Charles Burnett
BY
Brandon Harris
An interview with Charles Burnett.
My Brother’s Wedding and The Short Films of Charles Burnett are currently playing on Metrograph At Home. Strange Fruit, curated by Brandon Harris, is playing at 7 Ludlow across February.
BRANDON HARRIS: How you doing, man? It’s good to see you.
CHARLES BURNETT: It’s good to see you. How are you?
BH: I’m doing pretty well this morning. It’s very cold in New York, about 10 degrees… We should’ve done this in person in LA. [Laughs] There’s so much to talk about, but I just watched My Brother’s Wedding (1983) again—I had not seen the film since you originally opened it in New York, in 2007, so it’d been almost 16 years. So much has happened in my own life in that time—it’s funny, I felt I related to Pierce more now than ever, at 39.
To start off, My Brother’s Wedding had not quite as much time in production as your first film, Killer of Sheep (1978), which you made in fits and starts over several years. Although in post, My Brother’s Wedding took a really long time, correct?
CB: Killer of Sheep didn’t really take that long, it was just because I shot it on the weekends.
BH: Right.
CB: Because the actors were not actors. I thought I was encroaching upon their time, because they weren’t into acting, and they didn’t quite understand it. In fact, when I did Killer of Sheep, one of the actors who was my neighbor got sick, but I’d already shot some stuff with him and Stan [Henry G. Sanders] in the kitchen. He was supposed to be sitting at the dining room table, but he couldn’t come one day. He said, “Can’t you get someone else to take my place?” I said, “No, we already shot some stuff on you.” He didn’t understand you couldn’t exchange actors. I think people imagine it as a football game where you have a quarterback and if the guy gets injured you just change.
BH: Well, David Lynch has done it—you know, Lost Highway (1997) has different actors playing the same character later on. Or Todd Haynes. But for most films, it does not work.
CB: Having said that, when I did The Horse (1973), we started with this old horse on this farmyard scene—we used to go up to Shandon, up near Paso Robles in California. We had shot for a couple of days, but the guy I borrowed the horse from took him to the glue factory, and the poor thing was killed. We came up to shoot again, and the horse is gone. The only other horse left was this Black Stallion, a colt so to speak. It was obviously a different horse, because the first horse was emaciated and barely alive. And this other horse was fiery, you could tell he was youthful and wanted to mate. So there’s a scene toward the end where the horse is different. I always cringe when it comes on because I think people are going to jump up and say, “What’s going on here?” But no one realized it was blatantly a different animal. It’s a short film, only 12 minutes, so I guess people don’t have time to really figure it out.
The Horse (1973)
BH: It’s interesting you mention having to use another horse, because the principal actor on My Brother’s Wedding, Everett Silas, also left the production at some point, right? Did you have to scramble around his availability?
CB: Yeah. He disappeared, Pierce, the main character.
BH: Didn’t he enter the clergy? He became a preacher, if I’m correct?
CB: Well, that’s what he claims. It was his way of asking for more money. You know, we made a deal, but then when he got film on him, his agent called and said we need to pay him more. Everyone was getting the same amount of money—which wasn’t much, of course, but it was all I had as an independent film. It was ZDF, the German television company, who financed it. They had seen Killer of Sheep, and the guy wanted to co-produce a film; I said, “Of course.” Everett and I agreed upon a fee but he kept asking for more; I got to a point where I said, “I can’t,” and he disappeared for a long period. I was looking all over for him. After I don’t know how many months, he’d gone back South or something, he communicated with me and said he’d become ordained as a preacher, which didn’t sound legitimate. We finally got him on the plane to come back to LA. I remember the airport: he gets off, wearing Dracula capes, with a Bible in his hand, pretending he’s looking at some scripture. I was so mad but I couldn’t do anything. I was just happy to get him back. So we completed the story. Everyone had been telling me, “Fire that guy! You’d be better off starting all over.” I should have taken that advice. We finished the film, but at a cost. He was a troublemaker.
But you know, I’ve worked with a lot of older actors, and a lot of older people who didn’t get their due. Like in To Sleep with Anger (1990), Julius Harris, he was in Nothing But a Man (1964), I’d always wanted to work with him, so he came along. That was the bandage, an opportunity to bring these guys back.
BH: Watching My Brother’s Wedding and thinking about To Sleep with Anger and some things that connect them beyond, obviously, their setting and the milieu of the characters, both movies display an interest in class tension within the Black community, and the unusual ways in which it manifests. In My Brother’s Wedding, you have Pierce, who seemingly is jealous of his brother’s relationship with his soon-to-be wife, played by your wife, Gaye [Shannon-Burnett]. And then in To Sleep with Anger, there’s tension amongst the brothers that feels like it’s playing out amongst their sort of class destinies—there’s the younger brother Richard Brooks’s dissension with his brother, which boils over in a way that feels, if not sparked by the appearance of Danny Glover’s character Harry, then certainly it manifests as he enters their family and household. I’m curious, what animates that interest in the way class plays out in Black spaces? Which quite frankly, I don’t think we’ve seen often in movies in the way you show it to us.
CB: Well, I grew up in South Central [Los Angeles], before the Civil Rights Movement, when it was just on the brink of trying to desegregate a lot of the institutions. The community was virtually working class. Yet you had this mixture—it’s like the shanty towns where everyone’s piled in, the middle class and poor were all bunched together, so you also went to school with a lot of elitist kind of attitudes. Kids of doctors and professional people, they had these organizations, the “Jack and Jill club,” where it was made clear you weren’t a part—they were the ones who were doing well, and you’re taking shop. We listened to older people who would say “Stay in schools, just stay out of trouble. And get your diploma.” That’s what their idea and dream was, you know? Just don’t go to jail… They felt if you did that, you’d get a manual job, working at a car wash, maybe a carpenter, building houses. I used to work with a friend of mine’s father, they were plasterers. I’d be on the mixer, trying to keep the thing going. Meanwhile other guys would be playing tennis, and looking down on us. There was this conflict of people rubbing together, different attitudes and goals. You had a distorted view of one another.
The conflict in My Brother’s Wedding deals with that; Pierce’s brother Wendell [Monte Easter] wants to be in that class. He’s with this middle-class girl who looks down on Pierce, because Pierce has a tendency to romanticize the poor. Meanwhile, his brother aspires to be like her, a lawyer, and Pierce thinks his brother’s dating beyond his means, and that there are all these really down to earth girls in the neighborhood, so why don’t you deal with them, you know? It’s these kind of different conflicts that in My Brother’s Wedding manifest.
It shows that I’m sort of in Pierce’s corner, idolizing the working class: but they’re the real people… I should have been much more analytical, and said, “This is what we need to embrace both worlds.” Don’t forget these genuinely salt of the earth people who built the community. But we were just so angry, for all the wrong reasons—instead of coming together, and understanding... That is basically what the film is about. It’s about this older generation who left us with this folklore, values. It’s also a criticism.
My Brother's Wedding (1983)
BH: There’s something really poignant in how much Pierce cares about his friend Soldier [Ronnie Bell], to the exclusion of almost any other concern throughout the story. There are movies like Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) about male friendship and the lengths people will go, but rarely in the context of African American cinema can I remember anything like that. I was curious as to why you feel that is, for Pierce, in the story?
CB: Well there were the gangs, like in the late ’70s with the Crips and the Bloods, that you identified with because they were in your neighborhood. Even if you didn’t want to be in it, just living in a neighborhood makes you a part. If someone in your neighborhood was beat up by another gang, you’d be called upon to show your support, to the point where it was crazy, and you’d help contribute to this violence.
Your parents would tell you not to call the cops because it always ends in tragedy. That’s what the police department was in Los Angeles. First thing they’d do is pull up, search you—forensic search, they’re going to enter the seams of your pants looking for marijuana—victimize you. For example, a lot of kids picked up by the police were taken to the 77th Street police station that was notorious for beating up kids and charging them for crimes they didn’t do. A young man would be picked up, and he’d come back all beaten, bruises everywhere. The police would say “Oh, he fell down some stairs.” But the 77th Street police station was only one level. There’s only like three steps! Those kind of things were a constant. That’s how the Watts riots started.
One of the things that should be pointed out is why kids were frustrated. Watts was a late industrial place. It built things for the army and tire companies, and when those companies left in the ’40s and ’50s, that pollution stayed underground. Now the kids are still suffering from brain effects of lead and gas. If you wanted to get a drink of water out of Jordan High School, you had to let the water run for 10 minutes. It cost them millions to clean up. They did as much as they could, then took the polluted soil and dumped it on the railroad tracks. But to get to their houses, people needed to walk through this dirt… So it was always there. They don’t want to look at the cause of what was going on.
Killer of Sheep (1978)
BH: Charles, that was such a thoughtful answer, it took me in a lot of different directions. One is thinking about the movie that was the reason we first got to hang out, when I invited you to screen The Glass Shield (1994) for its 20th anniversary, almost 10 years ago. I remember when we showed that movie, it was right in the wake of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of the cop in Missouri. And now we’re talking almost 10 years later, in the wake of Tyre Nichols’s killing, for all who chose to watch that video, which is essentially a lynching carried out by Black men who felt empowered by that uniform to behave that way. I don’t know if there’s a thoughtful question here other than: what do you make of the persistence of this problem? It makes me think about that James Baldwin quote, “Everyone says, wait, change takes time, but I’m 57 years old or whatever, and am I going to live to see the change?” In your seventies you must have some perspective on this. It seems so absurd that you’ve had to live your whole life under the specter of this violence toward our community.
CB: Well, it’s not that difficult to correct because you can see how it started. Chief Parks hired a lot of white officers from Mississippi in the South. He figured that they knew how to handle Black people. And so there was this attitude, that policing in Los Angeles County, and Watts, and South Central was real police work. Because they thought Black people were the most violent. And so you get this higher adrenaline rate, whatever it is. The other thing is that the cops that police South Central are on the job 24 hours every day, every year. I was on the ride along with the 77th Street police department on a Friday night, it is so stressful. One night, I was ready to go home, I didn’t want to be there anymore. I’m not trying to justify anything, but when you go on these ride-alongs, the night watch person tells them, “The first thing is protect yourself and your partner, because everyone out there is out to kill you.” It’s like in Avatar (2009) where the guy says, “Out there every living thing wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes.” The attitude is that you’re in a cage with animals so you have to be rough.
When I grew up, you had to learn how to deal with the police. And when my kids were young, before they learned the ABCs, I had to teach them. But then you find later on that there is no way you can anticipate the violence police can impose upon a kid. There’s nothing you can tell them anymore. Don’t drive? Move to another country? You’re always redefining your relationship with the police. It’s not a question of putting money in a department. It’s moving police into different communities where they don’t have this negative attitude about the people that they serve.
BH: One more question. Anytime you use music, whether it’s the needle drops in Killer of Sheep or the score in My Brother’s Wedding, with the use of the trumpet and the eeriness that you’re able to create, there’s a dissonance between the tone of the music and the image. In My Brother’s Wedding, you use the songs of Johnny Ace very evocatively, in various moments throughout the story—these sort of swooning love ballads that I feel play an interesting contrast to Pierce’s own sense of lovelessness. There’s that remarkable moment when Soldier’s father asks him if he’s got a girlfriend and he just snickers, as well as the jealousy he has of his brother’s coming union. I was wondering about your thinking on those selections, both in terms of the source material, but also how you use them. When you place them in the movie it seems so unusual, and yet the intuition behind them is remarkable.
CB: Johnny Ace was this mythical figure in the community. He allegedly shot himself in the head playing with a gun. Johnny Ace had this voice that everyone would try to emulate. His records are very romantic. It was a time when we were still accepting those as part of our music tradition. It wasn’t just like rock ’n’ roll, and blues, it was a time of merging and mixing. Older kids were sneaking into clubs, and playing these folk tunes. These things were so much a part of your life. Blues, particularly, I listened to because my friends liked it. I didn’t understand a lot. But then I got older and experienced a lot of the things they were singing about.
Because I used to play the trumpet, I was with music very early. My mother used to play a lot of good old records. I got to a point where I wanted to preserve those records, because those old 78s were really breakable discs. If you just look at them hard, they break. I really liked [Johnny Ace], and used to play his records all the time. I would be inspired by images that they would produce. I thought he told a story, an older generation wishing what life was about.
BH: Do you still play the horn, Charles?
CB: No, it was a vanity thing. I used to spend hours blowing my trumpet, upsetting the neighbors. There was nothing I liked more than coming home, opening up the windows, sticking my horn out, and just disturbing people, you know? That’s how I felt I had a purpose. But when you play a trumpet like Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie you get this lip that hangs like a turkey neck. I got a callous, and I started thinking “Man, you’re going to be looking like…” so I drifted away. If I was playing the cello I would have stuck with it, but the horn gets your cheeks gets blown up like, this is a frog, you know? So I said, no, this doesn’t look too good.
I used to play Johnny Ace records all the time. I would be inspired by images that they would produce. I thought he told a story, an older generation wishing what life was about.
BH: I think that’s a pretty good note to end on.
CB: Actually, I was very, very good at it. There were a lot of good blues clubs, and a jazz club in The Valley. You know, the only time I thought about the future was when I thought about maybe playing in a band, going in and playing at one of those places.
BH: Do you ever regret being a filmmaker instead of musician?
CB: Yes, I do. Because when I hear a trumpet, it brings back a certain feeling.
BH: Well, I’m glad you became a filmmaker, Charles, and I think the audiences of your films are too.
CB: I’ll tell you what I did want: I always wanted to take photography, and I couldn’t afford to. I used to look at old magazines in the library. I bought this camera, a Leica 35, and I went out shooting documentary stuff. A young lady who was living in the courts died of an overdose, and she was lying in the doorway of a little apartment. I had my camera, and I started taking photos, “Oh, this is great.” The police didn’t stop me, I was walking around, just snapping pictures.
This lady comes up to me and very gently said, “Why are you taking pictures?” I said something stupid like, “Oh, just for fun.” And there’s this tragic figure laying down in the doorway, dead. I realized right after I said it, how stupid that was. It hit me so hard, like a knife in the heart. I put the camera away, no more photojournalism. I had no business doing that, profiting off somebody else’s misfortune. That was the end of that, you know?
Brandon Harris is the author of Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, the director of Redlegs (2012), a contributing editor at Filmmaker Magazine, an Amazon Studios refugee, and the President and Co-Founder, with Shaka King, of I’d Watch That.
My Brother's Wedding (1983)
