Mitchell chronicles Black film, his experiences in documentary
About four years ago, Elvis Mitchell was having dinner with Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh.
Soderbergh asked the former film critic for the New York Times and a longtime voice on NPR what he was doing with his career. Mitchell told him he had an idea for a movie, a documentary about the history of Black film, filtered through his experiences growing up in the 1970s. “He looks at me, and he goes, ‘That’s a great idea. I can cash flow this for you,’ ” says Mitchell.
A few years later, after ironing out the details, the pair was filming
Harry Belafonte — Mitchell interviewing, Soderbergh shooting — and the screen legend shared a wonderfully profane quip about the prime of his career where he said about himself, in the third person, “Belafonte could really not be (expletive) with.” “That’s when I thought yeah, we’ve got a movie here,” Mitchell says.
That movie is “Is That Black Enough For You?!?” — a thorough chronicle of Black film in Hollywood, and Mitchell’s experience with and around it. The documentary, now streaming on Netflix, features interviews with Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg and Zendaya.
For Mitchell, the film marks his leap from film critic to filmmaker, a rarely accomplished ascent, which is just the latest step in his lifelong (but sometimes conflicted) love affair with cinema.
As a child Mitchell, 63, would visit his grandmother in Mississippi during summers, and television was a way for him and his twin sister to
beat the miserable heat. When he was 6 years old, he remembers turning on “The Andy Griffith Show” and being scolded by his grandma.
“Why are you watching that? Where are the Black people in that show?” he recalls her saying, which flipped a switch in his brain about the content he absorbed and how he related to it. It forever altered his perception, which up to that time had been fairly innocent.
“There was always this immersion and distance from movies at the same time,” says Mitchell in a recent interview. “Even though there was this constant love for movies and what they could do, there was also this understanding of the way I and people like me did not fit into them. It’s this weird thing: it’s hard to love something that doesn’t love you back.”
It was around 1999 when Mitchell started thinking about “Is That Black Enough,” and it took nearly 20 years and just the right prompting (and clout) from Soderbergh to put it into motion. Filmmaker David Fincher also came on board as a producer.
Mitchell sifted through thousands of hours of archival material from films ranging from “Friday
Foster” to “Night of the Living Dead” to “Black Mama, White Mama” — the completed documentary has 165 film clips, give or take — and “Black Enough” talks about the history of Hollywood through the prism of race, how the independent film movement led to the blaxploitation era of the 1970s and the things mainstream cinema borrowed or outright stole from Black film, often without attribution.
Mitchell was honored to be able to deliver the documentary to viewers at the same time as
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” He sees his movie as sort of an unintended companion piece to the Marvel blockbuster, and the 100 years of film that led up to “Wakanda Forever’s” release.
As for what’s next for the critic-turned-director, the experience of making his first film is still sinking in.
“I don’t know what to do next. I’m in this weird position where I should be wearing a red vest standing in front of a Costco or something, and instead
I’m getting to think about if there’s something else I want to make a movie about,”he says. “I’m in a peculiarly blessed position, and I’m not looking down on it.”