From Uncle Tom to Sweet Sweetback: The Academy Museum’s New Exhibit

As Black History Month winds down, I want to consider the Academy Museum’s new major exhibit. Called “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971,” it’s slated to run through July 16, and it’s well worth seeing for its insights into how African-American actors and interracial subject matter came to be a part of mainstream Hollywood motion pictures.

 In cinema’s early days, Black characters were exclusively played by white actors in dark makeup. This held true when the characters were evil (the rapists and rapscallions who go after white women in Birth of the Nation are the obvious example). But it also applied when they were sympathetic, as in many early filmed versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The exhibit’s second room, which includes the provocative “Balcony Seating Only” installation, reminds us that Black audiences who chafed at the indignities of segregation once flocked to so-called “race movies.” Films like 1937’s “Harlem on the Prairie,” starring Herb Jeffries, mimicked popular Hollywood genres (for instance, the western and the detective story) but featured all-Black casts.

 It was the advent of the musical that allowed African-American performers to become increasingly popular with white audiences. The exhibit pays tribute to such crossover 1940s talents as the Nicholas Brothers (seen in their fabulous staircase number from Stormy Weather) and the sultry Lena Horne, a great favorite of my parents. Of course some terrific film clips from musicals like Porgy and Bess (1959) and Carmen Jones (1954) are on view. While watching the latter I was thrilled to spot my first teacher, future Kennedy Center honoree Carmen de Lavallade, among the background dancers.

 Some Black musical talents were featured in white films too, but generally in roles that could be snipped out for the Southern market. In this section of the exhibit I learned for the first time about “soundies,” two-minute musical presentations viewable by the Word War II-era public through coin-operated machines located in nightclubs and other gathering spots. The soundie has been called an obvious precursor to today’s music video: at the museum I watched Fats Waller outrageously mugging to “This Joint is Jumpin’” and Cab Calloway extolling the charms of “Minnie the Moocher.”  

 There’s a big jump from the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s to the era when Sidney Poitier played out on screen the tough issues facing African-Americans within the unfolding history of this nation. The exhibit naturally showcases Poitier’s landmark Oscar win for Lilies of the Field, as well as his appearance in such controversial hits as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night (both 1967). Appropriately, visitors can watch the clip of Poitier, his eyes flashing in anger, returning the slap of a bigoted Southern land-baron in the latter film. But this focus on Black stars does not preclude attention to rising Black directors like the gutsy Melvin Van Peebles, whose bold and angry Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) pointed the way toward the so-called blaxploitation era.    

 I realize that exhibits such as this one are constrained by what they can realistically cover. Time and space are not, needless to say, limitless. But I’m curious to know why 1971 was chosen as an ending date for this exhibit. The evolution of the heroic and strait-laced Poitier persona into Shaft and Superfly is surely worth exploring. And I’d love to know about the changing dynamics of audiences who are increasingly ready to root for a Black character more human and more flawed than those Poitier once played. Which, I guess, means a second part to “Regeneration” is much needed. When it opens, I’ll be there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Academy Museum: Some Exhibits You Can’t Refuse

 So what’s new at the Academy Museum, that Wilshire Blvd. monument to the art and science of filmmaking? The museum has always promised to evolve over time. Now that it’s been open for more than a year, several exhibits have departed and been replaced by others. In the space formerly occupied by an in-depth look at The Wizard of Oz, there’s now an even more impressive focus on The Godfather. Writer-director Francis Ford Coppola, bless him, has apparently documented his every impulse regarding the first Godfather film in particular. For me, as a teacher of screenwriting, it was a thrill to see a notebook made up of the pages of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel, with Coppola’s scribblings marking his evolving plans for bringing Puzo’s text to the screen through dialogue and visual cues. 

 In the Godfather section, there are also film clips aplenty. Some of my favorites showcase the various actors auditioning for the roles of Michael, Kay, and Don Vito Corleone. I learned that Coppola had Al Pacino’s look in his head from the start, even though his studio backers tried to hint that a blond like Robert Redford could be perceived as northern Italian. I also learned the lengths to which Coppola had to go in assuring his bosses that the often difficult Marlon Brando would be worth hiring for the title role. And costume sketches show how the creative team tried to set Michael’s WASP-y lady love apart from those with Italian roots by way of costuming and hair color. The importance of ambient sound is highlighted by a long clip from a scene in a Bronx trattoria that starts out amiably and ends with a brutal double murder.

 A few steps from the large Godfather exhibit is the small gallery devoted to costume design. I was surprised and pleased to see that the costumes I had remembered being on display (like Marilyn Monroe’s glittery red gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the bizarre floral raiment from Midsommar) had been replaced by alternatives, like the black velvet young-boy suit worn by Mary Pickford as the star of Little Lord Fauntleroy. There are also new video interviews featuring costume designer Anne Roth, makeup department head Joel Harlow, and hair designer  Yolanda Toussieng. I liked Roth’s steely insistence that she doesn’t design to please celebrities. Even though a major star may hate the color yellow, Roth goes ahead with her artistic plans if it’s determined that yellow is the character’s favorite color. Meanwhile Harlow explains in detail how and why he created exotic head tattoos for Black Panther. And Toussieng reminisces about how, to suggest a sort of topiary look for Edward Scissorhands, she invented radical cuts (and wigs!) not only for human actors but also for the  pooches cast in the film.

 My main goal in visiting the museum was to see the massive new full-floor exhibit called “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971.” I learned a lot in the first few rooms about how Black cinema evolved out of Vaudeville, featuring such stars as Bert Williams. There’s info about the first Black actor to play Uncle Tom in an early version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (formerly the role had been taken by white actors in blackface.) And a stunning installation reminds us that in many local movie theatres, “colored” audiences were required to watch from the balcony. The heart of the exhibit is the period, much loved by my parents, when musically gifted Black performers were being featured. Who knew that there once were “soundies,” in which musicians like Fats Waller performed their latest hits in two-minute film clips?

 

 

The Academy Museum, Take Two: A Salute to Diversity

Part of the mandate of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is to present to the public the breadth of the film community. It’s a very 21^st century mission: to try to overcome past industry biases by focusing with particular intensity on the contributions of filmmakers outside the mainstream. Of course a lot of attention is still being paid to the Hollywood status quo, and I’m sure many moviemakers continue to feel slighted. 

Yes, the big boys and the big studio movies are very much in the spotlight. For instance, the fingerprints of Steven Spielberg are everywhere (in the E.T. image, the Indiana Jones video tribute, the Close Encounters clip, and Bruce the shark leering at visitors from over the bank of escalators). But that makes total sense when you think of Spielberg as a major museum donor as well as a favorite of most of today’s movie fans. I’m certain my longtime film industry boss, B-movie maven Roger Corman, was not nearly so generous when it came to opening his wallet. Which may help explain why none of the museum’s galleries is dedicated to the art of making genre movies on a shoestring budget.

 That being said, the Academy has gone out of its way to tip its hat toward filmmakers of color. An introductory Stories of Cinema gallery on the 2^nd floor is divided into five sections. The first introduces 1941’s legendary Citizen Kane in terms of its origins and production. Right next door is a space dedicated to a very different movie, a small ethnic delight from 2002 called Real Women Have Curves. Starring a young America Ferrera, it’s the tale of an East L.A. teenager grappling with her weight and her Latina identity. Her mother is played by screen veteran Lupe Ontiveros, whose death raised hackles at the 2013 Oscar ceremony when her photo was left out of the annual salute to “those we’ve lost.”

 Next to a salute to editor Thelma Schoonmaker is a space devoted to Oscar Micheaux, a pioneering Black filmmaker (1884-1951) who was the first African American to make a feature-length motion picture. Micheaux is credited on about 40 independent productions, all of them featuring Black actors in stories geared to attracting “colored” audiences. His section of the museum backs onto a lively tribute to Bruce Lee, who brought Chinese martial arts traditions onto the world’s screens.

 A much longer and more comprehensive treatment is given to the incomparable Spike Lee, one of the most inventive filmmakers at work today. Lee is a life-long collector of movie memorabilia, and his large section boasts posters autographed by many of his movie heroes, foreign and domestic, as well as items reflecting his own body of work. Most interesting to me: film clips showcasing how mainstream movies from the past—everything from The Third Man to Night of the Hunter to Bye, Bye Birdie—have had an impact on his own directorial choices. And there’s the ultra-cool purple and gold suit he wore to honor the late Kobe Bryant while picking up his first Academy Award (for adapted screenplay) at the 2020 Oscar ceremony.

 In the all-inclusive spirit of the Academy Museum, I just watched Daughters of the Dust, a 1991 indie by a Black and female auteur, Julie Dash. It’s an inventive tale of the Gullah people, descendants of African slaves, living on an island off the Carolina coast. I admit I couldn’t always follow the complicated family story, but the film is mesmerizing to look at, as well as beautifully acted, and American cinema would be poorer without it.