COUNTERPUNCH LETTERS : Blacks in Filmmaking

While the best directors are being forced (a multimillion-dollar fee is quite considerable duress) into the vast arena of high-tech filmmaking, Third World movie makers find it perennially difficult to fund any project at all (“Blacks in Hollywood: We Need to Help One Another . . .” by Jim Brown, and “ ‘RoboCop 2’: Entertainment, Yes, but Also a Hero for Our Times” by Irvin Kershner, Counterpunch, July 16).

What we have in common is that we are now both facing new arenas. High-tech is certainly recent ground for all filmmakers, and for us African-Americans, all areas of filmmaking are relatively new, whether high-tech, low-tech or no-tech.

And the more exposure one has to anything the better one gets at it. Moreover, the more African-Americans enter the film industry, the better our chances of discovering more excellent talents.

The key is access, access to the means of production. We may not all yet have access to 35mm Panaflexes, but a few hundred bucks can purchase a camcorder with which we can master the fundamentals of camera angles, writing scripts and directing actors.

In the ‘70s the brilliant Melvin van Peebles proved to us African-American film students at UCLA that a black man could make a movie and control everything involved in the making of that movie from the artistic to complete ownership of his negative.

We at UCLA passed around the book that Van Peebles wrote on how he had made “Sweet Sweetback” until it was dog-eared; but more than that, we passed around the pride that we felt, vicariously, through him and his accomplishments. That pride buoyed me later when I managed, with the succor of MGM’s Roger Mayer and the financial help of my parents, to repeat what Van Peebles had done with my own first film, “Penitentiary.”

I am presently finishing up post-production on a modest high-tech film, “Street Wars.” What is lacking in cash, we are making up with resourceful creativity.

JAMAA FANAKA

Los Angeles