Why is the original Shaft a blaxploitation film?

Factual Questions
1

When I think of “exploitation” I think of one person or group taking advantage of another person or group. You cannot exploit yourself. My understanding is that Shaft was written/produced/directed/acted by blacks. How can this be a film that exploits blacks? True, the “sexy black Dick who gets all the chicks” uses racist language and violence, but just because it may be harmful to the black community does not make it black exploitation.

If you insist on calling Shaft an exploitation film, then at least call it a “black audience exploitation film.” The added modifier “audience” makes clear that the black filmmakers are excluded. Sure, its not as catchy as the word “blaxploitation” (which is, btw, in websters), but at least it is precise.

Of course, if websters is not correct with its definition(“the exploitation of blacks by producers of black-oriented films”), and the word “audiences” was incorrectly left out of the definition, then this is not the case of the general public being ignorant, but webster’s dictionary being imprecise.

2

Blaxploitation is a genre, like fantasy or action or Civil War drama. Shaft may have been produced by blacks, but its theme is quite similar to the later films, so it’s included in the blaxploitation genre.

3

“Blaxploitation” was coined to cover a group of action films that starred black actors and were aimed at Black audiences. It wasn’t meant to imply the people working in them were exploited, or even that the audences were – at least, not in the pejorative sense of “exploit.”

The idea was to “exploit” in the sense of “use a resource” (rather than “abuse a resource”). The black audience was there, they had money, and it was perceived that if you had a film with a Black hero, you had an audience ready and willing to see the films.

This sort of “exploitation film” was common Hollywood practice – make something tailored to the interests of a certain subset of the theatergoing audience, usually on a low budget (Now they do the same thing, only on a high budget). Someone combined “black” and “exploitation” and came up with the term.

4

Any film with Richard Roundtree, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Richard Pryor, Pam Grier, or Jim Brown is a Blaxploitation flick…my favorites!

“Blackbelt Jones” ring any bells?

I just got all 3 Shaft flicks on DVD :smiley:

-Sam

5

If you want to go back to the origins and see how it all began, look for a little film called Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.

6

Someone over there didn’t do their research. I don’t know who created the term, and that person may have meant it as a perjorative, but “exploitation” is not what the term is generally understood to mean.

7

You can’t possibly forget Petey Wheatstraw the Devil’s Son-in-law

8

“Exploitation” has a pejorative meaning these days that it’s hard to figure this one out. Today, if you called something a “young women exploitation movie”, everyone would intepret that to mean attracting male audiences with lots of gratuitous nudity, not attracting female audiences by portraying young women as heroes.

So I think RealityChuck has it right. Blaxploitation is now a genre name like any other. “Blockbuster” used to be more of a post facto evaluation of a movie’s success; now it’s a genre too.

Funny story, not really relevant: I heard an interview with Elmore Leonard, who wrote Rum Punch. After he agreed to let Tarantino make it into a movie, Tarantino didn’t call him for a really long time. When Tarantino finally did call Leonard, he apologized, and Leonard said something like, Oh I know why you didn’t call me. You were afraid I’d be mad that you changed the name and made the main character a black woman." Tarantino said, Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Leonard said the name was no big deal, and that he thought Grier would be perfect in the lead role.

9

Anyone recognize this one?

Cleopatra Schwartz

“She was 6 feet of black dynamite; he was a short Hasidic Jew. He studied the Talmud at night, while she burned the ghetto to the ground. They alone dared to triumph in a hellish inferno of unrelenting desire.”

10

blackbelt jones!

wow. that movie kicks ass.

11

It was the 70s. Everything was considered exploiting everyone. Civil rights had not yet settled down from the inevitable fanaticism so people were looking for excuses to yell racism or exploitation.

From the Black people I know, they loved the film. Many young Black males started imitating some of the things from it and through it came a whole bunch of Black films. Most films targeted Whites then – which was not considered exploitation but discrimination. So, when a film came out targeting Blacks, naturally it was considered exploitation because, then, Blacks supposedly did not practice discrimination.

I think the possibility of people being exploited also practicing discrimination was a concept too vast for the times.

12

Morgan writes:

> My understanding is that Shaft was
> written/produced/directed/acted by blacks.

It was written by Ernest Tidyman, who was white, with some assistance from John D. F. Black, who I think is also white. It was directed by Gordon Parks, who is black. I believe that the producers were white.

13

You’re missing the point, Prism. An exploitation film was a common industry term for a certain type of movie designed to cash in on some trend or audience. The word was not pejorative (other than the fact that most exploitation films were usually cheaply made and badly produced). Halliwell (who was writing about that time, defined an exploitation film as those “which have no discernable merit apart from the capability of being sensationalized.” A film like REEFER MADNESS was grouped as an exploitation film, as were various low-budget dramas (REFORM SCHOOL GIRL and the like.

The term had nothing to do with exploitation as we usually mean it today. No one was particulary bothered by the fact that Blacks were in the Blaxploitation films or that they were aimed at a Black audience (though they did have crossover appeal). The point was that there was an audience who wanted to see films with Black heroes, and the filmmakers were (in the eyes of the critics) churning out movies to fill that niche.

14

Cool. I agree. I never did see all of ‘REEFER MADNESS’ because the few excerpts were bad enough.

15

The Blaxploitation genre has been around for ages, but in the last three decades or so it has coalesced into something more particular than it once was. As Max Torque hinted above, Melvin van Peebles is responsible in part for transforming Blaxploitation films into the powerful and entertaining crime stories of the 1970s.

The subset of Blaxploitation films we are most familiar with have some similarities to each other. Most revolve around a single powerful protagonist who takes on The Man, usually outside of the law, portayed by a very good actor and backed up by a kickass soundtrack by an accomplished soul/r&b musician. Racial and sexist issues are treated quite differently in these films than they usually are today, although Singleton’s Shaft evokes a lot of the paradox and moral ambiguity of the originals.

Many, but not all, of these films were made on low budgets and reaped giant returns at the box office (a high-budget example is Shaft in Africa, which was filmed on location in Ethiopia). Blaxploitation films enjoyed a popularity far beyond their target audience, but they were exploitative (in the bad sense) in that the stars of the films were often underpaid and underacclaimed for their fine work. Some of the best, and best known, examples include:

Shaft; Richard Roundtree; Isaac Hayes.

Superfly; Ron O’Neil; Curtis Mayfield.

Black Caesar; Fred Williamson; James Brown.

All of the above were accompanied by unusually good sequels as well (okay, Superfly TNT (‘Taint Nothin’ Toit) isn’t all that good). I would have included any of a host of Pam Grier films in the above list (my personal favorite is *Coffy[i/]), but I can’t recall the artists who did the various soundtracks.

(As an aside, Sam Jackson has this line in Pulp Fiction: “…when my hands touch brain I am like Superfly TNT, I am the guns to the Navarone!!”)

Finally, we shouldn’t forget that one of the very greatest Blaxploitation films is the excellent animated film Coonskin, now known as Street Fight, directed by the incomparable Ralph Bakshi. The voice of the main character, “Rabbit,” is Philip Michael Thomas, of Miami Vice fame. It climaxes with one of the most illustrative lines of the entire genre: “Ha ha ha! It was a tar Rabbit, babeeee!”