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Sam Greenlee's Book
Is
Still Making a Statement
By DeWayne
Wickham
WASHINGTON – Thirty years after his movie,
The
Spook Who Sat by the Door was bum-rushed out of inner-city
theaters, Sam Greenlee is still an angry
man.
Greenlee’s film was drawn from his book by the same name,
which was published in 1969 – four years before his movie was
released. Written in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. and at the end
of a decade in which race riots threatened to spawn on
the streets of America the kind of guerrilla warfare that now rages in Iraq,
Greenlee’s book
was not well received by this nation’s ruling class. As
quickly as it showed
up in 1973, it disappeared from the big screen.
“The film was suppressed by the FBI. It was only out there
four months,”
Greenlee said Wednesday after a special viewing of his movie at
the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference. A couple
hundred people – most of them old enough to have seen Greenlee’s film when it
was in theaters –
watched it in a cavernous ballroom of the new Washington
convention center.
If you’re too young to have seen the movie during its original
release, or too
uninspired to have read the book,
The Spook Who Sat by the Door is about a black CIA agent who masters the skills of a
spy and then uses
then to lead a black guerrilla movement in this country. While
the fighting pits
blacks against whites, Dan Freeman – the CIA agent-turned-black-revolutionary
– tells one of his men that they are fighting for
“freedom,” not against “whitey.”
If the film’s plot makes you uncomfortable, that’s exactly
what it was
intended to do to white folks back in 1973. It was part of a
genre of black
protest movies that were lumped together with other black films
of that era. Called
“blaxploitation,” these movies have been widely dismissed as
a form of black slapstick – movies that glorify bad behavior
or trivialize inner city life.
But Greenlee’s film doesn’t fit that mold. Nor do many others,
like the 1971 film
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles X-rated movie about a black sex
performer who kills two cops after they brutalize a black boy;
or
Cornbread, Earl and Me, the 1975 story of a black
high school basketball star who is mistakenly killed by a cop.
Wedged in
between the release of those films were movies like Gordon’s
War, in which four black Vietnam veterans join together to
rid an inner city neighborhood of drug pushers; and
The Legend of Nigger
Charley, the tale of three runaway slaves who outwit the
bounty hunter sent to return them to captivity.
These movies were intended to make political statements, as much
as they were meant to entertain black folks. They contained
not-so-subtle messages
about black rage at a time when white indifference to the
on-going oppression
of blacks was widespread. And some of them – like
The
Spook Who Sat by the Door– may have been too controversial to stay in theaters very long.
What’s certain is that the fire that burned in Greenlee’s
gut when he produced his book and movie still rage inside him today.
“I’m a street dude who went to three fine universities,” Greenlee
said of himself to those who hung around to hear him after the screening
of his movie. “If I had been praised and offered an Academy
Award (for
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
) I’d have to look at myself and figure out
what I did wrong,” he said.
Like Oscar Micheaux, the largely forgotten black filmmaker who produced
44 feature films in the first half of the 20th century, Greenlee
thinks that if black stories are going to be told in the cinema
– and told well – those movies must be produced by blacks.
“If you want to make black films,” he said, “you’ve got to have black money.”
White money brings with it
white control, Greenlee said.
And in far too many instances today, white control of black
movies has produced a new genre of blaxploitation films –
movies that are largely devoid of any meaningful message.
Source:
Special to BlackAmericaWeb.com. DeWayne
Wickham
is a columnist for USA Today and the Gannett News Service, which
distributes his commentaries to more than 130 daily newspapers. He's a
former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, and a
scholar-in-residence and distinguished professor of journalism at
Delaware State University.
posted 25 September 2003
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update 6 August 2008 |
