was saying, I was trying to figure out a way to deal with it.
Guest:Was it Uptown Saturday Night?
Guest:That was the first one.
Guest:But Sidney Poitier went from being the biggest thing in the world in 1968 to, because of the way the culture shifted, being irrelevant by 1970.
Guest:In two years, to have that kind of... No kidding.
Guest:First of all, a bill of roughly 20 years to get where he was.
Guest:And to have all this fall apart in the course of two years, and then to reinvent himself and to start doing comedy and to make himself this...
Guest:not the comedian, but the straight man, and to make fun of what people thought Sidney Poitier was in these movies, and to become a movie star again based on that.
Guest:I cannot think of any other case in the history of the movies where somebody has had that kind of foresight and understanding of audience and of self-awareness to rescue himself from obscurity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Name it.
Marc:Not obscurity, yeah.
Marc:No, he had, but I'm saying like De Niro did it a little bit.
Guest:But De Niro was always getting off.
Marc:Yeah, he wasn't obscurity.
Marc:Nobody called De Niro a sellout and a joke.
Marc:That's right, but he did end up doing some pretty goofy shit, and it was kind of great to see.
Guest:He flipped his career around, but he wasn't the architect of it.
Guest:That's right, that's right.
Guest:Poitier goes, and again, when I met... Out of necessity, I imagine.
Guest:Well, you know, of course he did.
Guest:I mean, the same reason he's doing Lilies of the Field out of necessity, because if he doesn't do it, it's not going to get made.
Guest:How do you further the cause of black actors?
Guest:I mean, because, again, it's a tricky position that he was in.
Guest:Wasn't Belafonte in Uptown Saturday Night, too?
Guest:He is.
Guest:He played the heavy, right?
Guest:Yeah, he's basically doing this parody of The Godfather.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Because he studied with Marlon Brando.
Guest:I remember loving those movies.
Guest:They're full of these great little performances.
Guest:And there's so many people.
Guest:I wish I had a chance to get in this movie because they passed away.
Guest:There's an actor named Roscoe Lee Brown.
Guest:Yeah, I remember him.
Guest:Who's in Uptown.
Guest:He has that voice.
Guest:This great voice.
Guest:We also have this thing where just before that scene we have, the scene that's in the movie, he's this elected official.
Guest:He's trying to figure out.
Guest:Which fake pose?
Guest:Does he want to be a man of the people and wears dashiki?
Guest:Does he want to be upright and wear a suit and tie?
Guest:And so he's got all these portraits that he flips around in his office.
Guest:And just seeing him shift from one thing to another.
Guest:But he's also in, he's in uptight playing this gay character, this unapologetically gay character.
Guest:I mean, Roscoe worked a ton.
Guest:I wish that he lived long enough for me to talk to him for this.
Guest:I mean, I knew Rudy Ray more, and I wish I'd been able to get him.
Guest:I mean, my first brush with fame in 1975, a friend of mine and I are walking around downtown Detroit trying to figure out what to do to get out of the heat.
Guest:And we see this little guy walk past us wearing a leather hat, a leather jacket, with a matching bag and shoes.
Guest:And in Detroit in 1975, nobody was dressed like that.
Guest:So I just thought, this guy must be an actor.
Guest:I don't know how I thought this.
Guest:So I go, wait, are you Durville Martin?
Guest:He goes, you guys know who I am?
Guest:We go, yeah.
Guest:And he goes, you want to come see my movie?
Guest:We go, okay.
Guest:Now, this would be the point where he throws us in the back of a panel truck who we never heard from again.
Guest:He walks us around a corner to this movie theater where Dolomite is playing, which he has directed.
Guest:He walks past the ticket taker and goes, it's okay, these guys are with me.
Guest:And the guy's looking at him like, and who are you?
Guest:He walks us in, sits down, okay, guys, enjoy.
Guest:And that's how I saw Dolomite.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And we sat through it four times.
Guest:So we basically sat there until they kicked us out.
Guest:We were reciting the dialogue along with the actors for so long.
Guest:And then I got to meet Rudy Ray Moore.
Guest:He goes, I was there.
Guest:You should.
Guest:No, I didn't know you.
Guest:Because whatever Dolomite is about, he understood as a performer, Rudy Ray Moore, how to make an entrance.
Guest:And so many of these movies were about entrances, which is this thing that American movies do better than anybody, is people making an entrance.
Guest:You think about Marlena Dietrich or all these glamour entrances.
Guest:And Billy Dee Williams gets one and Lady Sings the Blues.
Guest:There's so many because they remind us of the glory and the power of wanting to see something different from our own lives.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's what a lot of these black movies did too.
Guest:They offered glamour and heroism when that was no longer in fashion.
Guest:In fact, I think they brought that stuff back into fashion and then were swept off to the margins because that's what always happens in black culture.
Marc:Well, yeah, and you sort of, you kind of blamed The Wiz a little bit.
Marc:I don't blame The Wiz, but I think The Wiz was blamed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think the, you know.
Guest:I see.
Guest:So they said this tank, we're done with black people.
Guest:Because the point I make in the movie is that it got bad reviews, but so did Coffey.
Guest:A lot of these movies got bad reviews.
Guest:But The Wiz didn't make money.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:The Wiz really didn't make money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Wiz, and I had an executive say to me once, The Wiz was like the black version of Heaven's Gate.
Guest:I mean, it lost a ton of money, and there were a lot of expectations about it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, should the guy who directed Cervico and Dog Day Afternoon be directing- Yeah, I don't know how that happened.
Guest:What's the backstory on that?
Guest:You don't know?
Guest:Why did he take that gig?
Guest:Because the guy who was supposed to do it, John Battam, was apparently fired after Saturday Night Fever.
Guest:That was going to be his next thing.
Guest:So he's doing someone a favor?
Guest:Well, they were going to make the movie, and he thought, you know, I can do this.
Guest:I think he was wrong, but he thought, I can do this, and probably thought, I want to do something different.
Guest:But John Battam, who was supposed to do it, had that objection.
Guest:He said, I think this is great, but I think Diana Ross is too old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he was done and Sidney Lumet thought, I can make this work.
Guest:They could have used Janet, but she was too young probably then.
Guest:She's way too young, but they could have used Stephanie Mills who had been in the show on Broadway.
Guest:True.
Guest:But they wanted to do it with a star and, you know, it was a miscalculation, the kind of thing that happens a lot, but...
Guest:When a black movie fails, it's the end of all black movies.
Guest:And also, all black movies are the same.
Guest:Black movies are a genre.
Guest:So if it's a black comedy, it's a black movie.
Guest:If it's a black Western, it's a black movie.
Guest:If it's a black romantic melodrama, it's a black movie.
Guest:So when it fails, it's not a Western failing.
Guest:It's black movies failing.
Guest:It's not a romantic comedy failing.
Guest:It's black movies failing.
Guest:And by the way, when these movies fail in the mainstream, they eventually bounce back.
Guest:We were hearing about the end of the romantic comedy.
Marc:until the george clooney julia roberts movie is a success so suddenly they're back yeah but i like how you sort of set up that after that the whiz that you know and then you sort of sort of focus on the new kind of black independent cinema you start talking about you know charles barnett and and who's a genius oh my god a poet yeah i mean i remember seeing that movie when did it come out
Guest:It came out in 78, but it didn't get a real release until the late 80s.
Marc:Yeah, because I saw it and I didn't know what it was.
Marc:I don't remember where I was.
Marc:Maybe I was still in college.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:Mid to late 80s.
Marc:I remember going to see it because it looked interesting.
Marc:It's an unforgettable movie.
Marc:I had no idea how to contextualize it.
Marc:Yeah, but other than just watching it as a movie.
Marc:Like, I didn't know who Charles Barnett was, but I became fascinated with him, but I didn't know where to find any of his other stuff.
Marc:And it's sort of an interesting story, right?
Marc:There's not a lot there.
Marc:It's a great story.
Marc:Short films.
Guest:I mean, no, he did To Sleep With Anger.
Marc:Oh, that's right, To Sleep With Anger.
Guest:The Glass Shield.
Marc:That movie's great.
Marc:There's a Danny Glover movie.
Marc:That movie's insane, dude.
Marc:Isn't it?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:But don't you love the story he tells about showing his movie at UCLA and all these flower children finding themselves in smoking drugs?
Guest:He goes, no, that was in my neighborhood.
Guest:Yeah, I love it.
Guest:Because he makes this movie about black life where...
Guest:The father is there.
Guest:And it's a movie about love.
Guest:I mean, you see that man looking at his daughter and his son and his wife and going out and basically crushing his soul to make a living.
Guest:But being in that neighborhood and being a part of something.
Guest:I mean, that is... You couldn't make that movie today because people wouldn't know how to do it with the kind of deafness and poetic touches that that has.
Guest:Beautiful.
Guest:And again...
Guest:The movie's still being imitated into the 21st century.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:You were able to track all the influence that movie had.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I could have done a whole movie on that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All the people who were stolen from him.
Guest:But, you know, I felt it was kind of great to go from that to then Martin Scorsese.
Marc:The Shutter Island.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Direct lift.
Marc:But that was an homage.
Marc:I mean, you framed it like that.
Guest:No, I'm not trying to say he still knows.
Guest:It's completely unwise.
Guest:Scorsese, he wouldn't know that.
Guest:And that's the only clip I have from the 21st century because I could have done the same thing with American Gangster, which lifts stuff from Gordon's War, those women cutting up the coke.
Marc:Oh, yeah, all that stuff.
Marc:Yeah, the cutting up the coke thing.
Marc:I don't quite understand one thing that's sticking in my craw.
Marc:What's that?
Marc:It's weird because Sydney and Harry make that Western as a reaction to Butch and Sundance, right?
Marc:The Western thing, the ongoing sort of obsession with it and need to regenerate it for every generation over and over again to lesser and lesser success, I don't understand it.
Marc:I don't understand why there's a need for it.
Marc:to own that fucking genre.
Guest:I think it's the one thing that feels really intrinsically American because, you know, a lot of comedy, that sort of stage play aspect was lifted from European art.
Guest:The Western feels like something that belongs to this country.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's also about this aspect of the still the wide open spaces.
Guest:There's romance about it that people love.
Guest:I'm not so in love with it either.
Guest:I was actually fonder of the stuff that sort of like flipped over in his head like Once Upon a Time in the West and those kinds of things.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:But I also get to that.
Guest:if you grew up a certain way for a certain generation, the Western meant something to you.
Guest:And to not see yourself, I mean, Fishburne talks about going with his father.
Guest:And the two Westerns I chose for that clip were The Searchers and Nevada Smith, because they're both about race.
Guest:And also having them be framed in the doorway.
Guest:That was the fun of making this, is I got to be really deliberate about all the clip choices.
Guest:That was the fun of it.
Marc:It shocked me about how much fun that was.
Marc:That moment in The Searchers where John Wayne's going to kill the girl because she's now with them.
Marc:It's a fucking devastating moment.
Guest:But I don't have the whole movie, so I've got to just have that doorway.
Guest:I get you.
Guest:And also in Nevada Smith, he's supposed to be part Native American, but he's also losing his life, losing everything around him, that doorway frame.
Guest:I just thought...
Guest:If I'm going to deal with a Western, I'm going to deal with a Western that deals with race in that way.
Marc:Look, even this conversation, there's so much more in the doc.
Marc:Again, I had to watch it twice.
Marc:You really did.
Marc:I did, yeah.
Marc:I'm touched by that, man.
Guest:That means a lot to me.
Marc:Thank you.
Guest:Doesn't it sound like I did?
Guest:It certainly sounds like you paid attention.
Guest:I figured you could get that from a single viewing, but I'm clearly impressed.
Guest:I mean, we've known each other for a long time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we've never really had this kind of conversation before.
Guest:And now I'm sure, okay?
Guest:That's how long we've known each other.
Guest:I'm not sure in a conversation.
Guest:But this has been really fun just because I couldn't imagine that you would pay this kind of attention to something that I did.
Guest:It's shocking to me.
Marc:Well, I think it's great, and I hope it gets seen a lot, and it was great talking to you.
Marc:Always.
Marc:Thank you so much, Mark.
Marc:That was Elvis Mitchell, a fellow broadcaster and now filmmaker, and the movie is called Is That Black Enough For You?
Marc:It's streaming on Netflix, and it's great.
Marc:So hang out a second.
Marc:Okay, if you want to check out an episode from the archives this week, it was six years ago that I went out to New Jersey to interview Bruce Springsteen.
Marc:It's episode 773 and it's available in all podcast feeds for free.
Marc:It's definitely a great episode if you're a Bruce fan and a great episode if you're a fan of this show because it's a full-fledged WTF interview.
Marc:We get into everything, including what he was thinking at the time about Trump's election and a lot of what he said actually could be said word for word today.
Marc:What's your biggest fear of it as we enter it?
Guest:I suppose would be that a lot of the worst things and the worst aspects of what he appealed to comes to fruition.
Guest:When you let that genie out of the bottle, bigotry, racism,
Guest:When you let those things out of the bottle intolerance that they don't go back in the bottle that easily if they go back in at all right, you know, whether it's a rise in hate crimes people feeling they have license to Speak and behave in ways that previously were considered un-american and are un-american That's what he's appealing to and so
Guest:My fears are that those things find a place in ordinary civil society, demeans the discussions and events of the day, and the country changes in a way that is unrecognizable, and we become estranged, as you say.
Guest:You say, hey, wait a minute, you voted for Trump.
Guest:I thought I knew who you were.
Guest:You know, I'm not sure.
Guest:You know, the country feels very estranged.
Guest:You feel very estranged from your countrymen, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Go listen to that in the same feed you're listening to this episode.
Marc:And if you want all the WTF episodes ad free, sign up for WTF plus by going to the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod.com and click on WTF plus.
Marc:On Monday's show, we've got my talk with comedian Tommy Tiernan that I recorded in Ireland.
Marc:Tommy and I have been sort of orbiting each other at festivals for decades, it seems.
Marc:And I've watched him do stand-up a few times, and I sort of got up to speed with him because he is a huge comedian in Ireland and the UK.
Marc:He's been here in the States a few times.
Marc:And it was – I really – sometimes I really like knowing somebody and knowing their work a bit but then sort of having to sit there and really dive in to who they are and more of their work.
Marc:And I didn't really – I'm sad now because we didn't really talk about the Derry Girls.
Marc:which is a show that he's in, and it's a huge show.
Marc:And Kit has been watching it and loves it.
Marc:And I think that was sort of a blind side of that interview, but it was great to talk to him.
Marc:Now, this is usually where I give you my upcoming tour dates, but I don't have any more.
Marc:After tonight, I'm done.
Marc:But between us, I'm sure I'll be at the Comedy Store.
Marc:Probably all the time.
Marc:Here's some guitar from the vault.
guitar solo
guitar solo