An inadvertent acknowledgement of MLK Day

I'm close enough now to my ranking deadline that I've started to plot out particular movies for particular nights. The Elvis Mitchell movie Is That Black Enough for You?!?, a feature-length essay on Black filmmakers and stars between 1968 and 1978, seemed like a good Monday night movie. You know, not the kind of movie you are expecting to knock back a few drinks while watching.

Of course, since it hadn't yet been Martin Luther King Day in the U.S., I didn't realise the appropriateness of watching it on that particular day until after the fact.

And having watched it, I wish I hadn't already set a monthly viewing series for 2023 (with another potential candidate lined up for 2024), because the documentary revealed so many blaxploitation or blaxploitation adjacent films that I have yet to see. In fact, I almost got out my phone and started making a Letterboxd watchlist of them on the fly. (Since the movie is on Netflix, I can still easily do that at some point in the future.)

For starters, can you believe I haven't actually seen the original Shaft?

This is not to suggest that blaxploitation is a total blind spot for me. I'd say I've seen five to ten movies that qualify as blaxploitation, with Super Fly and Blacula as a few titles that come to mind. The number of titles I've heard of but not yet seen, though, could make up a 12-month series with some overflow. 

And while I don't like to announce my monthly series a full year ahead of time, there's a good chance the option I originally had lined up for 2023 will get bumped back again to 2025, since Is That Black Enough for You?!? filled me with a real thirst to catch up on these other titles I've known about but not yet watched, plus some others that might be new to me. 

As a movie itself, Mitchell's film might be lacking a bit. It's too long at two hours and 15 minutes, though I should say it went by pretty quickly as I remained easily engaged with all the great footage he's assembled, as well as interviews with luminaries like Glynn Turman, Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, Billy Dee Williams and Laurence Fishburne. 

Still, Mitchell is a journalist, not a filmmaker -- I used to listen to him on KCRW when I lived in LA. The massive amount of content he's assembled proceeds chronologically, which is a useful way to organize such a compendium, but reflects a lack of imagination in terms of narrative structure. Plus you rarely get the sense that he's speaking to a larger overarching thesis statement, instead writing passages to link the chronological discussion of the films. These are observant passages and are interesting unto themselves, but they don't seem to be serving a unifying concept.

Plus he has some weird tendencies, like making a first reference to someone without including their first name. At one point he was talking about Sammy Davis Jr. and he simply referred to him as "Davis" despite it being the first mention. There was another instance of that but I can't remember who it was. 

I also find the title a bit florid for someone who is as academic and even-keeled as Mitchell tends to be. It's a reference to a repeated line of dialogue in a couple movies, but the outrage evident in the three punctuation marks is not something Mitchell himself embodies.

Still, Is That Black Enough for You?!? clearly got me fired up to dive into movies by and about Black people at some point in the near future, even if that near future may be 12 months away.

Plus, it's always good to be reminded what Martin Luther King Jr. fought for on the third Monday in January.

Are some legends unfilmable?

When Spike Lee released the brilliant Malcolm X in 1992, my first thought was, "Wow, I can't wait to see what he does with the life of Martin Luther King."

I'm still waiting.

We live in an era when Hollywood never leaves a hot idea untapped for long, and as proof of its devotion to certain ideas, reboots them before the corpse of the original is even cold. (The Incredible Hulk and this year's upcoming Fast & Furious are great examples and probably worthy of another post). But the same is most definitely not true for biopics. In fact, it seems like some of the truly deserving characters in the history of our nation -- indeed, the history of the world -- have yet to find a home in the cineplexes.

The conversation starts with Martin Luther King Jr., though it certainly doesn't end there. But while we're on MLK -- it being his birthday and all -- let's figure out what's behind his particular case. I do have some guesses.

1) He is such a beloved figure that no one wants to get his story wrong. I mean, the guy has his own holiday. The reverence reserved for him borders on the religious, and I certainly have no desire to dispute that. Any serious film about Martin Luther King would have to delve into unsavory aspects of his life -- such as his purported dalliances with women who weren't his wife -- and it may just be perceived that no good can come from that, in the public sphere.

2) Many inferior tellings of his story have already saturated the marketplace. While there has yet to be a truly authoritative prestige picture in the mold of Malcolm X, the man's story has been filmed numerous times. A large number of documentaries and a smattering of features about this man already exist. Perhaps because the features have generally been done quickly and had a TV-movie sheen to them, there's a sense that a theatrical feature would be stigmatized by being associated with its forbears.

3) It's more interesting for a filmmaker to tell the story of a flawed person. I'm not saying Martin Luther King wasn't flawed, but compared to Malcolm X, he was a frigging saint. If you're going to devote 205 minutes to the telling of a man's story, as Lee did with Malcolm X, you can't devote only 20 minutes to bad behavior. Generally speaking, I think filmmakers are drawn to characters who are not only tragic because they were killed, but tragic because of choices they made and ways they could not see themselves clearly. King's just about the best behavioral model you can think of, outside of someone like ... Barack Obama. (And I'm really interested to see what Lee -- or whoever he hands the baton to -- will do with Obama's story sometime in the 2020's).

My guess is that it's this last that really stops filmmakers in their tracks. Let's take someone like John F. Kennedy. "But wait," you say. "What about Oliver Stone's JFK?" Lest you forget, that wasn't the story of his life -- it was the story of his assassination. And sure, Kennedy has appeared as a character in many films, such as Thirteen Days. (Not by any means the most important example, just the one I could think of right now). But there hasn't been a prominent film about the man and his life yet. You could say the same thing about guys like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Sure, they've both been filmed numerous times, but it was usually either something done for television, or as a character in a movie with a broader scope.

When filmmakers focus their lens on someone famous, they want it to be someone a little unexpected, like HBO recently did with its series John Adams. Those who flocked to John Adams almost certainly did it for one of three reasons: 1) The acting (Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney); 2) The fact that it's on HBO; or 3) "Hey, I know he was a president -- but shit, I don't know anything else about him." Exactly. These filmmakers can make the definitive John Adams movie, and not worry about other cinematic interpretations that have come before. Lee could pretty much say the same thing about Malcolm X. Even as famous as he was, Lee basically "introduced" him to the world by virtue of the fact that he hadn't already been under the lens, in half-assed ways, a hundred times.

I guess when you come right down to it, X is more interesting than King in the same way that Richard Nixon is more interesting than Jimmy Carter -- and George W. Bush is more interesting than his dad. I mean, why do you think it is that Oliver Stone made Nixon and W., but never even considered making Carter and H.W.? According to Stone, the story of George W. Bush demanded to be made so much, we shouldn't even wait until the guy left office.

So will we ever see Spike Lee's Martin Luther King, or maybe just King? I guess I don't rightly know. But maybe now that Obama is in the White House, we can finally dig below the surface and paint a portrait of the real, flawed man that he was. Maybe now, the black man will achieve cinema's measure of the equality his race has always been seeking:

A biopic of a genuine human being, warts and all.