“[A] remake
of Shaft was so horrible that [actor
Samuel L.] Jackson was said to have refused to recite his lines because they
were written by a white man. ‘Not true,’ he said, when I asked about the
incident. ‘I changed his lines so they’d sound like a black man,’ he said. When
the author countered that those were the words he had written, according to
Jackson, ‘I said: “Yes, and you got paid for them. Now let me make you sound brilliant.”’
Jackson had to say ‘the corniest line I ever heard in my life and make it
believable,’ he told me, and then laughed before delivering it again: ‘It’s my
duty to please that booty.’”—Pat Jordan, “How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 2012
Ever since Tom Hanks’ heartfelt but incoherent Oscar
acceptance speech for Philadelphia—not
to mention Nicolas Cage’s characteristically weird contribution to The Rock (“But how, in the name of Zeus'
BUTTHOLE!... did you get out of your cell?”)—I’ve felt that actors should not
be allowed to write anything more consciously creative than a grocery list. (Don't talk to me about Orson Welles and Woody Allen; they're the exceptions that prove the rule.) But sometimes they can perform a useful
editing function.
Too bad, for instance, that George Lucas didn’t
listen to Harrison Ford’s tart but true comment on the dialogue in Star Wars: A New Hope (“George, you can
type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it"). And Samuel L. Jackson was well within his
rights to bridle at the tripe he was given for the 2000 remake of Shaft.
Pat Jordan is silent on who the white screenwriter
was for this latter film. Final credit for the script was given to director
John Singleton, Richard Price and Shane Salerno. Singleton is African-American,
so he’s not the guilty party in this instance (though, as the auteur of the
film, he could have cut the line in question). Price is a veteran
novelist-screenwriter known for hard-bitten dialogue, so I doubt if he cranked
out the line. That leaves Salerno, whose credits include Armageddon and, more recently, several teleplays for another
rehash: the new Hawaii Five-O. He sounds like the culprit, if you ask
me.
Well, pure cinephiles, I guess, would counter that
film is not about words but images.
And if you want proof of this axiom, see this YouTube clip contrasting the opening credits of the two versions of Shaft,
directed, respectively, by Gordon Parks and Singleton. (Well, proof somewhat,
anyway: Much of the energy of these sequences comes from the same nonvisual
source: Isaac Hayes’ electrifying, Oscar-winning theme.)
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