Shaft: Power Moves (Amy Abugo Ongiri, Jun 21, 2022, Criterion)
Shaft would be a different and more confrontational kind of project than Parks’s earlier work. He had been hired by MGM to bring Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 detective novel of the same name to the screen. Tidyman, who was white, himself had been commissioned to write the novel by Ronald Hobbs, one of very few African American literary agents working at the time, and the book contains many of the elements of Parks’s film in its commitment to the urban milieu of New York City and to creating the character of John Shaft as a strong, independent African American man. The studio had originally wanted to revise Tidyman’s novel to make the characters white, but Parks insisted on not only casting the character of Shaft as African American but also emphasizing and enhancing the Black cultural aspects of the novel.
Parks famously wanted to create a film that would allow audiences “to see the Black guy winning.” As modest an ambition as this may seem by today’s standards, it was shockingly bold in 1971, when positive images of African Americans in visual culture were virtually nonexistent. Hollywood had gently stepped into the terrain of Black representation with stars like Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, but the roles that they were offered were constrained at best and insulting at worst. With Shaft, Parks would deliver something unlike anything that Hollywood had seen before: a Black superhero.