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.