Extra: American Icons: Shaft

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1971 Richard Roundtree stepped out of a subway entrance to the Oscar-winning sounds of Isaac Hayes, and changed American movie-making. The box-office success of Shaft, about a fiercely independent, courageous, and sexy private eye, led to an explosion of black action B-movies, and crystalized a version of black macho cool that hadn’t been shown on the big screen before. And it was all put together by one of the most important American photographers of the mid-20th century, Gordon Parks. The story of Shaft is told by those that made the movie, and those they inspired.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:07.0	I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.
0:15.4	The latest version of Shaft opened in theaters a couple of weeks ago.
0:19.0	It stars Jesse T. Usher and Samuel L. Jackson.
0:26.8	Hi, I'm just, I'm looking for...
0:29.6	Chef?
0:30.9	Mm-hmm.
0:32.5	Who's asking?
0:33.4	John Shep Jr.
0:34.7	Your son?
0:35.5	My son?
0:37.0	Junior? Yeah. It has had not great reviews and not great ticket sales. Maybe it's a case of Shaft Overdraft. It's the fifth movie in the Shaft franchise and the third one to be called just Shaft. Not to mention a 1973 TV series also called shaft. But looking back
0:58.0	at the original shaft, it's more understandable why filmmakers have kept trying again and again.
1:04.2	That 1971 shaft is about a black private eye hired by a Harlem gangster to find the gangster's
1:10.3	daughter.
1:11.7	But even people who really love the movie don't really remember the plot.
1:16.5	What they remember isn't exactly what Shaft does or why he does it, but how he looks as he's
1:22.2	doing.
1:23.3	This tall, strong black man who had such presence walking across the screen.
1:28.3	Hey, where the hell are you going, Shaft?
1:31.3	To get late, where the hell you go?
1:33.3	That boy's got a lot of mouth on him.
	...

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