Not only is Pam Grier reviving memories of her butt-kicking past in Jackie Brown, but check out the posse coming up behind her: John Shaft, Christie Love and The Mack.
Those heroes of the 1970s “blaxploitation” era of film and television are blasting their way back to the screen, with movies currently being developed that feature all three.
The return of these violence-prone characters _ a male and female crime-buster and a livin’-large pimp _ may seem inevitable given Hollywood’s mania for revisiting old, popular concepts. Yet they’re also sparking controversy, as some African-Americans view a blaxploitation revival as a regressive return to negative stereotypes.
“To show blacks as pimps and whores just like they’re showing them as gangsters now, it did create an image about blacks that was like the Mafia was to Italian people,” said C. DeLores Tucker, chairwoman of the National Political Congress of Black Women. “We don’t need to go back to those images of the black exploitation movies. Let’s see some positive messages.”
But others view the prospect of new blaxploitation-type films as a chance to re-examine a rich, underappreciated period of African-American pop culture.
“I certainly think that the original blaxploitation era is one that has been misunderstood throughout the years,” said Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television. “What is often promising about the return of previous images to a new era is that they might be understood the second time around.”
What was understood the first time _ at least to the mostly black audiences who packed the theaters _ was that after decades of taking supporting roles in white-populated movies, black performers finally were getting their closeups.
“It’s the only catalog of American movies where the black people are essential to the stories and usually win,” said author Nelson George, who wrote the screenplays for Strictly Business and CB4. “They’re basically stories of triumph, and that was unusual.”
The stories usually involved gritty black characters sticking it to The Man (i.e., agents of the white power structure) as they liberally employed guns, fists and sex. The movies were dubbed “blaxploitation” because they featured black casts and fit the general exploitation-film description: heavily marketed movies made on the cheap.
Shaft, Gordon Parks’ 1971 tale of a black private eye (Richard Roundtree) scouring the streets of Harlem, jump-started the trend, spawning its own series of films as well as fellow crimefighters like Jim Brown’s title character of the Slaughter movies.
More troublesome heroes came out of the underworld, like Ron O’Neal’s drug-dealer character in Superfly (1972) and Max Julian’s pimp in The Mack (1973). Meanwhile, Pam Grier was creating the archetype of the sexy avenger in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974).
“I didn’t invent it, but I did exemplify what was going on in the women’s movement of independence _ that it was OK to be assertive yet feminine,” Grier said.
Grier’s action-woman image was so powerful that television soon followed with its first black policewoman: Teresa Graves as the title character of the 1974 crime show Get Christie Love!. But that ABC series lasted just one season, and blaxploitation had faded by the end of the decade.
Now Danny DeVito’s production company, Jersey Films, is developing a Get Christie Love! movie for Universal to star Whitney Houston. Director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood) is writing a new Shaft flick with the hope of starting another series, and the producers of New Jack City are remaking The Mack.
“It’s one of those really big loads of pop culture that hasn’t been mined,” said Jersey Films partner Michael Shamberg of the blaxploitation era. “Everything else has been brought back and strip-mined, but here you’ve got a mother lode that hasn’t been touched yet that people grew up on and that’s associated with some of the best music of the era.”
A new generation
“We’ve all seen enough ‘hood movies,” said Mark Gill, president of Miramax’s Los Angeles operation, “and a generation of moviegoers has cycled through since we last saw blaxploitation movies. And let’s face it, this is the ironic decade. All this postmodernist stuff works pretty well with the blaxploitation movies: You can have your funk and wink at it too.”
The blaxploitation era’s heavily orchestrated, sinuous soul music already has mounted a comeback. Rhino Records recently released a two-disc version of Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack packed with extra tracks. Also, hip-hop artists have been sampling Mayfield, Isaac Hayes (Theme From ‘Shaft’) and others from the period, and some rappers name-drop the blaxploitation characters.
“It’s very much a part of the tapestry of contemporary black young culture, so it’s still in some ways very current,” George said.
Boyd, author of the 1997 book Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the ‘Hood and Beyond, also credits Quentin Tarantino with boosting blaxploitation in his films.
“There’s a discussion of Christie Love in Reservoir Dogs, there’s a pivotal scene in True Romance where the characters are watching scenes from The Mack, and Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown seem to be on the same sort of kick,” Boyd said. “What it has done is made these images popular with a kind of hip, literate, contemporary film audience, and by extension he has given it a sort of credibility in popular culture as a whole that may have been previously exclusive to African-American culture.”
A question of relevance
The irony is that although Jackie Brown opens with Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street _ from the 1973 movie of the same name _ Grier’s comeback vehicle is an intrigue caper film that bears little relation to the blaxploitation formula. That’s fine with Grier, who wonders how a blaxploitation film could be relevant today.
“We’ll never be able to repeat the ’70s,” she said. “We can go back and reflect and have retrospectives, but politically, socially, intellectually, realistically we will never have it again. Anything that’s being done is derivative.”
Last year Grier co-starred in a movie that tried to update the formula in a socially relevant manner. Original Gangstas united her, Fred Williamson (Hammer), Brown, Roundtree and O’Neal as old-school toughies who don’t battle The Man but the young black gangbangers terrorizing the town. The target African-American audience stayed away.
“You thought people are going to want to see people come back to the community and stand up to the young men who are out of control and are destroying the community, and I don’t know if the support was there from the [filmgoers),” Grier said. “I don’t know if it was the storytelling or just the subject matter.”
Likewise, she is dubious that audiences would accept straightforward updates of the ’70s movies. “It won’t work because you have 20 years of people being much more sophisticated and sensitive to abuse and violence,” Grier said. “I don’t know if you did The Mack today how it would play. I don’t know if any of the films _ Coffy, Foxy Brown and Sheba [Baby) _ would work.”
Paul Hall, a producer of Singleton’s upcoming Shaft movie, said their goal is to “put together a picture that is rooted in the tradition of the era but is very contemporary in its feel. It’s about Shaft today. We catch up with John Shaft many years later and focus on his son, John Jr., who has become a policeman with the NYPD.”
Hall referred to Shaft as a well-known “name brand” and said the movie, which has not been cast, will be an escapist crime movie without any political angle.
“You can’t do that today,” he said. “It’s a different time. It’s a global market. When a studio gives you 25-30 million dollars to make a movie, you have to think about where that movie will play. You want to make a product that will get people in the theaters in Japan, Oklahoma, New York, Chicago, Utah.”
Pimp as hero?
The most potentially troublesome remake is The Mack, being produced by Doug McHenry and George Jackson for Twentieth Century Fox. That movie also hasn’t been cast, though gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg’s name has been floated for the lead, leading to suspicions that the movie will glorify a pimp as the original was criticized for doing.
“I really can’t see any way to remake it without doing the same thing again,” said Kim Roberts, arts and entertainment editor for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American semiweekly newspaper. “Even if you had different actors, it’s the same story.”
Tucker, who has fought an ongoing war against gangsta rap, argued that respected figures such as Colin Powell and the Rev. Jesse Jackson should be the subjects of movies, not pimps. “Too often Hollywood has projected the negative stereotypical images of people,” she complained. “Children are like sponges. Children today are looking at black women like ho’s and b’s.”
McHenry and George Jackson were not available for comment. But Boyd and George said they wouldn’t discount that a worthwhile movie might be made from The Mack.
“As opposed to these simplistic debates about positive and negative images, we need to probe these images and what they say about society,” Boyd said. “I think the attempts at arguing for the dismissal of negative images is short-sighted and narrow-minded.”
George noted that Americans, black and white, have enjoyed movies about criminals since 1931’s The Public Enemy. “Crime movies are basically about people making choices: crime, punishment, life or death,” he said. “These are compelling issues. There are stories embedded in the street life that are quite compelling, and even though people are nervous about them, I don’t see how you can avoid them.”
As for The Mack, he added, “There’s a story to be told about a contemporary pimp and what that life is like and what the consequences are.”
That’s not to say that George is enthusiastic about a blaxploitation revival.
“It does speak to a lack of imagination, doesn’t it?”
