One man’s trash…

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This article was published 24/10/2019 (2332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The movie Dolemite Is My Name, which starts streaming tomorrow on Netflix, does for ‘70s blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore what Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood did for the transvestite ‘50s filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr.

That is, it bestows affection and respect on a moviemaker whose slipshod exploitation product contained a vein of genuine artistic expression under the surface.

It is no coincidence that both films were written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the screenwriting team that has made a career of giving the biopic treatment to transgressive cultural figures such as porn publisher Larry Flynt (The People Vs. Larry Flynt) and comedian Andy Kaufman (Man on the Moon).

The writers were basically commissioned to write My Name Is Dolemite for its star, Eddie Murphy, who saw the role of a lifetime in the story of Moore, an Arkansas-born entertainer who, in mid-life, parlayed the success of raunchy, under-the-counter comedy albums into a film career, starring and producing the movie Dolemite in 1975 against impossible odds.

When it came to finding a director for the film, Murphy approached Craig Brewer, the Memphis filmmaker who covered similar terrain with his 2005 film Hustle & Flow, about a middle-aged pimp (Terrence Howard) attempting to change his career course to a hip-hop recording artist. Lately, Brewer has worked as a producer on Howard’s TV series Empire.

“I had been working with Eddie on another project for a while,” Brewer explains in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “When my name came up, Eddie was a big fan of Hustle & Flow and he felt that I would understand the material.”

Brewer’s connection ran deep, as it turned out, in telling the story of a novice filmmaker with extraordinary ambition.

“I know what it’s like to show up at a location without a permit and how to talk people into letting you film there,” he says. “I know what it’s like to talk people into being in it, and maybe talking to your best friend to ask him if his girlfriend would mind like playing a stripper in the movie or something like that.

“All the things that Rudy had to do in his movies, I knew what that was like,” he says. “At the end, there’s a certain optimism and an almost family environment that you have with your crew and your cast.”

One of the film’s subversive pleasures, as with Ed Wood, is that it forces a reconsideration of movies that are largely considered trash. Brewer has always been a big fan of the blaxploitation genre, and can discuss titles — The Mack, Shaft, Penitentiary and Truck Turner — with the expertise of a sommellier deliberating on the perfection of a 1945 Mouton Rothschild.

“Dolemite was always a special one,” Brewer says of the film about a pimp who leaves prison to get revenge on the man who put him there, with help from his “All-Girl Army of Kung Fu Killers.”

“When I was making films with my fellow crew members, we kind of enjoyed all the flaws of Dolemite,” he says. “We would quote Dolemite more than any of the other blaxploitation movies just because the lines were sometimes so outrageously delivered that we had to say them again.”

Brewer acknowledges his enjoyment might have been larded with a touch of contempt.

“When you’re younger, the gas you’ve got in your tank when you’re starting out is to kind of crap on everything else,” he says. “So you see a movie and you say: That ain’t anything! I can do that!

“And then you start getting into it and you realize that wasn’t so easy.”

Brewer credits a turnaround in attitude to his friend, the late filmmaker John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), who produced Hustle & Flow.

“John could watch Penitentiary and talk with such loving passion about a fight scene,” Brewer recalls. “But he could do the same thing with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.

“John could come running across the room and go: ‘Oh my God, did you see Jane Eyre? Man, that movie was awesome!’ And you’d be like: Really?

“Then we’d go see something lame together and I’d say: ‘That was lame.’ And he’d say, ‘There were some fun spots. There were some cool things in there.’

“He managed to make me see the good sometimes where all I could see was the crap,” Brewer says.

“I know not everybody should subscribe to that attitude … but I’ve had a better life since I’ve done it.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing