Shaft

Well, going through some facts, this film is based on Ernest Tidyman's nonfiction book about Donald Lang, and Donald Lang is the deaf, mute individual who was tried for murder.

Tidyman also wrote the novel Shaft, and like you mentioned, won an Academy Award for co-writing The French Connection.

This TV film premiered on CBS on May 27, 1979.

LeVar Burton plays Donald Lang, and Paul Sorvino plays Lowell Myers, who is the deaf defense lawyer.

Or the Dirty Harry movies.

Or the Dirty Harry movies or the original Shaft or any of those blaxploitation movies in general.

I don't know.

I think filmmakers are always trying to push the medium stylistically.

[laughs] This isn't, this isn't my white brother-in-law who's just like, "Hey, let's watch Blacula." [laughs] That'd be weird.

I mean, I've seen Shaft and, uh-

Mm

... uh, uh, a lot of the '90s, uh, like, gangster films.

Um-

Uh, like Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society.

Although Shaft is also copaganda.

[laughs]

Chef was Isaac Hayes.

Did the theme from Shaft, a.k.a. Sevens, the league theme.

Shaft.

Shaft.

Thank you.

Vossi's verdict here on SEN.

And however your career goes up and down, you'll always have-

You can always be Shaft.

You can always be Shaft.

[laughs]

And, and-

And Bruce Willis said, "I could be Shaft."

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Well, you can't be Shaft.

It was an unbelievably great year for music.

But I wanted to pick something, uh, whose tendrils extended a little bit beyond music, and I picked the soundtrack/score to the 1971 movie Shaft.

Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's things you're all about? Shaft.

Right on.

You see this cat Shaft is a bad mother- Shut your mouth.

I want to note, we're, we're all chair dancing except Glenn, which is the most chair dancing I've ever seen.

[laughing]

And you know, Isaac Hayes, he had that often imitated voice.

That was a comparatively early entry in the so-called blaxploitation movie boom of the early 1970s when US movie studios suddenly realized that there was a significant opportunity to make films that catered specifically to an African-American audience and reflected their life experiences.

Shaft, directed by the former Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, was of course the movie that really opened the floodgates for this genre, especially after its title theme by Isaac Hayes won the Oscar for Best Song.

Superfly was Gordon Park's next movie, and this time he signed up another big soul music star, Curtis Mayfield, who had broken through as a solo artist a couple of years earlier with Moving On Up.

Mayfield was already one of the first soul singers to tackle the political issues then beginning to affect American society in general, but especially the black community.