Black Directors in Hollywood

CHAPTER ONE. The Pathmakers

C H A P T E R O N E The Pathmakers Gordon Parks After directing five motion pictures in Hollywood, I was still fascinated with its seductiveness and its challenges.Yet, sometimes I couldn’t help but think of it as the grand illusion.1 Gordon Parks In addition to his distinctive career as a professional photographer, Gordon Parks Jr. has also been a published poet, an author of three autobiographies, a novelist, a composer, and a Hollywood director. With an early life filled with racial oppression, restlessness, and violence, Parks could have ended up as so many other blacks did—hopeless, forgotten, and lost. But by his own admission his advantage ‘‘was the great love of [his] family—seven boys and eight girls, and a mother and father who cared about [him].’’2 Without oversimplifying the importance of his family, Parks details in his autobiography, Voices in the Mirror (1990), the many experiences that he encountered from his birthplace of Fort Scott, Kansas—where he was born in 1912—to his travels throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Africa. His background unfolded like a picaresque novel, and Parks grew to appreciate his privilege to know the people and places that he did. Both in and out of Hollywood, Parks was an unquestioned success. In particular, as a black director, he was a pioneer filmmaker of historical significance, and as an artist, his vision shaped a variety of films enjoyed by an international audience. The first black photographer for Glamour and Vogue magazines, Parks landed an enviable position as a staff member of Life magazine in 1948. His first assignment was to cover gang confrontations in Harlem, the community that would later serve as the backdrop for his film Shaft. For over two decades , Parks’ photographs won him acclaim and brought him in contact with numerous celebrities and politicians, including well-known blacks such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Richard Wright, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X. But it was in the late 1940s in Italy when Parks first contemplated directing films, as he photographed actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto 9 Rossellini. However, unable to attain an assistant’s position with Rossellini , the opportunity to direct a feature-length movie did not arrive until the 1960s when, at the urging of actor-director John Cassavetes, Parks met with a Warner Brothers executive to discuss directing a movie based on Parks’ novel The Learning Tree. With his first film by the same name in 1968, Gordon Parks appeared intent on becoming an immediate black ‘‘auteur,’’ as he served as writer, music composer, producer, and director on the film. Relying on Burnett Guffey as director of photography, Parks presented a film that used the natural vistas of the Midwest to tell the story of a small town and the narrow, racist thinking that affected both the black and white communities. Set in Cherokee Flats, Kansas, in 1920, the story focuses on Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson), a fifteen-year-old black teen who must face the disappointments and dangers in life.One such danger occurs when Newt and his friends steal apples from a white farmer, and a confrontation erupts between the farmer and Marcus Savage (Alex Clarke), a troubled black boy who lives a tension-filled life with his father, Booker Savage (Richard Ward). When the boys witness Kirky (Dana Elcar), the white sheriff, shoot a black man fleeing from a craps game, Marcus’ harsh assessment of whites seems to be true. But Newt’s attention is soon drawn to Arcella Jefferson (Mira Waters), a black girl with whom he develops an innocent first love. Eventually, Marcus is sent away to reform school for beating the white farmer, and Newt plunges emotionally when Arcella becomes pregnant by the white son of the town’s judge. Toward the end of the film, Newt witnesses the murder of the white farmer, killed by Booker Savage. Afraid that his revelation would begin a racial conflict in the town, Newt allows a white town drunk to be arrested and taken to court for the crime. However, Newt’s moral sense wins out, and he confesses what he saw, resulting in the self-inflicted death of Booker Savage. At the beginning of the film, with its languid, wide-angle shots of Newt walking carefree through meadows and near a lake, Parks suggests that this film will be a sensitive character study...