DINAH-MITE!
Often neglected by collectors, Dinah-Mite was Mego’s answer to Barbie as AJ was to GI Joe. Her advertising featured her as an incredibly poseable doll who “sits and stands”; an overt shot at Barbie, who famously cannot “stand on her own”.
Dinah seems to have fared better than AJ, as she was advertised in their catalogs up through 1975. Since most of her stock did not languish in warehouses, her accessories and outfits are much harder to find.
Although Dinah started out as a white doll, she came in a Black version as well. Mego’s bendable doll rode the wave of 70’s blaxploitation heroines like Friday Foster, Cleopatra Jones, Foxy Brown, Christie Love and my fave, Velvet Smooth.
I came across this sister’s site while scoping the web for some Funky Stuff! And I was blown away by her creativity with keeping the images of 1970’s Funk alive. The images quickly reminded me of the Blaxploitation film era. The art is funky, crazy kool and I had an immediate connection with her designs. A couple of emails back and forth Desiree was happy to be apart of The Museum of UnCut Funk Family and we can’t get enough of that funky stuff!
Please read about Desiree and her company AFRODELIK DESIGNS.
WELCOME TO AFRODELIK DESIGNS brand
…collections of hand drawn art created through the spirit of SOUL
It began with a pen and paper, and the desire to show the world my creativity. For over 20 years, I have had a passion for drawing, which comes from the heart. My natural artistic talent of drawing makes me feel at peace.
My name is Desiree Marshall, and in 2006, I decided to fulfill a life-long dream, and launched my apparel company AFRODELIK DESIGNS brand.
The various pieces feature hand-drawn original designs celebrating culture. There are currently three distinct collections available:
- AFROCITY: a memorable throwback to blaxploitation movies of the 1970s
- AFRIKA: inspirational line drawings dedicated to the various African cultures
- IKONS: an ode to trendsetters and community leaders in music, politics and literature, to name a few
AFRODELIK DESIGNS is a young and exciting company that produces collections of original HAND DRAWN art, on T-shirts, Bags, Greeting cards, and much.
We are currently working on new designs and new products for Summer 2010.
Our products are enjoyed by men and women between the ages of 24-48, and children aged 1-12 years old, of ALL shapes and colours. There is something for EVERYONE!
Afrodelik collections have been described as unique, bold, urban and inspirational, and international celebrities such as Erykah Badu, actors Vivica A.Fox and Derek Luke, singer Jully Black, and playwright and actress Trey Anthony, all own Afrodelik tees.
New to the line is a dedication to the inspiration and iconic, Young Michael Jackson. Afrodelik Designs’ brand is available in stores in North America, also available on the Afrodelik website at www.afrodelik.com
If you want to ease the minds of film fans about a remake you’re working on, just compare it to Ocean’s 11. That’s what Will Smith did back in 2002 when his production company bought the rights to Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night with plans to do an all-star Black update on the 1974 classic that originally paired up Poitier and Bill Cosby. At the time, Smith mentioned casting Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. Eight years later, the remake is in motion again, this time with Smith set to costar with Denzel Washington.
In the original, Cosby and Poitier play old buddies who are robbed during a nightclub hold-up and must solve the case in order to get back a winning lottery ticket that’s in Cosby’s wallet. The film also starred Richard Pryor, Harry Belefonte, Flip Wilson and Calvin Lockhart. If Smith’s initial pitch can be continued, let’s hope that these characters are indeed filled with modern African-American stars like the aforementioned Murphy and Lawrence. And while we’re on the topic of casting, It’d be interesting and refreshingly against type to put Smith in the Poitier role and Washington in Cosby’s.
Warner Bros. and Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment are currently looking for writers to pen a new draft of the film, working from a previous script by Robb and Mark Cullen. And for the moment, director David Dobkin is attached to the remake.
Overbrook also holds the rights to the subsequent Cosby/Poitier pairings Let’s Do It Again and A Piece of the Action. Neither was technically a sequel to Uptown Saturday Night, though the three films are considered a trilogy. My assumption is if the Uptown remake is a hit, they’ll redo the follow-ups as straight sequels involving the same characters.
Source: Cinematical
Filmmaker John Sealey began his career making short films for artists and galleries. He studied film practice at the International film school in Newport, South Wales and went on to do an M.A. in European Cinema and PhD in Film Practice at the University of Exeter, where he currently teaches film. John’s practice is grounded in cultural identity and his films interrogate areas of research within Diaspora histories – their function to challenge and create new ways of reception within the formulaic structure of classical narrative cinema.
‘They Call Me…Don’t Call Me…’ was commissioned by David A. Bailey for The Black Moving Cube Project.
Two enigmatic ‘Diaspora’ characters arrive in Manhattan in search of the residue of Blaxploitation iconography in this experimental docu-drama.
Inspired by the ideas in John Berger’s book ‘Ways of Seeing’, ‘They Call Me, Don’t Call Me’ is also an in-depth study of how we read and understand images.
In the film, the interviewees are shown an image which has something to do with Blaxploitation cinema. The point in which they see the image is their first viewing (they have not been shown anything off-camera) and their initial reactions are captured on camera.
John contacted The Museum Of UnCut Funk and graciously offered to let us share his film with you. So please check it out…Thank you John for being so funky and so righteous…RIGHT ON!!!
Here is some text that was written for an upcoming exhibition that John’s film will be featured in:
Dr John Sealey – University of Exeter
They Call Me…Don’t Call Me… (2006) DV-Cam, 25min. commissioned by David A. Bailey for ‘The Black Moving Cube Project’ 2006
‘I used to have an afro like that’
Although a great deal has been said, written and visually documented on the subject of the Blaxploitation film, for some, the mere mention of this period in Afro-American cinema history, in today’s context, seems to conjure up a narrative image of a definitive cinematic black cool, as if nothing like it had ever existed before and that everything after it seemed doomed; trapped in a straight jacket of pastiche. The hip iconography of Afros, black leather, super-cool pimps and funky soundtracks is one that the cultural mainstream has taken to its ideological heart. But what of the value of these films beyond their first level of signification and how has meaning disseminated itself over the last thirty-five years since Shaft first pounded the streets of Manhattan?
As a teenager growing up in London in the late seventies, having an Afro wasn’t just about style. For kids like myself whose parents formed part of a major migration from the West Indies in the 50s and 60s, questions of belonging became an important issue, particularly in the face of exclusion based on race and ethnicity. Having an Afro symbolised a means of identification: an identification that acknowledges one’s own cultural background. Thus, to have an Afro was to state a kind of belonging.
But these visual references can also play a different role, one that is part of a system that creates layers to be used as a defence mechanism, or as a source of cultural knowledge with which one can draw from. Stuart Hall takes up this point:
There are at least two different ways of thinking about ‘cultural identity’. The first position defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people’, with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. (Hall 2003: 223)
It was this experiential approach that was my initial starting point in developing the drama/documentary, They Call Me…Don’t Call Me…
I wanted to make a film that investigated the residue of Blaxsploitation iconography and in turn comment on structures of meaning; how we perceive or read images. Taking the idea from John Berger (1972) that seeing comes before words, I opted for a filmic structure whereby the context of a particular image was absent, so that the interviewee would be positioned in such a way, that their recall emanated entirely from the memoir of their own visual and aesthetic criteria.
This image recollection concept is also imbedded within the film form, through the
re-construction of certain shots. The opening zoom as the characters hit the streets comes directly from the opening sequence of Shaft (Gordon Parks 1971)
and the male character as he peers out of the hotel window is a nod towards the famous rifle image of Malcolm X as he attempts to protect his family.
At the same time, the film attempts to address issues of gender within Blaxploitation, using diegetic space to re-evaluate the relationship between the male and female characters: they are in silent communion with each other, sharing the same objectives and actions.
In creating the personas of the two characters, I drew on the unique insights of French filmmaker Robert Bresson in his approach to directing, using the actor as a ‘model’ within a space in which movement or kinetics become integral to the film:
Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times) and are then dropped in the medium of the events of your film – their relations with the objects and persons around them will be right, because they will not be thought. (Bresson 1986: 32)
I embellish Bresson’s idea of using the actor as a model and automated action-character, to create a prototype ‘model’ that I can successfully apply to the documentary format. In They Call Me…Don’t Call Me…the characters provide a tension which polarizes the generic form; the documentary.
Although in the early stages of the project, I wanted to explore the dichotomy between the politics of transformation (the communal) with the individualist narratives of Shaft, Superfly (Gordon Parks Jr. 1972) and to some extent Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles 1971), I felt that I needed to take on a role of active observer in my own film. Yes, I had certain filmic elements under my control; I could choose the shots, approach people to be interviewed and also cut the film with a subjective slant, but as to what the outcome would be, and what the people would say, that seemed out of my control.
‘Ooh, wow. I think that is about people feelin the power…’
Two silent ‘Diasporic’ characters called They Call Me… and Don’t Call Me… arrive in the city of New York in order to search for the spirit of ‘Blaxploitaion Cinema’. To do this they ‘arm’ themselves with images from several of the most recognisable characters from the genre, including Shaft and Foxy Brown (Jack Hill 1974).
Their names offer the first ‘clue’ in their quest:
‘They Call Me…Mr Tibbs’ (In the Heat of the Night – Norman Jewison 1967)
‘Don’t Call Me…Nigger, Whitey’ (Sly and the Family Stone 1969)
They approach subjects (members of the public) in the street, and without speaking, show them pictures – which we, the spectator, do not see. These pictures form or instigate the interview that follows. The subjects then discuss the image and when they are finished the Diasporic character walks away silently, looking for the next subject who is willing to deconstruct the images that the two characters carry around in their pockets. Intermittently throughout the film, we hear an echo voice-over of a woman describing the situation in America today for Afro-Americans. This structure continues throughout until the final interview where a group of women discuss the attributes of Pam Grier in such films as Foxy Brown.
The film ends with the two Diasporic characters inside a car; either retuning from whence they came, or continuing their quest.
An important point to say here is that; all the subjects in the film were initially approached by either myself (the filmmaker) or the cast and crew and then asked to contribute their thoughts on the documentary we were making about Blaxploitation cinema. None of the subjects were shown any images beforehand off-camera as it was felt that by using this method, the subjects would react more instinctively. Once the subject had agreed to be interviewed, we would then go on to explain (sometimes at great length) the procedure or method of the set-up idea; whereby the subject would pretend to be unaware until approached by one of the characters with an image-card.
The idea behind this set-up was the influence of the lucid style and reflexive camera of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969).
In this film, Wexler (who, incidentally was Director of Photography on Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night) blurs generic or traditional distinctions between drama and documentary, appropriating a style akin to cinema vérité by placing his ‘actors’ in ‘real’ situations and recording the resulting drama.
Shot frenetically over two jetlagged days in Manhattan in August 2005, the film draws its energy from its mode of production in the same way as the production of Sweet Sweetback…
In Van Peebles’ film, the aesthetic is born from the coupling of cinematic revolutionary ideas alongside budgetary restrictions. The vivid and elliptical montage sequences produced when we see the protagonist on the run is a good example of a filmmaker harnessing the moment – the inter-thought or feelings that surround the moment of filming.
Like Sweetback, the characters in They Call Me…Don’t Call Me… are on a journey as they ‘trace’ the footsteps of Shaft through the Manhattan community, looking for answers to questions which can only come from the subjects that they confront.
The familiar quest narrative is one that is used time and again in Blaxploitation and lends itself perfectly to They Call Me…Don’t call Me… as the two characters walk the streets of Manhattan, ready to produce their images for public investigation.
The question is; are they chasing a memory, or exploring a dream?
——————–
A Baad Asssss Blasian Is Coming Back To Collect His Dues….
For all the brothers and sisters who dig Blaxploitation films, have seen the original Sweet Sweetback’s film, and can see the similarities between Sweetback, the sex performer and Tiger Woods, the sex addict, as the Curator of The Museum of UnCut Funk I just could not resist…
Synopsis: Produced, directed, written and scored by Sista ToFunky, this landmark Blasian film is as controversial as it is popular for its X-rated story of one bad ass Blasian brother’s triumph over The Man. After beating a couple of white golfers, he witnessed their brutalization of a little white ball because they were pissed they got their asses kicked by a Blasian. Fearing he would be framed for this brutalization, Tiger the sex addict goes on the run. As he flees from his fabulous life of fame and fortune, Tiger demonstrates his sexual prowess and insatiable appetite for ruff and wild sex by taping the asses of the willing and able. After a violent Thanksgiving holiday car crash, Tiger evades his Swedish wife, his celebrity Black friends who screw white women, the press and the paparazzi. The Tiger hunt is intensified when he runs off into the sunset to find his swagger (or a condom or another blond), while his agent, Mark Steinberg warns that his story ain’t over.
There’s a bad ass Blasian coming for your ass, your daughter’s ass, your wife’s ass and as a matter of fact any other ass that crosses his path.
Coming soon to a theater near you.
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Blax
During the 1970’s, Blaxploitation moved into the horror category with a number of movies, made for Blacks, staring Blacks. One of the most important actors from this period was William Marshall. He starred as Blacula, a Black version of Dracula in two movies, Blacula and Scream, Blacula, Scream. Blacula became the Blaxploitation’s eras first prominent horror film. Blacula gets released from his coffin in the 20th century and raids the population of Los Angeles for victims. Blacula, along the way, finds a girl by the name of Tina and falls in love with her. The police find out about Blacula and track him down. In a final chase scene, Tina dies and Blacula is left to mourn. He then sacrifices his life to be with Tina.
The movie was a commercial success. There were huge premieres in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the Black community. Although Blacula does make victims out of a number of white L.A. police, critics felt it was a milder than most of the Blaxploitation films.
For the most part, Blacks do not fare well in horror films, as they are generally the first to suffer or be killed. While some may object to the negative portrayals of Blacks in many Blaxploitation films, at least in the horror films some Black actors were allowed to live until the end!
There were a number of horror films made during the Blaxploitation era. These films allowed allowed Blacks to fight evil while sticking it to the man. The Museum of UnCut Funk pays homage to the classic Blaxploitation horror flick with a few posters from our collection.
From the minds of Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, the Afrodisiac phenomena got it’s start in 2005 as short stories and anthologies. Jim Rugg, co-creator of the Afrodisiac comic series, recently stated in an interview with Comic Book Resources “ We try to capture the style and energy of the great Blaxploitation movies”.
Capture they did. Afrodisiac has all the energy and hipness of some of the greatest Black films to come out of the 1970’s. In addition to embodying the artistic flow of 1970‘s comic books, Afrodisiac is straight up old school funk. Afrodisiac is a pimp who can hypnotize any woman with the mere mention of his name. The Afrodisiac character has been compared to some of the coolest cats of the Blaxploitation genre like The Mack, Willie Dynamite and John Daniels from Black Shampoo. Afrodisiac is as slick as Jim Brown in Slaughter or Issac Hayes in Truck Turner, and as cool as Brother Rabbit from the classic animated live action film Coonskin. Afrodisiac is the man!
Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have captured the true essence of what was going down in the streets of Black America during the 1970’s. With all the usual suspects, Afrodisaic has freaks, geeks, the man, hot chicks, bad ass rides and who can forget the fashion. Fashion played a huge part in Blaxploitation films. While SuperFly will go down as the flyest motherfucker in cinematic history, Afrodsiac represents on all levels, including his never out of place fro.
The Museum of UnCut Funk is thrilled that Jim Rugg shared some of the art from the soon to be released Afrodisiac graphic novel. The complete collection of Afrodisiac comics will be available in graphic novel form in December 2009. This is a must have for any comic book collector, fan of Blaxploitation films or anyone interested in comic art. Right On!!!
TNCZTGH3M26Q
Return Of The Super Pimps issues 1-6 are written by Richard A. Hamilton, drawn by Ulises Carpintero and Rich Bonilla, colored and lettered by various talents, and published by Dial “C” For Comics, Richard’s company.
Truth be told, the Blaxploitation movie was not, as has been popularly put forward by certain filmmakers and documentaries, merely made up of Black crime genre stories. There were comedies and dramas made during those days starring Black folk. There were even horror movies featuring mostly or all Black casts. Yet, for many, the Blaxploitation movement is treated as a singular genre–much like manga is today–with one almost universally pervasive stereotype that stands as the purest representative of those films: the hustler, the pimp.
Richard Hamilton is old enough to know that figure from those movies. But what he does to that stereotype turns it on its ear and seemingly redeems it. By doing that he lives up to his desire to mix the nobility of superheroes with the power of Funk and Soul, as stated in his first issue afterword.
The basic plot of Return Of The Super Pimps is this: The Super Pimps, a band of urban hustlers turned superheroes, once protected The Hood, an every-ghetto, from all manner of villains. That was, until one of their number lost his life in battle. That sad turn of events caused the SP’s leader, Blackbeard, to quit the hero biz and disband the team. Decades later, in our time, Police Detective Maple learns of the death of the SP’s former faithful servant and sets out to find his childhood heroes to tell them the news. Along the way, old friendships are tested and renewed, an old foe returns, and a team of heroes is reborn
Return Of The Super Pimps is a fun read. Nothing that will change the world of comics but a good, solid adventure yarn, full of characters and situations not normally seen in the standard superhero comic.
Source: http://www.comicswaitingroom.com/vince34.html
Return Of The Super Pimps
Written by Richard Hamilton
Pencils by Ulises Roman
Colors by Jasen Smith & Maria Laura
Letters by Atlantis Studios
Blackbeard — the leader with the living ‘locks! Ghetto Blaster — wielder of the fantastic 8-Track Suit! Homboy — the sentinel with a special connection to the street! Foxy Mama — lupine lady of the night! Sidekick — rookie kung-fu master! Over twenty-five years ago these Urban Revengers, these Super Pimps, protected The Hood from the diabolical Darquefire and were working to make their neighborhood a safe place to grow up. But on a fateful night as these five funky crimefighters battled their arch nemesis, a tragedy took place so horrific that Blackbeard not only walked away from the Super Pimps, he disbanded the entire group right on the spot.
Now, Detective Maple, whose boyhood heroes were the Super Pimps, patrols the very streets his idols once did. When he is called in on a murder, he recognizes the victim as Flapjack, the trusty servant of the crimefighters who have since subsided into urban legend. Using his skills as a detective, Maple hunts down one Marcus Maddox, who used to be Blackbeard, and is now a father trying to give his kids a better life than he did. Maple’s encounter with Maddox leads to meetings with the rest of former jive justice seekers, who reunite as citizens in the streets of The Hood. They soon discover evidence that Darquefire has returned, stronger than ever, and only some superpowered playas are going to be able to stop him. The five return to The Crib, their old secret headquarters, and suit up ready to take to streets. It is time to walk the walk and talk the talk, but are these middle-aged mofos still heroes or just has-beens?
Pouring out of the mind of Richard Hamilton, whose childhood was filled with the constantly spinning records of Kool And The Gang, the cinematic badness of Shaft, and Stan Lee’s multitude of comics, comes this glorious blaX-Men-ploitation! Hamilton puts his screenwriting training to excellent use here, with a super fresh and righteous story that spills from one page to the next. You can almost hear the booming bass and see the glitter of the disco ball in each carefully penned pun and feel the real fur boas as Hamilton culls every stereotype from the street and make it his own.
Each character, as in any superhero group book, is given a specific power and personality that both works to bring the group together in a crimefighting harmony, but has enough quirk to cause strife. The book’s obvious influence are Marvel’s mutant heroes, with a slightly more subtle influence from Warren Ellis’ The Authority. Hamilton’s decision to tell the back story through the eyes of young Maple also calls to mind the outsider-looking-in mentality of Marvels or Astro City. Hamilton has also worked hard to make his characters as imperfect humans with all the insecurity and doubts that come with them. As of issue three, Hamilton has yet to dive into how these superheroes obtained their powers, but their natural aging suggests they are mortal. This plays an important part of some of the subplots and adds an element of danger to their decision to reform well past their prime.
In order to bring his creation to the page, Hamilton needed artists who were as much in touch with the style of his heroes as he was. Hamilton found a crew of pencilers, inkers, and colorists who fit the bill perfectly. The character designs are top notch, and like Blacula or Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, each seem to find roots in a pre-established character and then given a makeover by Xzibit. The colors are particularly striking, and each page is drenched in so much purple even Huggy Bear would blush with embarrassment.
If you strip away all the flashy funk and glitz, and the seemingly hokey riff on the ghetto lifestyle, Hamilton’s story not only has heart, but has several messages that he sneakily slips in. His overt push for education and good parenting through Blackbeard should be applauded, and his warning against STDs rivals any comic book sub-context to date. These books may be a little tricky to track down in a local comic shop, and you might have to go straight to the source, but any trouble is well worth it to add these to your collection.
Source : geeksofdoom.com
Return Of The Super Pimps comics are a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk Collection.
“My friends admit I am black, beautiful and sometimes bitchy, but only when the situation calls for it. If life were a painting I’d be in the middle with a cynical little smile on my face and Hollywood in the background. My name is Dorothy Jean Dickerson. If the name isn’t familiar to you, my face and figure probably are. I’ve appeared in a number of ‘Black’ motion pictures — blaxploitation films some people call them — and my star is definitely on the rise.” So begins Inside Black Hollywood, the first published novel by actress Carol Speed, who starred in THE MACK and a half-dozen other B-movies back in the early ’70s, but is mostly known these days for being mentioned in a Quentin Tarantino script TRUE ROMANCE.
A fictionalized account of the making of THE MACK — it’s called THE CHANCE here, with Ms. Speed telling the whole sordid story through her Dorothy Jean Dickerson persona — Inside Black Hollywood drops its readers headfirst into the mire of the ’70s exploitation movie scene and makes them swim with the sharks for 250 pages. Sure, all the names have been changed to protect the innocent (as well as the guilty, the stoned, and the just-plain-stupid), but you won’t need more than your two eyes and a copy of THE MACK to figure out who’s who.
First and foremost, there’s arrogant leading man Henry Worth (Max Julien), a borderline sociopath scheming to get Dorothy Jean fired from the film so his girlfriend — bitchy actress Lisa McLaine (Vonetta McGee) — can get the role instead.
Next on Speed’s shit list is producer Gerald Goldfarb (Harvey Bernhard), who overestimates Worth’s box-office worth and insists on kissing his ass instead of Dorothy Jean’s (Bernhard also produced Julien and McGee’s THOMASINE AND BUSHROD a year later).
Then there’s the director, Mark Katz (Michael Campus?), who’d rather bone every actress on the set than make a halfway coherent film. Oh, and let’s not forget the pathetic, self-pitying starlet Tanya Stevens (Annazette Chase), who screwed Mark to get a part in the movie — a part that’s getting smaller and smaller with every passing day — and out-of-control comedian Bubba Johnson (Richard Pryor), who’s on the skids because he told one too many “big dick” jokes in front of little old white ladies in Las Vegas and got his ass kicked out of town by the Mob.
And in the middle of it all is Dorothy Jean Dickerson, our lovely heroine and God’s gift to bargain basement cinema, who proves to be almost as obnoxious and egomaniacal as the others. When she isn’t fussing over her wardrobe and fighting with her costars, she’s either shoveling coke up her nose by the kilo or bitching endlessly about her shitty personal life and alienating everybody around her. Somehow, she manages to tear herself away from the mirror long enough to hook up with Fred Sullivan — underworld figure, player extraordinaire, and one of the shady Sullivan brothers, who are putting up the money to make the film. Fred’s character is based on Frank D. Ward, one of the Ward brothers, who financed most or all of THE MACK; he even appears in the film as himself, during the Players’ Ball scene (he’s the first runner-up after Goldie for the “Player of the Year” award). Speed obviously fell head over heels in love with Frank Ward, judging by the way Dorothy Jean literally (and repeatedly) soaks her panties at the mere mention of Fred Sullivan’s name. If you remember the dedication that appears at the beginning of THE MACK (”In memory of a MAN — Frank D. Ward”), you’ll know exactly where their relationship is headed.
“When I came to Hollywood everything began to happen for me almost immediately,” Speed told Black Stars magazine in 1980. “I was doing one film after the other and my career was moving forward at an extremely fast pace. Then all of a sudden this all ended. I must confess that much of it was my fault, because I committed several acts that contributed greatly to it.” Dorothy Jean’s behavior during the shooting of THE CHANCE certainly backs this up, but the loss of Frank D. Ward — more than any bridge burning that may have occurred during the making of THE MACK — was most likely what led Speed to start writing Inside Black Hollywood in 1974, under the title Dorothy Jean Dickerson – I Thought You Knew!
That same year, she had starring roles in ABBY and BLACK SAMSON, and then… nothing. She dropped out of the business and moved in with fading rocker Sly Stone, bringing only the clothes on her back and her unfinished manuscript. “For the most part, we stayed high from one day to the other,” she admitted to Black Stars when asked about this period in her life. “Time was of little importance, because one day was like the next one. I did absolutely nothing.”
She eventually wandered out of Sly’s compound and found her way back to her parents’ home in San Jose, where she sobered up and got her head together before returning to Los Angeles to finish her novel (probably in late 1978, since Dorothy Jean mentions Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” at one point).
Around this time, she also appeared in her last film to date, the Rudy Ray Moore jaw-dropper DISCO GODFATHER (1979).
Speed may have been a star on the rise when she made THE MACK in 1973, but by the time Holloway House published her book seven years later, her acting career was finished and the “Black Hollywood” of the title was just a memory.
A rumor in early 1997 had her joining two of her costars from THE BIG BIRD CAGE — Pam Grier and Sid Haig — in JACKIE BROWN, but the reunion never happened. She did contribute to the Tarantino-backed What It Is! What It Was! blaxploitation book in 1998, but was noticeably absent from the special edition DVD of THE MACK a few years later.
The whacked-out, paranoid bulletins that were emanating daily from her MySpace page seemed to be written by a person who either takes too much of the wrong kind of medication or not enough of the right. That’s a shame, because Speed’s a strong writer, and Inside Black Hollywood — when recognized as a work of nonfiction — is a fascinating and important contribution to B-movie history
Source: Temple Of Schlock
