LANDMARK 1968 DOCUMENTARY ‘BLACK ON BLACK’ DEBUTS ON YOUTUBE
Joe Saltzman, a hungry young TV producer in Los Angeles at the time, remembers well that day in the early 1960s: “When I pitched to CBS management the idea of doing a 90-minute documentary on what it was like to be Black and living in urban America, they thought I was crazy. All I wanted to do was a documentary in which Black people who had never been on television would look in the camera and tell us their story.”
It wasn’t until the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots that Saltzman — who is White — was given the green light, but it would be three years before his “Black on Black” aired one night in July on KNXT Channel 2 in L.A. and on CBS affiliates in four other cities. Now this 1968 documentary, with “no narration and no White reporter standing with a microphone and saying, ‘Behind me is the ghetto,’ ” can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
Shot on 16 mm film in the homes, businesses and neighborhoods of South Central L.A., “Black on Black” gives a voice to a community that had none at the time. Its men, women and children are seen and heard going about their daily lives. It was honest, unvarnished, cinema verité filmmaking for television.
“I felt as a journalist I wanted to tell the stories of the people who didn’t have the access to power, who were ignored by society,” reflected Saltzman, who has been a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles for 55 years. “That was my job. Not to make my documentary, but their documentary.”
Full disclosure: Joe Saltzman was my first and best journalism professor when I was a student at USC. What I’ve learned about telling a story and about being true to yourself and others I learned from him. youtube.com (search for “Black on Black 1968”)