Host Brandon Jenkins kicks off the season with Blaxploitation scholar, author, and professor Dr. Novotny Lawrence. They discuss what made the 70's the perfect moment for the Blaxploitation movement to come to life. This Episode's Blaxploitation Watch List: Dolemite Is My Name (2019) Dolemite (1975) Cotton Comes To Harlem (1970) Blacula (1972) Scream Blacula Scream Shaft (1971) Coffy (1973) Cleopatra Jones (1973) Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) Blackenstein (1973) Together Brothers (1974) Watermelon Man (1970) Sugar Hill (1974) Buck and the Preacher Man (1972) Thomasine and Bushrod (1974)
Brandon: Before we start the show, I wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains strong language and references to some pretty adult themes. So, maybe be careful before you play it with kids around. Cool? Let’s jump in.
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That was Eddie Murphy as the character Dolemite in the new Netflix biopic, Dolemite is my Name. Dolemite was a smooth talking, rhyme saying, Kungfu crime fighting pimp brought to life in 1975 by comedian and actor Rudy Ray Moore.
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I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins, here on There’s Something About Dolemite, we’re taking you back to the funkiest time in film. Throughout this season we’ll explore Rudy Ray Moore’s career, his cold, classic Dolemite and the lasting impact of the Blaxploitation movement.
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Brandon: According to Rudy Ray Moore, he first came upon the mythical character Dolemite in the 1970’s while working at a record store in Los Angeles to make ends meet. While there he overheard a homeless man named Ricco spitting whimsically explicit rhymes about a character named Dolemite. Here’s Ron Cephas Jones who played Ricco in the Netflix film.
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The stories were so hilariously shocking at the time that it occurred to Moore to record these tales, rework them with a new spin and perform them as his own, eventually building out the character Dolemite to his liking and making a movie centered around his X-rated exploits.
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A true B movie through and through, the original Dolemite, it’s a site to see. The film was packed with wide bodied cars, stylish pimps, crime fighting hoes, sex, drugs, an off brand of martial arts and comedic moments so oddly timed it’s difficult to tell if they were intentional or by accident.
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It sounds a little weird to say it considering the aforementioned, but there’s something about Dolemite that feels innocent, almost child like albeit from a really twisted and obscene kid. Despite this charm, upon the film’s release in 1975 it was panned by critics who saw it as low brow, poorly constructed and defensive. Rudy Ray Moore knew that he was tapping into something special, that he was speaking to a certain audience and he knew what they wanted. Although it was put together with a measly $100,000 the film was successful at the box office, earning $12 million and taking the relatively obscure and pushing him further into the spotlight.
So, how does a struggling black comedian in the ‘70’s go from performing hood folk tales to a box office hit? Well, if the initial theme of Hollywood was to imagine a world where no black people existed, giving birth to responses ranging from erasure, to stereotype, to servant, to the respectable negro, the forthcoming era of film would obliterate those notions. What you get is the era of blaxploitation, what you get is Dolemite, what you get is Rudy Ray Moore.
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Brandon: All of this made me want to dig deeper into the era of blaxploitation, to find out how it all began, who are the pioneers and what were the reasons it was a criticized as it was revered? So, that’s what we’re going to do on this show. We’re going to take a look into the origin of the movement, the music, the costumes, the action scenes, the role of women in these films and how all of this laid the groundwork for much of the culture we experience today. So, to help us deconstruct what made the ‘60’s and ‘70’s such a ripe time for blaxploitation to pop off and change black cinema, let’s turn to this week’s interview with Iowa State University professor, author and blaxploitation scholar, Dr. Novotny Lawrence.
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Brandon: Dr. Lawrence, thanks for joining me.
Novotny: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Brandon: I want to start at the very beginning. Just the term blaxploitation and like what it really means. I think when I see the term I understand where the black in blaxploitation is but can you help explain where the exploitation in blaxploitation is? Because it kind of has pejorative feel to it.
Novotny: Yeah, that’s always the tough part. So, there used to be a time in Hollywood where studios had full on exploitation departments. And so, the exploitation would be considered the trailer or it would be a poster. And so, the way that that essentially works is if we think about that in contemporary times is that if we have a film like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and we put Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio’s images on that film we can say we’re kind of exploiting their image.
So, that was one way in which, you know, exploitation used to be thought of. And so, certainly in the 1970’s if we put Pam Grier’s picture on the cover of Foxy Brown or on a poster for Foxy Brown rather, we understand that there’s kind of this element of exploitation in that traditional sense, in that poster. But at the same time, in that context, it wasn’t considered a negative to think about those departments as exploitation but that’s one way that we can look at the term.
The other is, is that, you know, we can start looking at, you know, what happened with African American talent during the blaxploitation movement? And that is that we had all these people working in these films, in front of the camera, behind the camera, in areas like craft services and styling hair and they had all this groundswell of work. And so, you know, more than any other point in time in motion picture history we have all these African Americans who are working. And then, all of a sudden, when blaxploitation comes to an end, much of that talent is cast aside and they’re not working anymore.
So, in that regard, maybe it was African Americans who were exploited because they were useful for a period. And then, when Hollywood used all those resources up or blaxploitation, rather, dried up in Hollywood, that was it, they didn’t need them anymore. So, that’s one way in which we can look at exploitation too.
But then, the final way that, you know, is an interesting consideration is that when we talk about some of these films like say a, Cotton Comes to Harlem, being set in Harlem. And we think about the economic and political conditions of Harlem and what life was like and we put those conditions on grand display in films. But perhaps don’t pump some of that money back in the community to address them, did we exploit some of those conditions at the time? So, I think it’s a really multi layered question and I don’t know that any of those answers are necessarily wrong. I don’t know that any of those things are just the right answer but I think it's a combination of factors that we really have to think of when we talk about that term, black exploitation.
Brandon: I feel you. I noticed you defined it sort of—you were using time as part of the definition but I think it’s also noticeable that you don’t define it as a genre necessarily, a film genre.
Novotny: Yeah.
Brandon: Why is that?
Novotny: Well, and that—that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to get at in my work and I hope that people will catch on, is that because blaxploitation is kind of a cycle of films. It’s more—I kind of liken it to film noir. So, there are characteristics that define blaxploitation. So, for example, if we have a blaxploitation film, we have to have a black hero or heroine, if we don’t have that, we don’t have a blaxploitation film. They’re not going to be tokenized, right? So, they’re going to be surrounded by other black characters in the film. They’re going to be set in predominately black urban locales. And so, we have many of these characteristics that define blaxploitation but underneath that classification we also have different genres of films.
So, we have horror films like Blacula, you know, with black Dracula. We have detective films like Cotton Comes to Harlem and Shaft. We have, you know action films like Coffy featuring Pam Grier or Cleopatra Jones featuring Tamara Dobson. So, we see that blaxploitation is kind of style or perhaps a cycle or a movement of films but not necessarily a genre. And so, I’ve been trying to work to correct that for years and get people to think about it a little bit differently so that one, we can give many of the films and the performers and directors their due. And at the same time, so we can make accounts of motions picture history and the black cinematic experience more complete by doing that as well.
Brandon: What takes place in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s that allows blaxploitation to create itself and also thrive?
Novotny: Yeah, a combination of factors that I talk about and I think that, you know, there are other circumstances but there are three that I really like to highlight. And one of those is, this problematic history of representation that we’re talking about. So, African Americans, you know, this long period of time when they’re just depicted as other and less than. And again, the most—you know, any of the stereotypes that you can think of, that they’re still, you know, prevalent, that people still recognize today even if they don’t believe them. When we talk about fried chicken and watermelon eating and lazy and stupid and all of that stuff. It’s embodied in those early cinematic representations and at some point, that has to change. People have become tired of those kinds of images and so, that’s the first thing.
The second thing that I think really starts to push back against some of those things is that we get to the Civil Rights movement. And one of the things that I think is not common knowledge for some people is that, as part of the Civil Rights movement organizations like the NAACP were challenging Hollywood to be better too. And certainly, Hollywood had to respond, not only to the pressures exerted by the NAACP but also to the changing ideology of the day. African Americans are in the streets, they’re demanding rights. And certainly, while I wouldn’t say there was just this major change of heart, you have to start responding to the socio-political conditions that are taking place in the streets. So, we get the Civil Rights movement.
And then, the final thing, and this is why I say, I wouldn’t sit here and try to say, “Oh and people had a change of heart. You know, Hollywood producers just looked and they said, “Oh, we just feel so badly, look at how we treated black folks for all these years. We have to be better folks.”” I would love to be able to tell folks that. I would—yes, that’s what happened. But I can’t tell people that because that’s not what happened.
Part of the thing that happened or that last characteristic in addition to historical misrepresentation, Civil Rights, is that Hollywood is struggling financially in the 1960’s. People were staying home to watch television and so, there’s this decline and so Hollywood needs something to energize itself. And so, the thing that they find out is that black people will go to the movies. Now, go figure, right? I mean, black people had been going to the movies all along. But Hollywood was not really targeting the African American demographic.
And so, you know, coming out of the 1960’s, you know, we have Civil Rights and then we have the emergence of black power and the thing that happens is, Cotton Comes to Harlem comes out in 1970 and it taps into those themes of Civil Rights and black power and it puts these two black detectives on screen. The film is directed by Ossie Davis, who eulogized Malcolm X, and black people went to see it. You know, about 70% of the revenue of that very successful film, Cotton Comes to Harlem, comes from black people. And so, Hollywood has to step back and go, “Oh, wait a minute, like they go to the movies.” Right? It was like, well of course they go to the movies, right?
Brandon: You point to the percentage of black audiences you know? But I’m wondering the critical reception of these. And when I say critical reception I am thinking about, you know, mainstream, white male dominated medias systems that would have a say in some of these films. What was the critical reception like?
Novotny: Hey, that’s a great question. I think that it—it’s actually one of the things that I think allows other people to go into the game, so to speak, the blaxploitation game. Cotton Comes to Harlem is actually very well reviewed. It’s a film that was released by United Artists, so it was a major film studio. It was based off a very popular series of novels written by an author named Chester Himes. He was an African American man who was kind of displaced, he was living in France after he became pretty much unpublishable in the United States. And he wrote this series of novels based on these two heroes working as police detectives in Harlem.
And so, Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. buys those novels and then adapts them for the screen and, you know he changes the film a bit in that there not quite as gritty as the novels had been. But at the same time, he injects humor, he puts Harlem on grand display and he shows the life and love that exists sometimes in such communities. And so, by doing so critics really picked up on that, they liked the humor, they liked the satire. And Cotton Comes to Harlem is incredibly well reviewed.
Sweet Sweet Back’s Bad Ass Song is really pretty divisive and it’s not only, you know, some white’s who were hesitant to embrace that film but there were African American reviewers who kind of didn’t quite know what to make of that film too. So, it was kind of divided. So, as you watch that film, every time he gets out of a jam, he does so by using his sexuality. So, there’s a scene in which he—in order to get out of his handcuffs when he initially escapes from capture from the police, after he beats them up, he escapes. He goes to see a woman and she won’t let him out of his cuffs until she has sex with him. Now, of course, this does not send very good messages about women, which is one of the key problems of blaxploitation cinema but at the same time, this becomes his weapon of choice.
So, one of the critics for the film, when they looked at it, essentially sums his review up by saying, “No one ever fucked his way to freedom.” Right? And, you know—or let me go back. He said, “Black people can’t fuck their way to freedom. If we could have, we would have celebrated the millennium over 400 years ago.”
Brandon: Right?
Novotny: So, very divided. We had criticisms like that but then we have others who say, “This is a raw film.” Huey P. Newton who was, you know, actually, you know, one of the founders of the Black Panther party was actually very positive about the film, he loved it, he embraced the film. And then, you know, it’s just one of those things were the black intelligence here and the press, they’re very divided.
Brandon: With you writing on this movement for over ten years, how much of this movement is properly archived and how much would you imagine that we’ve lost to the ether or to business or to Hollywood or to just a chasm in our own storytelling?
Novotny: Boy, I think that because of the way blaxploitation happened, the emergence and how—and it becoming so popular so quickly. I think that a lot of what we lost from blaxploitation are probably films made by companies that were created just to make blaxploitation movies because they wanted to capitalize. I think those offshoots, so, for example, there’s a film—and you may have heard of it and I think a lot of people actually heard of it—Blackenstein. So, we had Blacula and then we got Blackenstein which was a black Frankenstein.
And so, American International Pictures, which is a studio that made several blaxploitation films was originally going to make Blackenstein and then they decided, “No, we’re not going to do that, we’re going to make the sequel to Blacula called Scream Blacula, Scream. So, they dismissed the plans and so, there’s a company called European International Pictures that is created just so it can make Blackenstein. It’s terrible, the production of these are bad. But, you know, it’s quickly shot, it’s shoddy acting and sets and it’s just really a bad film.
But we get films like that, that come out of blaxploitation that are still certainly worth archiving, worth taking a look at to really put the movement in full context. I think we’ve lost a lot of those. I also think that we have lost track, it’s still hard to pinpoint exactly how many of these films were made during 1970 and ’75 and then, again, we get the remnants or the residual films in ’76, ’77. Sometimes students, when I teach my blaxploitation class, they will—you know, they have to write a—they pick a film and I tell them, “Position it within the blaxploitation movement and using the characteristics, so on and so forth.”
And every now and then a student will write about a film that I haven’t heard of yet. And again, I have been working on this area or in this area for a long time. So, a few years back a student came to me, he gave me a film called Together Brothers. I hadn’t heard of Together Brothers, I now have it in my collection because he said, “You know, I’ll probably never watch it again and this is what you do, so here you go.” So, I think we’ve lost, you know, some films that require viewing, whether we would look at them and say, “They’re great or they’re poor or whatever.” Because, again, it gives us a full understanding of what was going on during that period.
Fortunately, a lot of the films have been preserved or re-released even. I think MGM Video has it’s, you know, ‘70’s Soul Cinema Collection, so you can find a lot of the titles there. There are other companies that release versions of films. I have a copy of, I believe its Richard Roundtree’s film, Charley One-Eye. And, you know, sometimes what you find is you buy those things on DVD or Blu-ray and the transfer isn’t very good, they haven’t been preserved very well. But you still have them to give some insight into what those films looked like. So, I think, you know some of those smaller films we lost but, you know, there’s been a resurgence and an interest in getting some of the more canonic films out there as well as some of the ones that have pretty good production values.
Brandon: I want to switch gears a bit and speak specifically about Dolemite and its star, Rudy Ray Moore. As a performer and a creator, where do you place Rudy Ray Moore? Where does he stand in the greater conversation of blaxploitation?
Novotny: I think that Rudy Ray Moore is a very wonderful cult blaxploitation figure. And I use cult because, you know, somehow, and I think it’s probably because of things like the—some of the campiness associated with Dolemite, you know, or The Human Tornado, it’s because of those things he hasn’t risen to the same level as say a Richard Roundtree, who played John Shaft or a Tamara Dobson. But he is a fantastic cult figure who’s influence can be felt and seen in things like hip-hop and in other films as well. And so, I think that he deserves a more prominent place, actually then he’s historically gotten. And as scholars, we have to step up and talk about Rudy Ray Moore more, so to speak.
Brandon: Yeah, you said cult, you know, it’s like he’s not necessarily off to the side, but like you said, not in the traditional conversation as a Richard Roundtree or Pam Grier. What was it about him and his films that made him stand out and kind of move towards cult but also stand out as a talent on screen?
Novotny: I think it’s that tendency that audiences have to look at something that maybe isn’t slick in production value or where you can tell that, you know, “Okay, we’re having fight scenes but it’s clear those punches aren’t landing.” You know? Like it’s, you know, it’s that tendency to look at those things and dismiss because sometimes we attribute importance or value to authenticity or to how real something looks rather than looking at something as a whole or understanding it.
And what I think, the people who really loved Dolemite, what they understood is they like Rudy Ray Moore’s comedy, him being a comic and essentially bringing his act to cinema. He’s among the first to ever do that and that, you know, he swore, he used curse words in his comedy. He’s, you know—we talk about Richard Pryor but Rudy Ray Moore is before Richard Pryor, he influences him. And so, he incorporates those things into his act and so, he had this built in audience that I think his films really appealed to. So, if you knew Rudy Ray Moore and you understood and appreciated him delivering “Signifying Monkey” in his stand-up act, you were going to appreciate hearing that in Dolemite. And so, I think that it means that his built-in audience is what really gravitates to his films and really gives him that cult status. And they had a capability to also share his work with others. The other thing is, is that those films weren’t released, say, in the mainstream exactly or didn’t get the same kind of release as say of Shaft. So, I think all those things kind of make him a cult figure but an incredibly important figure at that.
Brandon: I love that. Finally, before we let you go.
Novotny: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
Brandon: You’ve given us a crazy roster of films, some that I knew about, some I’ve never heard of, ever. Which now I have to go digging for. But can you give us your blaxploitation must watch list of films that you haven’t mentioned today?
Novotny: Oh, boy, okay. That I have not mentioned today, oh, that’s really good, okay. Let me think here, because I have mentioned a lot. Okay, so here’s what I would say, and this does not necessarily mean that when I say you must watch it, that this is going to be ground breaking cinema. But I would say that it’s that they weren’t watching because of their place in the movement. And some of them are good and other’s you might kind of go, “Why did he recommend that we watch this?” But I would say that—I would even go pre-blaxploitation, that I would advise everyone to watch Watermelon Man, that’s Melvin Van Peebles—his first film that he made for Columbia in ’69. I mentioned it but I would say watch that because I think it makes—we start to understand the aesthetic in Sweet Back if we watch Watermelon Man. So, I would suggest that.
But films that I haven’t mentioned that I would think that you would have to watch, I would say in terms of action/heroine, it’s valuable to watch Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, that is the sequel to the first film. I think that it is also important to watch Scream Blacula Scream which is the sequel to Blacula. There is another blaxploitation horror film called Sugar Hill that a lot of people don’t know about. When we say Sugar Hill, we think of a Wesley Snipes film from the ‘90’s. But no, the blaxploitation horror film is really interesting and I would suggest watching that. I would also recommend watching Buck and the Preacher Man, which is sort of Sidney Poitier’s foray in the blaxploitation. It’s a Western and it features Poitier and Harry Belafonte. So, I would recommend that.
And then finally, I would watch Thomasine & Bushrod, which is another blaxploitation Western that I think has some—you know, it’s about—it’s a Western and it stars Max Julien and his girlfriend, her name was Vonetta McGee and they’re in the film. And really interesting going up Western Adventure. So, I would say those would be a list of titles that if you can access them or get to them, they—I would check those out.
Brandon: Word, Novotny thank you, you’ve given us so much and this hit list. You’ve given me some homework.
Novotny: No problem at all, thanks a lot, it’s really a pleasure.
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Brandon: Thank you guys so much for tuning in for this episode, make sure to share your thoughts about the show by hitting up our friends at Strong Black Lead on Twitter. This show is a collaboration between Netflix’s Strong Black Lead and Pineapple Street Studios. Special thanks to executive producers Jasmyn Lawson, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. And shout out my producers, Agerenesh Ashagre and Jess Jupiter. Our original music is by Daoud Anthony. Tell your friends about the show and make sure to rate and subscribe to There’s Something About… Dolemite on Apple Podcast, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. And that’s our show, we’ll see you all next week.
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