Shut Yo..The Rise of Blaxploitation

One of the points I drive home in my weekly writings is that we have to look at the diversity of our potential audiences. As movies evolve and shift and a new paradigm takes hold, it would be easy to accept the party line coming out of Hollywood that theaters are primarily for event pictures. But instead, diversity should be one of the foundations of a new theatrical environment.

There was a bold and creative record store owner and songwriter, Berry Gordy. Detroit-based Gordy had the bright idea of reaching into the deep trough of talent in the Motor City to give white audiences a glimpse of the Afro-American experience. Atlantic Records had done this previously but, at best, only had a modicum of success. The gyrations of Elvis Aaron Presley betrayed his song catalog's origins and made America curious for more.

A year later,?the Marvelettes scored Tamla's first U.S. number-one pop hit, "Please Mr. Postman ."By the mid-1960s, the company, with the help of songwriters and producers such as Robinson, Talent Chief William "Mickey" Stevenson, Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Norman Whitfield, had become a significant force in the music industry. From 1961 to 1971, Motown had 110?top-10 hits.

America began to seek out the diversity in its midst.

It began in the late '60s. The foundational great downtown theater has been closing one by one. Facing a massive demographic shift, Hollywood’s distribution pattern was changed. Studios are going through a lousy recession, and movie production has been cut back as an answer to it (never a good idea). The significant event pictures which were the mainstay of these glorious downtown theaters were now considered bad investments. So the studios changed their distribution patterns and moved away from a primarily downtown exclusive release in favor of multiple bookings in the new twin cinemas popping up in the suburbs.

The cinema of exploitation pioneered by Roger Corman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, James Nicholson, and Robert Lippert proved that a lower end of the market, one not controlled by the studios, could become an incubator for new cinematic forms.

The Afro-American audience became the primary audience for the abused downtown theaters. Hollywood started making rather flaccid pictures to appeal to this audience. The studios made movies like Sidney Poitier's "The Lost Man" (1969) (1970), “Tick, Tick Tick” starring football great ?Jim Brown, and the cinematic retelling of the Broadway hit “The Great White Hope” (1970), starring James Earl Jones. They were all flops.

In the winter of 1971, a movie made by an Afro-American and for Afro-Americans was released, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” It was the story of?a poor?man (who happened to be a pimp) fleeing from the?white?police. The filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles played the race card masterfully. He pitched his movie about a pimp who blows away two white racist cops and then is forced to be on the run. He launched a campaign with ads that pitted the races against each other. Based on his X rating, he even marketed, "This is the movie the Man doesn't want you to see. Rated X by an all-white jury!"

This movie understandably did not attract large white audiences. Still, its salaciousness and evoking persecution of Van Peebles created lines around the block and repeated viewing only to be seen again on the release of "Star Wars ."The movie showed Hollywood there was money in appealing to Afro-American audiences.

On the sounds of compelling percussions and narrative lyrics, Isaac Hayes, backed up by the Bar-Kays, introduced John Shaft to American audiences. This tale, directed by Gordon Parks, an Afro-American Photographer who later made a name for himself as a director, told the story of this hard-hitting, take no B.S. private investigator who does battle with both Harlem crime lords and the mob. The opening title sequence has Shaft navigating his way through a series of 42nd street marquees, all blaring out titles of exploitation movies.

Hollywood wholeheartedly jumped on the blaxploitation bandwagon in the following two years, releasing more than 40 blaxploitation pictures. Saints and sinners in this crop of movies claimed to share the black experience with America. The crowning example was "Superfly," again directed by Gordon Parks. Starring Ron O’Neal, it told the story of a pimp trying to leave life. The movie’s soundtrack broke records, made a ton of money, and set the stage for other blaxploitation movies that followed.

Like many things in American culture, a good thing was ruined by the outcry that these movies, which provided work for Afro-American writers, directors, and actors, were harming the perception of the Afro-American communities. As a result, the Blaxploitation movies starting in 1974 started to see their demise.

Movies like "Uptown Saturday Night," "Cooley High," and then 1976's "Car Wash" would widen the witnessing of Afro-American culture by giving it a comedic slant.

The ability to discern your community, to discover what they want to see is critical to developing a baseline within your theater. In life and business past is usually prologue. Look back at what has worked and what has evolved. This is a period of deep movement within this business. It is time to define yourself.