The Black List: The Beginning

2008-01-21

When former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders got together for lunch, they walked away with more than a satisfying meal; they had the beginnings of a magnificent project. The two friends ultimately collaborated on The Black List, a feature-length film they aptly describe as “a living coffee table book.”

A collection of evocative mini-portraits, The Black List recounts the stories that comprise the deeply personal experiences of 20 African-American subjects. In front of a simple backdrop with no visible interviewer or audible questions, subjects ranging from comedian Chris Rock to choreographer Bill T. Jones to Obama foreign policy advisor Susan Rice to corporate powerhouse Richard Parsons and rock guitarist Slash recount moments and impressions that have informed their outlook.

We grabbed a few minutes at the Entertainment Weekly Café in the Kimball Art Center to talk with the collaborators before the projects’ Sundance premiere:

 

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The idea for the project started when I was having lunch with Toni Morrison who was talking about Margaret Garner and the fact that there were so many amazing women she had auditioned I should do a book on opera stars. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of opera stars, but I thought there was an interesting idea there.

Elvis is a good friend, and he’s also my neighbor, so we sat down at lunch and started talking about it…

Elvis Mitchell: We were going in the same direction on different roads. I’d always wanted to do something around reclaiming the notion of being “blacklisted” – to turn it into a positive, rather than a negative, connotation.

TGS: I started thinking about Black people I knew — Parsons, Faye Wattleton — incredible people. Elvis said ‘I love this! Let’s take back the Black List.’

The more we talked, I realized: that’s not a book, that’s a documentary. We should also do everything at once – film, book, pix. By the end of lunch we had 175 names on a napkin.

I called [art curator] Thelma Golden to do a test. Asked her to be a guinea pig. Thelma certainly knew Elvis’ work, and thought him to be a highly respected, intelligent interviewer. I have a certain reputation as a photographer. The combination was us making portraiture.

EM: Whenever black people are on camera there’s always an agenda. This wasn’t that at all. Each interview is a conversation; each interview has a conversational tone.

TGS: After Thelma, I called Toni who was a big fan of Elvis and we had a wonderful lunch. She said yes, which opened a lot of doors. We knew what we were doing at that point. I started out in film – went through the AFI program, produced a couple of projects (Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart and Thinking XXX)– so I love the whole filmmaking process. The way we shot — two cameras, no zooming let’s you come into it, let’s you view the film. The idea of not having Elvis in the film, not hearing the questions — we knew that was something we could edit. Once we had [the technique], it was a question of ‘let’s get interesting people.’

EM: Interviewing in the traditional sense – both people on camera, hearing the interviewer ask the questions — you end up judging the questions, not listening to the answers.

Being a black person informed [my work on] this project more than being a critic. What I always see is what’s missing. There’s never been a time when African-American culture has been more of a shaping force. People under 30 speak in hip-hop. Yet, I am constantly reminded that the world I talk about, that I talk to my friends about, is never portrayed.

What this was not going to be was a standard look at black culture. “What’s it like to be Black in America?” was not the question I was going to ask another Black person. So each interview really became more of a conversation. After a while people just bought into the idea. They were curious: ‘where is this going?’ They couldn’t go to their repertoire of sound bites…

TGS: Elvis makes people come alive and trust him. As for the style in which we shot, I’ve been used to making portraiture in a very simple way: One light, simple backdrop. Each session ranged from 30 minutes to roughly an hour. We had four minutes for the portrait of Colin Powell.

HBO gave us a little seed money. Early on a group of guys at Freemind Ventures saw the interviews with Thelma and Toni and thought it amazing and said they would finance the project. Met with them every week or so to see if it was a good fit. It was. We did it. They have very strong plans to do educational outreach to go into schools, even prisons. [An exhibition of the 20 portraits] is opening in July at The Museum of Fine Art in Houston.

HBO was an obvious fit. A DVD is obvious.

EM: In 1999 I served on a panel with [Sundance festival director] Geoffrey Gilmore. He can be tough, but respects people who give as good as they get. I knew he would be honest with me about what he thought. [Sundance senior programmer] Shari Frilot (who is Black) said ‘I love this, I want my family to see this.’ Sundance felt like the most logical place for us to be.

I’m just excited about seeing it with a Black audience. Once we started to see fruition of the film… I got a taste of [the response] in Detroit with my sisters, who were talking back to the screen. Within the community, that’s always been a working ethos — the call and response.

TGS: I also think something historic is happening with Obama – he wasn’t where he is now a year ago, but it’s a zeitgeist moment geared toward this discussion of race. An amazing thing — the right thing at the right time. 10 years ago, there would not have been a conversation about the Black experience.

EM: In media terms they wake up once a year. Oh my God its February: let’s write something good about Black people. Here is something good.

TGS: Ultimately, we made the film for ourselves. And like-minded people.

Wednesday, before the official start of the festival, HBO Documentary Films picked up theatrical release of the film. Look for The Black List: Volume I to hit screens in the Fall of ’08.
To learn more about the film and the filmmakers, go to TheBlackListProject.com.

Read Kim Voynar’s review of The Black List at Cinematical.com 

Black List Vol. 2