[VA - The Best Of Blaxploitation (2006)
Gildo Santiago
John Singleton was only 3 years old when he went to see Shaft with his father in 1971. "My father used to always say, and he looked a lot like Richard Roundtree too, that someone saw him walking down the street and made that movie," laughs Singleton. Singleton's father wasn't unique. The movie attracted large crowds across the country. Black men saw themselves in Shaft, they wanted to be him or be like him. Women of all races thought he was sexy. Even white men dug him; Shaft was the kind of brother they knew they could be friends with. The result was a crossover hit still popular today, and for director Gordon Parks, a legacy as the creator of one of the most culturally important films of the last thirty-five years.
In 20 years at Life, Parks completed more than 300 assignments. He shot high fashion in Paris and the celebrities of the day such as Laurence Olivier, Helen Hayes and Henry Fonda. He played paparazzo as the first photographer to shoot Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini in the midst of their scandalous love affair. He was also a muckraking documentarian, his photographs of Flavio da Silva, a sickly young boy living in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, and the Fontanelles, a poor family struggling in a Harlem tenement, exposed the collateral damage of discrimination. "His work at Life attracted attention in my house, as a black man who was doing extraordinary work in the world at-large," says director LeVar Burton. Parks' photo features were renowned "to the point where they were being celebrated in the popular culture, by white culture. And that was rare when I was growing up."
Black parents used Parks, and his work, as examples for their children. "My parents would show me the articles and photo essays that were shot by Gordon Parks, so I knew about him much before The Learning Tree and Shaft," says Lee. Director Tim Story's (Fantastic Four) parents kept a stack of magazines that featured Parks' photography. Story says he related to the photography and to Shaft before he knew who Parks was, so for him, as for many, the art came before the biography. "The only thing I can really pull from [Parks], throw into my work, is the art, the photographs, the films. If I were doing a project that dealt with the history of what he was going through, then I could put that in my work, but the only thing I can get something from is the art. Everything else is more about history."
Parks started out in the days before the Civil Rights Act, during the struggle for equality, when there were few black professionals of any occupation, when role models were people who were simply able to build lives on their own terms. By those standards, Parks' success seems miraculous.
Parks came to Hollywood for two reasons, the first was that he wanted to challenge himself, and making a film had been a goal of his for some time. He had already made a short documentary about Flavio da Silva, the subject of his earlier photo essay. After he published his autobiographical novel The Learning Tree in 1965, about a 15-year-old boy who lived in a Kansas town with fragile race relations, he spent two luckless years trying to attract backing to turn the book into a film with himself as director. One producer suggested making all the characters white. Another thought the solution was getting Gloria Swanson to play Parks' mother.
Parks' second reason for coming west was to break through the color barrier that still existed in Hollywood. Melvin Van Peebles recalls walking down the Champs-Elyses in Paris in 1967, shortly before his first independent feature, Story of a Three Day Pass, stunned the San Francisco Film Festival, when he ran into Parks, "my first black living legend," says Van Peebles. "He talked about the film, the one that he wanted to do. And said he had not been able to crack the white barrier in Hollywood as a director. And I told him not to worry that I was going to let him in."
Then in 1968, actor-director John Cassavetes read The Learning Tree and became determined to help. "There are two things that compelled Cassavetes," wrote Parks in his memoir To Smile in Autumn. "He loved The Learning Tree and he wanted to see that barrier against blacks in Hollywood come down." Cassavetes got Parks an interview at Warner Bros.
"Having been around the media for a number of years, he knew that motion pictures would give him some attention," says filmmaker and historian Melvin Donalson, author of Black Directors in Hollywood. "He used his notoriety, in the best sense of the word, and his fame to make that transition." Blacks had made and distributed independent movies in the early days of filmmaking, led by the prolific Oscar Micheaux, the first black man to write, produce and direct a silent film (The Homesteader, 1918) and a talkie (The Exile, 1931). But no black man had ever directed a studio movie. In the late 1940s, studios began to insert small scenes with black actors into big releases, a ploy that attracted black audiences to those movies, undermining Micheaux and his peers.
In the years immediately before Parks, the only blacks in Hollywood with any influence were the few actors who had attained leading-man status, like Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte (black actresses were not in the picture at all). There were no black studio executives, or even black crew. Hiring blacks, "just wasn't done in those days," says Kenneth Hyman, the head of Warner Bros. Seven Arts, whom Cassavetes had encouraged to back The Learning Tree. Hyman, of course, knew of Parks when the photographer walked into his office, and says he was "impressed by him." Parks' celebrity, and the fact that the movie he was going to make was inspired by his extraordinary life, appealed to Hyman who had more or less decided he wanted to work with Parks before the meeting. "He was a distinguished photographer, a distinguished man. There was no denying he knew about lenses and lighting and photographing people," says Hyman.
Parks also had a story that could appeal to both black and white audiences. "It wasn't a story that had a political edge. It showed racism but it did so in a way that it pointed the finger not only at the white characters but there were black characters that had some flaws," says Donalson. At Hyman's suggestion, Parks didn't only direct The Learning Tree, he also agreed to write, produce and score the film. At Parks' urging, Hyman hired nine black crewmembers. Once he had gotten inside, Parks immediately brought others with him. "Gordon was a master of the system," says Warrington Hudlin, producer and host of the documentary Unstoppable: A Conversation with Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks & Ossie Davis. "He figured out how to be right inside and make it work."
Gordon Parks was adept at filmmaking, but the people who admire his movies don't marvel at his technique. Parks visual style was evident in the way he composed frames like photographs, giving his films a gritty, journalistic feel. "At the time in my life when he influenced me the most it wasn't about studying how he did this shot, it was about the emotion of the moment," says Story. "It's more about what made him so cool or what makes me smile when I see that scene." Parks' films were technically at least as accomplished as many then being shown. "In terms of moving black film forward, they looked as great as the other stuff that was in the theaters at that time, that's almost as important as the stories that were being told," says director Gina Prince-Blythewood (Love and Basketball), "because we had to prove we had the talent to make the same kinds of films that the white filmmakers were making, that they didn't have to be second-class films." The Learning Tree opened to mixed reviews, but it did well enough to launch Parks' second career as a director. For black artists that meant Hollywood was open for business. Within a year, Van Peebles would make Watermelon Man for Columbia and Ossie Davis would direct Cotton Comes to Harlem for United Artists.
In 1971, MGM hired Parks to direct Shaft, his most influential film. John Shaft, "the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks," as Isaac Hayes' Oscar-winning theme song described him, solves a kidnapping by using connections within Harlem's gangs and the NYPD, moving effortlessly between the two worlds. Parks didn't think much of the script by J.D. Black when he got it, but after making The Learning Tree as a lyrical, picturesque morality tale, Parks wanted a movie that would prove he could be a commercial director. Also, Cotton Comes to Harlem and Van Peebles' 1971 independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song had young blacks lining up at the cinemas and Parks wanted to be part of that. Parks also wanted to be an inside man, a real studio player, and he knew a moneymaker could get him there. In his autobiography Voices in the Mirror, Parks advised that black filmmakers who want success have to "broaden their horizons and prepare themselves for any worthy project that means survival."
Shaft was not as much "a film by Gordon Parks" as The Learning Tree had been. Ernest Tidyman created the character, Black wrote the screenplay and Joel Freeman produced it. Hayes' score is as famous as the movie itself. But Parks is in the details. The HBO documentary Half Past Autumn, which was produced in conjunction with a retrospective of Parks' photography that toured the country between 1997 and 2001, includes a video clip of Parks working with Hayes on the music for Shaft. Parks is laying out the pace that the beats should keep as the music accompanies Shaft across Times Square in the movie's opening sequence. Hayes, on the piano, and his guitarist start playing the familiar riff; as Parks' vision comes alive, you can see how he made the scene work.
Parks shot Shaft for $1.2 million; it took in more than $18 million at the box office, mostly from young blacks and their white friends. His use of contemporary music and authentic locations were copied ad nauseam in the blaxploitation films of the early '70s which provided a windfall for cash-strapped studios but eventually degenerated into trashy fare, populated by bad actors playing stereotypes. But Parks' vision wouldn't be completely lost. Decades later, directors like Singleton, who remade Shaft in 2000, with Samuel L. Jackson in the lead role as John Shaft's nephew, and Quentin Tarantino, who did his take on blaxploitation films with 1997's Jackie Brown, would help keep the genre alive. In 2000, the Library of Congress gave Shaft its cultural seal of approval by selecting it for preservation based on its historical importance. (The Learning Tree was one of the first 25 films to receive the honor, in 1998).
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