Episode 12: shaft

Hotter than Bond. Cooler Than Bullitt.

Before Shaft, badass movie detectives were white. Shaft starred Richard Roundtree as a Black detective, prowling New York City's tough streets, saving lives and taking no guff, especially from 'The Man.' Directed by Gordon Parks, Shaft was a huge hit in 1971.

“I chose this type of film—a fast-moving adventure drama—for two reasons. Honestly, the most important reason is to show Hollywood, which is always doubting whether a man can do this or that, especially if he’s Black, that I can do a different type of thing. Their thinking is ‘So he did The Learning Tree, which is a nostalgic piece. But can he do the fast-breaking film? The up-to-date film?’ So it’s like proving myself all over again,” Parks said.

This January 1971 interview with Walter Burrell is part of the Gordon Parks Collection at Wichita State Universities Library.

“The basic concept of this film is basically what I’ve done in Harlem and other places all my life,” Parks added. “Covering crime for LIFE magazine all across the country. Taking picture at night with homicide squads, vice squads, dope squads.

“The Harlem gang series I did back in 1949 is all a part of the particular mood of this film. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I know it so well. Yet it still has to be proved to Hollywood that a Black director can not only do his memoir, but can also do a fast-moving film like, for instance, Bullitt. Possibly the second reason I’m doing it is because I like Shaft. I think he can emerge as a Black hero for Black kids just as much as James Bond emerged as a hero for white kids or whomever. But I particularly like Shaft because he deals with more concrete problems, those with which Black kids can more closely associate themselves. Whereas Bond was more frivolous and all over the place with his beautiful girls and guns shooting out of tires and so forth, Shaft deals with his problems through brute strength, through what he has learned in the ghetto and in the gutter as a man.

“He’s a more honest character. I believe I’ve seen a few like him in my lifetime.”

The audio story in this episode originally aired on KFAI’s MinneCulture. Image of Shaft promotional material courtesy of Wichita State University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives.