How exactly did you and Brown work together?
I gave James a copy of Black Caesar to work from. The only problem I ever had with him was that when he had to score a three-minute scene, he wrote five minutes of music; and when he had to score a five-minute scene, he wrote nine minutes of music. I said, “James, this music is supposed to fit this scene exactly.” He said, “Well, then you’ve got more than you need.” I said, “That’s not the way it works. You are not supposed to have more than you need. You are supposed to score the action perfectly.” Unfortunately, that’s not what he did. James then did the exact same thing on Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off. [7] He had been hired by AIP on the strength of his score for Black Caesar, but had delivered all of this music to the makers of that movie and they didn’t know what to do with it, because it didn’t fit. When I was in that same situation with him on Black Caesar, I just went into the editing room and re-cut the music myself and made it work. The people on Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off didn’t have me to fix their problem for them, so they panicked and went crazy. That is why AIP wouldn’t hire James Brown again when we did the sequel, Hell up in Harlem. That was the issue they had. It wasn’t that James didn’t do good music; it was because his score did not time-out to be properly inserted into the movie. That necessitated me having to rework it all, but I’m glad I did because it turned out fine. It just took a little more time and effort on my part. I had no intention of getting upset and panicking like they did on the other picture. I just made it work.
Was Brown upset at not landing the gig to score Hell up in Harlem?
James wanted to score the sequel, but American International was not going to let that happen because his previous efforts were deemed unsatisfactory. When Hell up in Harlem was finished, I begged them to use him again, but they wouldn’t do it. I told James’s manager, Charles Bobbitt, “They will not hire him again. The only way we can do this is if James will write and record the music on spec. If they like what they hear I’m sure AIP will use it, because they can have no doubts about his ability to deliver.” Bobbitt called me back the next day and simply said, “The man accepts the challenge!” I couldn’t believe that a big star like James Brown would be willing to do that, but he readily agreed. So, we gave James a print of the movie, and he went out with his band and back-up singers and created the entire score for Hell up in Harlem — for free! He then delivered us the completed tapes and I played them for AIP, but they were absolutely intransigent. They were still furious about the previous problems they had experienced with James on Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off. In fact, I think they were actually suing him. So, they refused to use James Brown and I went back to Bobbitt and said, “I’m sorry. I think the music is terrific but they just won’t budge on the matter.” He said, “Hey, no problem. You did your best for us and we appreciate it. We’ll use the music someplace else.” They then took that music and released it as an album called The Payback and it turned out to be the most successful album of James Brown’s entire career! The score he originally recorded for my movie has since featured in films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and a lot of other big pictures and is instantly recognizable. Every time I hear it I say, “Oh my god, that music was written for Hell up in Harlem!” Unfortunately, it is now associated with other director’s movies and not mine.
Who came up with the ad slogan for Black Caesar — “The cat with the .45 claws!”
Not me! [Chuckles] AIP had their own advertising people, and they didn’t usually ask you to approve their work. I mean, you do have an approval in your contract but that approval really means nothing if they have finished the advertising and it’s already been printed-up. They did what they wanted to do, and I couldn’t stop that slogan being used, regardless of what my opinion was. I thought it was terrible, but the picture did tremendous business, so maybe it was a good slogan as far as the audience they were aiming the film at was concerned. No doubt, also calling the picture Black Caesar: The Godfather of Harlem sold a lot of tickets, too, because it was riding on the recent success of The Godfather. That was a source of some embarrassment for me because Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, was a personal friend of mine. I had known Mario for years and his kids used to stay at my house when they came to California. I do remember that one day Mario walked in and just stared at the poster for Black Caesar that was hanging on my wall. He then turned and looked right at me. I was so embarrassed because I had clearly made the Black Godfather!
How was Black Caesar received by AIP and then later by critics?
American International loved the picture. They certainly got much more than they paid for, that’s for sure. I don’t think they expected it to be as good or as spectacular as it was for the money that it cost. As for the critical reaction to Black Caesar, it was probably like the critical reaction to all blaxploitation movies: it was pretty much dismissed by the reviewers. That didn’t really matter. Nobody cared because people were lining up at the box office to see the film. I actually think Black Caesar was more positively reviewed than the average blaxploitation movie because no critic ever really took that genre very seriously anyway.
What did you make of the other major blaxploitation films of the era such as Shaft, Superfly, and Foxy Brown?
Shaft and Superfly were pretty good movies, and I guess Foxy Brown was okay, although it was a little disgusting. Foxy Brown was a simple revenge movie where the main protagonist went out and killed everybody who had screwed her over. None of those films had much depth to them and, in fact, those three pictures you mentioned are probably the only blaxploitation movies I ever saw. I’m not even sure if I saw Foxy Brown on its original release. I may have seen it later on television or on video. Frankly, I didn’t go to the theater to see those kinds of films. I certainly enjoyed making them, but most of those pictures were so bad I had no desire to sit through them. Let’s face it, what killed the blaxploitation picture was that they made so many awful movies it couldn’t possibly survive as a commercially viable genre. Of course, filmmakers then started combining Black stars with White stars in later movies like 48 hrs and Lethal Weapon, teaming Eddie Murphy with Nick Nolte and Mel Gibson with Danny Glover. This meant that both the White and Black audiences could now go to the theater together to see this new combination. That development effectively signalled the end of the exclusive blaxploitation movie as we once knew it. It was pretty much dead — at least until I made Original Gangstas many years later and deliberately re-teamed a lot of the old blaxploitation stars.
Has there been any interest in remaking Black Caesar?
Yeah, there’s talk about a remake all the time. Nothing has happened yet, but every once in a while somebody will run the idea past me. I guess there’s already been a remake in all but name. A few years ago, Denzel Washington appeared in American Gangster, which is basically a big-budget remake of Black Caesar. [8] If you saw that movie, you’d realize it was the same damn story! Washington even looks like Fred Williamson and is dressed up in the same suit, the same hat, everything. That film was simply taking Black Caesar and remaking it under a different title, even though they claimed the story was based on the life of an actual person. It’s certainly possible that it was, but it was still uncomfortably close to my movie. I think Black Caesar is better than American Gangster. Even though they spent fifty times more money than we did to make it, they didn’t have the “shoeshine scene” in their film where he blackens the White guy’s face. That scene alone is better than anything found in American Gangster. That one scene transcends their whole picture.
Hell up in Harlem (1973)
Hell up in Harlem has the look and feel of a film that has been rushed into production. Was that indeed the case?
Yeah, it was. American International Pictures demanded a sequel be made because of the commercial success of Black Caesar. They obviously wanted to cash-in on the first picture after it did so well at the box office. They wanted a sequel immediately and I had no choice but to make the second movie, because
if I didn’t do it they would have simply given the project to somebody else. I did not want that to happen. I wanted to control and maintain the story and the characters, so I agreed to do the picture. My original title for the film was Black Caesar’s Sweet Revenge, but AIP were convinced that title would confuse certain members of the audience, who might think they were watching Black Caesar all over again on a re-release. So, we went with Hell up in Harlem, which I thought was a rather good title. The unfortunate thing was that the picture had to be made so quickly.
With such a swift turnaround, is it safe to assume that you were unable to develop any other ideas for the sequel?
Oh, I pretty much went with the first idea I had and that’s exactly what I wrote. AIP wanted the sequel so quickly that I didn’t have time to perfect the script as much as I would have liked. Before I knew it, we were shooting the sequel and I had to kind of wing the whole picture. I didn’t really have enough time to prepare Hell up in Harlem and, frankly, I don’t know what other ideas I could have had. I immediately knew that I wanted to do a story where Tommy’s father comes back, gets into the gang, and evolves into a gangster himself before the father and son part ways. I also knew that I wanted to kill off Gloria Hendry’s character and introduce Tommy’s son, continuing that father-son dynamic. There are some very good scenes between Tommy and his father, and I was interested in the development of that relationship. I also thought that Mr. DiAngelo, the crooked district attorney, who was the villain of the piece, was interesting. I actually intended to kill that character off fairly early in the film, but Gerald Gordon, who played DiAngelo, was so good in the part I wrote more scenes for him and turned his death scene — which I’d already shot — into a dream sequence. I didn’t want to waste one foot of film, and I liked the moment where Big Papa murders DiAngelo in the street, so I used it. Some of the other stuff in the movie was certainly more disjointed and uneven, because I just shot action scenes and had to somehow slot them into the story. Again, to be perfectly honest with you, we were kind of making it all up as we were going along.
I agree that Hell up in Harlem is “disjointed” and often has a loose, freewheeling quality. It’s clearly padded with several disparate sequences — the “Florida Keys” episode perhaps being the most glaring of all.
Yeah, that’s really what I’m talking about. You have these guys swimming onto the shore of some unnamed island off the Florida Keys and there’s some gunplay and fighting. If I had cut that entire sequence out of Hell up in Harlem, it wouldn’t have mattered because it doesn’t really have anything to do with the central story. I did scenes like that because I could do them, and I had fun doing them. My reasoning behind the island invasion sequence was that I felt we needed a big action scene somewhere that was the equivalent of the swimming pool massacre in Black Caesar. So, we shot that sequence out in Malibu and had a bunch of underwater cameramen and frogmen. We also had a lot of people in the picture that were relatives, friends, and associates. Everybody wanted to be in the movie, and I’d say to them, “Okay, come on out and we’ll shoot you.” Actually, one of the boys who gets killed in that sequence is Eugene Puzo, the son of Mario Puzo. I thought it would be fun to have Mario’s son in the picture and then kill him off. The girl in the bikini who you see doing a little martial arts was Mindy Miller, who was actually dating Fred Williamson at the time. I even had my agent, Peter Sabiston, in there. I also killed Peter in Black Caesar, too. In fact, whenever he was around I would grab him, put him in a costume, and usually kill him off! [Laughs] Not that my doing that ever reflected my feelings and respect for Peter; he just died very well.
Would you agree that the Florida Keys sequence is also rather odd in some ways?
Yeah, it is a little odd, and I do still question my motivations for doing it. When I look at Hell up in Harlem now, I realize that we either had too many friends or we just killed too many people in the movie. It would have been a lot better if we had shortened that sequence and actually murdered a lot less people. At the time, I liked the idea of these Black maids infiltrating this property and then suddenly pulling out guns and laying waste to people as Tommy and his guys invade the island. I should also say that, frankly, I don’t think Fred Williamson could swim, although he would never admit it! All we see in the film is Fred coming up on shore in the wet suit. He looks great, but I don’t think he actually did any swimming during that sequence. Fred would never dream of telling you he couldn’t swim, but I’m pretty sure he couldn’t. It probably wouldn’t be good for any action movie star to admit such a thing.
Tommy’s father is a righteous, repentant man in Black Caesar, who returns to build a new relationship with his estranged son after “selling cosmetics in the South.” However, in Hell up in Harlem, he is suddenly transformed into the ruthless gangster Big Papa Gibbs. Do you think his transition is a little extreme based on the evidence of the first film?
Well, that character’s transformation does not occur overnight. DiAngelo tries to kill him, and so he becomes a fugitive, who is attempting to stay alive. His son takes him into his organization and effectively trains him to be a gangster. Over time, the father evolves into Big Papa, but that process isn’t immediate. You may remember that in The Godfather, Michael Corleone is first introduced as a nice, square kid, who comes back from the Marine Corps after the war. He wants nothing to do with the family business but, over a fairly short time, he then evolves into the leader of the organization — the Godfather himself — after committing a murder. I was trying to do a similar thing with Tommy’s father. Although he becomes a gangster and is engaged in criminal activities, I still think Big Papa retains his sense of decency and is a moral man, it’s just that his moral compass is maybe a little skewed. Of course, tragically, he then dies and it’s a credit to Julius W. Harris, who played Tommy’s father in both pictures, that his death is so affecting. I must say that I loved working with Julius. He did a great job, and later appeared in Full Moon High and Maniac Cop 3. I saw Julius regularly over the years, and he was a gentleman and a fine actor. All I had to do was pick up the phone and he would be there for me, ready to work. That is the kind of actor I like. Julius would never ask what he was supposed to be doing or what was happening. He simply showed up and did whatever was required. He always gave his best, and I appreciated that. In fact, I always enjoyed having Julius around. When we were shooting in New York, we took him out to nightclubs and stuff like that, and we always had a good time with him socially. He was a great guy that is sadly no longer with us. [1]
What were the challenges you faced in shooting Hell up in Harlem?
There were several challenges, actually, the first being the small problem of Tommy dying at the end of Black Caesar. Of course, in the American theatrical release, we had removed the sequence in which he dies but, as I told you, in the foreign and home video versions, Tommy is killed by the street gang. So, we had to somehow restore him back to life. This was a relatively easy thing to do as there was no way for the audience to know for certain that Tommy was dead. He’d been severely beaten by the gang members, but I thought he was such a physically tough and determined guy he could survive it and stumble away to fight another day. A far more serious challenge was the fact that Fred Williamson was not always available for shooting. He was making a picture at Universal called That Man Bolt [2] and he was very busy. It turned out that Fred would only be available on Saturdays and Sundays. We were actually shooting It’s Alive during the week from Monday to Friday, which meant we had to shoot Hell up in Harlem on the weekends. So, we were literally working seven days a week and usually with most of the same crew members. I was working both them and myself to death, but we did eventually get enough scenes with Fred. I then had to go to New York with Fred’s double and shoot all the scenes with a stand-in. This guy looked like Fred from the back, but when Fred finally saw the finished film, he was very unhappy and complained that the guy’s ass was too big! [Laughs] Anyway, we shot the scenes and then I came back to California
and shot the reverse shots with Fred — all the close-ups of Tommy. It was incredible to think that we were shooting a movie where the lead actor wasn’t present for a large portion of the shoot, but we did.
All things considered, those shots of the double in New York and the inserts with Fred in Los Angeles cut together surprisingly well.
Yeah, they did. It could have been disastrous, but I knew exactly what I was doing. When Fred saw Hell up in Harlem a couple of times, he swore that he was actually present at the time the New York scenes were being shot. I had to keep saying, “No, Fred, that’s not you, that’s the double. You were never there.” No matter how many times I repeated this fact to him, Fred refused to believe it. He kept insisting that it was him and eventually I just had to let it go. I figured that if I could fool the actor himself into believing that he was physically present in those shots, the audience would certainly believe it, too.
You clearly enjoyed an interesting relationship with Williamson during the course of shooting both films.
Larry Cohen Page 16