Only in a career as pioneering and storied as Gordon Parks‘ could an achievement like “first Black director of a Hollywood studio movie” fall into the second paragraph.
Yet, Parks’ significance as a photographer and renaissance man does often overshadow his film efforts. Sure, fans may know him as the director of the original “Shaft” (1971), but this virtuoso visualist offered the 20th-century film canon much more in “The Learning Tree” (1969) and “Leadbelly” (1976).
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On today’s episode of Be Reel, we look back at Parks’ underappreciated film resumé and are joined by producer/director Craig Laurence Rice to discuss the years he spent with his idol while making the Emmy-nominated documentary “Half Past Autumn” (2000). Rice also shares the history behind several of Parks’ unmade scripts and a surprising commonality between Parks and fellow Twin Cities legend Prince.
For the uninitiated, Parks achieved early acclaim in the 1940s for his remarkable and ground-breaking photojournalism. For Life Magazine, he captured Black life, poverty, the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, and the degradation of the criminal justice system in unprecedented ways. His point of view as a photographer is still celebrated and analyzed in new books like “The Atmosphere of Crime.”
Then, Parks became the bestselling author of the autobiographical novel “The Learning Tree,” which chronicles a young boy coming of age in 1920s Kansas. Parks subsequently adapted his novel for Warner Bros. in 1969, making him the first Black director to work for a Hollywood studio.
He followed the success of his debut with the “Shaft” series, adapted from the Ernest Tidyman novels, introducing the world to the gritty realism of New York City in the early ’70s and the iconic, titular John Shaft–a streetwise private eye famously unfazed by danger all about.
In 1976, seemingly as a fusion of the rural roots of “The Learning Tree” and the anti-hero of “Shaft,” Parks endeavored to make a biopic of legendary folk singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Leadbetter that was ultimately buried by Paramount. Perhaps Parks’ finest film work, “Leadbelly” also marked the decline of his ambitions as a Hollywood filmmaker. As Rice tells us, Parks was essentially put off for good by the industry’s unwillingness to promote an authentically Black music biopic.
All three films discussed today are breathtaking in their visuals and sadly timeless in their ability to analyze racism as a system and the complicated way Black masculinity can be shaped by white supremacy’s roadblocks and provocations. Parks’ concern with documenting these experiences lives at the heart of his work.
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