Blaxploitation pride deep cover 19928/31/2023 By the early 1980s, he was directing episodes of major shows like “Knots Landing,” “Dallas,” and the soap opera “Falcon Crest.” As one of television’s few Black directors, Duke faced terrible racism. But that I was serious about my craft,” Duke said.Īlready a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, Duke leveraged his early film success to enroll in the American Film Institute. I think after that understood that I was a serious actor and that I didn’t just take roles to be funny or humorous. Their reticence changed when they watched him play Abdullah, a Black-Muslim revolutionary working in the titular business of director Michael Schultz’s “Car Wash.” “Abdullah was a proud Black man. Hailing from Poughkeepsie, New York, Duke was the son of working-class parents who were not initially supportive of his chosen profession. “In those days, if you were a Black director, you were expected to only do projects that were Black-oriented,” Duke told IndieWire during a recent interview via video call from his Los Angeles home. Rebellion - during which he helmed episodes of “Dallas” (making him the first African American director to do so) and “Falcon Crest” the height of his directorial feature run happened during the Black New Wave of the 1990s, when he was also making white-led movies like the Olympia Dukakis vehicle “The Cemetery Club.” Maybe it’s because he doesn’t belong to a singular era? His movie acting career began with the Blaxploitation hit “Car Wash” his television career coincided with the rise of African American filmmakers during the 1980s - now known as the L.A. A number of directors emerged during this period and went on to enjoy long-lasting careers after the official end of the era.Jessica Chastain Abandoned Perfection to Create Dynamic Performance in ‘George & Tammy’Īnd yet, his name is rarely mentioned alongside Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes brothers, or Julie Dash in discussions about the decade’s most important Black auteurs. Blaxploitation definition Empowering new voicesīlack exploitation might sound like black filmmakers and actors were being exploited, and there is some debate over the matter, but most agree that the movement was a powerful and important one in retrospect. These were some of the most important films of the Blaxploitation era. Films like Blacula and Ganja and Hessexplored the horror genre through the Blaxploitation lens while films like Dolemite infused over-the-top comedy into the crime/action storyline. The demand for Blaxploitation films was high, and a brief golden age was experienced before the rabid interest eventually waned.īlaxploitation films often explored similar themes of crime, fighting back against “the man,” and black American life and struggles of the time, but the films were not confined by style or genre. Dozens of Blaxploitation films were shot concurrently and released quickly one after another throughout the early 1970s. In the months and years following, there was explosive growth in the number of Blaxploitation movies being made. The genre burst onto the scene with the one-two punch of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft from directors Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks respectively.
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