Kool Cats And Hip Chicks Blog

Today I ventured to the Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con with three goals in mind. To meet Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Billy Dee Williams. As my business partner and I made our trek, we talked about our continued love of the 1970′s, the films, the animation from the Saturday morning cartoons and the comics. We even discussed how this could be a small turning point in our lives as we continue to follow our passion by meeting these 1970′s film icons.

Once we arrived at the Philadelphia Convention Center I saw Pam Grier with her manager crossing the street heading toward the center. I shouted out “THERE’S PAM GRIER” and startled my business partner. I acted like I was a crazed fan screaming “WHERE’S THE CAMERA”…it was one of my funnier moments. I was reminded that I came here to take a picture with her and may have a chance to talk to her.

We parked the car and walked to the Convention Center, turned the corner and BAM, people with and without tickets were stacked up in the same line, all the way around the block waiting to get in. The process for entry was a nightmare…a 35 minute wait once I was in the Convention Center, and this was with tickets that I pre-ordered and paid for over the internet. When we finally arrived for the picture Pam Grier was gone. Well as anyone who PAID to have their picture taken at these events in hopes of having a 1 to 2 minute conversation would have been…I was ticked off. But I kept my cool and demanded my photo, since the Convention Center was ridiculously slow in processing my intake, which prevented me from seeing Pam on time.

Finally after much complaining a photographer escorted me to Pam’s booth and I was introduced to her. She was ever so gracious and kind. She shook my hand and for what felt like an eternity we stood arm in arm and I had my photo taken. I took a minute to gain my composure and I walked over to her booth and had a chance to talk to her about The Museum of UnCut Funk (MOUF), it’s mission and how we would love to do an interview with her. She expressed an interest and gave us a timeframe that would be good. I thanked her again and proceeded to pick up my Pam Grier and Billy Dee Williams photos.

There was as lag in time to pick up photos so we visited Richard Roundtree at his booth. He too was kind and gracious. I told him about the MOUF and our collection, especially items related to him and his body of work. Like Pam Grier he expressed interest in being interviewed. My photo of Richard will be mailed to me due to a back log in processing photos.

Billy Dee Williams was more reserved and since I had taken a photo with him earlier I introduced myself and shared with him our mission at The Museum of UnCut Funk. He too took my card and like the others seemed interested in an interview.

I can’t tell you if or when these interviews will come to fruition. We will certainly do our best to make them happen. But what I will tell you is that yesterday was one of the best days I have had while pursuing my passion.

Sista ToFunky

Emmy, Tony and Oscar winning production, set and costume designer Tony Walton (All That Jazz, Mary Poppins and Broadway’s Pippin just to name a few) shared his Oscar nominated set and costume work for the 1978 film The Wiz. The film was the adaptation of the hit Broadway musical of the seventies and the Black version of the L. Frank Baum classic The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Sidney Lumet, it featured Diana Ross as Dorothy, Nipsey Russell as the Tinman, Richard Pryor as The Wiz and a young Michael Jackson as The Scarecrow. Lena Horne played Glinda the Good Witch.

Universal spent a record $24 million on the production, making the movie the must expensive musical made up until that time. Studio execs were worried Ross was too old to effectively play Dorothy and rumor had it she won the coveted role by promising to deliver the pop sensation as The Scarecrow. Sadly Jackson’s dance skills were never fully utilized in the film. And even sadder for his fans, he had only one solo number, “You Can’t Win” which was at the film’s end.

The multi-talented Walton designed the sets along with Philip Rosenberg, creating a yellow brick road out of Congoleum at the Astoria studios in Queens. Apparently the flooring company came out with a style called Yellow Brick Road in their collection shortly after the film premiered. Many of the film’s special effects were created with matte paintings, as evidenced by the Manhattan skyline scenes below, by the Hollywood master Albert Whitlock.

The 1970s produced the film genre that would become known as ‘Blaxploitation’. These films were made specifically with an urban Black audience in mind. These movies were larger-than-life, action-packed and full of funk and soul music. These films also incorporated progressive social and political commentary. From Pam Grier to Bill Cosby, check out who delved into this genre and what the actors have been doing since the 1970s.

Pam Grier’s fame grew in the 1970s when she starred in several Blaxploitation films like ‘Coffy’ and ‘Foxy Brown’. Grier revitalized her career and paid homage to the ’70s genre in 1997 when she appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Jackie Brown.’ Her role as Jackie Brown earned her a Golden Globe nod for Best Actress. 

Grier played Louis Williams in ‘Mars Attacks!’ in 1996 and Carol in ‘Holy Smoke’ in 1999. Grier’s acting resume is extensive and lately she’s hit the television screen. She played Kit Porter on ‘The L Word’ for 5 years and appeared in ‘Smallville’ in 2010.

Janet MacLachlan, who played the compassionate schoolteacher in Martin Ritt’s Oscar-nominated “Sounder” (1972), has died at age 77. A highly respected stage, film and television actress, Maclachlan was known for a serious, no-nonsense style that led her to be often cast as a judge, nurse, doctor, psychiatrist, teacher or social worker. She was highly visible during the transitional period of the 1960s and 70s, when African-Americans fought against negative stereotypes on screen and began to make significant inroads in front of and behind the cameras.

MacLachlan died Monday, October 11 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Hollywood. She had been admitted two days earlier suffering from cardiac symptoms, family members said.

She was born Janet Angel MacLachlan in Harlem on August 27, 1933, to James and Ruby MacLachlan, both Jamaican immigrants. She attended the all-girl Julia Richman High School and excelled in math, graduating in 1950. According to a New York Times interview, it was in high school that Maclachlan “felt black” for the first time, as there were only three other African-American students on campus. “It was very strange because I had come from an all-black school and I didn’t know how to deal with it,” she said.

MacLachlan’s first acting experience was in a Harlem Boys Club play, as a teen. Later, while she was attending Hunter College, she studied drama in a private class taught by Sidney Poitier, who instilled in her not only the importance of refining her craft but also of developing a point of view. “He had a tendency to lecture me because I had no attitudes and no beliefs and I was very wishy-washy,” she once recalled. “He wanted me to help find out who I was and not to let people tell me what to do.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1955, MacLachlan worked at clerical jobs while studying acting at the Harlem YMCA, the Herbert Berghof Acting Studio and the Little Theatre of Harlem. After a few years she had worked her way up to become an executive secretary and office manager for a New York public relations firm, but the business world was unsatisfying and she felt the calling of the stage. In 1961, MacLachlan impulsively gave up her job and its then-decent salary of $175 per week and traded it for a $5-a-week stipend to understudy Cicely Tyson in two productions simultaneously: “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” and Jean Genet’s controversial off-Broadway play, “The Blacks: A Clown Show.” After Tyson’s departure from “The Blacks,” MacLachlan played the role of Virtue, the prostitute, for six weeks, working alongside such acclaimed and established actors as James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Jr., Maya Angelou and Roscoe Lee Browne. Suddenly her acting career was off and running. That same year she appeared in the parody “Raisin’ Hell in the Son” and was called the “most memorable member of the cast” by a New York Times reviewer.

Robert Hooks, who portrayed Deodatus Village (a role first played by James Earl Jones) in “The Blacks,” remembered MacLachlan as “…a brilliant woman and a great individual and super talent. I always admired her acting ability, and just as a strong black woman she was there all the way. Not necessarily a feminist but just a strong black woman with strong beliefs about feminism. There was a pridefulness in her work, and she refused to do the silly stuff.

“She played the role of Virtue, a role that Cicely Tyson originated, and that’s when I got so taken with her,” Hooks continued. “It was probably the meatiest role she’s ever done, because she was one of those actresses who never really got the big shot, the Cicely Tyson-type shot as an artist, but when she did do the roles she mastered them. We had a wonderful time, because most of our scenes were together. I witnessed the depth of her character study, and I was right there on the stage with her when she was doing it.”

MacLachlan made her Broadway debut in December 1962 in Peter Feibleman’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” at the Booth Theater; the cast featured an array of established and up-and-coming black thespians from the New York stage, including Roscoe Lee Browne, Al Freeman Jr., Rudy Challenger, Ellen Holly, Diana Sands, Claudia McNeil, as well as Tyson and Hooks. MacLachlan then spent time with the repertory company at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, honing her craft by appearing in “Hamlet,” “Death of a Salesman” and “The Miser.”

By 1964 she had moved to Hollywood and was signed by Universal as a contract player.  MacLachlan had one-shot parts on TV series such as “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater,” “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Fugitive.” Through the late 1960s and early 70s she appeared on “The Invaders,” “The FBI,” “Ironside,” “The Mod Squad,” The Name of the Game” and other series. Two of her best TV roles, both of which aired in 1967, are an African girl in an episode of “I Spy” with Bill Cosby, which was shot on location in Greece, and a first-season episode of “Star Trek” in which MacLachlan played an Enterprise crewmember named Lt. Charlene Masters.

MacLachlan made her feature film debut in “Up Tight” (1968), a remake of John Ford’s “The Informer” with the Irish Republican Army’s struggle against the British replaced by a faction of the black power movement in a Cleveland ghetto. This politically charged, controversial film was released shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (it begins with documentary footage of King’s funeral procession) and depicted the struggle between groups advocating nonviolent and armed resistance. It was the first American-made film by director Jules Dassin since his blacklisting and exile in Europe, and its cast was a virtual who’s-who of black Hollywood in the late 1960s, including Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Browne, Frank Silvera, Max Julien, and Raymond St. Jacques. MacLachlan played Jeannie, girlfriend of the leader of a militant gang (St. Jacques).

Dick Anthony Williams (actor, “Up Tight”): “She was a great teacher and a solid, grounded actress. We had great, great respect for each other. We’d been in a number of things together: “Up Tight,” “The Sophisticated Gents” and other things. She quietly went about her work; she didn’t go for a great deal of fanfare like some actors. She was a very fine actress and fine person, and she’ll be terribly missed.”

Although MacLachlan was not always outspoken about her political beliefs, she did not hesitate to express her views on the status of African-Americans in Hollywood. In a 1968 interview with Soul magazine, she said, “There really hasn’t been, say on television, a truthful honest black character on any show in a continuing role … 99 percent of the writers are white. And they don’t really know. So what they are doing is writing white roles for black people. The only way to correct that is to have black writers.”

During the early 1970s, MacLachlan avoided the Blaxploitation pictures that were in fashion and instead focused on film roles reflecting her desire to bring credible African-American characters to the screen. In “Change of Mind” (1969), a bizarre sci-fi-drama wherein a white man’s brain is transplanted into a black man’s skull, she played the dead black man’s confused and conflicted widow. In “Halls of Anger” (1970) she was Lorraine Nash, a no-nonsense high school teacher who counsels a fellow educator (Calvin Lockhart) whose classroom is a tempest of racial tensions. “…tick… tick… tick…” (1970) had MacLachlan playing a rather thankless role as the wife of a black sheriff (Jim Brown) in a small, racially divided southern town. “The Man” (1972), based on an Irving Wallace novel and scripted by Rod Serling, cast MacLachlan as the rebellious daughter of the first African-American president of the United States, played by James Earl Jones.

Paul Bogart (director, “Halls of Anger”): “She was a serious actress, and she didn’t have a lot of attitude, which was easy for black actors at that time to have. She was devoted to her craft. All I know is that I liked her a lot, and I depended on her and I was grateful when I had her.”

Contributor: Steve Ryfle

The Movie Posters featured in this article are from the archives of The Museum of UnCut Funk.

Comic actor Marlon Wayans‘ next screen role could turn out to be portraying a real-life comedy icon.

EW.com reports that Wayans is in talks to play Richard Pryor, the groundbreaking comedian whose troubled life will be depicted in an upcoming biopic, “Richard Pryor: Is it Something I Said.”

Wayans is reportedly being considered for the part after fellow funnyman Eddie Murphy dropped out of negotiations early on. The film was written and will be directed by Bill Condon of “Dreamgirls,” who originally shopped it as a vehicle for Murphy.

Sources at the Entertainment Weekly that Wayans, best known for such over-the-top comedy films as the “Scary Movie” franchise and “White Chicks,” impressed producers in a 13-minute screen test in which he “transforms into Pryor.”

The Pryor project, scheduled to begin shooting in the spring, is being made by Sony Pictures and Adam Sandler‘s production company. Variety.com reports that Sandler is considering playing a small role as Pryor’s first agent.

Budgeted at about $20 million, the movie will cover Pryor’s controversial life and career as a raunchy standup, beloved movie star and troubled drug addict who famously set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine.

Pryor died in 2005 at age 65 after a series of health problems, including multiple sclerosis.

Stickin’ It To The Man

In the early 1900′s the term “The Man” was used to describe a boss figure. This term later began to be applied to anyone who hassled a group of people and eventually to anyone in a position of power.

In the 1960′s “The Man” began to see widespread usage by the Black Power Movement to describe the white oppressors that the movement was fighting against. A number of newspapers from the era used the term and it quickly gained currency, both among Black activists and those who struggled in solidarity with them.

During the 1970′s the term “The Man” became a part of the vernacular of the Blaxploitation film era. “The Man” referred to the police, the mob, the politicians and anyone who was white with power. In most cases “The Man” held the key to the destruction or redemption of Black characters in these films.

There were a number of white actors and actresses who got their start in Blaxploitation films and saw their careers take off after they made their Blaxploitation film debuts. The Museum of UnCut Funk presents a new visual DocuFunk short called “The Man” that pays homage to Blaxploitation’s “other” stars.

Rosalind Cash was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 31, 1938. As a young woman, she took off with only $20 in her pocket to seek her fame and fortune in New York City. At first things were difficult: “I had a cold-water one-room apartment in Harlem sharing a kitchen I didn’t dare use because of the rats,” she told The Guardian. But Cash attended the City College of New York, and managed to ferret out the first stirrings of independent black theater in the city. She made her stage debut in 1958 in a production at the Harlem YMCA, performing in a play by Langston Hughes called Soul Gone Home.

In 1968 she landed a role in Washington, D.C., in a production of The Great White Hope, a play about the career of Black boxer Jack Johnson. The part was a choice one, but at the same time an even better opportunity opened up: a slot with the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), a pioneering organization devoted to presenting plays by Black writers and furthering the careers of Black actors and theater personnel. Cash pulled out of the Washington production, having to turn over two weeks’ salary to the theater involved, so that she could return to New York and join the NEC. She was one of the company’s founding members.

Cash emerged as a star of the company, appearing in several productions her first year, including a play called Kongi’s Harvest by the South African writer. The following year she played the lead in a production of Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies of Dark Old Men, one of the most-performed Black theatrical works of the day. Cash would reprise the role in a 1975 television version of the play. She continued to appear with the NEC through the 1970s, and also landed high-profile roles with other theatrical organizations; in 1973 she took on the role of Goneril in Shakespeare’s King Lear in a New York Shakespeare Festival production. That role, too, she would later play on national television.

Hollywood had its eye on the talented young actress, however, and the focus of Cash’s efforts gradually shifted in that direction. After a small part in 1971′s Klute, she broke through with the female lead role in the science-fiction action thriller The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. The role, in one of the first Hollywood action films to feature a Black lead character, was one that several leading Black actresses of the day had set their sights on. Cash not only won the role, but blew audiences away with her powerful performance. “Her first appearance in the film is ,” noted writer Stephen Bourne in The Independent. “Strong and aggressive, she looked ready to steal the film form under Heston’s nose…” The second half of the film, unfortunately, toned down Cash’s character. Still, she was named to the annual Top Ten Stars of Tomorrow list compiled by the industry firm Quigley Publications, the first Black named since the list had been created in 1941.

For several years, other lead roles came Cash’s way. In the Black-oriented murder mystery Melinda (1972), she had, in the words of film historian, “her best role of this period as a woman on the edge, holding on for dear life, struggling to keep a relationship with a man who hardly seemed her equal.” She also landed roles in mainstream hits like The New Centurions (1972) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974), but these came at a price. Cash was cast as a good-natured ; the role did not appeal to her, but like other serious Black actresses of the 1970s, she found that parts suited to her talents were very hard to come by.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cash turned her attention to television, winning guest slots on such series as “Starsky and Hutch,” “Police Woman,” “Kojak,” and “Hill Street Blues.” In 1977 she appeared opposite O.J. Simpson in the made-for-television movie A Killing Affair, in which Simpson played a police officer who has an affair with a white coworker. She chose her film roles carefully, appearing mostly in projects that she found significant. In Wrong Is Right (1982), she played the first Black woman to become U.S. Vice President. That year she was also featured in Sister, Sister, a film written by poet Maya Angelou that drew on her full range as an actress perhaps more than any other; she co-starred with and Irene Cara in a story of the reunion of three adult sisters. Sister, Sister earned Cash a nomination for an NAACP Image Award, as did Go Tell It On the Mountain (1986), based on a novel by James Baldwin.

Cash gradually gained greater recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning induction into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1992. Television work continued to come steadily, with appearances on The Cosby Show, thirtysomething, and other series. The onetime cold-water-flat-dweller finally found steady employment with a recurring role on the daytime soap opera General Hospital, on which she played the of an extended Black family. On October 31, 1995 Rosalind died of cancer at the age of 56 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Rosalind’s Filmography:

Klute, 1971.
The Omega Man, 1971.
The New Centurions, 1972.
Melinda, 1972.
Hickey and Boggs, 1972.

The All American Boy, 1973.
Amazing Grace, 1974.

Uptown Saturday Night, 1974.
Cornbread, Earl and Me, 1975.

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, 1975 (made for television).
Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, 1976.

The Monkey Hustle, 1977.
A Killing Affair, 1977 (made for television).
The Class of Miss MacMichael, 1979.
Wrong Is Right, 1982.
Sister, Sister, 1982 (made for television).
Go Tell It On the Mountain, 1984 (made for television).
The Offspring, 1987.
Forced March, 1990.
Second Coming, 1992.
A Dangerous Affair, 1995 (made for television).
Tales from the Hood, 1995.

The Movie Posters are from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.

Born in 1927, Sidney Poitier grew up in the small village of Cat Island, Bahamas. His father, a tomato farmer, moved the family to the capital Nassau, when Poitier was eleven. It was there that he first encountered cinema. Even at a young age Sidney recognized the ability of cinema to expand one’s view of reality. At the age of sixteen, Poitier moved to New York and found a job as a dishwasher. Soon after, he began working as a janitor for the American Negro Theater in exchange for acting lessons.

While working at the American Negro Theater, Poitier was given the role of understudying Harry Belefonte in the play Days of our Youth. Filling in for Belefonte one night, Poitier made his public debut. This led to a small role in the Greek comedy Lysistrata. Though nervous and unsure of his lines, Poitier was a big hit. He continued to perform in plays until 1950, when he made his film debut in No Way Out. No Way Out, a violent tale of racial hatred, made him a hero back home in the Bahamas. The colonial government deemed it too explosive and censored it.

No Way Out American 1950

Throughout the fifties, Poitier made some of the most important and controversial movies of the time. Addressing issues of racial equality abroad, he made Cry, The Beloved Country, about apartheid in South Africa. He later took on problems closer to home in Blackboard Jungle and  The Defiant Ones. This film was about two escaped prisoners who must overcome issues of race in their struggle for freedom. For his role in The Defiant Ones, Poitier was nominated for an Academy Award. Sidney made several films during this period and some of his other great works included Go Man Go!, Edge of the City, Mark of the Hawk and Porgy and Bess.

In 1959, Poitier returned to the stage with a stirring performance of Walter Lee in Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first play by a Black playwright to show on Broadway. It was an insightful and moving reflection of Black family life, and it had great popular appeal. Poitier would reprise his role for the Hollywood adaptation in 1961. During this time Poitier starred in Paris Blues, Pressure Point, The Slender Thread, The Long Ships, The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Bedford Incident. It was not until 1963, for his role in Lilies Of The Fields, that the movie industry saluted Poitier with its greatest award. In an era where Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Prize and Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, Sidney Poitier was the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.

A Raisin In The Sun 1961

Paris Blues 1961

Lilies of The Field 1963

The Bedford Incident 1965

Poitier followed up this triumph with an electrifying performance as a Black detective from the north trying to solve a murder in a southern town in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of The Night. Having concerned himself with  the problems of racial inequality in many of its manifestations, Poitier tackled one of the great taboos of the time. With Patch Of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, he focused on interracial romance. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was the first Hollywood movie about interracial romance not to end tragically. By the time of its completion in the late sixties, Poitier was one of Hollywood’s most popular stars. Poitier also starred in The Lost Man, For The Love of Ivy, To Sir With Love and Duel at Diablo.

A Patch of Blue 1965

Dual at Diablo 1966

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 1967

In The Heat of The Night 1967

For The Love of Ivy 1968

To Sir,  With Love 1968

The Lost Man 1969

During the 1960′s fallout from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Poitier became the target of criticism from segments of the Black community. Accused of being too passive in a scathing article in the New York Times, Poitier retreated to the Bahamas to reassess his life. When he re-emerged in the 70′s, he shifted his energies from acting to directing. Beginning with Buck and The Preacher, Poitier directed a series of highly entertaining films, including A Warm December, Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do it Again and A Piece Of The Action. During the 1980′s he directed the hit comedy classic Stir Crazy, starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, Hanky Panky, Fast Forward and Ghost Dad starring Bill Cosby in 1990.

Buck and the Preacher 1972

A Warm December 1973

Uptown Saturday Night 1974

Let’s Do It Again 1975

A Piece Of The Action 1977

Stir Crazy 1980

Hanky Panky 1982

Fast Forward 1985

Ghost Dad 1990

After a decade away from acting, Sidney returned to the screen in 1988 for Shoot to Kill. Returning to apartheid-free South Africa nearly fifty years after Cry, The Beloved Country, Poitier played one of the great heroes for racial equality, Nelson Mandela. In the 1997 television docudrama Mandela and De Klerk, Poitier returned triumphantly to a theme he had dealt with throughout his career. After half a century in show business and fifty-five roles, Sidney Poitier’s indomitable strength and commitment shine through in everything he does: “I was saying to an audience, this is who I am; look at me”.

Below are more posters from films starring Sidney Poitier, which are a part of The Museum Of UnCut Funk collection.

They Call Me Mr. Tibbs 1970

The Organization 1971

Brother John 1971

The Wilby Conspiracy  1975

Lena Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her talent and artistry, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success: “I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”

In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub in New York City and when she signed with MGM, she was among a handful of black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical “Stormy Weather.” Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her most famous tune.

Stormy Weather Movie Poster is from the private collection of Mr. Gordon Bussey

On screen, on recordings and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in such songs as “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” In 1942′s “Panama Hattie,” her first movie with MGM, she sang Cole Porter‘s “Just One of Those Things,” winning critical acclaim.

In her first big Broadway success, as the star of “Jamaica” in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time.” Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her “the best female singer of songs.”

But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.

“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out. … It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she said in Brian Lanker’s book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”

While at MGM, she starred in the all-black “Cabin in the Sky,” in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included the Red Skelton comedy “I Dood It,” “Thousands Cheer” and “Swing Fever,” all in 1943; “Broadway Rhythm” in 1944; and “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1946.

Bronze Venus is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk

One of the most glaring exclusions, though, was the MGM remake of “Show Boat.” Horne, who had appeared in the role of Julie in a “Show Boat” scene in a 1946 movie about Jerome Kern, seemed a logical choice for the 1951 movie, but the part went to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not sing.

Cabin In The Sky is from the collection of Separate Cinema

“Metro’s cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses,” film historian John Kobal wrote.

“She was a very angry woman,” film critic-author-documentarian Richard Schickel, who worked with Horne on her 1965 autobiography, said Monday.

“It’s something that shaped her life to a very high degree. She was a woman who had a very powerful desire to lead her own life, to not be cautious and to speak out. And she was a woman, also, who felt in her career that she had been held back by the issue of race. So she had a lot of anger and disappointment about that. I’m talking particularly about her movie career.”

Early in her career, Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman the audience can’t reach and therefore can’t hurt,” she once said.

Later, she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.

Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions — one straight and the other gut-wrenching — of “Stormy Weather” to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.

Broadway Window Card from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk

A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was “ageless … tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her.”

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in black society. Her daughter,Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book “The Hornes: An American Family” that among their relatives was Frank Horne, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She was largely raised by her grandparents as her mother, Edna Horne, pursued a career in show business. Lena Horne dropped out of high school at age 16 and joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabledHarlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white. She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle‘s orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in 1940.

A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.

Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to “pass” in a white world with her light complexion.Max Factor even developed an “Egyptian” makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM. But she refused to go along with the studio’s efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.

“I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become,” Horne once said. “I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.

That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.

She got involved in various social and political organizations and — along with her friendship with singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson — got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and, in 1963, joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.

The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry. She appeared in her last movie in 1978, playing Glinda the Good in “The Wiz,” directed by her son-in-law, Sidney Lumet.

Horne had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.

In the 2009 biography “Stormy Weather,” author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she had married a white man, she replied: “To get even with him.”

Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.

“I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters,” she said. “It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live.”

And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.

“I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she said, “because being black made me understand.”

Contributor: The Associated Press

The Museum of UnCut Funk: Rest in peace Ms. Lena you will be missed but your spirit will live on.

Orfeu Nefro is part of the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.

Marpessa Dawn was directed by Marcel Camus and based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, “Orfeu Negro,” as it is called in Portuguese, brings together an innocent country girl, played by Ms. Dawn, and a trolley car motorman and gifted guitarist, portrayed by Mr. Mello. They meet amid the frenzy of Rio’s carnival and are soon swaying to a provocative samba among the crowds. But Eurydice is stalked by a man in a skeleton costume. Eventually, Orpheus finds her in the morgue. In the end, bearing her body in his arms, he falls to his death from a cliff.

“Black Orpheus” became renowned for its soundtrack by the bossa nova legends Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá, with songs like “Manhã de Carnaval” and “A Felicidade.” It won the Palme d’Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best foreign film in 1960.

Gypsy Marpessa Dawn Menor was born near Pittsburgh on Jan. 3, 1934. As a teenager, she moved to England, where she had bit parts on television, and later to France, where she worked as a governess and danced and sang in nightclubs.

After her role in “Black Orpheus,” Ms. Dawn appeared in several less successful movies and on French television. She also starred in several plays, including “Chérie Noire,” a comedy that toured France, Belgium, Switzerland, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

Marpessa Dawn, died on Aug. 25, 2008 at her home in Paris. She was 74. The cause was a heart attack, her daughter Dhyana Kluth said. Ms. Dawn’s death followed by 41 days that of her “Black Orpheus” co-star, Breno Mello, who played the title role.

Without question, one of the most breathtaking beauties to emerge out of the 70′s ”Blaxploitation” era was actress Vonetta McGee.  This lovely  sister, born in San Francisco on January 14, 1945, possessed the complete package; looks, talent and determination which should have made her a marquee name in Hollywood.  Instead, this tantalizing, tan, and talented lady found herself in in the land of Blaxploitation, where her some would considerable her talents were laid to waste.

Although the air was thick with civil and social issues, still, a beauty such as Vonetta’s would rarely go unnoticed.  She was encouraged to participate in the Miss Bronze California beauty contest, where she walked away with the crown.  A film career followed and Vonetta took off for Europe where she earned small roles in several low-budget movies.  She returned to the States in 1969 and won a small part in the film The Lost Man, which starred Black screen icon, Sidney Poitier.  The film got her some notice, but it would be three long years before she would get her first major movie role.

The Lost Man Movie Poster is a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

In 1972, Vonetta was cast in the murder mystery Melinda, playing the title character.  Although her part was small (she is murdered early on in the film), it was vital, earning her rave reviews from both the New York Times and Village Voice, which both proclaimed her “the most beautiful woman in film!”

Melinda Movie Poster is a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Over the next few years, Vonetta’s resume would fill up with leading lady roles in “blaxploitation classics” such as Blacula, Shaft in Africa and Detroit 9000. She was working steadily but the roles were far from challenging.  More often than not, she was cast as the supportive, understanding girlfriend, whose primary lot in life was to look cute and not get in the way of their super-macho male co-stars.  Whereas Pam Grier, at the same time, was cementing herself as Hollywood’s first Black Super-Woman, Vonetta was still waiting for the meaty role which would make her a household name. Ironically, she had lost an opportunity to play a super-heroine herself when the lead role in the 1973 film Cleopatra Jones, which was written by her then boyfriend, Max (Julien of The Mack fame), went instead to super model Tamara Dobson.

Blacula, Shaft in Africa and Detroit 9000 Movie Posters are a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Throughout the period, Vonetta continued to work but had yet to see an A-Budget script. In 1975, that changed when Clint Eastwood chose her to star alongside him in The Eiger Sanction, which he also directed.  It was a bit of cinematic history, being that it was the first time a Black actress had been cast as the female lead in a mainstream Hollywood film opposite a white actor.  Sadly, the role gave Vonetta about as much to do as her “Blaxploitation” films had, leaving her still knocking at stardom’s door by Hollywood’s standards.

More of Vonette’s Filmography in Movie Poster Art Form:

1968: Faustina

1984: Repo Man

1990: To Sleep with Anger

Contributor: Keith Brooks

The Museum of UnCut Funk is shocked and sadden at the passing of Vonetta McGee on July 9, 2010.

Some would argue that if there was one actress that threatened Pam Grier’s reign as America’s Black glamour queen of the 70′s, it was the bewitching bronze beauty Judy Pace. A former Ebony Magazine model, Judy was a modern day Queen Neferteri, with sexy bedroom eyes, pouting full lips, all gloriously displayed on a petite chestnut brown frame.  In color-conscious Hollywood, Judy became one of the first dark-skinned dramatic actresses to be recognized as a sex-symbol.  The Daily Variety once referred to her as The most beautiful woman in Hollywood.

Southern California born and bred, Judy was one of five kids raised in a middle-class Los Angeles environment.  After graduating from high school, she attended Los Angeles City College where she majored in sociology.  She was enticed away from college with an offer to join the prestigious Ebony Fashion Fair.  Judy harbored no aspirations for a film career, until one pratically fell into her lap.  Director William Castle (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler ) saw her pictures in Ebony and chose her for a part in his film 13 Frightened Girls.  Upon completion of the film, young Judy was now smitten with the Hollywood bug.  She wanted to be taken seriously so she began taking acting classes, and performing in L.A. theater.  Small parts on television and films developed, leading up to Judy’s first major role in the 1968 film Three in the Cellar.

Judy followed up her success in Three in the Attic with another groundbreaking role, this time on the small screen.  After losing out to Diahann Carroll for the role of Julia, Judy won a nice consolation prize, landing a part on the popular 60′s night time soap Payton Place.  Judy played Vickie Fletcher televison’s first Black female antagonist.  Judy’s Vicki character was bad to the bone, manipulative, a liar, Vicki basically ruined the lives of just about everyone she touched.  When Payton Placewas finally canceled in 1969, Judy was offered the lead in a new, “hip” made-for-TV film called The Young Lawyers.  With a very ”60′s,” theme, Judy plays one of three young lawyers who take on cases dealing with the poor and oppressed.  The film would later be turned into a weekly series, with Judy reprising her role.

Judy continued to shake things up on the big screen when in 1970, she starred in the first Hollywood produced and financed film directed by a Black, Cotton Comes to Harlem. Directed by actor Ossie Davis, Cotton Comes to Harlem was derived from the writings of Black novelist Chester Himes. Given a main stream budget, the film became the first Black action block buster paving the way for what would later be deemed Hollywood’s blaxploitation film era of the early 1970′s.  In many ways Cotton Comes to Harlem was very stereotypical in its depiction of Blacks.  However it succeds because it is able to give off that certain “coolness” and vibe which are indicative of the Black experience in America.  The film is centered on charlatan black leader Rev. Deke O’Malley (played by Calvin Lockhart), who plans to steal the money of poor Blacks with a bogus back to Africa movement.  With an all-star cast that included Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Redd Foxx, Clevon Little and Lockhart, Judy more then held her own.  Playing Iris, O’Malley’s sexy, hot-tempered girlfriend, Judy nearly steals the movie as she vamps, seduces, and even commits murder for the man she loves.

Cotton Come to Harlem Movie Poster is from the The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Cotton Comes to Harlem appeared to be the vehicle that would launch Judy into superstardom, but in reality, it would be her last major role.  The blaxploitation era she helped to usher in created roles for Black male actors, but very few films gave Black women, with the exception of Pam Grier, much to do.  Hollywood completely missed the message of Cotton Comes to Harlem by assuming that Black audiences wanted shoot-em-up action flicks with Black super-heroes.  In a nutshell, Black audiences wanted the same thing white audiences wanted, good movies.

Movie Poster art from Judy Pace Filmography:

1970: Three In The Cellar

1973: Cool Breeze

1972: Frogs

1973: The Slams

Cool Breeze and The Slams Movie Posters are from The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Contributor: Keith Brooks

“She’s the Godmother of them all…The Baddest One-Chick Hit Squad that ever hit town!” So promised the 1973 promotional poster for the American International Pictures release of Coffy; whose star was a luscious afro-sporting, gun toting, buxom Nubian princess named Pam Grier.

The definitive sex symbol of the 1970′s, Pam single-handedly changed the image of females in film; from helpless victim to that of independent tough heroine.  She was Wonder Woman without the red,white and blue tights.  She was a female warrioress, who didn’t need to butch it up, when it was time to get mean (a la the shaved head Demi Moore in G.I. Jane), or take enough steroids to outflex Arnold (ya hear me Terminator’s Linda Hamilton).  Pam was a bad ass avenging angel, who always exuded femininity, confidence and sexuality.

Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Pam was the daughter of U.S. Air Force mechanic Clarence Grier and his nurse wife Gwendolyn.  As a child, Pam lived the typical nomadic existence of a military brat.  The family finally settled down in Denver, Colorado, where Pam graduated from high school.  She later attended college as a pre-med student.  Not a rich girl, Pam entered several local beauty contests to earn extra money for tuition.  It was during one of the pageants, that she was spotted by a Hollywood film agent who felt she had the natural beauty to make it as an actress. Reluctant initially, Pam eventually gave in to the lure of potential stardom and moved to Los Angeles, California.  Working as a switchboard operator to pay the bills, Pam enrolled at UCLA, where she began studying acting.

In 1970, Pam made her screen debut in the Russ Meyer bizarre cult classic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.  That film would however, lead to bigger roles in a series of exploitive B-Movies such as The Big Doll House, Women in Cages (both released in 1971), Hit Man(1972) and The Twilight People (1973).  The films were pure camp, with plenty of naked bodies on display, Pam’s delicious curves being one of them. After three years in Hollywood, Pam Grier was nowhere near a marquee name, however she was beginning to make waves.  While the movies she was featured in were Z-grade at best, her performances in these films made them at least watchable.  It would be her next film, Coffy, which would carry her from wannabe to the Queen of American International Pictures (AIP).

Big Doll House, Women in Chains, Hitman and Twilight People Movie Posters are a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Coffy was a jagged-edged, low-budget film about a nurse, who after witnessing her sister becomes strung out on drugs, metamorphoses into a single-minded vigilante bent on waging a one-woman war against the city’s drug lords. Coffy is not afraid to use any and all means necessary, including her voluptuous body, to extract her bloody vengeance on the mobsters, crooked cops and dirty politicians behind the endless flow of narcotics on the streets. Many Hollywood film critics quickly wrote Coffy off as cheap, exploitative B-movie fare. However, what they failed to factor into the equation was the effect this unexpected keg of dynamite named Pam Grier would have on her audiences. Despite the paper thin plot, Pam danced through the role of Coffy with such conviction and fire, that you find it impossible to not only enjoy her performance, but believe it as well. In the hands of a lesser actress, the film’s shallowness would have been exploited in droves. However, Pam had the grittiness, sex appeal and toughness of mind to ensure that in a forgettable film, she was definitely not a forgettable actress.

“Coffy” is from The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Pam continued down her  path to stardom, recreating her Super Soul Sister role several times in films such as Foxy Brown and The Arena which were both released in 1974, followed by Sheba Baby, Bucktown and Friday Foster the following year. Unfortunately, the quality of the films continued to be taken from the so-called blaxploitation fountain that flowed freely out of Hollywood. Still, it was hard to deny her obvious feminine charms and appeal. New York Magazine went so far as to dub her “Sex Goddess of the Seventies!” While Pam continued to build up a strong (predominately male) audience; her radical film image had not yet attracted a female following. In fact, Pam became the object of criticism from some feminists, as well as from the Black community. Women in the seventies, particularly Black women, had a hard time accepting and identifying with Pam’s gun toting, blouse dropping, sharp tongue super-heroines. The Black media also found it difficult to anoint the brazen Ms. Grier as the successor to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. Instead of viewing her as a maverick, a glamour queen of the times, Blacks turned their back on Pam box office success, viewing her not as a trendsetter and pioneer, but as a cinematic freak show performer.

Foxy Brown, The Arena, Sheba Baby, Bucktown and Friday Foster Movie Posters are a part of  The Museum of UnCut Funk collection

Pam’s image problems stemmed from the fact that she was walking on untested ground for Black women (and in many ways, women in general). In the history of American film, there had never been a Black woman portrayed with so much raw sexuality and fiery independence. Pam’s characters had male lovers, but they were never defined by them, nor controlled by them. Pam’s Coffy and Foxy Brown characters did not stay behind while their men (Jim Brown or Fred Williamson) stomped on the bad guys, nor were they the kind who would be just whisked up in a man’s arms and taken to bed. Pam’s Friday Foster and Sheba Baby characters were just as adept at butt kicking as any macho man on screen. And as far as the bedroom was concerned, she always had the final sayso on who entered it and when. Interestingly, among Pam’s few female admirers at the time, was Gloria Steinem, publisher of the ultra-feminist Ms. Magazine, who saw Pam for what she was, a strong independent woman; going so far as to label her “Super Sass!”

As the decade closed, American International Pictures, the house that Pam built, dropped her like a bad habit.  Formerly one of the busiest actresses in Hollywood, Pam’s career became tepid at best.  Her career would get a critical boost in the 1980’s for her mesmerizing performance as a psychotic hooker in 1981’s Fort Apache The Bronx.  Unfortunately, roles such as that were few and far between for Pam.  By the nineties, her career had practically come to a halt; it would take a maverick director, with a fetish for 70’s cult movies to bring the black queen of action films back to relevance. Quentin Tarantino had set Hollywood on fire with two violent, twisted, yet masterfully intriguing films; Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Combining the stylish film noir of the 1940’s and 50’s with the uninhibited, gore of 60’s-70’s grindhouse, Tarantino had injected Hollywood with much needed creativity and originality. His next masterpiece would be the resurrection of the blaxploitation film, and to do this, Tarantino knew he needed an actress bigger than life. He needed Pam Grier.

Jackie Brown was tailor made for the comeback of the former Queen of AIP. Playing a struggling airline stewardess who gets caught in the violent world of drug trafficking, Pam’s Jackie is a survivor, able to give as good as she gets. The film wasn’t the critical success of Tarantino’s other films, but it did bring in a hefty $70 million worldwide.  Pam Grier was back, and roles, worthy of this fiery, independent actress soon begin to flow in.  Pam would go on to star in the films Jawbreaker (1999) and Snow Day (2000), and even got her own short-lived television show, Linc’s in 1998.  In 2004, she became a cast member on the highly successful Showtime series The L Word.

For Pam Grier, the more than thirty year struggle to find that elusive glass slipper seems over.  Today, her old films are enjoying a huge cult following among men, as well as attracting a new generation of female viewers who can now identify and appreciate her strong, independent characters.  While recognition as a powerful actress, role model, sex symbol and pioneer was more often then not, a frustrating journey; Pam, like the super-hero she always portrayed, eventually won in the end.

Contributor: Keith Brooks

Until recently, there were few Black actors in a ever shrinking white-dominated society who were not faced with difficult choices and obstacles. The Bahamas-born Calvin Lockhart, who has died in 2007 was no exception. The handsome, charismatic Lockhart, who had classical acting training and who spoke French, German, Italian and Spanish, was mainly forced to take roles that he disliked.

At the start of the 1970s, more than two decades after the birth of the modern civil rights movement, Black Americans wanted a more positive media image of themselves. However, hollywood had other intentions so Blacks had to settle for broad comedies and slick thrillers, labelled “blaxploitation”. These films became more formulaic as the 1970s progressed – most of them were either “private detective takes on the mob” or “dealer becomes king of the pimps”.

Nevertheless, whatever the quality of the blaxploitation movies, they were directed by Black directors and starred Black actors, playing characters not seen from a white perspective. Lockhart appeared in one of the first Black – as distinct from noir – thrillers, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis. He was the swindler-cum-preacher Reverend Deke O’Malley, who has conned $87,000 from the “good folks” for his phony Back to Africa movement.

Lockhart played suave gangsters called Silky Slim and Biggie Smalls respectively in Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975). At least, Melinda (1972), directed by Hugh Robertson, the first Black editor to be nominated for an Oscar, gave Lockhart the chance to play a super-hero, an egotistic disc jockey who has to take on the mobsters who had murdered his girlfriend.

In the same year, Lockhart was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he appeared in several plays, notably Buzz Goodbody’s production of Titus Andronicus in which, as Aaron the Moor, he asks “is Black so base a hue?” and launches into a defence of his colour.

Lockhart had already spent almost five years in England (1965-1970), where he had appeared in TV dramas, such as the Wednesday Play and five British films in 1968: A Dandy in Aspic, The Mercenaries, Only When I Larf, Nobody Runs Forever and Joanna. In the last, directed by Mike Sarne, which also featured Donald Sutherland as a dying English aristocrat, Lockhart, as a nightclub owner was one of the first actors to dent a cinematic taboo with a Black-white love scene with the heroine, Genevieve Waite.

Sarne then cast him as the effete Irving Amadeus in the disastrous Myra Breckinridge (1970), and he played a pimp in John Boorman’s Leo the Last (1970), before returning to the US to star in Halls of Anger, (also 1970). The setting of this was an all-Black blackboard jungle which, because of the national integration plan, has to accept 60 white students who suffer the kind of racism that usually affects black people. However, Lockhart, cast as a teacher, solves all the school’s problems by his liberal approach. Despite the theme he disliked making the film and walked off the set more than once.

Lockhart, born Bert Cooper, the youngest of eight children, had left the Bahamas aged 19 to study engineering at New York, but became involved in a YMCA theatre group, and studied with the legendary drama coach Uta Hagen. He made his Broadway debut, taking over from Billy Dee Williams, in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, in the role of the sailor who gets the white girl (Joan Plowright) pregnant.

During his second stay in England, Lockhart was given one of his best film roles in The Beast Must Die (1974) as the millionaire owner of a country estate where he has gathered a number of people, one of whom he hopes to reveal as a werewolf. It was enjoyable, camp nonsense, but it did feature a rich, successful Black man, whose colour is never mentioned, a rare phenomenon in films of the early 1970s. Another potentially interesting part was in The Baron (1977), where Lockhart played a struggling Black film-maker who turns to the underworld to raise money. However, the film descended into many of the cliches of blaxploitation gangster movies.

A couple of years later, Lockhart suffered a heart attack brought on by the news that his son from a former marriage (he was married four times) had lost the use of his legs from jumping under a train. But he returned to work, albeit in a minor capacity. He was in seven episodes as Jonathan Lake in TV’s Dynasty (1985-86), was the head of a Jamaican voodoo-gang in Predator 2 (1990), and had small roles in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks (1992).

In 1979, Calvin met Jennifer Miles in New York, and they had a son in 1981. They married in 2006: she survives him, as do his other two sons and a daughter.

Contributor: Ronald Bergan

* Cotton Comes to Harlem, Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do it Again, The Beast Must Die and Melinda Movie Posters are a part of the Collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.

The Museum of UnCut Funk celebrates the movie poster art of John Solie. John’s legendary skill for depicting “dead-on likenesses” of famous people has kept him in demand by major Hollywood movie studios, television networks, book publishers and magazine editors. He has created over two hundred movie posters and painted Blaxploitation movie stars such as Trina Parks, Billy Dee Williams, Jeanne Bell, Richard Roundtree and Jimmy Cliff for movies such as DarkTown Strutters, Blast, TNT Jackson, the Shaft sequals and The Harder They Come.

John’s work spans much farther than Hollywood. As a talented sculptor as well as illustrator and portrait artist, John was commissioned by CBS Television Network to create a bronze sculpture of “the most trusted man in America,” Mr. Walter Cronkite, which is on display in the lobby of the CBS Building in New York.

Solie is a proud member of the NASA Art Team and has paintings on display at the Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center.

The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes John Solie and his many achievements and his contributions to one of the most exciting times in Black film history.

D’Urville Martin was an actor, director and producer who was considered one of the hardest working men during the Blaxploitation film era.

D’Urville was born on February 11, 1939 in New York City. He first began acting in the mid 1960’s. His first film was Black Like Me. He landed a TV role as Lionel Jefferson in the first two episodes of the television series, The Jeffersons in 1975, before the role was re-cast with actor Mike Evans.

He went on to become a prominent figure in Blaxploitation films. D’Urville acted in several movies with legendary Blaxploitation icon Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. He was especially memorable as Williamson’s reluctant partner Toby in the Nigger Charley pictures.

He played the old childhood friend Reverend Rufus in Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem. D’Urville popped up in two flicks by director William Girdler, playing the villainous pilot in Sheba Baby and a flamboyant pimp in The Zebra Killer.

Martin directed the Rudy Ray Moore comedy Dolemite where he also plays Willie Green, and directed and produced Disco 9000. D’Urville was the associate producer on the film The Final Comedown (aka Blast).

He appeared in guest roles on Dr. Kildare, Daniel Boone, The Monkeys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, All in the Family, Love, American Style, and Ironside.

D’Urville Martin led a hard partying lifestyle, which directly caused his unfortunate and untimely death from a heart attack at age 45 on May 28, 1984.

Sources: Wikipedia, Ask.com, IMDB and Carol Speed Wed Den

Roxie Roker may best be remembered for playing outspoken Helen Willis for ten years on the popular television sitcom The Jeffersons. Along with her TV husband Franklin Cover, they comprised the first interracial married couple on network television. In addition to television, Roxie had also found success on stage and in the occasional feature film.

Born on August 28, 1929 in Miami and raised in Brooklyn, Roxie is the alumni of Howard University and with a drama degree Roxie flew to England to study at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon. In the 1960s, Roker supported herself with a secretarial job at NBC’s New York office while trying to find acting jobs. Roxie launched her drama career off-Broadway in productions such as Jean Genet‘s The Blacks.

During the 1960’s, Roxie hosted a local community television show, but that wasn’t close enough to acting, so she quit to practice her craft full time. With the Negro Ensemble Company she appeared in Ododo and Rosalie Pritchet. In 1974, she earned an Obie and a Tony nomination for The River Niger. In 1975, shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Norman Lear cast Roker in The Jeffersons.

Roxie occasionally guest-starred on other series and appeared in television movies. Her feature-film appearances were rare. In 1974, she made her debut in Claudine as Mrs. Winston. In the ’90s, Roker resumed her stage career, appearing in a theatrical version of The Jeffersons and then touring opposite Mary Martin and Carol Channing in Legends. Roxie’s son, Lenny Kravitz is a rock musician and record producer and Roxie’s cousin The Today Show weatherman and TV producer Al Roker.

Roxie Roker died on December 2, 1995 in Los Angeles of breast cancer.

Sources: IMBD, Wikipedia, Ask.com

Thalmus Rasulala was born Jack Chowder on November 15th, 1939. One of the many Black actors from the 1970’s and beyond who never got his rightful due, Thalmus will always be at the top of my list of great performers. He amassed a wealth of television, film, directing and other credits, including winning a Theatre World Award for his role in the Broadway production of “Hello Dolly” with Pearl Bailey and an all Black cast.

Thalmus was a man among men, known for his roles from the height of the 1970’s Blaxploitation explosion. In 1972, he portrayed Dr. Gordon Thomas in Blacula, a widely successful film that mixed horror and gore with the excitement of blaxploitation.

In 1972, he also played Sidney Lord James, the lead character in Cool Breeze, a remake of The Asphalt Jungle with an all Black cast. In this film, James is an ex-convict who plans to steal $3 million worth of jewels, sell them, and use the money to start a bank to back Black businesses. He is assisted by two pals, his half-brother and a preacher who also works as a thief. The operation is ultimately backed by a man who cheats on his wheelchair-bound wife with a sexy woman.

In 1973, Thalmus starred in one of the best classic pimp movies ever, Willie Dynamite. In this movie Thalmus played Robert Daniels, the D.A.

The Slams is a violent prison drama from 1973, in which an imprisoned criminal finds himself flooded with offers to spring him if he reveals the secret location of the $1.5 million he stole from the mob before he went to jail. Thalmus is credited as the Assistant Director on this flick.

In 1975, Thalmus played the role of Charlie the grocery store owner in Cornbread, Earl and Me. Cornbread, a Black kid who strives to escape his ghetto surroundings. He does so by becoming a high school basketball star–and the idol of the other youngsters in his community. On the verge of starting college on a scholarship, Cornbread is mistakenly killed by a police officer.

In 1975, Thalmus also starred opposite Pam Grier in Friday Foster. Thalmus plays Blake Tarr, the richest Black man in America. Grier plays Friday Foster, a freelance photographer with an insatiable thirst for adventure. In her assignment to photograph Tarr, Friday unearths a conspiracy to assassinate him.

In 1975, Thalmus starred again with Pam Grier and Fred Williamson in Bucktown. This film is about a man named Duke Johnson, played by Williamson, who moves to a small and racially divided southern town where his nightclub owning brother was murdered after he refused to pay crooked white cops for “protection.” When he is threatened himself, he calls in some of his buddies, one of whom is played by Thalmus named Roy, to help him. When the friends decide to take over the town, Johnson becomes a one-man army on a mission to oust the baddies.

In 1975, Thalmus starred with Dean Martin in Mr. Ricco. In this obscure drama, Martin, a San Francisco lawyer defends Black militant Frankie Steele, played by Thamlus, who is on trial for murdering a cop.

He was also a special guest on the 1975 episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’ hosted by Richard Pryor. They did a great ‘Exorcist’ parody with Thalmus as Father Merrin and Pryor as Father Karras. The priests dished out some intense discipline to Regan (played by Laraine Newman) when she started bad mouthing their mammas.

In 1976, Thalmus’ went on to land a role in Alex Haley’s Roots as Kunta Kinte’s father Omro. In 1977, he played Dr. Alvarez in Killer On Board with Patty Duke, George Hamilton and Jane Seymour.

Other notable film and television credits include:

1974 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – Ned

1976 – 1977 – Played Bill Thomas (Mabel King’s ex) on several episodes of ‘What’s Happening?

1976 – Adios Amigo – Noah

1978 – The President’s Mistress – Lt. Gordon

1979 – The Bermuda Triangle – Coast Guard Officer

1981 – The Sophisticated Gents – Snake

1884 – The Jerk Too – Crossroads

1986 – The Defiant Ones - Fred

1986 – The Boss’ Wife – Barney

1988 – Steven Segal’s Above the Law – Deputy Supt. Crowder

1989 – The Preppie Murder

1989 – Trekkies probably recognize him as Capt. Donald Varley on the ‘Contagion’ episode of ‘The Next Generation.

1990 – Lambada – Wesley Wilson

1991 – He was the police commissioner in New Jack City, and played Jack Chowder

His final film role was in 1992 as General Afir in Mom and Dad Save the World, which was released posthumously

Thalmus Rashlala died of a massive heart attack in Albuquerque NM on October 9^th 1991. He was only 52. He was survived by his wife Sherilyn and four children.

Source: Wikipedia, IMDB, Answers.com and Racks and Razors



The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes John E. DeCoste aka Terry Carter. Terry was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 16, 1928, the only child of William and Mercedes DeCoste. Terry’s mother was a native of the Dominican Republic. His father was American born, of Argentine and African-American descent. Terry’s parents taught him Spanish as well as English as a child. Growing up in a bilingual, bicultural household, in a predominantly Italian, Williamsburg neighborhood, next door to a Jewish synagogue, was an early influence in developing Terry’s appreciation for cultural diversity.



Terry remembers walking his first picket line at age 8, at his father’s side, in a demonstration to support demands for better conditions for recipients of “home relief”, as the welfare program of the day was called. At the age of 9, Terry acted for the very first time: in the role of the 15th century Portuguese explorer “Vasco da Gama” in a historical play about the discovery of America, in auditorium of his elementary school, P.S. 88 in Brooklyn.

When Terry graduated Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1946, he enlisted in the merchant marine to see the world. As a crew member on the SS Marine Marlin, he sailed to Germany and walked among the utter devastation that was once the proud port of Bremerhaven. The merchant ship took on as passengers displaced persons, and former prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors and transported them from Germany and other European ports to Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. After six months as a seaman, Terry took a job as a mail clerk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

As part of the museum’s program, the museum film department exhibited a seemingly endless film festival of avant-garde independent and foreign films. Terry tried to see every one of them. The year that he spent at the museum altered his life course: he became an ardent devotee of the arts and an avid film buff. He made acquaintances with many young painters and writers, some of whom later became famous.

After that year, Terry went off to Northeastern University in Boston to study pre-law. While there, he worked weekends as a “piano player” with a jazz combo, drawing on his experience of classical piano study from age 8 through 15. They played at night clubs, and for weddings and bar mitzvahs. In the 1950s, while studying law at St. John’s University Law School in New York, he met the well-known theatre actors Howard Da Silva and Morris Carnovsky. They convinced him to consider the pursuit of a career as an actor.

Realizing that drama training would help him in the courtroom, he studied law by day and acting by night. His first drama teacher was Howard Da Silva, who offered him a scholarship at Actors Mobile Theatre, Da Silva’s acting school. Terry took classes in Method Acting. It wasn’t long before he lost interest in the prospects of a law career: After his second year at law school, he dropped out and began to study acting full-time. As a young teenager, Terry had already taken on the nickname “Terry”, after the adventurous young hero of the popular newspaper cartoon Terry & the Pirates by Milton Caniff. Terry kept on using the name through high school. When he got into show business, he got tired of the white people asking him how come he had a foreign-sounding last name, since most African Americans they knew had Anglo-Saxon surnames such as Wilson, Jones or Jackson. So, Terry switched from “DeCoste” to the more English-sounding “Carter” for his professional name, as did many actors of that era who had foreign-sounding names (e.g. Kirk Douglas, John Garfield and Jack Benny), and has used it ever since. 

Terry’s acting career started in 1952 with a leading role in Edward Chodorov’s Decision, at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in Greenwich Village. He became a member of the theatre group and the following year, in Les Pine’s play, Monday’s Heroes, he played the part of a teenager in a Jewish family, with no special makeup. It was an early experiment in non-traditional casting. Terry studied with Herbert Berghof, Uta Hagen and Stella Adler in those years. Terry landed his first Broadway role in 1954, as the male lead opposite Eartha Kitt, in the play Mrs. Patterson. The company toured major cities before opening on Broadway at the National Theater, for a run of several months. Later, he played the part of “Howard” in the revival of E.Y. Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow (1955) at the City Center Theater.

In 1956, Terry was one of the first black actors on equal-footing as a regular on a TV sitcom series, portraying “Private Sugarman” on Phil Silvers’ Sgt. Bilko (aka You’ll Never get Rich aka The Phil Silvers Show). The series lasted four years, and was the model for subsequent comedy series about the military, such as Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy. In 1957, Terry played the title role in “Bob Thomas of the Philadelphia Inquirer”, part of The Big Story series which focused on the outstanding achievements of journalists. A non-smoker, Terry had to learn to smoke in order to play key scenes in the teleplay.

The series sponsor was Pall Mall cigarettes, and the show was broadcast live, so it was crucial that Terry smoke convincingly. He carried it off, but he has never smoked another cigarette since. 

In 1962, Terry returned to Europe for an extended stay. He lived some months in Paris and then spent a year in Denmark before moving onto Rome. In Rome, he learned to speak fluent Italian. Terry fell in love with his language tutor, the Italo-Yugoslavian Anna Scratuglia. In the fall of 1963, Terry returned to the United States. In 1964, he asked Anna to join him in New York. They married and later had two children: a son, Miguel, and a daughter, Melinda, both of whom were raised speaking Italian as well as English.

In 1965, walking up Broadway one day, Terry ran into a producer friend who suggested that he do a screen test for the position of TV newscaster. Although he had no journalistic background, he drew upon his 13 years of experience as an actor and landed the job: Terry Carter became world’s first black TV anchor newscaster, for WBZ-TV Eyewitness News in Boston, the Westinghouse flagship station, for the next 3 years. In addition to covering crime stories and “hard” news, Terry became Boston TV’s first opening night drama and movie critic. Even though Terry was now a TV newscaster, he still maintained his relationship with the William Morris Agency.

While summering in Rome in 1967, Terry was sent by the Morris Agency to meet Italian producer Dino deLaurentiis and avant-garde art film director Tinto Brass, who asked him to star in his movie, Nerosubianco (aka Black on White or Attraction), set in London. Since he was still a TV newscaster, Terry had to request a 13-week leave of absence from his news anchor job, in order to work in the film. Although it was an unprecedented request for Westinghouse, he got it. Before long, he realized that his first love was acting. Once his three-year newsroom contract was up, he packed his bags and he and his wife moved to Hollywood, in search of greener pastures.

His first important role on arriving in Hollywood in 1968 was as a detective named “Jaffie”, in the made-for-TV movie Company of Killers, in which he worked alongside Van Johnson and Ray Milland. From 1968-71, singer Diahann Carroll became the first Black female to star in her own TV sitcom series, Julia. Terry had a recurring role as Julia’s boyfriend “Bert”.

 In December 1969, only 5 months after Neil Armstrong takes his first step onto the Moon, Terry played the role of “Mike Carter”, the first Black astronaut to the Moon, in The Bold Ones: The New Doctors. Many of the scenes were filmed in the actual Apollo Spacecraft.

During the 1970’s Terry starred in several Blaxploitation films, including the 1974 film Foxy Brown with Pam Grier. He also starred in Abby 1974, and Brother on the run 1973. In 1975, Terry founded Meta-4 Productions, Inc., a small Los Angeles production company, through which he produced and directed more than one hundred industrial and educational films and videos for public broadcasting and for virtually every agency of the federal government. Terry also formed the Council for Positive Images, Inc., (CPI) a non-profit organization of which he is still president, in 1979, dedicated to enhancing intercultural and interethnic understanding through audiovisual communication. Under the Council’s auspices, he has produced and directed award-winning dramatic and documentary programs for PBS, focusing on cultural and historical topics.

In 1978, McCloud’s creator Glen Larson and producer Leslie Stevens were asked to make a major film for television in response to the success of the Star Wars trilogy of George Lucas. Star Wars special effects specialist John Dykstra and his team were brought in to start on the models for what would become the most expensive film ever made for television: Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a Star World. The cast was a mix of young, still relatively unknown actors like Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict, combined with legends as Bonanza’s Lorne Greene, Ray Milland, Lew Ayres and Alfred Hyde-White.

Terry, who’d just worked with creator Glen Larson and producer Leslie Steven on McCloud for 7 years, was selected for the part of “Lt. Boomer”. As chance would have it, Terry broke his ankle roller skating with his daughter a shortly before Galactica started filming. The part of “Lt. Boomer” was then re-cast and given to young actor Herb Jefferson, Jr. But the 7 years on McCloud must have made an impression on its producers, because Terry was later offered another part in the series: that of “Colonel Tigh”, the right hand of “Commander Adama”. Still a warrior rather then a diplomat, “Tigh” was often at odds with “Adama” on his decisions. It was a part Terry found even more challenging and satisfying to play Since Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a Star World cost an enormous amount of money to make it was quickly decided to turn it into a TV series. A combination of multiple last-minute script revisions, the costs of $1 million per episode and a bad TV time slot made the network decide to cancel the show after just one season.

Terry made a reprise in 1999 and played the part of now “President Tigh” in Richard Hatch’ trailer Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming, an attempt to revive the original series. In 1980, Terry was elected to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, where he served two terms. In 1983,

Terry was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He served on the Documentary Committee and the Foreign Films Committee for the Oscars. That same year, Northeastern University awarded him a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications. In 1985, Terry received a Los Angeles Emmy Award for K*I*D*S, a TV miniseries he created, produced and directed. K*I*D*S was the story of a multi-racial group of teenagers struggling to cope with some of the adult-sized conflicts confronting youth in America today. In 1987-88, Terry produced and directed JazzMasters, a series of video portraits of twelve great jazz artists for TV2 Denmark. The series featured interviews and performances of Chet Baker, Kenny Drew, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Carmen McRae, James Moody, Niels-Henning, Wayne Shorter, Clark Terry, and Randy Weston. In 1988, Terry produced and directed the award-winning, Emmy-nominated TV musical documentary A Duke Named Ellington about the life and work of pianist, composer, bandleader and jazz legend Duke Ellington. Making this documentary required Terry to spend a lot of time in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Duke’s son Mercer lived.

In 1991, Terry was sent to China by the USIA (United States Information Agency), on a cultural lecture tour. He visited then-British Hong Kong, and Beijing, Chengdu, Chong Ching, Guang Zhou and Shen Yang, meeting Chinese filmmakers and students, and lecturing on his experience as a filmmaker in the U.S. In 1992, Terry started research and development on what is to become a 90-minute documentary for PBS about African-American anthropologist, dancer, and choreographer Katherine Dunham, whose show-stopping performances greatly influenced the evolution of American dance theatre. Terry’s biopic Katherine Dunham: Dancing with Life is about Ms. Dunham’s extraordinary life and work. In 1998, Terry appeared in the Swedish international thriller movie and TV miniseries Hamilton, in which he played “Texas Slim” head of the CIA.

Filmography: Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming (1999)

Trailer - Hamilton (1998)

Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a World (1978)

Abby (1974)

Benji (1974)

Foxy Brown (1974)

Brother on the Run (1973)

Nerosublanco (1969)

Parrish (1961)

Source: Wikipedia, IMBD and Terry Carter.net