Pam Grier
"Does a black person make them an African American? No. There are Hispanics that are very, very dark skinned so the word has lost its meaning, it's not a very concise or proper word to use even today and it wasn't then."
Pam Grier
"There are things we have to do to protect ourselves in a climate where people are facilitating hatred and discrimination. This support of white supremacists reminded me of the ’60s and Jim Crow and all we left behind. Within Los Angeles and the industry, people don’t see it, but I live in the Heartland and I see it. I’m very community minded. I’m an activist. And then I hurt more and I cry more when I hear people calling me a nigger to my face. What did I do to deserve you to say that to me? When I’m helping probably more white people than black people right now.
Well, I won’t let it hurt me. It’s gonna take a whole lot more than that to hurt me, after all I’ve been through."
Pam Grier
"When Roger Corman was looking for women to do his biker and nurse movies, he looked for women who were rebels, outsiders, who could hold their own. They hadn’t used a woman of color yet, but Roger being a filmmaker with a foothold in European culture, where women had a bit more equality and freedom in society, he brought that element to his movie making."
Pam Grier
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Interview excerpts:
Coffy, Foxy Brown and their ilk were exploitative, but arguably also progressive. As a heroine enacting revenge fantasies, your influence on modern films like Kill Bill is now obvious, yet in the early ‘ 70s these movies were labeled as racist blaxploitation by black activist groups. There was a political backlash.
"The only political backlash was that white producers were making films about black life. Well, then why don’t the black producers get together and produce them? There were very few. So maybe they felt disenfranchised. But I would go to them and say, “What can we do? How can we leverage?” They didn’t have the projects; they didn’t really know what to do. And so I said, “I’m trying to build enough leverage and find an audience.” With these exploitation films, they were about the worst life in the community, good versus evil — these were just regular things that go on. I said, “We can’t solve our community problems until we show them. And if we show them and you get embarrassed enough, maybe you’ll change and do something about it.” And that’s when they’d sit there and look at me. I said, “Stop having communities eat their own, and maybe we can write about great things. I’m trying to get the Dorothy Dandridge story done, but I can’t get it done. We don’t have the studios. If you want to build black studios where we can make films about black life, build them."
Hollywood’s version of black life is still mostly rooted in stereotyped characters and white savior movies like The Blind Side. Forty years later there are still few black studio movies.
"It is a business, and mainstream movies are made for the audience that supports the business. That’s all it is. Theater is theater; they’re two totally different dynamics. When it comes to filmmaking, you have to understand it’s a business. They don’t have to put black people in the movies."
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