The Return of Charles Burnett
In “The World Wide Floyd Webb,” Floyd Webb of itutu.com says:
I started in computers in high school. Worked on the IBM 1401 series, studied FORTRAN and COBOL (yuk)… Went on to work on the 360 series… the muse said, Git the hell out!… My eye was on visual expression… not the early manipulation of electrons and code nightmares…
The graphical interface of the Macintosh brought me back… I played with Charles Burnett’s machine back in 1984 on the balcony of his Slauson apartment [in Los Angeles, CA]… Time folded on me as I played with it…
This “visual expression” under the influence of Charles Burnett surfaces again in “‘Killer’ Classic” by Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun:
The film that scored the biggest per-screen average in New York and Los Angeles last weekend ($15,864) wasn’t Meet the Robinsons ($4,866) or Blades of Glory ($6,604). It was a 30-year-old underground classic about life in Los Angeles’ Watts community in the mid-1970s: Killer of Sheep, the debut feature of Charles Burnett, who began the project as a graduate student.
This shows yet again that Black filmmakers in particular and your filmmaking friend in general can make films before trying to start a business that sells films. I can almost guarantee that Charles Burnett had no get-rich-quick schemes attached to this early work. The fact that it made money decades later is only a tribute to the man that always was there…
The cost barrier to filmmaking is very low but the bling-bling psychological cost is still extremely high. Low-cost filmmaking is a community organizing effort. My extensive but indirect experience with street-level filmmakers shows me that it is easier to organize new group of Black Panthers than a new group of Black actors to make a film—especially in Los Angeles. This sounds cold and irretrievably bitter but even the ass of the most Pollyanna, colored, donkey-riding socialite would be surprised about how many young, Negro would-be actors can’t even read the words on some film scripts—yet these are the same bling-bling people who need to paid crazy amounts of money (relatively speaking) for them to show up late or wearing the wrong wardrobe.
The success of Charles Burnett takes away whatever bitterness you may want for me and introduces a time scale that is far removed from Western-style instant gratification. We need to it take back… way back… and then to future…