Quote of the Day (Samuel L. Jackson, on ‘The Corniest Line I Ever Heard’)

“[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.)