Episode 245: Cinema Junkie Book Club: ‘Black Film’ by David F. Walker
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[This is an automated transcription and may contain inaccuracies]
CLIP They call me Mr. Tibbs.
I’d like to think that everyone knows who Sidney Poitier is and the impact he had when he slapped a white racist in In the Heat of the Night in 1967.
CLIP In the Heat of the Night Did you see that?
But not as many people know who Oscar Micheaux is or the Johnson Brothers or Mantan Moreland. But author David F. Walker hopes to fix that with his new book, Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to listener supported KPBS Cinema Junkie, I'm Beth Accomando.
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BETH ACCOMANDO It’s time for another Cinema Junkie Book Club Edition as I invite author David F. Walker to discuss his new book about Black Cinema. This book is a deep dive not only into Black films but also into how social, political and industry history impacts what we see on the screen and how what we see on the screen gets reflected back in the world. It is also a passion project for Walker who grew up loving the movies his mom took him to. The book is a celebration of Black artists but also an examination of the racism rooted in Hollywood and across the U.S. It's a book that will make you want to seek out familiar classics, cult films and forgotten gems.
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BETH ACCOMANDO I need to take one quick break and then I will be back with my conversation with David F. Walker.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to Cinema Junkie. I’m Beth Accomando. Eisner Award-winning author David F. Walker has been a frequent guest on Cinema Junkie, often talking about Blaxploitation. But I have also had him on to discuss his graphic novels such as The Black Panther Party and Big Jim and the White Boy. Today we discuss his new book, Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies. David is an incredibly busy person who also just launched a Kickstarter for his Blackenstyne comic. Before talking about either of his latest projects, I wanted to discuss the recent Academy Awards. Leading into them Ryan Coogler’s Sinners garnered an unprecedented 16 Oscar nominations but lost the top prizes to Paul Thomas Anderson and One Battle After Another – which highlights a long standing problem in Hollywood – the industry along with Academy voters feel more comfortable with films that have a white protagonist and a white filmmaker even if the film purports to tell a Black story. So I began by asking David how this reflects some issues raised in his book, and what does it say about either how far we've come or how far we still have to go?
DAVID F. WALKER
Yeah, well, that's a great question. I'm still mulling a lot of it over. The publication date of the book kept getting pushed back. It was supposed to originally come out in 2022, and every time it got pushed back, I was trying to find another film to hang the closing statements on. And Sinners was the one, and the Oscar nominations hadn't even been handed out yet. The book probably went off to the printer probably within a month of the movie coming out. So I was just sort of like projecting, like, I think this movie might be special beyond what we're seeing. When the nominations came out, I just remember thinking, wow, this is amazing. This has broken the record for nominations. I was hoping that we would see a shift in what the Academy voters have yet to make. And we don't— we never see the results. You know, for all we know, Sinners lost by 3 votes, you know. But the fact of the matter is, is that Sinners does not have a white protagonist that, that the audience can glom on to, right? Vast majority of times that movies have been nominated for Best Picture, you know, something that we would consider a Black film, if it does not have a white protagonist that a white audience can relate to, it doesn't win.
DAVID F. WALKER
But a movie like Green Book wins, and it's like, what? It's similar to, I mean, it was Driving Miss Daisy, and Driving Miss Daisy won as well, right? So that's the thing. It's like, we still live in a society and we still have, you know, this board of voters that are still, uncomfortable with certain things or can't relate to certain things. I was incredibly disappointed. I wasn't surprised. Coogler and Sinners are an amazing company, right? Orson Welles and Citizen Kane did not win. Frank Capra and It's a Wonderful Life did not win. Scorsese and Raging Bull and Goodfellas did not win, right? And then when you look at the movies that did win, a lot of the times, I don't know a single person who has Ordinary People on their home video shelf, right? Like, the same with Green Book and, and all these other ones that win. And, and one battle after another was— I, I was like, oh yeah, this is the one that's going to win. Does it deserve to win? In my humble opinion, no, not at all. But I also understood why it won.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Does Ryan Coogler also scare the industry because he's sort of outsmarting them at their own game? Not in terms of what he puts on the screen, but he negotiated quite an amazing amount of control over his film, which I feel like they can't be entirely happy about, even though it made a ton of money.
DAVID F. WALKER
What's interesting is when people talk about the unprecedented deal that Coogler got with Sinners, first off, it's not unprecedented. Other filmmakers have gotten it. He's the first Black filmmaker to get it. But what nobody's talking about The rumors that I've heard was the person that who advised him on how to get that deal and how to negotiate that deal was Tyler Perry. And, and that's who the film industry should be afraid of. Not because he doesn't make good movies, but because as a business person, Tyler Perry has it on lockdown, right? Tyler Perry owns— I believe he owns every single one of his movies. If I had known about the deal Coogler had at the time, I would have loved to have talked about it in the book because that's going back to the tradition of the race filmmakers of the '20s and '30s, Oscar Micheaux and the Johnson Brothers and folks like that who operated completely outside of the mainstream film system, the studio system, in similar ways to what Tyler Perry has built for himself. Nobody operated the way Tyler Perry did, But you couldn't in the '30s, right? Segregation and all these different forms of oppression kept that from happening.
DAVID F. WALKER
But I'm not a fan of Tyler Perry's movies, but I look at the way he runs his business with awe. I used to get into conversations with people and it would be like mutual bashing sessions. Oh, I can't stand Tyler Perry movies. And now I'm like, yeah, I'm not even talking about his movies. I'm just talking about what he's doing as a business person. But the truth of the matter is, is that Kugler deserves the, the deal he got. He's earned it, and he asked for it, right? He demanded it. And I just don't know if other filmmakers even think to do that. It's, it's almost like it's unheard of. I suspect that the folks at Warner Brothers were probably thinking— some of the leadership at Warner Brothers at the time was thinking, oh, this film's not going to do anything. Not all the forces at Warner Brothers But a lot of them did not want to see this film succeed. And I don't know if it was simply because of the business deal or simply because they didn't think it was a good movie. The thing I've discovered over the years is, you know, you can have a great movie, a great book, a great album, a great anything, but if the people that run the marketing and the publicity and run the big machine, if they don't get it You're potentially dead in the water, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
It, it really takes something extremely special like Sinners to rise above it all. I think there was— there were some of us that thought, okay, it's going to be a good movie. Like, Coogler hasn't made a bad movie yet, but he was only, what, 4 films into his career? So he could have made that 5th film could have been a turkey. Maybe he'll be the one who never has one.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, one thing I love about your book is it's not just about the films. You give it this historical context that, and I mean by history is not the history of films, but you give it this real historical context so that we can kind of see how films play a role in that history and how history plays a role in the film. So what led you to kind of format or design your approach in that way?
DAVID F. WALKER
I'm just a weird nerd. I think the, the movie that really— I won't say it was the movie that captured my imagination, but the movie that got me interested in what goes on beyond the movies, behind the scenes, and, and what's going on in the world at that time, at the time it was made, was Night of the Living Dead. Night of the Living Dead. The dead who live on living flesh. The dead whose haunted souls hunt the living. Which was, you know, uh, came out in '68. It was made in '67, came out in '68. And I was obsessed with that movie. I saw it when I was a kid on TV one Saturday afternoon and then immediately tried to find every book on monster movies that talked about it and began studying it. And so many people would talk about what was going on in the '60s and how that related to the movie. As I started to evolve into some semblance of a film scholar or film critic, I was informed by everything that was written about Night of the Living Dead, right? And so I've always been the sort of person that's like, well, you can't just look at one thing and study it and not study what came before it, what was happening around that time.
DAVID F. WALKER
And that's part of what I wanted to do with this book because I feel most of the times I read about film, especially now, there's very little historical context. There's— maybe they'll talk about Spielberg, and they'll, you know, Spielberg was part of the New Hollywood generation that emerged in the late '60s with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, and that's all they'll say. But they don't talk about what was going on in the studio system. They don't talk about what was going on in a sociopolitical context. So you don't understand why Bonnie and Clyde is so important, right? You don't understand why The Wild Bunch was so important, but you also don't know how much trouble it had getting, you know, finding an audience, that the studio wasn't behind it. And to me, nothing is more infuriating than when I read stuff like that and there's something missing and I'm wanting more. I wanted to try to give this book— I needed it for me to be more than just, this is how movies were made and this is who made the movies. And it was like, okay, there's a section in the book where I'm talking about in the '60s and I'm talking about a movie, A Patch of Blue with Sidney Poitier, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
And that movie was made in '65, which was the same year as the Watts Riots, right? While I enjoy that movie, it is the ultimate in sort of fantasy of like racial harmony Here it was, it was filmed 3 miles away from where the Watts Riots happened. I'd never read anything about that. For me, it was like I was just looking at Patch of Blue and I was like, when was this made? Wow, okay, this is made between '64 and '67, '68. There's a lot of turmoil going on in this country. Patch of Blue and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and all of Sidney Poitier's movies, were the antithesis of what was happening in the real world, in the streets. And I was like, we need to talk about that because a lot of times we seldom talk, really talk about film as propaganda and film being used as a way to push an agenda, even if that agenda is being pushed on an almost subconscious level. Because I think a lot of times filmmakers don't realize what they're doing. I'd like to think that the people who made Green Book did not realize how horribly offensive that book was, or that movie was, excuse me. But maybe they were aware of it.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, you begin with the beginning of film, like the 1890s.
DAVID F. WALKER
Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Talk a little bit about these early, early, you can't even really call them films in the conventional sense of how we think of narrative stories. But you find that even in these early bits, like Edison's actualities, things where it was almost just documentary-like or whatever, but that those were the beginnings of, like, certain patterns and certain stereotypes. So talk about how these things that we don't really consider movies kind of laid the groundwork for what was to come.
DAVID F. WALKER
Well, yeah, so Edison and some of the other early filmmakers, they were making primarily what we would now think of as documentaries. They would just shoot an image. And a lot of times those images were fairly benign. But there's a short with a little young Black kid who's dancing, right? And if you were to call that The Dancing Child or even like The Black Dancing Child, that would be pretty innocuous. But the title of that short movie, and it's a pretty famous short actuality, is called Dancing Darkie Boy, right? And that's that title in and of itself. And all of these films, most of them have these incredibly racist titles or bordering on very racist titles, right? And so we see that what was acceptable in parts of this country and parts of the society immediately spilled over into film, even before film had a narrative element to it. And then as narrative stories start to begin, right, and these are beginning as early as the late 1800s as well. What they're capturing on film, which is what was popular at the time, and minstrel shows and vaudeville and blackface were still incredibly popular in the 1800s and going into the 1900s.
DAVID F. WALKER
There was a shift, and this is what one of the things that infuriates me about what a lot of other contemporary film critics and historians write about. They'll talk about Black performers who performed in blackface, but they don't contextualize it in the understanding that Black folks took over blackface. They were taking it over to get rid of it, and then film gave it back to white people. Film gave blackface back to white people, and all of the big white vaudeville stars got to make films in blackface, whereas Bert Williams was the only blackface Black performer who really almost became a movie star. That's a whole other story. But what you see is the minstrel show and these racist portrayals and the dehumanization of Black folks that was always part of popular culture in this country, live theater. That's what I mean when I say popular culture, live theater performances like that. Those didn't last beyond the moment. You would go see a performance of the stage version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and there'd be white performers in blackface, and then it was over. And while that tradition continued for years and for decades, film made it so that you could watch it over and over and over again, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
It— instead of writing something on paper, you can burn paper really easily, but those racist ideas, that racist ideology was suddenly written in stone, and it's really hard to burn stone. Film replaced paper and parchment. It's the only analogy I've been able to come up with, the only metaphor that I've been able to come up with. And some people think I'm being overly dramatic when I say these things, but it's like, well, yeah, of course you think I'm overly dramatic because you don't— you're not seeing the bigger picture. You're— there's a French woman who was one of the most popular filmmakers of the silent era, Alice Guy-Blanchet. And she made a movie called A Fool and His Money, and it had an all-Black cast. And all the stuff I've read about it talks about it's an interesting film except it's full of racial stereotypes and racial tropes. And most people don't know the bigger history behind it. But what they also don't know is that everything those Black actors are doing is everything white actors were doing. Like, I'm talking Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, all of them. It's comedy, but you're confusing the comedy of the time with racism.
DAVID F. WALKER
And it's like, A Fool and His Money is not a racist movie, right? But if you don't understand the bigger picture, the bigger context, you could— it's easy to confuse those sort of things. I get very passionate about this stuff. I'm sure the passion will wear down 6 months from now after the book's been out a while.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, the other thing about this too is that you mention, you know, if you are what you eat.
DAVID F. WALKER
Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Are you also, are you what you watch?
DAVID F. WALKER
Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So how did these kind of early films and moving on into later decades too, I mean, how is that impacting both white audiences and Black audiences who are seeing them?
DAVID F. WALKER
Oh, wow. Well, that's a whole other book in and of itself, right? But let's talk about white audiences first and foremost, and I'm not, I'm not saying this in a negative way about white people. I'm just talking about this particular group of society. If you had a movie like, say, Birth of a Nation, it's playing to audiences in the South who are so steeped in their racial ideology, white supremacy, the dehumanization of Africans and their descendants, that it's feeding what they already want to believe to be true. "Get him up! Bring him up!" But then Birth of a Nation may play someplace where the people watching it don't know any Black people at all, or they have very limited interactions with Black folks. And so suddenly you have this movie and then all these other movies that come along, and it's very easy for people to confuse film with reality. In the 1800s, people watching just footage of a train coming towards them and them screaming because, you know, oh, it's really a train. And so I think that part of what film did for white audiences was it gave them this representation of Black folks that wasn't real, but they confused it with reality.
DAVID F. WALKER
And then film never gave a counter-narrative, right? So you never saw the alternative. So in the '30s, there weren't that many white people going to see the movies that were made for Black audiences, right? It was interesting because I think that we can go back to the early '90s. There's a movie that encapsulates it so perfectly, which is Reggie Hudlin's movie Boomerang, which is a romantic comedy with Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry and Robin Givens. And there were all these white critics and white audiences that were like, this movie's a fantasy. There's no Black people like this. This is like— and it was like, What are you talking about? Black audiences are like, oh my God, yes, finally we're seeing a sweet romantic comedy in the tradition of what audiences have been getting since Clark Gable and Carole Lombard and even further back than that in the silent era. But there's this mainstream representation of that with Black folks, and there's some audiences freaked out. This can't be real. The problem is that people confuse what they see with film as being some semblance of reality. Television, the same way. And then as it applies to Black folks, we have— some of us have the same problems, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
Where we don't realize, oh, what we're being shown is a variation of someone's interpretation of us. And then we start to live that way, right? We see people acting the way— and it's not just Black film, but it's like Scarface becomes— the Paul and the Scarface becomes sort of the, the, guidebook for how you're supposed to act if you're a drug dealer, right? And it's like, oh, please just stop this, everybody. Like, how about we just enjoy movies for what they are, which is not real, and we get past these trappings and we, we stop using film and television and other media to define who we are? Because that's what we ultimately do, is we allow it to define who we are. And how we act and how we interact and what we expect from other people. And it's amazing to me how much we confuse real life with make-believe.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, I think a lot of people are familiar with Oscar Micheaux and look to him as kind of this, the first real Black filmmaker, but you bring up a group of other people. So talk a little bit about the research you had to do to kind of find, 'cause some of these films are just not readily available. You can't just like look them up up on YouTube and be able to watch them. So what kind of research did you do to kind of find this broader spectrum of Black filmmakers early on in the film industry?
DAVID F. WALKER
Oh, it was, it was an insane amount of research. And if you, you know, if you go back to the bibliography, you're going to get an idea of it. There were a fair number of books written about Black film and Black actors and that sort of stuff. Most of it's out of print. And a lot of that stuff, like, like there's a British film critic named Peter Noble who wrote a book in 1948. There's a fair number of books that came out like in the '60s and even into the '70s during the height of blaxploitation. And again, all these books are out of print. I managed to get my hands on a lot of these books, so I was studying what they were talking about. And then I, I read a little, not a lot, but a little bit about vaudeville, a little bit about music. To understand, like, where certain things were coming from and how certain things started to evolve. And every now and then I would stumble across something that I hadn't heard about or I didn't know much about. And for me, the hardest part were the silent films because the vast majority of those are missing or lost, destroyed.
DAVID F. WALKER
But every now and then I would stumble across something, and I even have stumbled across stuff since the book has come out. That are like, ah, there's one mistake in the book that I know for a fact is a mistake that I did not know until maybe a month ago. That's where I talk about an actress named Mattie Edwards who was in a series of short films for the Lubin Manufacturing Company, which was one of the biggest producers of silent films. And all the films Lubin made were destroyed in a fire in like 1916, 1917. So there's not a lot of information about them. Mattie Edwards was a Black vaudeville actress actress, and then there was a guy named John Edwards who was also a Black vaudeville performer. And I had read one thing that said that they were married, and so I said— I wrote that they were married in the book. And then I recently found evidence that, that they weren't married, that they weren't even related. They just had the same last name. And what isn't in the book, but what I'm starting to suspect, is that Mattie Edwards was in all likelihood the first Black woman to be signed to a contract by a film studio.
DAVID F. WALKER
Everybody gives credit to another actress, Madame Saltiwan, as being the first Black woman to be signed to a contract, whereas the first Black actor was Sunshine Sammy Morrison, who was part of the Our Gang, you know, ensemble. But I think it was Mattie Edwards, and I'm so obsessed with her. And Lubin made the most racist movies you could possibly imagine, But for a brief period, they made— it was, I can't remember exactly what it was called, but it was like called their All-Colored Comedy Classics or something like that, where they made a series of what were essentially race movies. They were still pretty racist at the time, but they predated the race films that we talk about when we talk about Oscar Micheaux or the Johnson Brothers. That's sort of become my new life mission. For the time being, is like finding out more about these people. What was really helpful were there's a handful of like research archives that I, I managed to get access to, and so I was able to find stuff that's not in books, right? And, and the reality is, is that I, I think a lot of researchers are just not as like crazy as I am when it comes to this stuff.
DAVID F. WALKER
I want to know who these people are and understand how did we get here? What did they do? What were they demanding? What were their deals? And what I see when I read about this stuff is a lot of people not— A, not speculating about how did Bert Williams become the first Black actor to have a deal where he got to write, produce, and direct his own movies? And again, this was in the 1910s. And why wasn't Bert Williams a bigger movie star? Well, it wasn't just because he died at an early age. Stage, like, there's other factors around it. But usually when people talk about Bert Williams, they go, oh, well, he was a Black performer who performed in blackface, and that's very problematic. And it's like, okay, can we, can we talk a little bit more about how he was the biggest star of vaudeville? And had his film career gone differently, and had he not died at such an early age, he would have been the first major Black movie star. There's no getting around it. Then you ask, "Well, why didn't he make more movies?" Then you have to understand, and I've only seen one place write about this, film didn't pay actors much money.
DAVID F. WALKER
Vaudeville and live theater still paid more money. One of the other reasons why there weren't as many Black performers, A, because white filmmakers weren't using them, but they were making money in live theater. Found this out because Anita Bush, who was the biggest, one of the biggest Black actresses in theater at the time, there was a studio that wanted to turn her into a movie star. And she was like, why would I do that? I make more money, you know, on the stage. And the moment you understand that one fact, that one person thought that way, and that all of the biggest actors, Black actors of that time knew each other because they were all in vaudeville, and they all were on the same circuits, it's not a big stretch to go, oh, this is why nobody was chomping at the bit to make movies, right? Because at this point, you had Charlie Chaplin and you had Buster Keaton and folks like that, but some of these folks predate their film careers.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And that research also led to you uncovering quite a bit of poster art and ephemera dealing with Black films.
DAVID F. WALKER
Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So what was the process like to decide what to include in the book?
DAVID F. WALKER
It was very easy for me. It was finding stuff that was usable in terms of, like, was it a good quality resolution or was the physical copy in good enough condition to be scanned? I could have done a book of just that. I will say that there were people who felt that some of that, the art that I wanted to use, was inappropriate or they didn't like the art. And that turned into— people who know me know that you don't want to lock horns with me. And that there's some of that happened, you know, for me, Part of it was I would read stuff about Oscar Michaux or Spencer Williams, all these old filmmakers, and it was like there's almost never any pictures of them. There's never any pictures of the posters, all that sort of stuff. There's a handful of books that have reproduced some of this stuff, but again, a lot of those books are out of print. And I feel like, well, when you're reading about movies, the same thing if you're reading a book about the history of comic books. If there's no visuals in it, how do you write about a visual medium that doesn't include visuals?
DAVID F. WALKER
And so to me, it was always very important. And, and it just so happened that I have in my personal collection a massive amount of both actual physical posters, physical press books, and, and movie stills. But I also have access to a lot of digital collections, and it was like let's use as much of it as possible, right? Thankfully, the Academy Motion Picture Sciences Museum a couple years ago did a big exhibit on this stuff. I managed to go to that. Walking through that, that exhibit and seeing all the posters and all of the— there was costumes and all this stuff. And it was like, okay, I'm doing the right thing with this book, right? Seeing this stuff in real life to me was was so overwhelming, awe-inspiring. I was like, we have to have this in the book. Even though, again, there were people who were like, oh no, we're not going to put this stuff in the book. You know, it's— this is— I find this offensive. And I was always like, yeah, I don't care what you find offensive. Like, I find you offensive, child, you millennial.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now you brought up the idea of race film and racist film.
DAVID F. WALKER
Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Explain to people who may not be familiar with the term, what is a race film?
DAVID F. WALKER
Okay, a race film, that term became popularized around 1916, 1917, in the aftermath of the release of The Birth of a Nation. There was a growing movement of primarily Black filmmakers, but there was also a lot of white filmmakers, which is also something I don't talk about nearly enough in the book, but that they were dedicated to making movies for Black audiences that, in theory, represented Black people in a way different from how Birth of a Nation does it. One of the first companies to do this was the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded by brothers Noble Johnson and George Johnson. And that was where the term race film came from. There was a term called race man, right? W.E.B. Du Bois and folks like that, political leaders, were considered race men, people who spoke up for the Black race, who— it was a way of taking back a lot of the negativity that was surrounding these terms. And so race films emerged in 1916, and they pretty much lasted through till about 1948, which was the year that Oscar Micheaux— I believe it was '48— made his last movie. And so it was a term that was applied to movies that were made for and marketed to specifically Black audiences.
DAVID F. WALKER
They weren't always made by Black folks. And then at some point they started calling them— other terms emerged. There was race films, there was colored films, there was all-Black cast movies, Black, you know, things like that. And I haven't been able to figure out exactly when some of that terminology began to shift. You know, they were still using race movies, that term, at least into the early '40s. And that was probably a time where the shift really began. And that all has a whole other story behind it because that was in part the government in the military trying to get Black folks not to see themselves as being equal or to promote civil rights, but to get Black folks to feel like they belonged in a society that didn't want them. This all comes back to— there was surprisingly low support for the war both in Europe and in the Pacific. There was research that showed that while Black folks did care about what was happening, in Germany and France and other parts of Europe, a lot of Black folks didn't see the Japanese as the enemy. There was almost no support for the war in the Pacific.
DAVID F. WALKER
Things like rationing and all that sort of stuff was not popular within the Black community because of poverty, right? And so the government came up with this plan to make Black people feel more included in society. Not equal. That's the crucial thing. Not equal, but crucial participants in society. And They tried to use film as one of those tools. And I think that that was probably where the term race film started to peter out. And even the idea of an all-Black cast movie was being frowned upon because that made it sound like separate and unequal, right? They didn't want the unequal part even talked about. And they wanted separate to be, hey, we're all getting along. Black folks, they can drive taxicabs and they can be elevator operators and things like that.
CLIP Mantan Moreland au revoir…
BETH ACCOMANDO I need to take one last break and then I will be back with more of my conversation with David F. Walker about Black film.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to Cinema Junkie. I’m Beth Accomando speaking with author David F. Walker. Since I follow David on social media, I am well aware of some of his obsessions, one of which is Black comedian Mantan Moreland who appeared regularly in the old Charlie Chan movies. So I asked David about his love for Mantan Moreland
DAVID F. WALKER
Haha. Mantan Moorland. It's not just Mantan Moorland that I become hooked on, but it's also Step and Fetch It, Willie Best. It's a lot of these. Comedic performers who made a name for themselves starting in the '30s, '40s, and into the '50s. And they played characters that by today's standards are racist stereotypes, clichés, tropes, right? And even by those— the standards of those days, they were pretty bad, right? But Mantan Moreland, to me, is the funniest of all these performers, right? Stefan Fetchit is funny, but I don't like his style of comedy, right? Just like I prefer Abbott and Costello over the Three Stooges. It's a matter of taste, right? But Mantan Moreland is one of the funniest comedic performers I've ever seen. Hi, boy. Hi, how are you? I'm sure glad to see you. Yeah, yeah. Look here, is you still in? Is you still out? Oh, sure. Then while you were out, did you run into— Oh yeah, I went over and I saw him. You see, nobody introduced us, so I walked up to him and I said— That's the wrong approach.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yeah?
DAVID F. WALKER
Sure. Why didn't you ask him back? I did, and we killed it. So I tried to borrow his— I thought the finance company got that. Oh, they did, but he got another one. Oh, I see. Say, is he still going out? No, I'm keeping company with her. No. Yeah! I thought all the time you were— Oh, she's married. No. Yeah, she married a fellow by the name of— He's a nice fellow. Oh, he is? You know, for the longest time I was embarrassed to admit that I, I thought he was funny because people would say, oh no, he was, he was part of the problem, you know. And they would talk about Steppenfetchit as being, he's part of the problem. And it's like, no, they're symptoms of the problem. The performances they're playing are symptoms of the problem, but they are just practicing a craft. And if you study the craft, you're going to see that they're really good at what they do. And so I become really obsessed with Mantan Moreland as I was working on the book, and I started to really fall in love with him as a person and as a performer.
DAVID F. WALKER
But what I saw was that if, if I could take any one actor from, say, the mid-'30s on up to the late '40s, he's the one that you can really understand the Black role in Hollywood more than anyone else. Nobody talks about what a huge movie star he really was because he wasn't as big as Hattie McDaniel, he wasn't as big as Steppen Fetchit. Steppen Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel were in A pictures, they were in studio pictures, you know, Gone with the Wind and, and movies like that. Mantan Moreland wasn't in anything like that. He was total B movie guy, but he was like the king of B movies, right? He was in a ton of Charlie Chan movies, he was in all these movies with this white actor named Frankie Arrow, where they played sort of an early version of the buddy comedies in which, you know, you have this young white guy who's kind of a goofball, and then you've got the older Black guy. Now look, this is the way I've got it figured out. Porter steals $100,000 from Elliot, makes him register in this hotel on an assumed name so he can keep his eye on the bonds.
DAVID F. WALKER
Bonds? Does that mean anything to you, Jefferson? Yes, sir, it should. To do. That's just what we're gonna need to get us out of jail if you is wrong. But I can't be wrong. Do you remember those crooks we caught? You know, when you had the dummy up on the roof? Yes. Somebody in this hotel is a go-between for the hot bond racket, and we're gonna find the evidence right here in this room. Now look, you get to work in the bathroom. Search it, tear it apart if you have to. Uh, do you really mean tear it apart? Yes, go on. Oh my goodness, here we go again. And, and when you study Mantell Moreland's career, what you see is a guy And you see a studio, Monogram Pictures, which was a low-budget company that specialized in B-movies. And they pushed Mantan Moreland like he was a big movie star. And they were putting him on the posters for the movies and in the lobby cards and in all the advertising material. And this is crucial. Black people weren't allowed to be shown on posters in the South. They weren't allowed to— you didn't market them at all in the South.
DAVID F. WALKER
And I have yet to find any Monogram pictures, marketing material, advertising material that was specifically made for the South. Meaning one of two things, which I haven't been able to figure out yet, is either Mantan Moreland was acceptable in the South, or Monogram was like, we don't care, we're not going to release to the South. Because the, the southern states, the former Confederacy, and it still does this, held the film industry hostage. The film industry, for now more than 120 years, 130 years or so, has always bowed to the whims of Southern states. And that was another reason why the performances and, and the parts were so racist and so steeped in stereotypes, because Southern states had to be good with it. Because if they didn't, they wouldn't show the movie, the movie wouldn't make money. And that's the bottom line. At the end of the day, it wasn't because Hollywood was run by a bunch of racist idiots, which it was, right? And, you know, and D.W. Griffith himself was a confirmed racist, right? He was from a family that lost everything during the Civil War. He didn't believe in Reconstruction. And that's reflective in his work.
DAVID F. WALKER
But when you realize that, like, when Southern states wanted to ban a movie, they could. Censorship laws were different back in those days. There was no recourse if a state or a region said, "We're not going to show this movie." They just didn't show the movie. Hollywood was always stuck with that reality. What I'm trying to figure out about Mantan Moreland and his movies was, well, where were they playing? And was there a completely separate advertising campaign for them? When I talk about some of that stuff, people look at me like, "What are you talking about?" It's like, no, I I can show you proof positive of how these advertising campaigns were designed to leave out the fact that Black people were in them or to downplay the role of Black performers. The shift in mainstream Hollywood really happened with The Defiant Ones. With Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier was a movie where it was like Sidney was on that poster. It was like there was no getting away from the fact that he was a co-star. I'm a strange colored man in a white south town. How long you think before they pick me up?
DAVID F. WALKER
Get off my back! I ain't married to you now. What do I care? Come on! You married to me, all right, Joker, and here's the ring. But I ain't going south on no honeymoon now. We going north. But you look at some of his earlier movies and it's like, is he in that movie? It was very interesting. It's very interesting to see what was allowed to be shown in advertisement and marketing. If you study that, you also begin to understand more about movies than I think a lot of people do.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And you cover a lot of actors that I think people are familiar with. I don't think there's— there can't be many people who don't know who Sidney Poitier is and the impact that he's made on film and representation. But as we've talked before, Blaxploitation is something that we both love. And it sometimes also does not get respect. Even within the Black community, the exploitation part is what is often seen. But talk about why it is important to include Blaxploitation in this, as well as looking to people like Sidney Poitier who are so well esteemed.
DAVID F. WALKER
Well, it's a lot of it. It's like if you don't talk about Sidney Poitier, we'll start with him. If you don't talk about Sidney Poitier, You can't understand how blaxploitation came to be, right? You have to talk about Sidney Poitier, you have to talk about Jim Brown, and you have to talk about Woody Strode. Definitely those three. And then there's some key movies you really need to talk about. But then if you don't talk about blaxploitation, you can't contextualize or understand what evolved out of blaxploitation in terms of film. There was this time in the '80s where Black film and Black characters in films were once again relegated to like 1940s and '50s style supporting roles. Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor being the two exceptions to that. But while Black participation in film died off in the '80s, hip-hop evolved out of what had been, you know, blaxploitation, grindhouse cinema, kung fu movies. And then hip-hop worked its way into film, late '80s, actually the early '80s, you know, it starts with movies like Breaking and Beat Street and Crush Groove. But by the early '90s, hip-hop is part of film, right? But in order for hip-hop to be part of film, we really need to acknowledge that blaxploitation is part of hip-hop, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
And then if you acknowledge that blaxploitation is part of hip-hop, you've got to look at Sidney Poitier and the Negro problem pictures of the '40s and '50s and the race films, and you start to see the connection. This isn't an exaggeration. When I was watching Sinners And when you get to that scene where they pierce the veil and all these generations of ancestors are there, I started crying, right? I literally started crying in the theater because what I was seeing was not just the music. I was seeing the bigger picture of what Coogler and his entire team were trying to say, which is that the present can't exist without the past and that the future will not happen unless there is a connection between the present and the past. The same is true for film. You don't ever have to read a play by Shakespeare or see a play by Shakespeare performed live in theater to not be impacted by Shakespeare, because Shakespeare has impacted so many things, right? And I think that the problem is, is that a lot of times we don't look at that sort of stuff, and we don't look at blaxploitation as being Shakespearean, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
But it really kind of is. It laid the foundation for, for what was to come and the promise of what was to come. And this is also really important, the fact that those movies largely went away. They still existed in some contexts, but such a low number of Black films from, we'll say, '79 to '86, that left this huge gap that when Spike Lee came along and then Robert Townsend came along and then Keenan Ivory Wayans came along, like, Hollywood was ignoring an audience once again that really wanted something, really needed something. And you could make the argument that Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, and Keenan Ivory Wayans wouldn't have the careers they have now if Hollywood hadn't ignored both the Black audience and Black filmmakers during a nearly 10-year span, right? And what we call the death of Blaxploitation It was a negative thing, but so much positivity came out of it in that this audience again was starved and they got something that they wouldn't have gotten. We probably wouldn't have gotten a movie like House Party. Yo baby, you looking real good. Step off. Scandalous. Kick it, Pop. Which I think is not given nearly enough credit credit for what it did and where it sits in the history of film.
DAVID F. WALKER
It's part of the reasons in the book. I think Crush Groove that Michael Schultz did, directed also, and Michael Schultz definitely does not get the credit he deserves as a filmmaker. And so a lot of this was like, this book, a lot of it was just trying to address this imbalance, I think, that's in history, in the history of film. You can pick up books on the history of, you know, the '70s cinema. I think Peter Biskind's Easy Rider, Raging Bulls is a great example of that. I think there's like one sentence dedicated to Shaft, and that's about it, right? And it's like, how are you going to talk about the '70s and how '70s cinema changed Hollywood and not include blaxploitation when that was what kept the film industry going, right? For a very brief time, people forget, how bad the studios were, and you had these maverick filmmakers that were making movies that would change Hollywood as a whole. But you also had these filmmakers that were making movies that were making money that was keeping studios solvent at a time when Fox was auctioning off its backlot and all of its props.
DAVID F. WALKER
And, you know, everybody was on the verge of bankruptcy. And suddenly these small movies come along that didn't cost much money They made a lot of money for the investment, but more importantly, they made just enough money to keep the lights on, right? And Reggie Hudlin always talks about this. He says the profits that Superfly made in '72 helped to keep Warner Brothers alive long enough to put out Superman in '78. Again, most people don't see it that way. Most people don't talk about it that way, but that's, that's how it is. 'Cause I said so.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, in addition to all the great posters and ephemera that you have in the book, you also have John Jennings doing illustrations. What made you decide to go that route?
DAVID F. WALKER
I wanted to have original illustrations of certain actors. And at one point, that was going to be a much bigger section of the book. And it had nothing to do with John, because there was a different artist before John. Came on board, I wanted a series of 9 portraits done for every decade that was in the book. And I wanted there to be portraits of actors, actresses, directors, whomever I could get. For a whole host of reasons, that idea got scrapped at some point. And in part of getting it— of it being scrapped, there wasn't an artist to do it. And so I reached out to John, who had always been on my list of artists I wanted to work with. But John's like, the busiest man in the world. And I said, hey, man, you know, would you be interested in doing this? And he jumped at it. And then we had to decide, well, okay, who is he going to do these, these portraits of? And the reason I wanted some sort of portrait, some sort of illustrative representation of, of, of these people was because in a lot of cases there's only 1 or 2 photographs of these folks, or that's the same photographs that are used over and over again.
DAVID F. WALKER
And I was like, well, I just don't want those same pictures in my book. It's okay with posters and things like that, but I felt like— this will sound really weird— I wanted the book to look like, from a visual standpoint, I wanted people to see that it wasn't just us taking old stuff and showing it again. I wanted to show that, no, we're actually putting thought into representation that's contemporary, and there's an artist out there— because you can look him up and you can see that there's a guy named John Jennings, and this is what he did. And then maybe some other young artists out there will be inspired to do their versions of portraits and illustrations of actors and moments from films. Part of that is a generational thing. It was growing up and getting magazines like Starlog and Fangoria And I loved the behind-the-scenes pictures. But there was always like, you know, you would see a picture from a movie and you'd be like, wait a minute, that's not a scene from the movie. Is this a cut scene? Or, you know, I always talk about the fact that in Escape from New York, Snake Plissken has a tattoo on his abs that you see when he takes his shirt off.
DAVID F. WALKER
But there's publicity shots in Starlog of him with this giant tattoo on his arm that he doesn't have in the movie, right? And I'm like obsessed with that sort of stuff. I'm obsessed with— there's an issue of Starlog, again going back to Escape from New York, where there's a still from a scene in which Kurt Russell doesn't have the eye patch on. And I remember reading an interview with Kurt Russell where he talked about how he was always forgetting to put on his eye patch, and they wouldn't catch it during the first take. And I 'Look at that picture.' And I'm like, 'That was when this picture was taken. They— no one noticed he wasn't wearing the eyepatch.' And then it made it past publicity. And I'm a nerd. That's what it comes down to, right? And, and I'm, I'm not ashamed of it.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, seeing his illustrations, uh, at the Comic-Con Museum, they had his— I don't know if it was Inktober or whatever, but he did all these Black horror characters, and he had this gallery of those photos. And I mean, gallery of his sketches, and it was so amazing. I thought they were great.
DAVID F. WALKER
I, I love when I see artists do stuff like that. It's a sign of respect, right? Because Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff weren't the only people to play monsters. They weren't the only people to have roles in these movies. And if you're looking at Black performers and you want to talk about monster movies or horror movies, you're going to have to include Mantan Moreland. You're going to have to include actors who— that some people might have problems with the performances that they gave, but this is all we had, right? And so let's talk about that, you know. Let's, let's, let's talk about Mantan Moreland in Jack Hill's Spider Baby. Anybody home? I don't think it was intentional. Anybody home? Please say yes, somebody's home. Mantan Moreland's character— spoiler alert, right— he gets killed in Spider Baby. Hello? I caught you! I caught a big fat bug right in my spider web. Not only does his character get killed, but in a lot of ways that archetype died off with that movie Spider Baby, right? You still saw versions of the Black character who would get scared and his eyes would bug out, but that was sort of the death knell for that character.
DAVID F. WALKER
Or I should say it evolved into something else, which we then saw in the '80s in horror movies like Night of the Demons and the Friday the 13th movies. But, but most people don't understand that evolution, you know, how one thing leads to another.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And since we're talking about monsters here, tell us something about your Kickstarter for Blackenstein.
DAVID F. WALKER
Oh man. Well, first of all, I have to say that I, I ask people this all the time. Have you ever seen a movie, read a book, something like that, that you hated so much you can't get it out of your head. Um, for me, that's the movie Blackenstein, which I have hated since the first time I saw it. Eddie, this is Dr. Stein, the doctor I studied with when I was in school. And I hated it so much that I almost every day there was a day, a moment dedicated to my hatred of that movie. And I didn't just hate it because it was a bad movie that was poorly made on every level. I hated it because it was a— it was— there were so many missed storytelling opportunities in it, right? You know, I've had success with a comic I've co-created called Bitterroot, which is sort of a horror— is very much a horrific story. But I always wanted to do something different in terms of horror and monster movies. And I had this idea kicking around of the type of story I wanted to tell, the sort of satirical tone I wanted to tell.
DAVID F. WALKER
But also had an underlying sociopolitical statement that wasn't at the forefront of the story, was below the satire, below the horror, below the monstrousness of the story. Then one day I was laying in bed at 2 o'clock in the morning, I couldn't sleep and I was thinking about how much I hate Blackenstein. Then suddenly this idea popped in my head and I saw a version of a character of a Blaustein monster. I quickly sketched it out in my notebook, and then about 5 minutes after that, a whole story came to me. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I was determined to do something with that character and with the characters that I built around it. And a lot of it was inspired both by the Universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s, but also Blaxploitation And then comics of the '70s, which there's so many people I know who read comics, like they never read comics from the '70s, right? Or, you know, they're like, oh yeah, my introduction to comics was Spawn, or, you know, whatever. And it's like, what, you've never read something written by Doug Moench or Bill Mantlo or Don McGregor?
DAVID F. WALKER
What, you poor child, you've never read anything that's overwritten and overwrought and filled with so many adjectives that you You know, you got to look up what they mean, and I wanted to do that. And so that's what Blackenstein became. And I'm kickstarting the first story. It's a one-shot comic, 24 pages with a bunch of back matter, so it's going to be 40 pages total. But it's the beginning of my version of the Universal Horror Monsters or Hammer's House of Horrors or whatever you want to call it, but it's, it's my take on it. I think funny, but I also think disturbing. But it's also a love letter to monsters. A lot of us grow up loving monsters. I mean, I can see in your background, you have nothing but monsters, right? Like, why do we love monsters, right? And which monsters do we love? I think that says a lot about us, both as individuals and as a society. And for me as a kid, the Frankenstein monster was always my favorite. He was always the character that I related to the most because I was always like, "Wait a minute, what did he do wrong?" All he did wrong was he was born, right?
DAVID F. WALKER
That's the— when you really think about it, he's not the monster. Society is a monster, right? And society is a monster that turns him into a monster to sort of feed their monstrosity, to feed their appetites for injustice, intolerance, and persecution. Right. And man, like, if you can't do something with that and turn the monster Frankenstein into the monster Blackenstein and make statements like that, like, that's low-hanging fruit. I don't know why anyone else hasn't done it. The reality is, even if they did, they wouldn't do it better than me. But, you know, so.
BETH ACCOMANDO
All right. Well, it's always great speaking to you. The book's fantastic, and I look forward to Blackenstein.
DAVID F. WALKER
I thank you very much. I will— I'll send you a preview of the PDF in, in a little bit so you can see it. So before it comes out.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Awesome. All right, thank you very much.
DAVID F. WALKER
Thanks for talking to me. It was great talking to you.
BETH ACCOMANDO
That was David F. Walker, author of Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies
That wraps up another edition of KPBS listener supported Cinema Junkie. If you enjoy the podcast, then please share it with a friend because your recommendation is the best way to build an addicted audience. You can also help by leaving a review.
Till our next film fix, I’m Beth Accomando your resident Cinema Junkie.
