Shaft Nostalgia

By Jeff Siegel

To anyone who was there, nostalgia for the 1970s seems an odd and curious thing. What is there to be wistful about in a decade that produced Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian hostage crisis?

That's what makes this summer's debut of the remake of Shaft -- the seminal black action-adventure movie -- so intriguing. John Singleton, who directed the new Shaft, doesn't seem like the sort who would go in for bell bottom mindlessness or sex and violence just for the sake of sex and violence. Boyz N the Hood is not Titanic.

But that's the sort of effect the original has on so many, even those who should know better. They remember the music and Richard Roundtree's leather pants, and they forget what Shaft meant in 1971. Shaft not only gave African Americans their first real shot at Hollywood jobs behind the camera, but it played a pivotal role in rescuing the movie industry from the financial quirks that threatened the industry's future in the era before multi-plexes and suburban movie malls. It was far from an exercise in sex and violence, as so many of its detractors claimed.

"Shaft is certainly significant," says critic Todd Boyd. "It was the first mainstream studio film from that era that accented what would become a staple of Hollywood: the urban black male figure. It spoke in a voice that Hollywood hadn't heard before."

Today, Gordon Parks is past 80, with a lifetime of accomplishments to his credit-- award-winning photographer, critically-acclaimed film director, respected author and well-known musician. Parks, the son of a Kansas dirt farmer and one of 15 children, can sit in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the U.N. building and play his piano, think about writing another book or plan another retrospective of his photography. But that doesn't mean the man who directed Shaft has let down his guard.

"I hate that term, blaxploitation," says Parks. "Shaft has nothing to do with exploitation. I don't know where they got that. What Shaft was about was providing work for black people that they never had before, letting them get into films. That's not exploitation. Shaft was the type of film that Hollywood made with white actors. Cagney could have been in Shaft. But I didn't notice that they called those kind of movies white exploitation. Now, I'm not responsible for what the studios did after Shaft was a success, how they rushed in to take advantage of that success. What we wanted was to get the movies integrated."

There are many ironies surrounding Shaft's success -- and it was immensely successful, breaking box office records throughout the country -- and none is more ironic than that contradiction. The movie that has been held accountable for every excess from Superfly through Cleopatra Jones, Foxy Brown and Three the Hard Way, to the dollar-a-day-crudities that eventually killed the genre, was praised at the time for advancing the cause of the African American in Hollywood.

Behind-the-camera hiring emphasized minorities, with black and white working on each phase of production. Ernest Tidyman's script was polished by John D.F. Black (a Star Trek veteran, oddly enough), and his job was to heighten the excitement and in Parks' words, "make the movie more black."

"What you have to remember is that Hollywood had never done a black picture for black audiences," says scholar Elizabeth Hadley Freydberg. "All of the images, even in films like Cabin in the Sky, were developed for white audiences and reinforced what white people thought about black people."

That was not the case with Shaft, as the noted New York Times film critic Vincent Canby realized when he saw the picture on a Saturday night in a Manhattan theater. His visit came in the middle of the theater's weekend -- an almost continuous screening of the movie from 10:30 a.m. on Friday to 2 a.m. on Sunday. The audience, wrote Canby, was 90 percent black, and when Shaft made love to a white woman in his shower, the audience booed.

"I'm led to wonder," Canby wrote in awe, "if, perhaps, the existence of what seems to be a large, hungry, black movie audience -- an audience whose expectations are treated mostly in token fashion by TV -- might not be one of the more healthy and exciting developments on the current movie scene."

Canby's analysis, as dated as it may seem now, made perfect sense in 1971. The movie industry was not on firm financial footing. Attendance was down, its stars were old and its methods were shopworn. It was, in many respects, still making pictures for the same audiences it had made them for 25 years earlier-that generic white, middle-class audience who went to downtown movie theaters.

Even the hip films like Easy Rider, Carnal Knowledge and Midnight Cowboy, played to the younger portion of that audience. Most of the rest was indistinguishable from what had preceded it in the past three or four decades. In the first six months of 1971, Hollywood released Rio Lobo, Raid on Rommel, Plaza Suite and Love Story -- hardly the sorts of things that would play to Canby's Manhattan movie crowd.

What few attempts had been made to reach the new urban audience had been haphazard. Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, about a black stuperstud on the run from the police, had debuted in early 1971, but was never more than an art house hit for all of its later critical praise. Even the mainstream pictures, like the 1970 adaptation of Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem were as notable for what they didn't include as what they did. Himes, for one, didn't think much of the movie, lamenting the changes that had been made to attract a white audience.

What few in Hollywood realized was that the white audience had changed, and the biggest change was where it went to the movies. Downtown theaters were closing by the hundreds in the early 1970s, as urban whites moved to the suburbs and stopped going downtown to the movies. It's no coincidence that the week Shaft opened in New York, the first multi-plex opened in the New York area -- four screens in one building in Queens.

Eventually, the blockbuster hits of the late 1970s and early 1980s like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark enabled the studios to transform themselves from companies that produced movies for people to watch in large downtown theaters to companies that distributed movies for people to watch in suburban multi-plexes. But until that transition was complete, the future was dicey. Shaft and the films that followed paid the bills until the suburbanization of the movie business was complete.

"I don't think it's too much to say that these films helped to save the studios," says Boyd. "Most pop culture trends take place outside of films, so it probably wasn't a growing realization that there was a black audience that led them to make these movies. I think they were embracing the financial rewards."

That confusion was reflected in the film's acceptance. No one was quite sure what to make of Shaft, even with all of those black faces on the screen. It was a traditional private eye movie in an era when Klute passed for a traditional private eye movie, and it presaged the action-adventure films of the 1980s like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard by more than a decade.

About the only thing anyone agreed on was that they didn't like it. One of Canby's colleagues at the Times said it had the "dramatic logic of a Flash Gordon movie." Clayton Riley, an African-American critic, wrote, "Shaft was a disaster. It was technically mediocre and poorly acted. Worse, Parks, who was supposed to know better, made a film that lacked style and substance."

The reviewers were unduly harsh. Shaft is not a great film, and Parks prefers The Learning Tree, his adaptation of his autobiography, and Leadbelly, a biography of the legendary blues artist, among his work. But Shaft is not a bad film, either. It has not dated, something that few of its contemporaries, whether blaxploitation or mainstream, can claim. The narrative, which involves Harlem gangsters, the Mafia, black militants, and Roundtree crashing through a glass window with a gun in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, has its flaws. But it seems like Citizen Kane compared to any of the Die Hard movies.

The reviewers missed three things: Parks' direction, which had an urban sensibility to it that was rare at the time; Roundtree's performance, an astonishing effort from someone in his first movie; and Isaac Hayes' soundtrack, which broke as much ground as the film itself did.

Parks, who lived in New York, knew the city. He had made his name in 1949 with a Life magazine series exploring Harlem gangs. He knew how to make New York a character in the picture, whether it was Harlem, the Village or the Upper West Side. Anyone who doubts that should watch the opening scene, when Roundtree gets off the subway at Broadway and 42nd Street, cuts across traffic and walks uptown to his office. Parks shot the scene from the roof of a nearby building, but didn't close the street. When a cab almost bumps Roundtree, it really almost bumps Roundtree, and the actor's gesture at the cabbie is really a gesture at the cabbie.

"That story needed to be told with authenticity," says Parks. "Richard was terrified he would be hit by a car. But that's why I love that scene. From that moment on, everyone knows that Richard is Shaft."

That is something, hopefully, that Singleton took note of. If Shaft is about anything, it is about that -- a black man making a living in New York. That he throws people out windows is almost incidental.

Roundtree's story is even more amazing. He had been a model in the late 1960s after dropping out of Southern Illinois University, where he told an interviewer he started acting because he wanted to meet girls. He had done a stint with the Negro Ensemble Company, a road show of The Great White Hope and non-speaking parts in two since-forgotten films. He only got to read for Shaft because he knew Parks' son, David.

But the director was impressed, and not just by Roundtree's rugged good looks. He brought a suppressed rage to the character that showed up on the screen several times, especially when he broke a bottle over the head of a Mafia goon after the latter had spit on him. Roundtree's performance hinted that Shaft knew that anger wasn't the solution to the black man's problems, but that also he wasn't sure that anything else would work.

Before Roundtree, black actors who wanted to be stars had to be like Sidney Poitier -- safe enough for a white daughter to bring home for dinner. After Roundtree, black actors who wanted to be stars could look forward to having the white daughter for dessert.

Hayes was already a well-known figure in soul music when Parks approached him about writing music for the film. At Memphis' legendary Stax Records, Hayes and partner David Porter had written and produced a string of Sam and Dave hits, including "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Coming." Parks says he thought Hayes' sound -- what one critic has described as "slow, somber and as slinky as great sex" -- matched what he was trying to do visually.

A bunch of people agreed. Hayes' double-record soundtrack, which he wrote and produced, won an Academy Award and a Grammy, going platinum in the process. The Theme from Shaft, with its strutting, insistent rhythm section (featuring the Bar-Kays) and its wah wah guitars, hit No. 1 on the pop charts, an especially impressive achievement given its intoned monologue and its 4-minute length. In fact, Hayes has been called everything from the father of disco after cutting "Hot Buttered Soul" in 1975 to the man who made it possible for Barry White to be Barry White.

"There have been so many things written about Shaft and about me that all I can do is take it in stride," says Parks. "As long as it's halfway true, I'm not going to complain about it.

"Shaft was a big hit because we gave the audience what it wanted. We gave them, for the first time, a black hero, and it was a hero that they liked." And that's better than any attempt at nostalgia.