Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (19 page)

African-Americans had appeared in films long before Melvin van Peebles made the revolutionary
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
in 1971, but his story of an angry fugitive putting it to The Man (white society) for a lifetime of degradation was the spark that ignited a screen revolution. The history was not complimentary. At the beginning, movie blacks were generally the butt of racist humor or condescension, usually cast as comic relief, servants, or, at best, “a credit to their race.” Unless they appeared in the productions of Oscar Micheaux or other visionary filmmakers on what was then known as the “Negro Circuit,” blacks in fully realized characterizations were the exception rather than the rule. Even when a new generation of actors of color emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s — Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Beah Richards, Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Ethel Waters, or Diana Sands — they struggled for meaningful roles.
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As shown earlier, when Sidney Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs returned a slap to Larry Gates’s George Endicott in
In the Heat of the Night,
American movies began to catch up with where the Civil Rights struggle was heading. The April 23, 1971, release of
Sweet Sweetback
kicked it up several notches. Advertised as “rated X by an all-white jury” (the MPAA), van Peebles’s kinetic, incendiary movie ably served as wish fulfillment for millions of black filmgoers who embraced its revolutionary style and vengeful message. Its $15 million gross on a $500,000 investment goaded every Hollywood studio to look around for movies that could star black actors and actresses, although most of them wound up being made by white directors and producers. The “blaxploitation” cycle had begun. Produced cheaply because film companies figured only “urban” (read: black and brown) audiences would buy tickets, and distributed primarily to cities where the “urbans” lived, they provided limited entrée into the largely segregated Hollywood industry for many black filmmakers.

Shaft,
released on June 25, 1971, was an event as notable as
Sweetback,
for it was directed by Gordon Parks, the award-winning photojournalist for
Life
magazine, who had made 1969’s
The Learning Tree.
More to the point, it was from MGM, a major Hollywood studio whose sales department was able to secure prime theatrical runs, turning it into a crossover smash.
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“It was fantastic, a very special project,” recalled the film’s seasoned producer, Joel Freeman. “It was the beginning of a whole other era toward black films. It was a quality production and the studio was behind it.”
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Parks’s street cred made the film authentic to uptown audiences who flocked to see it, and it gave other audiences, especially in big cities other than New York, a taste of Harlem life. The throbbing title song by Isaac Hayes didn’t hurt either.
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What the screen credits don’t reflect, however, is that Silliphant and his producing partner Roger Lewis were the pair that made the film happen.

“Ernest Tidyman wrote a book called
Shaft,
” Silliphant told filmmakers Carol Munday and Robert N. Zagone in 1984. “The manuscript was sent to me, I took it to MGM, MGM said, ‘let’s go.’ It was not difficult.”
[233]
Actually,
Shaft
had been in the works at MGM for some time. Tidyman’s 1970 novel was about a black detective, John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), who plays the black Mafia and black nationals against the white Mafia to solve a kidnapping. Silliphant and Lewis bought the book after other studios (including MGM) wouldn’t commit; it was their involvement that brought MGM’s James Aubrey to the table. Silliphant, Lewis, and Tidyman formed a joint venture to produce
Shaft,
and Tidyman wrote the script.
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They split $50,000 producer fee, another $50,000 deferred, and 33 1/3 percent of net profits, which would be cut to twenty-five percent if other profit participants were brought on board.
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Once Tidyman turned in his draft, dated August 19, 1970, Parks took writer John D. F. Black with him to New York to show him around the locations (which Parks knew intimately) and then worked with Black to rewrite and shape Tidyman’s script. Shooting began on January 11, 1971, dangerously close to a planned July 21, 1971, release on a $1.24 million negative cost coming in $200,000 under MGM’s already tight budget.

Even before
Shaft
racked up huge grosses — $2 million on only 105 screens was just a start — MGM put a sequel,
The Big Bamboo,
into the works. Silliphant and Lewis signed writer B.B. Johnson to write it
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but, by the end of the year, he had been replaced by Tidyman.
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With its title changed to
Shaft’s Big Score,
the picture opened on June 8, 1972.

There has long been speculation that Silliphant did rewrites on one or both films. This may arise from knowledge of his facility and speed as well as his producing experience on
The Joe Louis Story.
Nothing can be found in his files that supports such a claim. What does emerge is his bona fide interest in African-American cinema.

“I’m neither ashamed nor proud of having been a part of that movement,” he continued to Munday and Zagone, whose 1984 documentary was subtitled
The Erosion of Black Images in the Media.
“It simply struck me that it was time to amuse people in the theatres and that what the black people needed, and maybe the white people need to see, was some black heroes. It was all part of the ‘black is beautiful’ movement of, when was that, the sixties, whenever it started. If black was beautiful, therefore black should be heroic, and we all know about the beautiful muscular structure of young black men, so why not show a guy who’s that way, who’s good with the ladies, who’s good with a gun? It struck me as a very simple thing to have an important black hero.”
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Inevitably, a third
Shaft
was ordered, and, this time, Silliphant decided to write it himself. When it came out on June 14, 1973, he realized that the film was “one of my great miscalculations. I felt that black Americans might have, deep within their psyches, some basic and lasting connection with their antecedents, their ancestry — as was ultimately demonstrated by the success of David L. Wolper’s mini-series,
Roots
(1977).”

In fact,
Roots
was never far from Silliphant’s mind. In 1976, its author, Alex Haley, had personally come to the Silliphant home on Benedict Canyon, handed him his manuscript pre-publication, and asked him to script it. “Stirling wept when he read it,” Tiana recalled, “and he asked Haley, ‘Why did you bring it to me? You want a black man to write it.’ Said Haley, ‘I don’t want a black man to blacken my script. I want a professional writer. I want you.’ When Warner Bros. wouldn’t let Silliphant out of his commitment to write
The Enforcer
for Clint Eastwood, he was heartbroken to have to turn Haley down. Scripted by Haley and James Lee,
Roots
redefined television as well as America’s view of race.
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There were some bumps getting to
Shaft #3
when Tidyman submitted a screenplay pitch titled
A Carnival of Killers
to Lewis, then went behind Lewis’s and Silliphant’s backs to Dan Melnick, by then chief of production at MGM, to set up the sequel on his own. This was a breach of his joint venture agreement with Lewis and Silliphant, whose attorney wasted no time informing Tidyman’s attorney of this in a letter that alludes to an exchange of verbal abuse on a phone call that preceded it.
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The third sequel was always Silliphant’s call, according to the original agreement dated April 7, 1970. “I persuaded Jim Aubrey, at the time heading up production at MGM, to let me write and produce a story dramatizing the slave trade in Africa,” he said. “Incidentally, this sort of thing still goes on. I was convinced that black America would flock to see Shaft ‘stick it to ‘em’ in Africa and single-handedly throw a wrench into this miserable traffic in human beings. We shot in Ethiopia and in Paris and we made a slick, Hollywood product (lacking all the raw street vigor and honesty of the first
Shaft
). The film is a disaster. I was wrong about black America. They avoided the movie by the millions. At that time the connection with Africa was not yet in fashion. This was before all the African historical revisionism and the now-trendy African thing, right up to this week’s fashions out of Paris, definitely showing an African style influence.”
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As to what a white writer was doing making a black story, Silliphant became prickly: “I am not in the cheering section for African-American cinema, although I certainly would do everything to encourage it, only because I dream of a time when Spike Lee, should he choose to, could direct
Star Wars
or
Home Alone
or
Basic Instinct.
Or that Ron Howard could direct
Malcolm

X.
I am agin’ this apportioning of rights to any individual based on his race or religion. When a white writer can write a better ‘black’ novel than James Baldwin and a black man can write a better novel than Proust —
then,
I say, we’re finally getting somewhere.

“Yes, I have devoted much of my writing to this matter of human (I do
not
say ‘race’) relationships because, like war, inter-racial strife is just too fucking stupid for words. It is simply the extension of ignorance, of primitive fears, of Neolithic attitudes. And so I have written many stories and characters about this. But in no way do I see myself as a trail-blazer. Others have written more tellingly about this subject than I could ever hope to. And have I been criticized or obstructed from within the TV or film industries? Not if the writing is good enough, the story powerful enough. Hollywood will make
any
thing if it promises to return a profit. Any failure I may have had in this regard is a failure of my writing, not of the bankers.”

The previous year, Silliphant had adapted for the screen, and for Richard Fleischer to direct, one of the more realistic and fatalistic police novels: Joseph Wambaugh’s 1971
The New Centurions.
Wambaugh, a former Los Angeles policeman with a bittersweet relationship toward the force,
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wrote a moody, episodic book that fell to Silliphant to stitch into a drama with a clear narrative through-line. The multi-character piece involves policemen Andy Kilvinski (George C. Scott), Roy Fehler (Stacy Keach), Gus Plebesly (Scott Wilson), Sergio Duran (Erik Estrada), Roy’s wife, Dorothy (Jane Alexander), and a nurse, Lorrie Hunt (Rosalind Cash). In the course of a one-year time span, Roy is shot but recovers thanks to Lorrie; Roy’s marriage to Dorothy hits the skids because of his obsession with police work; Andy sinks into depression and kills himself; and, to seal everyone’s fate at the end, Roy is killed when he answers a policeman’s most dangerous call, a domestic disturbance.

The middle 1970s were a time when, to paraphrase producer Robert Evans, you had to call your psychiatrist to understand the movie you’d just seen. Realism was the ticket, and filmmakers reveled in finally being able to show life as it was rather than the way Hollywood wanted it to be (the phase lasted about seven years until
Star Wars
).

By that measure,
The New Centurions
did not disappoint; in fact, it retains its power thanks to Silliphant’s ability to combine characters and situations as he had done with
In the Heat of the Night
so that viewers, as opposed to readers, could follow with their hearts as well as their brains.

One scene is especially instructive in displaying his craft. The book
shows
an incident in which Kilvinsky goes into a woman’s house to talk an intruder into leaving, later revealing to his befuddled partner that there was no intruder — the woman had the DTs. As written, it’s an example of an experienced cop’s ability to judge human nature. In the film, Kilvinsky
tells
that story in his valedictory phone call to Fehler before killing himself. Then, at the end of the film, Silliphant keeps a scene from the novel between Fehler and a woman (Anne Ramsey) in a similar incident, only this time the intruder is real and Fehler is killed. By alertly planting the anecdote and paying it off with the act, he creates irony and closure in the film where neither existed in the book.

“I’m pleased [about] that coupling of incidents,” Silliphant said. “It was quite deliberate because I was looking for a linkage between Kilvinsky’s death and Fehler’s death. And it seemed to me that
seeing
him go into the house and playing out the intruder-who-wasn’t-there scene was not as dramatic — since the intruder
wasn’t
there — as letting Kilvinsky
tell
it out of a wistful final moment of recalling the past as he is about to terminate for all time his future.

“Joe Wambaugh’s dialogue in
The New Centurions
is so excellent, so real in terms of its coming out of his experience in the LAPD, that I quite simply combed through it searching for bits which, in turn, suggested scenes. I found this a most rewarding search. As to the mechanics involved in recognizing moments which may illuminate the story or its characters, I have no way of explicating that process. It comes solely from having done it for so many years that my trial-and-error sensors have become acute, and, because of my own life experiences, I seem to make instantaneous choices from any number of options. In a way it’s the same process as the ancient Polynesian navigators used: years of remembering the scent of drifting flowers, observing the stars, watching and feeling the currents and waves, [and how they] gave them the feeling of where in the pacific they were — without sextants, compasses, or sat-nav.”