Chicago’s Blacklight Film Festival Creator Still Going Strong at 70

Chicago South Side native Floyd Webb, a filmmaker known for starting the Blacklight Film Festival four decades ago, calls himself an “AARP-generation success story” for reinvigorating his career at age 70.

Webb was shooting a feature film in New York and editing a pitch for a movie about 1930s-era Black Chicago Air Force Pilot John Robinson when he carved out time for this Sun-Times interview.

The film he is producing — “Legally Drugged” — is based on Richard Schneeberg’s book about a Brooklyn man who survives homelessness and mental-health challenges to emerge as a multimillionaire real-estate mogul. The movie he’s pitching is about “The Black Condor” John Robinson, an airman who helped start the Ethiopian Air Force at the invitation of then Emperor Haile Selassi, the Ethiopian Airlines and the Tuskegee Airmen Flight School.

Webb also works as a consultant. One of the films on which he consulted with filmmaker-animator Paul Louise-Juli, an African space opera titled “Yohance,” has been accepted in the Cannes Film Festival and taken on by the French company, Federation MEAC.

If that weren’t enough, the South African team that Webb has been working with on a dramatic film and documentary about Yasuke, an African warrior who went to Japan and fought in the war to unify that nation, has completed the first volume of a comic book to promote the Netflix 2025 project. Web has done consulting and historical research with Mandla Dube, a favorite director of Netflix Africa.

BLACKLIGHT FESTIVAL RELOAD

Webb is also raising money for the Blacklight Festival RELOAD, a three-day event Oct. 17-20 at Chicago Filmmakers, 1326 W. Hollywood Ave. The event — part of Chicago Filmmakers’ 50th anniversary — aims to engage a new generation of filmmakers by exhibiting new film works and presenting a summit to explore volumetric cinema, interactive fiction, virtual and augmented reality, the use of artificial intelligence, the future of storytelling in cinema and the latest in black video game development, content and design.

Webb can identify with his protagonists. He grew up in the Harold J. Ickes housing project at 23rd and State streets on Chicago’s Near South Side, moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, when his father, Vietnam War veteran Bernie Webb, moved the family there for one year when Webb started high school. When the family returned to Chicago, Webb attended and was graduated from Proviso East High School in Maywood.

It just so happened that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Proviso East was embroiled in race riots.

“I became part of a radical leftist anti-racist clique,” Webb said. “We published an underground newspaper called Gideon’s Babble, and opposed the school administration’s dress codes and discriminatory practices. We were mostly students in the top 10 percent of our class.”

That time proved auspicious, too, because Webb’s father returned from Vietnam with a Super-8 movie camera that Webb used to film the school protests and anti-war demonstrations.

Webb’s other teen-aged revelation was seeing the late Chicago native Melvin Van Peeble’s “Story of the Pass” film on WTTW-TV’s Friday night program, “Foreign Cinema.” The 1967 film was based on Van Peeble’s French-language novel La Permission. It starred Harry Baird as a Black American soldier who is demoted for fraternizing with a white shop clerk in France.

“The film just blew me away,” Webb said.

“It showed so much technique, the story was authentic and relevant, the acting was brilliant. … I didn’t know that Van Peebles was Black until years later.”

A MOTHER’S SMARTS

Webb’s mother, Carolyn Webb, played a key role in Webb’s life, too. After Webb was the target of a robbery, his mother put a stop to his daily childhood pickup work, which ranged from selling JET magazine for the nearby Johnson Publishing; 25-cents-per-chore jobs sweeping the press room at “Muhammad Speaks,” the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, and delivering sandwiches for the Jewish deli across the street; and $1 pay for helping musicians carry their instruments up the back stairs to the studio at Chess Records, then at 2120 S. Michigan Ave.

His mother, who grew up as a “country girl” in Jonestown, Mississippi, went on to work in an automotive factory as a United Auto Workers (UAW) member, making enough money to buy the family a house in west suburban Maywood. His maternal grandmother, Portia Phipps-Miller, had trained to be a schoolteacher at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University in Alabama), the first institution of higher learning for African-Americans. So Webb’s mother encouraged him and his sister to read.

“I was reading when I was 4 years old,” Webb said. “When I got my first library card at age 6, my mom allowed me and my sister to walk to the mobile library.”

AFRICAN JOURNEY

By age 20, Webb was ready to explore the world in the same way he had explored his neighborhood — and his experiences with racism spurred him to go to Africa.

He started his journey in Tanzania by way of New York, an Icelandair flight to Reykjavik and then on to Germany to visit his uncle. He ended up in Paris, working in a darkroom and practicing flute at the American Center on Bly Raspail. The American center at that time was a haven for expatriate Black artists. Webb became part of the community of artists and blues, classical and jazz musicians like Chicago Beau, Oliver Lake, Baikida Carrol, Noah Howard, Joseph Bowie and Anthony Braxton.

“I even ran into the Cuban Abstract artist Wilfreo Lam there,” Webb said. “James Baldwin held court in the Cafe Select some afternoons, not far from the American Center. I would sit listening, 20 years old and too shy to speak, and with a stutter that I had back then.”

In London, he worked for a photo agency and took a bus to Marrakesh, Morocco, and then traveled in Algeria and Tunisia before reaching his destination in Tanzania.

“It frustrated me that I didn’t have anyone to support me in opening a photo studio,” Webb said, noting that he knew white peers whose families gave them major investments to start their own businesses.

“I started with $1,000 to $3,000 jobs,” he said. “I had no overhead. I could rent a studio to do the work. You figure out how to work from where you are, instead of being angry.”

“I had a wanderlust and left the country as a photojournalist after I became a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP),” Webb said. He intended to cover the African Liberation Movement in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

There were few independent Black filmmakers in America at that time.

“I had the successful example of Gordon Parks, a great photographer who became a great director with his film, the Learning Tree (1968), and who later became a good friend and supporter,” Webb said. “I met documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne in New York. He introduced me into his circle, and that got me started as a filmmaker.”

Webb took buses and hitchhiked through Africa —Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire.

“I didn’t know enough to be scared,” he said.

INDEPENDENT FILM REBIRTH

Webb returned to the United States in 1976, when a renaissance in Black independent filmmaking was brewing behind the decline of Black action genre films, aka “Blaxploitation.”

He joined the Chicago Filmmakers, made an experimental film, “Flesh/Metal/Wood,” and joined the Black Filmmakers Foundation, a New York-based group that distributed the work of Black independent filmmakers such as Spike Lee, Warrington Hudlin, Julie Dash, Roy Campanella II and Charles Burnett.

Webb decided to organize his own festival of Black films, curating 20 films from throughout the world. He now operates his own streaming channel at blackness.tv and distributes his own films through blacknussnetwork.com.

OPENING DOORS TO GREATNESS

Judith McCray, president of Juneteenth Productions and a senior professional in residence at DePaul’s College of Communication who serves as faculty advisor to the college’s Association of Black Journalists (DUABJ), described Webb as “a powerful force for good in Chicago filmmaking.

“He’s opened doors to opportunities for people of color in the city’s vast production scene, while also introducing films and documentaries produced by African American filmmakers of earlier eras to diverse audiences long before it was popular to do so,” McCray said. “And, throughout, he has stayed in the game with the best of intentions and good humor.”

Webb invited McCray more than 10 years ago to participate in a panel discussion of the Blacklight screening of the film “The Spook Who Sat By the Door,” an adaptation of the book of the same name by the late Sam Greenlee. Many of McCray’s films are available on Webb’s streaming channel - blacknuss.tv - honoring her company’s 25th anniversary in June 2022: https://blacknuss.tv/programs/juneteenth-productions.

Before COVID started, Webb took time off for two-and-a-half years to care for his father, who suffered from prostate cancer and long-term effects of Agent Orange, a herbicide used in the Vietnam War to clear vegetation for battle. His father died in rehab in May 2020 after he had contracted the COVID virus.

• Webb’s advice to today’s aspiring artists includes:Give yourself as many experiences as you can.

• Develop your craft by maximizing your skills, including using the latest technologies. Webb’s tech skills include film editing, motion graphics and desktop publishing.

• A niche audience is important. It’s about being authentic and, when necessary, uncompromising.

• Join like-minded groups that help you stay relevant and up-to-date. Webb is part of technology-centric think-tank groups comprising everyone from startups to successful entrepreneurs to big companies. “I’ve been part of a yearly meeting of one cohort of 250 people who have an ‘un-conference,’” he said. “Those meetings are so useful. Being probably the oldest person there, I always hope I have as much to give as I get from being with so many smart younger people. It keeps me fresh and alive.”