Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1014407
18 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2018 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY overseas against people of color. On Labor Day, September 3, 1973, 45 years ago, United Artists quietly premiered The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a movie reflecting these issues, at the Maryland Theatre in Chicago's South Side. With a story shifting from pointed political satire to the plausible nurturing of a black rebellion, it was independently produced by its director, Ivan Dixon, and Sam Greenlee, who wrote the original novel and co-wrote the screenplay with Mel Clay. Greenlee's friend, Colostine Boatwright, an actress who played a dancer in the movie and later appeared in Cooley High (1975), told CineMontage, "Sam insisted that it be screened first in his own neighborhood." Within a week, Mayor Richard Daley's office, which had denied location permits for the movie to be shot in Chicago a year earlier, pressured local movie houses to pull it from exhibition or face city inspections. Over the next four months, though, UA arranged a 21-city tour for Spook as a "blaxploitation" movie in black neighborhoods. The trailer proclaimed that its main character "was for five years [the CIA's] token Negro and, when he got out, he turned ghetto kids into a revolutionary army!" At the end of September, according to a UA press release, it had grossed "an excellent $361,636 in 13 cities…$40,836 in its first three days at the DeMille and Juliet Theatres in New York." In the National Association of Theatre Owners' BoxOffice magazine, a review noted, "It effectively mirrors the increasingly strained black- white relationship." Before Spook's December 19 Los Angeles theatrical opening, the movie was welcomed to LA with an October 29 benefit premiere at the Fox Wilshire Theatre, sponsored by the Hollywood Civil Rights and Education Foundation and the National Association for Sickle Cell Disease, and hosted by vocalist Nancy Wilson and actor Greg Morris (Mission: Impossible, 1966-1973). But before the end of the year, The Spook Who Sat by the Door vanished from the screen. In a 2011 interview with media studies academics Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall, published in the 2018 book Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" (along with essays and the full screenplay of the movie), Greenlee said he believed that UA "pulled it off the market at the behest of the FBI." The distribution prints were all destroyed, but the producers retained the rights to the movie and Dixon vaulted the original negative under a different name. Over the next 20 years, a few bootleg VHS copies circulated, bringing it a reputation as an "underground black classic," but it remained unknown among general audiences. CONTINUED ON PAGE 20 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16 The Spook Who Sat by the Door. United Artists/Photofest