Giving Us the Shaft

By Vincent F.A. Golphin

His first movie, Boyz N the Hood (1991), peeped what was going on in the minds of black young men in the nation's deepest ghettos, the kids most Americans wanted to forget. Filmmaker John Daniel Singleton showed those who had little contact with black males that the angry, impoverished generation is more than a violent, terminally destructive breed.

At the same time, the youngest director nominated for an Oscar cast a new genre in black cinema -- thug flicks, laden with boys, guns and blood. Throughout the '90s, the formula was repeatedly ripped off by movies such as Allen and Albert Hughes' dramatic Menace II Society (1993) and mocked by Paris Barclay's comedic Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996).

Beyond that, Singleton, purposely or accidentally, raised up a thug role model, a black anti-hero that had even not so angry and poor youngsters from Compton to Carmel, Brooklyn to Beverly Hills and Harlem to Hollywood "thugged out" in low-slung, baggy jeans, bandanas, stocking caps, shades and hooded sweatshirts. So, little surprise, in this decade the director offers young black males a different role model -- Shaft.

Crooked cops, small-time drug lords, sleazy informers and sadistic rich kids scratch around New York City's grimy underbelly for Detective John Shaft, a baaad mutha... .well, you can dig it. With Samuel L. Jackson in the starring role, the film purports to be a new take on one of the great film icons of the 1970s. The lead character is tough, smart and cool, like his fictional uncle and mentor once and again played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft.

Singleton directs, co-produced and co-wrote the classic remake which also stars Vanessa Williams, Jeffrey Wright, Christian Bale, Dan Hedaya, Busta Rhymes and Toni Collette. The screenplay, co-authored by Shane Salerno and Richard Price, revived the 1970s breakthrough drama, now part of the Turner Entertainment Co. Library, based on the novel Shaft by Ernest Tidyman. Still, the plot is very 90s.

When spoiled college kid Walter Wade (Christian Bale) kills a black student, John Shaft (Jackson) makes the arrest. Walter skips bail and flees the country, and after two years of waiting, Shaft hauls the rich kid back into custody after he sneaks back into the States. But when Walter's wealthy father posts bail once again, the kid hits the streets and looks to put Shaft in a body bag. But he will have to wait in line. Two corrupt brother cops (Dan Hedaya and Ruben Antiago-Hudson) and a Dominican drug lord (Jeffrey Wright) whom Shaft dissed are also on the blood trail. Shaft's closest pals: Carmen (Vanessa Williams), a colleague on the police force and a streetwise confidant, Rasaan (Busta Rhymes) are the only ones who watch the detective's back while he tracks down a murder witness (Toni Collette) who can put all of the bad guys away.

The original Shaft (1971), directed by Gordon Parks three years after Singleton was born, was a ground-breaker, too. Like Boyz, the drama about a black private detective spawned a new black hero. It also marked the birth of an entirely new genre. Movie-goers had never seen an African-American hero as tough, as sexy and street-smart as John Shaft, played by Roundtree.

"Things were different then," says Singleton. "Up until that time, we really only had Sidney Poitier. When Richard Roundtree came on the scene in Shaft, it had an effect that was just wild. Everybody wanted to copy it."

Shaft gave a generation of black youth shouting "black power" a stronger sense of their potential. Samuel L. Jackson said: "I first saw the original Shaft in Atlanta when I was in college, and it was pretty awesome stuff for me. It was the first time I actually saw someone who looked like me, sounded like me, dressed the way I always wanted to dress and played a hero. He was our first real hero. It was all about Black Pride, and he was very proud. He was strong, he was smart, he was unafraid. He had the power and even the ego that we all wanted."

Nearly thirty years hence, Roundtree, who won the role after doing only one bit part in a previous flick, admitted: "I had no concept of what starring in a film was all about. I was thrown into the water and just started swimming. And then to have it explode like that -- it caught me totally off-guard. I think we can safely say that it changed my life."

Singleton said only a few actors can play the role today. "Sam Jackson was absolutely the pinnacle of those guys," he said. "Shaft is a cool, contemporary presence -- a man who moves easily among many different worlds. He's as much at home downtown as uptown. That's the way the character was originally."

Jackson left an indelible mark on American cinema as Jules, the psychotic, philosopher/hitman in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. In addition to unanimous critical acclaim for his performance, he received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations as Best Supporting Actor as well as a Best Supporting Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He reprised the nutball-killer role in the same director's bizarre tragicomedy Jackie Brown. He received a Golden Globe nomination and the Silver Bear Award for Best Actor in a Comedy at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Jokingly dubbed "the hardest working brother in Hollywood," in the past few years Jackson has starred in The Negotiator and Francois Girard's The Red Violin, Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea, and made a cameo appearance in George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace. This summer he is on the screen in Rules of Engagement with Tommy Lee Jones as a military officer who is on trial for firing on civilians. He also completed production on Caveman's Valentine, directed by up-and-comer black filmmaker Kasi Lemmons. The film follows the story of a homeless man in New York City who discovers a murder. Currently, he is in production on Unbreakable, in which he co-stars with Bruce Willis.

Ex-Miss America Vanessa Williams, who has her own stories about life's ups and downs, said she jumped at the chance to co-star as police detective Carmen Vasquez. "The big carrot that was being dangled in front of me was the chance to work with Sam Jackson," she recalls. "He really knows the art of filmmaking and had a lot to offer every day. It was wonderful watching him feel so at home and knowing what he was doing."

Carmen, Shaft's partner, usually calms the detective's anger. "She's not a nagging wife," Williams explains, "but she does get tired of him trying to do it by himself. She lets him go, but she kind of rolls her eyes and says, 'Okay, that's what I'm dealing with.'"

Jackson and Williams benefited from the assistance of real Jersey City, New Jersey homicide Detective Calvin Hart, who served as technical adviser. As he worked with Jackson on The Negotiator, he brought Williams into the squad where he works, introduced her to female detectives on the force and gave her tours of crime-infested areas. "I showed her where drug deals were going on," he says, "and taught her how to spot the quick moves that give criminals away." He also showed her how male and female officers work with each other and how the presence of a woman tends to calm the often-angry reactions of male cops and detectives.

Rapper Busta Rhymes (Rasaan) is Shaft's right-hand man. "I'm pretty much the guy Shaft can't be because he's a cop," he said. "Shaft has to go about things in the right way, to follow the legal procedure to solve crimes and deal with thugs. Rasaan can assist him in a very unorthodox street way. And that allows Shaft to do his job that much more efficiently." An established figure in the music industry, Rhymes has been branching out increasingly into acting, appearing in Singleton's Higher Learning (1993) and other film and TV productions.

"It's a super blast of an opportunity for me," he says. "I just want to be able to show people that Busta Rhymes has a whole lot to offer on every level. My experience from this film has definitely taken me much further in what I want to accomplish."

Even Gordon Parks makes a cameo. "Gordon Parks is somebody I've modeled my life after," says Singleton. "It was very important to me to have Gordon Parks in this film." Parks' appearance (he can be seen seated at a table in a sequence at Harlem's Lenox Lounge) is, in fact, an echo of the cameo he made in the original Shaft.

In 1991, while Spike Lee was trying to work out his issues on black-white love with Jungle Fever, Singleton recast what black flicks should or could be with Boyz N the Hood. It was a searing debut that garnered the first Best Director Oscar nomination for an African American and won the then-24-year-old director and writer an Oscar bid for Best Screenplay, as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director. The $7 million dollar film went on to become one of the highest-grossing U.S. movies.

The Los Angeles-born child of a mortgage broker and drug company executive who were never married was honed by studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television into an industry player. After winning three college writing awards, Singleton talked Columbia Pictures into a hesitant partnership for what was basically a buddy movie set in the south L.A.'s gangland. The main characters Doughboy (Ice Cube), Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut) are young boys who become firm friends. As the movie fast forwards, half-brothers Doughboy and Ricky grab at different solutions to their tough lives. Ricky is the football "All-American," poised for a USC scholarship. "Dough" succumbs to the violence, alcohol and crime around him, but maintains a strong sense of pride and code of honor. Between those two is their friend Tre, who is lucky to have a father, "Furious" Styles (Laurence Fishburne), to teach him to have the strength of character to do what is right and to always take responsibility for his actions.

Like the original Shaft, the movie far outclassed the copycat films that followed. Singleton showed the nation those angry young black males' dreams and disappointments with often-ignored, complex social causes. Many conservative critics rejected the insight as liberal nonsense, but those viewers who cared about African America's future came out of the 107-minute epic certain that something more than crime was brewing in U.S. cities.

Singleton joined Lee as a top gun in African-American cinema, although the critics never loved him as much again. He kept trying to make the over-30 movie market look differently at Generation X (as in Malcolm, whose militancy many of them admired). Often youngsters filled the seats and adults didn't get it.

Boyz was followed by Poetic Justice (1993), a road trip that tried to blunt the "thug" anti-hero wave. The movie, co-written by Singleton and Maya Angelou, cast an unlikely Janet Jackson (Justice) as a flaky college student who when sobered by the murder of her first and only boyfriend, drops out of college to become a South Central Los Angeles hairdresser. Poems helped her cope. On the way to a literary convention in Oakland, she is forced to ride with an independent-minded postal worker (Tupac Shakur) whom she cannot tolerate. After various arguments between them and their friends, the pair discovers a similar disgust and hate for social and domestic violence.

Singleton's films were largely autobiographical and likely signaled problems on his own domestic front. He married Akosua Busia October 12, 1994, by whom he fathered a daughter, Hadar. More than a year later, the tabloids had him romantically linked with supermodel Tyra Banks. By June 15, 1997, the couple was quits.

Higher Learning (1995), whose cast included Banks as Deja, a college track star, tried to give the nation a heads up about the intense anger embodied by college youth from different countries, races, social and economic backgrounds forced to integrate. The film, which starred Omar Epps, showed how campus life tosses the naÔve neophytes into financial problems, sexual harassment and issues of personal safety such as date rape, self-doubt and race hate. Students, already under pressure to perform in the classroom, on the track, or in front of their friends, are strained to a breaking point by prejudice and interclass conflict.

The movie won a 1996 Outstanding Supporting Actor NAACP Image Award for Laurence Fishburne, who played the wizened Professor Maurice Phipps. Ice Cube, who played a leftover 1970-style militant afraid to graduate, gained a nomination for the prize, too. Most white critics looked the other way. Then, just when his work might have been marked as too juvenile to take seriously, Singleton pricked the nation's conscience with Rosewood, the story of the 1923 massacre of blacks in a rural Florida town that retold an ugly truth.

Ving Rhames starred as Mann, a drifter who helps residents of the all-black Rosewood flee when a white woman falsely claims rape by an African American. A lynch mob from the impoverished white town next door attacks the innocent community. Wholesale murder ensues.

Historians estimate that in real life more than 400 unarmed men, women and children were slaughtered, then buried in mass graves. Those who escaped to Gainesville and other towns kept silent for decades. The first mention of the massacre is found in the 1982 Church of God By Faith Handbook. The broader public learned the details from the St. Petersburg Times in 1985. Florida's legislators voted and the governor signed a reparations bill in 1994. Singleton hit the spotlight, too.

The movie won the nod for top honors at the Acapulco Black Movies Festival. Singleton was nominated for best director. Ving Rhames was slated for best actor. The 140-minute drama was contended for prizes in best movie and soundtrack categories. The director, star and film won nothing. The director was nominated for a Golden Bear at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival. The movie was nominated for a slew of Image Awards. It won the 1998 Political Film Society, USA prizes for best expose' and movie about human rights. There were no big-time awards. That is why Paramount hopes Shaft signals Singleton's comeback.

Filming took place in some of New York City's most diverse neighborhoods, including Harlem, where the historic and recently revitalized Lenox Lounge serves as Shaft's favorite watering hole and as a symbol of the new New York that Shaft calls home. The Art Deco bar-restaurant, dating from 1939, was once a gathering spot for black notables ranging from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X. It is now an elegant beacon in Harlem's new commercial center at Lenox Avenue just south of 125th Street. Up the block is the new Starbuck's started by Magic Johnson, and down 125th Street is Harlem, U.S.A., the community's first major shopping mall.

The exterior of the police station was located in the Bronx. Many of the street scenes were filmed in historic Brooklyn neighborhoods like Vinegar Hill, Red Hook, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. The crew also filmed across the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The costumes are another selling point. "John Shaft is the man," explained costume designer Ruth E. Carter. "He's the guy who women want and who the bad guys are afraid of. He's it. I didn't have to elevate Sam in this respect, because he's already there as an actor, but I wanted to parallel his talent with a kind of smart, savvy look that was approachable but also menacing." Essential is a beautiful, flowing leather coat -- Roundtree wore three in the original. Carter said she figured, "If he could do it, so can we."

Throughout the various neighborhoods where filming took place, the studio reports that residents were unfailingly supportive and accommodating, particularly to Richard Roundtree. "To this day," he laughs, "I'll be walking down the street in New York City and wherever I'm going, people are screaming out, 'Shaft!' I get so much love, it's just incredible."

The elements swirl to make the film a summer box office splash. The studio publicity machine is cranked, pushing for articles even though the only film available for preview is a one minute, 11-second teaser, most movie-goers will see in cinema coming attractions. Heroes are not easy to make.