The man who paved the way for black directors in Hollywood

IN 1968, 20 years after being hired as Lifes’ first African-American photographer, Gordon Parks prepared to demolish another line of color. You are about to become the first black director of the Hollywood people, said Kenneth Hyman, production manager at Warner Bros., when they first met. The studio wanted Parks, then an accomplished writer, documentary filmmaker, 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 script and the musical score, and serve as producer.

As Parks recalls in his memoirs A hungry heart, published in 2005, a year before his death, Hyman told him, I think only of two directors who have tried to do what you are about to do: Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin. No pressure there. But Parks intended to make The Learning Tree aware of a burden that film pioneers Welles and Chaplin, 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 these closed doors.

Gordon Parks on the set of The Learning Tree in 1969.
Courtesy of the Everett Collection

And that’s what he did. The Learning Tree, shot in Fort Scott, Kan., In a magnificent wide screen, is a story of adulthood drawn from the childhood of Parks Prairie, both gently nostalgic and flawless in its representation of American racism of the 1920s. (Parks was born in Fort Scott in 1912.) This opened the doors to subsequent waves of black filmmakers to introduce himself to Hollywood, including Reginald Hudlin, Robert Townsend, Charles Burnett, Ernest Dickerson and Michael Schultz, who can all be counted among the students of The Learning Tree, the creative children of Gordon Parks. (There are many others, including Spike Lee, Julie Dash and Parkss Gordon Parks Jr., the director of the classic blaxploitation Superfly, who died in a plane crash in Kenya in 1979.)

The heritage of Parks that runs through their work is less a question of direct influence than of spirit, ethics and sensitivity. The learning tree is frankly political, but also tender, sexy, comical and full of details observed and memorized with acuity. You could say the same of Schultzs Cooley High (1975), Burnetts Sheep killer (1978), Dickersons Juice (1992), Townsends Hollywood Shuffle (1987) and Reginald and Warrington Hudlins House Party (1990), all very different in their method and their humor, but animated by the confident local knowledge and the affectionate humanism that Parks has brought his writings and photography into American cinema.

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 the blue. His breakthrough was, like theirs, both a harbinger of a rapidly changing era and a sign of how late change can be felt simultaneously. Already? and Finally! He was not the first black American to use a movie camera, and The Learning Tree was not the first Hollywood production of his time to address the experience of black people. The late 1960s saw the rise of independent African-American filmmakers like William Greaves and Melvin Van Peebles and the rise in Hollywood of enlightened racist dramas like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Whos Coming to Dinner, both released in 1967.

The Learning Tree is something else, however: an absolutely personal film, entwined with the own experiences of its creators, which claims an authoritative place in the mainstream American. In life (and before that in the Farm Security Administration of the New Deal era), Parks was known for his intensive and intimate portraits of housing projects, working-class neighborhoods and poor rural towns, and there was always a risk, given the institutional. whiteness of Time Life Corporation, that these images could be misinterpreted as exotic. But its aesthetic rigor, the beauty and the integrity of these images allowed Parks to do more than explain black life to white America. He was, like his exact contemporary Ralph Ellison (who grew up in a state south of Parks, Oklahoma, and who like Parks eventually went north) engaged in the great mid-century project of explaining America to himself.

Henry G. Sanders and Kaycee Moore in Charles Burnetts Killer of Sheep (1977).
© Milestone Film & Video / Courtesy of the Everett collection

The idealism of this endeavor may seem bittersweet in retrospect, and by the time Parks turned to filmmaking, it had begun to fall apart. When it comes to racing, Hollywood doors have a way to close suddenly, or to drive into half-empty rooms and long dark corridors. After The Learning Tree, Parks realized four other functionalities: Shaft (1971), Shafts Big Score! (1972), The Super Cops (1974) and Leadbelly (1976). (He also joined the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, on a mission for life and helped found Essence magazine.) Although the critical and commercial fortunes of these films have varied, they represent the kind of work that would have was able to lay the foundation for a long career in Hollywood. After Leadbelly, an ambitious musical biopic released with minimal promotional support during a regime change in Paramount (and, in my opinion, one of the big neglected films of his decade), Parks never made another film of studio.

THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CINEMA, like the great national history it refracts, is a complicated chronicle of progress and withdrawal, drawn back by long habits of exclusion and condescension, and pushed forward by grace and the tenacity of artists like Parks and his followers. None of his heirs had an easy route through Hollywood. Some started in a relative boom (the 1970s, early 1990s) to deal with the indifference of the industry when fashions changed. Many have moved between studios and the independent sphere, or between cinema and television. Studying their filmographies is admiring their ingenuity, but also considering careers marked by frustration: poorly budgeted and poorly marketed films, and a large number that have simply never been made. Not to mention the masterpieces that were ignored or undervalued in their time, a list that would include, at a minimum, Burnetts Nightjohn (1996, about a slave who learned to read in the south before the Civil War), Hudlins The Great White Hype (also in 1996, on a boxing promotion program to make his black fighter more popular) and Schultzs magisterial Car Wash (1976), a daily farce in the Dee-Luxe Car Wash at downtown Los Angeles.

From left to right: Ernest Dickerson directing Khalil Kain and Omar Epps in Juice (1992).
Paramount / courtesy Everett Collection

Wrestling and art go hand in hand, which does not mean that art is simply an expression or representation of wrestling, even when, as in Townsends Hollywood Shuffle, wrestling is the subject. This film pushes satirical pleasure to the racial problem of the American film industry, its appetite for representations of black servility, crime and suffering; its indifference to the tastes of some of its most reliable consumers; his soft and hard bigotry in the context of a history of lower middle class effort. Despite all its outbursts of fantasy and fantasy, it remains anchored in the realities of work, love and family.

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 on him. It is a lasting theme of American literature, and also in a distinctive and absolutely central way of African American film. It may not be something Gordon Parks invented, but it is something he left behind.

A.O. Scott is a critic for the New York Times and the author of Better Living Through Criticism. Bon Duke is a director who works on both still and moving images. Top photo, grooming and hairdressing: Monique Samala. Production: Maritza Carbajal.