In Black America; Trying To Get Over, with Keith Corson

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. These were just desperate in the late 60s. They had so many big budget flops and disasters and demographics were just changing so they would try anything and some things would be successes. They appealed to the counterculture with films like Easy Rider and it worked. Let's make some movies for hippies and I think what they found with the independent success of Sweet Sweet Back Badass song and that kind of low budget surprise success of MGM's shaft was that there was an audience out there. They could be a revenue stream for Hollywood because they just had no idea what they were doing at that time going into the 70s. And it's changed in the old guard of Hollywood. All of the studios had been run by the same first or second generation Jewish immigrants would have been the founders of the studios in the 20s. This was trained to a new corporate class and largely people from outside of the film industry so they weren't formed by the same logic of the first 50 years of the studio system.

So it was just kind of a free for all and you had a couple independent successes that really opened that door to say like hey there are black audiences that will come out to watch films. Keith Corson, visiting professor of English at Royal College and author of Trying to Get Over, African American Director after Black Portation, 1977 to 1986 published by University of Texas Press. From 1972 to 1976 Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films, targeted African American audiences. But found this era known as Black's Portation. The momentum suddenly reversal of African American filmmakers and a large voice separated the end of Black Portation. From the Black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee's, she's got to have it in 1986. Illuminating an overlook era in African American film history, trying to get over as the first in depth study of African American directors, working during the decade between 1977 to 1986.

Corson provides a first definition of Black's Portation and lays out a concrete reason for it and explain the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. The focus primarily on the work of eight directors who were the only African American directors making commercially distributed films in the decade that followed the Black's Portation cycle. I'm Johnny Ohansson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, trying to get over with author Keith Corson in Black America. Well, it's a contested term is the first thing to kind of consider with Black's Portation and it's been used in different ways by different people. Black's Portation was coined by Variety and they just meant it was a trend in appealing to a Black audience. Jesse Jackson and Operation Push used it as this way of Hollywood exploiting African Americans on screen and off screen. So I had this negative connotation. The way I see it is it's a production cycle. It is a focused on by Hollywood studios on making films for a prominent Black audience with predominantly Black cast and you can see a spike that happens right after Shaft and Sweet Sweep Back's Badass song in 1971.

And then it has an end after 1976. So I really look at it as a time signature, right. Films may be between 72 and 76 because after 76 Black representation. In a lot of ways just goes away in the American film industry up until you know the arrival of spike using the careers of eight directors and the 24 films they produced from 1977 to 1986 to tell a larger story about Hollywood. And the shifting dialogue about race power and access keep course and show how these directors are key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they shape popular culture over the past quarter century. Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado earned a BA degree in film studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder. A master's degree in radio and television film from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in cinema studies from New York University.

The decades of the 1960s and 70s can be defined as a time of change with the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement and the Vietnam War protesting. The Sultry Foundation of America was being challenged. This spirit of change also manifested itself in Black cinema. Coming off the heels of the peak of the civil rights movement came in the creation of a genre known as Black's Plortation. If it wasn't for Black's Plortation era, the film industry would have collapsed. Through 1976 and estimated 2000 Black's Plortation films were produced with the range of stories as varied as mainstream action films. Wow, I think it's one of those things. You know, latch-key kids in the 80s, right? You just kind of come home and you figure out what you want to do. And for me, it was just going to the video store, renting movies and Cinemax and HBO and Encore and all just the influx, this flow of movies. And I just kind of over-indulged. And then I realized you could do this for a profession and freaked me out. I thought that was the most amazing thing ever.

Do you remember some of those first movies that you saw that kind of sparked that interest that you still like to view the day? Yeah, I mean, I think the transition from watching movies just for entertainment to thinking seriously about movies, the movie that really did it for me was Spike School Days. It's not something that most people like of Spike, right? But something about that film, you could tell there was a critical discourse going on there. And I was 11 or 12 and I saw it and it just opened up my world in terms of how I looked at stuff. So school days was a big movie for me. When one attends college to major in cinema, what are some of the coursework that they undertake? Yeah, they take sort of intro to film. You sort of learn the language of film, right? Some has its own way of organizing. It's text. So you learn editing, you learn about meat on sin, right? What's placed in front of the camera? You learn about narrative. So that's really the beginning. And then after that, you get into theory and history.

I mean, those are the two major things that you focus on. So you kind of learn how to break down a film, place it in historical context and aesthetic context, tease out themes, right? The same way you look at literature. So students really get into film because you can, you feel like you're familiar with it. It's not daunting. The same way, you know, looking at great Gatsby could be daunting. It seems successful. So it's a great kind of gateway drug for a critical discourse for students. I just recently spoke with one of the directors of the new roots and he was explaining to me about the process of putting a film together. From your standpoint, I understand that sometimes they more often than not, they shoot films out of sequence. How was that done and does it really bother the director to a certain extent to do that? Yeah, I mean, a lot of this just kind of practical decisions, you know, you need to repeat a scene or a locale later on.

And how are you going to maximize your time, your effort, the economy of setting up these shots and getting your film in the can? But sometimes they make me, they can really bother the director. One of the movies I write about in my book is Car Wash. Right. Amazing 1976 film by Michael Schultz. And Schultz said it was too complicated. There are 20 moving parts in terms of characters and keeping everything together. The day of a life in a LA Car Wash and he shot the whole thing in sequence, which was really rare. Right. So some directors just find it daunting to take on the task of having all these things, all these bodies and characters in motion and having it all out of sequence. So it takes a lot of pre-planning or shooting in sequence. What brought you to the point that you believe that this type of undertaking needed to take place, Black Portation, 1977 through 1986? I was an undergrad and I was taking a course on cinema in the 1970s and each week we had a different representative example of something that's gone on the 70s and we did shaft and I wrote a paper on it. And in researching that paper, I just realized how little was written, how few scholars have looked into African American images, not only in the 70s but in the era after, right after Black Portation.

There's so much going on but it's just this void in scholarship. So when I was an undergrad, I thought I had the idea of feeling in that gap and that's what I've attempted to do with this book. When one speak of Black Portation, I guess this generation has no idea what we're speaking of. So give us a class course in that particular terminology. Sure. Well, it's a contested term. It's the first thing to consider with Black Portation and it's been used in different ways by different people. Black Portation was coined by Variety and they just meant it was a trend in appealing to a Black audience. Jesse Jackson, an Operation Push, used it as this way of Hollywood exploiting African Americans on screen and off screen, so at this negative connotation.

The way I see it is a production cycle. It is a focused on by Hollywood studios on making films for a prominent Black audience with a predominantly Black cast. And you can see a spike that happens right after Shaft and Sweet Tweetbacks Badass song in 71. And it has an end after 1976. So I really look at it as a time signature. Films may be between 72 and 76 because after 76, Black representation in a lot of ways just goes away in the American Film Industry up until the arrival of spike. Tell us how did we get to this point in history cinema? The African American audience was looked at as a viable option for the studios in Hollywood. Yeah, I mean, the studios were just desperate in the late 60s. I mean, they had so many big budget flops and disasters and demographics were just changing. So they would try anything and some things would be successes, right?

I mean, they appealed to the counterculture with films like Easy Rider and that worked. So, hey, let's make some movies for hippies, right? And I think what they found with the independent success of Sweet Tweetbacks Badass song and that kind of low budget, that surprise success of MGM's Shaft was that there was an audience out there that could be a revenue stream for Hollywood. Because they just had no idea what they were doing at that time that going into the 70s. And it's a change in the old guard of Hollywood. I mean, all of the studios had been run by the same first or second generation Jewish immigrants would have been the founders of the studios in the 20s, right? And this was transitioning to a new corporate class and largely people from outside of the film industry. So they weren't informed by the same logic that had underpinned the industry for the first 50 years of the studio system. So it was just kind of a free for all. And you had a couple independent successes that really opened that door to say like, hey, there are black audiences that will come out to watch films.

How did you design on the eight directors to highlight in this particular work? I mean, really it was. So I wanted to tell the story about what happened between the end of the black exploitation cycle and then the arrival of Spike Lee. Okay. So I'm looking at what happens in between there. And there's only eight directors who make commercially distributed films in that time frame, you know, feature-length films that made it to theaters for a paying audience. And these are the directors and those are the filmmakers working with African American directors, but they're outside of the kind of commercial oriented cinema. So these directors kind of present in themselves to me. And these are just the people who made those films. All right. If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny Ohansson, Jr., and you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio. And we speak with Dr. Keith Corson, visiting Professor of English at Rose College, an author of trying to get over African American directors after Black Portation, 1977 through 1986. Keith, it is difficult in this half hour that we have to go through the litany of information that you've stated in this particular work.

Why wasn't it important for you to begin with chapter one when you talk about Bill Guns 1981 novel, Ryan Stone, Sheriff Krupper? I think Bill Gunn is a great representative example of someone who struggled with how he related to Hollywood. And I think that's the really the through line of my book is that you have directors who are attempting to exist within mainstream Hollywood, but are finding all sorts of points of resistance. Right. Them being resistant to Hollywood and Hollywood being resistant to their inclusion. And Gunn is this sort of tragic figure. He's this absolute genius overflowing with creativity, but his ventures as a director and a writer in Hollywood were across the board, frustrating. So Gunn was just a great example and Gunn, someone who wrote this novel, you know, it's a thinly veiled autobiography about his experience of being a writer on the Muhammad Ali biopic, the greatest, this 1977 film, which is not great. And he got fired off of it, but Gunn is just in this novel. He's so articulate with the experience of a black artist working in Hollywood at that time.

So it was the absolute perfect hook. Why was it so difficult for African American directors doing this period before and after to go on the financing and distribution deals? Wow, I think there was this opening of the door during black exploitation. One of the false myths of black exploitation is this is a bunch of films made by white directors and about a third of the films were made by African American directors. The 182 films that came out between 72 and 76, 58 were directed by African Americans. So it was an unprecedented inclusion for black directors. First time black directors were brought into the fold. What happens after 1976 is that there's a transition into blackbuster filmmaking. So small budget films that were the kind of the bread and butter of the black petition era just kind of disappear and really like a person who really, the only two people who really transitioned out of the black exploitation era in terms of being black directors and still working in a high level in Hollywood are Michael Schultz and Sidney Pauari.

So it was just a time they weren't making those kind of films and there weren't black directors who were being trusted by the studios for whatever reason to handle quote unquote mainstream fair. Michael Schultz seems to me in your writing. He happened to be at the right place at the right time. He also had the right, it might be the wrong word, but he had an agreeable personality working in Hollywood. He knew how to compromise and make films for a studio which not all directors have that ability to kind of put their ego aside and just say, what do you have for me? I'll make this work. And this comes from his work in television where you have less agency. So Schultz absolutely was, you know, just had the right personality and the right temperament to make that transition.

When he went to make Cooley High, tell us about that process. Yeah, I mean, Cooley High was this. He had made two independent films before that that hadn't done much business. But what happened was that American International Pictures, the exploitation studio that was making Cooley High. They had been kind of the, they had been the recipient of the brunt of the anti black exploitation attacks from people like Jesse Jackson. And so one of their ways of responding to this was making more sensitive films about black community. And so they hired Michael Schultz because basically because he was black, they felt like they needed a black director to make this black focused film. And Schultz said that he was just kind of given freedom to craft that how he wanted, as long as he kept it under budget, he could do whatever he wanted. And he made this amazing heartfelt film. It was promoted as the black American graffiti.

But one of the things that Schultz talked about afterwards, he said that he got a call from from Francis for Coppola and George Lucas. So friends for Coppola had had produced American graffiti and Lucas directed it. And Coppola had said to Lucas, like, hey, I saw this film. They say it's a black American graffiti, but it's better than American graffiti. They called up Schultz and then he went up to the to wine country with them and hung out and they became friends. So it's just an amazing film that he just had kind of freedom to turn into what it is. Besides him having projects on his own, you write about him being a director for hire. He used to come in and save films that would destined to be complete flops. Yeah. He saved this film, a great lightning, this Richard Pryor film that was originally directed by Melvin Van Peebles and it was his passion project for Van Peebles. It's a story about Wendell Scott, the first black stock car racer, the first black NASCAR driver.

And Van Peebles had a falling out studio got fired, been away through, and Richard Pryor, who had starring in the film, called up Schultz's, hey man, I'm here in Georgia shooting this film. And I need some help. So Schultz went in to save that and then four years later, he ended up doing the same thing on bust and loose. Another prior vehicle that production basically had halted in Schultz went in and saved the film. Schultz was also instrumental in getting more African Americans involved in the trade. Took him a while, but he finally got there somewhat. Yeah, I mean, part of this had been started by Gordon Parks in the 1970s when he's making shaft and the sequel to shaft. He was really involved in getting inclusion in unions, right, in the film crews, teamsters and everything. When Schultz was shooting this film called The Last Dragon, he shoot in New York City and it was a union film and he saw that all the crew was white.

And he's like, this needs to be addressed. And he didn't address on that film, but later on that same year, he went and shot a film called Crush Groove. This hip-hop film in New York. And when he made that film at Warner Brothers, he was a producer on that film as well as director. And he made sure that opportunities would be crafted. I think it had maybe a 50% film crew that was of color. And it opened up opportunities. I mean, Ernest Dickerson, who we come a director in the 90s, but he was Spike's director of photography. His first real-paying gig was as the cinematographer on Cooley High, straight out at NYU, grad school. He's working on a Warner Brothers film. And that's all because of Schultz. So we credit Spike with a lot of this stuff while I'm what he's doing, particularly with Do The Right Thing. But that had been something that Schultz had worked on. City Portie had worked on that, inclusion in film crews, and then definitely Gordon Parks. So there's a legacy. There's a lineage.

I found an interesting that Spike Lee was hanging out with Michael Schultz back in the day and one would think that Spike just propped up overnight. Yeah, I mean, Spike's a cinephile, right? And Spike was always engaged. I mean, he was watching everything. There's great stories about him as an NYU student going to John Pearson and requesting certain films for Pearson's kind of repertory screenings and saying, hey, I want to screen Paul Schrader's blue collar because I think it's a great film about black identity and unions and things like that. So Schultz was engaged. I mean, Schultz was interested in, excuse me, Spike was engaged with what was going on. So he's definitely someone who picked a lot of his tendencies, I think, from a number of filmmakers that he learned about in film school and was screened out on his own, but also African-American filmmakers. We tend to not think of that. We tend to think of Spike as someone who's kind of created an vacuum, but that's certainly not the case.

I also found interesting from some of the photos that included in the book, some of the actors that came to be prominent looking at Samuel Jackson. Also looking at Denzel Washington, then his other brother, I can't, I flipped over earlier in today. He was a stable on Kojak, but we also talking about Bill Doos and Ivan Dixon. And look like all of these individuals came along at the same time while these black African-American directors are trying to get a foothold in the industry. Yeah, I mean, it was an interesting time in the early 70s for black actors. And a lot of this was people who came in a theater. I mean, the black arts movement really, in some ways, got co-opted, might be the wrong word, but there was a pool of talent out of New York in the early 70s with this flourishing of black-focused cinema. So you see all sorts of, there's an amazing collection of people all working at the same time.

If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny L. Hanson Jr., and you're listening in black America from KUG Radio. And we speak with Dr. Keith Corson, building professor of English at Rose College, an author of trying to get over African-American directors after black portation, 1977 to 1986. Writing his second act, Sydney Poitier, one would have thought that Sydney's celebrity, it did guiding him a lot of respect as far as his acting career is concerned, but he had difficulty up behind the camera. Yeah, and one of the things that's really fascinating about Sydney is how this whole span in his career as a director has just kind of been ridden out of his history. Try to keep Sydney kind of sealed as this civil rights icon. So we look at the defined ones over and over again, we look at in the heat of the night, and we just kind of want to keep him in that space. But, you know, he transitioned and he had this kind of second act in his career as a director, and was doing some interesting things and some things that didn't pan out so well in 1980s.

But that's 20 years of his career that really just not talked about very often. So I think it's worth considering. And what I found really fascinating about Poitier in this transition is these generational struggles that you see, how that civil rights generation relates to an audience in the 70s, in the 80s. Right, this, this sense of being in touch or out of touch with, with the youth, right, and party is definitely out of touch by the 1980s. But I think it's interesting kind of like look at the political underpinnings of that, you know, this kind of maybe more conservative viewpoint that you get for someone like party or like Cosby, right. And that's one of the things when this book comes out, you know, I wasn't prepared. Cosby's a recurring figure. I didn't know I'd be taking on that baggage, but it is what it is, right. Right. Also, you write in the book about Mr. Poitier's directing style, which he basically took from stage as far as having a long view of the story and action instead of having close up.

I guess you can explain it better than I can. Yeah, I think one of the things you see in contemporary comedies, people like Judd Apatau is they create space for improvisation. Okay. When you when you shoot a film in a, when you should have seen in a film, usually using one camera, right. So you're, you're focused on one angle, and then you set up for another angle, you have to repeat that dialogue exactly as it's written on the screen. That leads to a very kind of, you're tied to the script that way. Poitier would shoot with multiple cameras like you wouldn't television, and that way you give or he would take, he would have like these kind of wider takes where you have everything happening in front of the camera in a single take. And that way, if prior wants to go on a kind of a walk about in the middle of the scene with Gene Wilder, he can do it, right. Really innovative way of shooting comedy. And now with people like Judd Apatau, Adam McKay, that's really the standard way of shooting. You get films like Ancerman, they can have a whole second film just on alternate takes because you just have interesting people forming these movies and see what happens. You know, it's kind of open things up. And, and the scripts were really written with this kind of space for improvisation, right.

Let's talk to actually just say like Richard, do your thing. Then they go with it. Right. Let's talk about Mr. Poitier's first film directing project, Buckingham Preacher, and you're writing about the similarities in which he was trying to bring out in the film as it related to historical presence of African Americans in the West, but also some of the things that would happen in the civil rights movement at the time. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's really interesting about genre films, and I think the Western is the greatest example. I always talked to students about this. You know, why do we make so many films that in this 30 years span in this very specific geography in the world, right. Why do we return to the West? And really it's this representative example of America, right. Symbolic gesture of what America means. And it changes based on who's making it and when these films are being made.

I mean, what a Western means in the 1970s is different than what it meant in the 1930s, right. And the kind of relationship we have with the nation. So it's it's a great way of having Alan Gory. Keep course on visiting professor of English that rose college and author of trying to get over African American directors after black exploitation in 1977 to 1986. If you have questions, comments or suggestions after your future in black American programs email us at J Hanson at kut.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Remember the Lakers on Facebook and the followers on Twitter. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org until we have the opportunity again for Texas co-produced today with Alvarez. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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