From Pam Grier to `Black Belt Jones'
Book looks at the `History of Blaxploitation Cinema'
As a preteen growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey, Odie Henderson saw a tremendous number of wildly inappropriate movies. Take age 4, an especially big, bad year for Henderson and inarguably too young to be eye-mauled by “The Exorcist.”
But there was also that time the future Boston Globe film critic and author of the new book “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema” saw a double bill of “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown,” starring Pam Grier. Grier figures prominently in Henderson's book, published earlier this month. It's an extremely good read. The word “Blaxploitation” doesn't fly with everyone these days. Nor did it in the long-deferred phase of American film that brought a flowering of Black opportunities on screen — Henderson frames the timeline as 1970 to 1978 — sparked by the success of “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” followed by “Shaft” a year later, in 1971.
Henderson has no problem with the label because he loves the range of work it encompasses. “Is it a genre, like comedy or Western,” he writes in the book's prologue, “or something more fluid and harder to define? I like to describe it the way I'd describe the equally slippery term `film noir': Blaxploitation is an era, a period of time when certain films are definitive examples and others are up for discussion and debate.”
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q
Odie, isn't age 4 at least 10 years too early for “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown”?
AQI definitely should not have them at that age! That same year, 1974, I also saw a double feature of “Enter
A the Dragon” and “Black Belt That's one of Marvin Jones.” I recall being fascinated Gaye's best songs. He by both Jim Kelly's and wanted to be a singer like Pam Grier's Afros, usurped Frank Sinatra, not the sexy only by Franklyn Ajaye's soul singer he became. But Afro two years later in “Car he wrote the entire score Wash.” I saw a lot of movies for “Trouble Man.” Michael way too young, but when you Kahn, who became Spielberg's have aunties or older cousins, editor, he edited that you had opportunities film, by the way. to do things like that. I remember my pops saying to me a lot of the time, after we saw something on the deuce, 42nd Street, in Times Square:
“Don't tell your mother.”
Q
Take us back to the beginning. Some folks
might guess the Blaxploitation era started with “Shaft,” but that was a major studio, MGM, not American International Pictures …
A“Shaft” was the movie that basically saved MGM from bankruptcy, so Hollywood had a big stake in the film's success. At that point MGM was about to merge with 20th Century Fox, but the deal fell through. And then “Shaft” made a lot of money, directed by Gordon Parks.
The year before, though, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. made “Cotton Comes to Harlem” with Ossie Davis directing, and that made a lot of money first. That one got it on Hollywood's radar that Black folks would see a movie about Black people. Defining Blaxploitation by a single genre would be disingenuous, but there are characteristics common to all that aren't genre-specific: the attitude, the swagger and most importantly, I'd argue, the music and the fashion.
QI mean, the “Foxy Brown” opening credits are almost too much for one movie. Fantastic. And an irresistible song, although compared to the title song from “Trouble Man”?
You write in the book that you began research with one explanation for Blaxploitation era's demise in mind. But that changed?
A
It did, yes. My theory was it died because by
the late `70s there were a lot more Black people on TV, and TV was free. You had a big event like “Roots,” but before that, Black sitcoms that were hits: “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” “Sanford and Son.” I assumed what killed Blaxploitation was a combination of that, plus the blockbusters like “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” Black folks went for those, just like everybody else. But then Elvis Mitchell interviewed me for his Netflix documentary on Blaxploitation, “Is That Black Enough for You?” And we had this friendly dispute about what killed it off. He thinks it was (the commercial failure) of “The Wiz” in 1978. We went back and forth on that, and he finally said, “I think we actually think the same thing here: That when the (Blaxploitation) movies ceased to be marketable for Black audiences, the era died.” “The Wiz” cost an ungodly amount of money, and lost a lot. But it's beloved by Black folks my age everywhere. As much as I have problems with “The Wiz,” I cannot deny my childhood love of it.
Q
Was the Blaxploitation era of the real low-down movies, lots of crime and sex, a double-edged sword, do you think?
A
You have to first talk about what was happening on screen before this time. With Hollywood's preCode era (1929-1934), in movies like “Baby Face,” actors of color occasionally did more than bit roles — the maid, the porter. But until Sidney Poitier came along in the middle of the 20th century, there wasn't much besides those mostly negative images. When Poitier became a star, he fell victim to having to represent the entire race in a positive light.