Black Market

Producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. was finishing up work in Harlem last week on Come Back Charleston Blue. The director, Mark Warren, is black, as are most of the cast and crew. Billed as a sequel to 1970's lucrative Cotton Comes to Harlem, the film is something more than that. It is part of a new Hollywood wave of eminently commercial movies by blacks about the black experience.

Cotton had merely been a successful novelty for Hollywood. Then, in Sweet Sweetback's Baadaasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles gave white film makers a revelation, earning several million with a low-budget opus that was furiously and uncompromisingly black. But it was Shaft that put the message across. Photographer-Author-Composer Gordon Parks' action film about a black New York James Bond cost $500,000 and was one of three movies that made any profit for MGM last year: an astonishing $ 13 million gross in the U.S. alone.

Money like that means business.

Hollywood finally took note of two basic facts: first, with movie theaters clustering in big cities and whites moving to the suburbs, the black sector of the moviegoing public was growing rapidly (an estimated 20% in the past five years); second, the black audience was hungry for films it could identify with, made by blacks, with black heroes, about black life. Now every major studio is making a play for the big black market.

More Realism. Prompted by the success of the original, most of the studios are going blackface with adventure films. Parks and company are now shooting Shaft's Big Score for MGM, which just released Cool Breeze, a black version of The Asphalt Jungle. Warner's, with Charleston Blue in the works, is planning a series of black "active adventure comedies." Universal and Fox will contribute their own versions of the black private-eye story. A bit more imaginative, Columbia has a black western, Buck and the Preacher, ready for spring distribution; it is directed by Sidney Poitier, who stars with Harry Belafonte. Paramount will release The Legend of Nigger Charley, about a slave who kills his overseer and heads for the frontier--a Southern western.

Exploitation? Black intellectuals are dismayed at the spate of Shaft-like characters about to emerge, feeling that they simply perpetuate for whites the myth of the black superstud. But Parks insists that Shaft--"a ballsy guy, to hell with everybody, he goes out and does his thing"--was an important symbol for the black community. Besides, black film makers are looking at the bright side. They are getting work, and films are getting made.

Gordon Parks Jr. has just turned director and completed shooting his first feature, Superfly. An independent production, the film, about a Harlem hustler confronting his world, is still in the adventure genre but with deeper implications. "There's more energy here," said the younger Parks on his set. "It's a lot more relaxed, more informal. Our crews are smaller and communication is better--most black film makers want to be realistic." Says Hugh Robertson, a black film editor hired by MGM to direct his first movie: "Some of the stories we'd like to make are still too potent for the studios to tackle, but the masses can be educated." Ossie Davis is even more optimistic. "The impact made on American music can be duplicated in film," he says. "It can become our medium. As outsiders in America, our life-style is richer, more rhythmic and colorful, and we may have retained enough vitality to regenerate the culture."

Depending on one's point of view, Davis' vision may seem like an expanded version of a racial cliche, or like a black rhapsody. His approach, however, is practical. As president of Third World Cinema, a film company that is also a New York-based community project, he is helping young blacks learn about all aspects of film making. With federal funding, TWC has established an on-the-job training program for aspiring black and Puerto Rican moviemakers, with 53 apprentices now working, and a film school is in the planning stages. TWC's film plans are appropriately ambitious. They include a biography of Billie Holiday (Motown, a black record company, is already shooting its version of the Billie Holiday story, starring Diana Ross), a film from the works of Puerto Rican Author Piri Thomas, and an adaptation of John O. Killens' chilling war novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder.

The number of blacks on both sides of the camera has increased by several hundred percent over the past two years. Still, on most black movies, the technicians, who must be highly trained and union members, are predominantly white. This prompted CORE in January to send a list of seven demands for money, jobs and control to all studios planning to film in Harlem. Some of these seemed negotiable; others, like script approval, were unrealistic. Goldwyn, who made peace with CORE and other groups to finish Charleston Blue on location, points out that film makers may simply "start recreating Harlem in Albuquerque. It's cheaper and easier."

Back in the Hollywood dream factory, AIP, the company responsible for all those beach-blanket movies, motorcycle epics and Vincent Price horror shows, is cashing in on the trend in its own way. Black Director William Crain recently completed shooting the first all-black vampire movie: Blacula.

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