For over 50 years, the entertainment manager and promoter Clarence Avant has been a quiet but influential presence in American music, movies, sports and politics, working behind the scenes to connect the right people with each other. In his documentary “The Black Godfather,” the director Reginald Hudlin turns a spotlight onto Avant, who has helped boost the careers of everyone from Hank Aaron to Quincy Jones to Barack Obama. This is a portrait of a man who has made his many friends a lot of money, but has also urged them — always — to keep their higher ideals in mind.
Food, murder, music festivals, and yes, tigers. Maybe learn something important while you binge.
The era of streaming has inspired a new golden age of the documentary film. Streaming giants like Netflix have provided the money and platform for documentary filmmakers to explore projects that might not have otherwise found a home. And with that we’ve seen an explosion of documentary films and series that cover topics ranging from everything to true crime, sports, and tigers. The subjects that Netflix documentaries cover are seen by so many people that it inspires actual change within the system.
Steven Avery got another appeal in the case addressing the murder of Teresa Halbach. People have an insane passion for cheerleading and “getting on mat” thanks to Cheer. And the popularity of Tiger King has pressed a Florida sheriff to seek tips in the decades old cold-case. Among all the great fictional movies to binge, these are the best documentaries on Netflix.
The Black Godfather
Clarence Avant grew up in the segregated south and went on to become a hugely influential behind-the-scenes figure in the entertainment industry. Director Reginald Hudlin interviewed more than 75 people over three years, including Quincy Jones, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Bill Withers, and Barack Obama.
In 1969, Gordon Parks became the first black director to make a major Hollywood studio film. His career made it possible for the next generation to fight their way into the mainstream — only to face the same opposition Parks had.
From left: the directors MICHAEL SCHULTZ (“Cooley High,” 1975), ROBERT TOWNSEND (“Hollywood Shuffle,” 1987), REGINALD HUDLIN (“House Party,” 1990), CHARLES BURNETT (“Killer of Sheep,” 1978) and ERNEST DICKERSON(“Juice,” 1992). Photographed at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles on Feb. 13, 2020. Bon Duke
IN 1968, 20 YEARS after he was hired as Life’s first African-American staff photographer, Gordon Parks prepared to demolish another color line. “You’re about to become Hollywood’s first black director,” he was told by Kenneth Hyman, the head of production at Warner Bros., during their first meeting. The studio wanted Parks, by then an accomplished writer, documentarian, poet and composer as well as a famous photographer, to adapt his 1963 novel, “The Learning Tree,” for the screen. In addition to directing, he would write the screenplay and the musical score, and serve as producer.
As Parks recalls in his memoir “A Hungry Heart,” published in 2005, the year before his death, Hyman told him, “I can think of only two directors who attempted to do what you are about to do: Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin.” No pressure there. But Parks would set out to make “The Learning Tree” conscious of a burden that Welles and Chaplin, cinematic pioneers though they were, had never faced. He knew that “a multitude of hopeful young black directors would be watching, counting on me to successfully open those closed doors.”
Gordon Parks on the set of “The Learning Tree” in 1969. Courtesy of the Everett Collection
And so he did. “The Learning Tree,” shot in Fort Scott, Kan., in wondrous wide-screen, is a coming-of-age story drawn from Parks’s own prairie childhood, at once gently nostalgic and unflinching in its depiction of 1920s-vintage American racism. (Parks was born in Fort Scott in 1912.) It opened the doors for subsequent waves of black directors to break into Hollywood — including Reginald Hudlin, Robert Townsend, Charles Burnett, Ernest Dickerson and Michael Schultz, all of whom can be numbered among the students of “The Learning Tree,” the creative children of Gordon Parks. (There are many others, including Spike Lee, Julie Dash and Parks’s actual son Gordon Parks Jr., the director of the blaxploitation classic “Superfly,” who died in a plane crash in Kenya in 1979.)
The Parks legacy that flows through their work is less a matter of direct influence than of spirit, ethic and sensibility. “The Learning Tree” is forthrightly political, and also tender, sexy, comical and full of acutely observed and remembered details. You could say the same about Schultz’s “Cooley High” (1975), Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” (1978), Dickerson’s “Juice” (1992), Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle” (1987) and Reginald and Warrington Hudlin’s “House Party” (1990) — all wildly different in method and mood but enlivened by the confident local knowledge and affectionate humanism that Parks brought from his writing and photography into American film.
From left: Carter Vinnegar, Bobby Goss, Stephen Perry, Alex Clarke and Kyle Johnson in “The Learning Tree” (1969). Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Like other firsts in African-American history, from Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama, Parks did not come out of nowhere. His breakthrough was, like theirs, both a herald of rapidly changing times and a sign of how belated change can feel — simultaneously a matter of Already? and At last! He was hardly the first black American to wield a movie camera, and “The Learning Tree” was not the first Hollywood production of its time to address the black experience. The late 1960s saw the rise of independent African-American filmmakers like William Greaves and Melvin Van Peebles and the ascendance, in Hollywood, of racially enlightened dramas like “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both released in 1967.
“The Learning Tree” is something else, though: an absolutely personal film, entwined with its creator’s own experiences, that lays authoritative claim to a place in the American mainstream. At Life (and before that at the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration), Parks was known for his intensive, intimate portraits of housing projects, working-class neighborhoods and poor, rural towns, and there was always a risk, given the institutional whiteness of the Time Life Corporation, that those images could be misinterpreted as exotic. But his aesthetic rigor — the beauty and integrity of those images — ensured that Parks was doing more than explaining black life to white America. He was, like his exact contemporary Ralph Ellison (who grew up one state south of Parks, in Oklahoma, and who like Parks eventually went north) committed to the grand midcentury project of explaining America to itself.
The idealism of that enterprise can look bittersweet in retrospect, and by the time Parks turned to moviemaking, it had started to come undone. When it comes to race, Hollywood’s doors have a way of closing suddenly, or leading into half-empty rooms and down long, dim hallways. After “The Learning Tree,” Parks directed four more features: “Shaft” (1971), “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972), “The Super Cops” (1974) and “Leadbelly” (1976). (He also embedded with the Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif., on assignment for Life and helped found Essence magazine.) Though the critical and commercial fortunes of those movies varied, they represent the kind of work that might have laid the foundation for a long Hollywood career. After “Leadbelly,” an ambitious musical biopic released with minimal promotional support during a change of regime at Paramount (and, in my opinion, one of the great neglected movies of its decade), Parks never directed another studio film.
THE HISTORY OF African-American cinema, like the larger national history it refracts, is a complicated chronicle of progress and retrenchment, pulled backward by long habits of exclusion and condescension, and pushed forward by the grace and tenacity of artists like Parks and his followers. None of his heirs has had an easy path through Hollywood. Some started in relative boom times (the ’70s, the early ’90s) only to face industry indifference when fashions changed. Many moved between the studios and the independent sphere, or between movies and television. To study their filmographies is to admire their resourcefulness, and also to contemplate careers marked by frustration: movies that were meagerly budgeted and poorly marketed, and a great many that simply never got made. Not to mention the masterpieces that were ignored or undervalued in their time — a list that would include, at a minimum, Burnett’s “Nightjohn” (1996, about a slave who learns to read in the pre-Civil War South), Hudlin’s “The Great White Hype” (also 1996, about a boxing promoter’s scheme to make his black fighter more popular) and Schultz’s magisterial “Car Wash” (1976), a day-in-the-life farce set at the Dee-Luxe Car Wash in downtown Los Angeles.
From left: Ernest Dickerson directing Khalil Kain and Omar Epps in “Juice” (1992).Paramount/Courtesy of the Everett Collection
The struggle and the art go together, which isn’t to say that the art is simply an expression or representation of the struggle, even when, as in Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle,” the struggle is the subject. That movie pokes satirical fun at the American movie industry’s race problems — its appetite for depictions of black servility, criminality and suffering; its indifference to the tastes of some of its most reliable consumers; its soft and hard bigotries — within the context of a story of lower-middle-class striving. For all its flights of whimsy and fantasy, it remains grounded in the realities of work, love and family.
Which is much like “The Learning Tree,” a portrait of the artist (a teenager named Newt Winger, played by Kyle Johnson) as a young man discovering both his own potential and the limits the world places upon it. That is a durable theme of American literature, and also — in a way that is both distinctive and absolutely central — of African-American film. It may not be something Gordon Parks invented, but it is something he bequeathed.
A.O. Scott is a critic at large at The New York Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” Bon Duke is a director who works in both still and moving images. Top photo, grooming and hair: Monique Samala. Production: Maritza Carbajal.
During the photo shoot for this article, my assistant Toyia Brown took some additional photos.
Michael Schulz, Reginald Hudlin, Robert Townsend, Charles Burnett and Ernest Dickerson. Don’t we look like the cast for the coolest cop show EVER?! Doesn’t the dapper Michael Schulz look like the chief of detectives? Robert Townsend and I are looking serious but all we do is make each other laugh when we see each other. Comment+ Permalink
Look back at a landmark run with the scribe who shepherded T’Challa through ‘House of M,’ ‘Civil War,’ and more!
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Take a guided tour of Marvel’s mightiest creators with Marvel Tales! Ben Morse, currently a visiting lecturer at UNLV, previously spent a decade working within the House of Ideas. In each installment of this series, he utilizes that insider knowledge—plus his lifelong fandom—to connect with comics professionals as they spin stories about the Marvel Universe and its inhabitants!
Before Reginald Hudlin wrote the classic 1990 Kid n’ Play vehicle House Party, before he served as President of Entertainment for BET, and before the acclaimed producer teamed with Quentin Tarantino for the Academy Award-nominated Django Unchained, a Marvel stalwart ignited this titan’s creative spirit. Exposed to Silver Age comics via his brother and future collaborator Warrington, young Reggie encountered T’Challa, the esteemed Black Panther, when the hero first debuted in 1966’s FANTASTIC FOUR (1961) #52 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Hudlin fell in love with the Panther immediately, appreciating Kirby’s sleek design as well as Lee’s nuanced take on the African king. He would be influenced in his own work by that original tale, as well as the seminal BLACK PANTHER series written by Priest for Marvel Knights beginning in 1998, particularly appreciating the revelation that T’Challa first joined the Avengers“to spy on them of course! [Priest] made all of it make sense.”
Still, despite these classic contributions, Hudlin found the Panther’s appearances on the larger spectrum to be “wildly uneven,” but “always believed in the potential of the character” which he felt was “never fully realized.” In 2005, the longtime devotee of the Wakanda warrior got his chance to explore that potential.
“Paul Power is a storyboard artist who introduced me to one of my heroes in the medium, Neal Adams,” Hudlin recalls. “Neal was very generous with his time and felt I should meet with Marvel, so he set up a meeting with Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso. We talked for a while about comics, and at the end of the conversation [they] asked me what book I wanted to write. I was stunned, because that’s not why I was there. But I left with the assignment of writing a six-issue Black Panther [limited series].”
Overjoyed, Reginald shared the news with his friends and family, and found a familiar refrain: “Who is the Black Panther?” Realizing the character’s lack of visibility to the mainstream audience presented a challenge, he resolved to make that questions the heart of his work; indeed “Who is the Black Panther?” became the title of that first story. “I knew I had to write a story that told you everything you needed to know about him and told in a way that you could follow it even if it was the first comic book you ever read. I’m very big on accessibility.”
In terms of collaboration, the neophyte scripture sought out legendary artist John Romita Jr., who had made his name on every Marvel property from Daredevil to Spider-Man, but never tackled the Panther in any extended fashion. The duo met for lunch in Los Angles and hit it off. “I knew he was a brilliant artist, and I knew he worked fast,” notes Hudlin. “But what I didn’t know was he was such a great guy! We really clicked as people. It’s rare that anyone can be all three things. He’s very special. After confirming his interest, I went to Marvel and insisted he draw the book. And wouldn’t stop insisting until they gave in. It worked out for everyone.”
In crafting their Black Panther tale, Hudlin and Romita focused in not just on T’Challa, but his homeland, establishing and embellishing on the idea of Wakanda as a “special place” that resisted outside invasion attempts of any sort. The kingdom would become a character in the book every bit as important as any other.
Speaking of characters making their mark, in the second issue of BLACK PANTHER, we meet for the first time Shuri, the younger sister of our erstwhile royal, possessed of spirit and ingenuity that made her an early fan favorite and has brought fame both on the page and in multimedia portrayals across film and television. Hudlin had other motivations: “It made no sense to me that T’Challa would be an only child. Royalty always has an heir and a spare. I thought there would be a younger sibling, and that it should be a girl for maximum contrast. It made sense that she would be really smart and would ultimately inherent the title of Black Panther. That way my son and daughter would be able to dress up as Black Panther for Halloween.”
In terms of antagonists, longtime Panther arch foe Klaw made the most sense with the effort to establish Wakanda as he represented the “typical European invader.” Hudlin loaded up the villain side of the equation with “a cross section of [characters] each representing a different colonial power” including the United Kingdom’s Black Knight, the United States’ Rhino, and China’s Radioactive Man.
Once Hudlin completed the outline for the project, the Marvel powers-that-be responded with a simple question: What story would he tell next if he kept going? Fortunately for the writer, he had a concrete answer in mind involving part of T’Challa’s past driving towards his future: “As Prince T’Challa became King T’Challa, he would have to find a bride and start a family. We quickly decided that Storm would be the perfect match. So, the [limited series] became an ongoing series as we built toward that wedding.”
Revisiting the tale that launched Hudlin’s nearly four years with the character beginning in BLACK PANTHER #1 from 2005, the writer remembers several moments that stood the test of time with himself as well as fans: “There’s a conversation between T’Challa and a young boy who worships him. T’Challa explains the same God that empowers him also flows through the young man, so he can do anything. That really landed with people.
“There’s also a scene when T’Chaka, T’Challa’s father, tells off a group of powerful Europeans, and that clip of that scene from the [2010 animated series adapting the story] went viral and never stopped circulating. And finally, the fight scene between Black Panther and Captain America, which blew everyone’s mind in the comic and in the animated series. Because the Panther wins, decisively.”
Over a decade removed from actively writing the Panther, Hudlin will never be far from the legacy T’Challa has enjoyed across all mediums; he takes appropriate pride in his contributions to the expansive canon. “Between the comic books, the animated series I did that was based on the books, and the movie that took inspiration from both, ‘Who is the Black Panther?’ has become the definitive Black Panther origin,” he states. “Shuri is not only canon, but one of the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe. All that is very satisfying.”
Read “Who is the Black Panther?” as well as the complete work on Reginald Hudlin on T’Challa via Marvel Unlimited with the first 38 issues of BLACK PANTHER (2005) as well as the initial six-installment arc of BLACK PANTHER (2009), which moves Shuri into the title role!
