Long-lost ‘Solomon King’ film restored
Before Sal Watts died in 2003 at age 63, the Mississippi-born, Antioch-based businessman accomplished a lot.
He served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1962. He had fashion outlets and record stores, called Mr. Sal’s, in Oakland and Los Angeles. He ran his own record label, Marsel Records, named after one of his daughters. He had an interest in KEMO-TV, an Oakland TV station now known as KOFY-TV, where he supplied programming that included a dance show and a sketch-comedy series.
And he did all of this by the time he was 33.
But it was African American actor and comedian Mantan Moreland, who appeared on Watts’ sketch show, who inspired Watts to try his hand at filmmaking. After all, the ’70s was the era of Blaxploitation, where many actors and actresses of color were finally getting their close-ups on the silver screen. Some were writing and directing the movies as well.
“He just let Sal know that filmmaking isn’t such a far stretch from television producing, and that he felt Sal would be able to pull off a film,” Belinda Burton-Watts, Watts’ widow, told The Chronicle during a recent video interview from her home in Antioch. “So, that’s what put it in his mind.”
Watts would go on to write, produce and direct “Solomon King,” a 1974 action film set in Oakland. He also starred as the titular ex-Green Beret and exCIA agent, a nightclub owner who has to go back into avenger mode when agents from a power-mad Middle Eastern sheikhdom go after him and his girl, a princess hiding out in America.
Watts’ experiences in the Army gave him inspiration for the story, Burton-Watts said, because “he was a paratrooper, and also involved in a lot of, I guess you would say, shady operations through the govern