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“BLACK DYNAMITE” co-writer-director, Scott Sanders
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City]
With Black Dynamite, we wanted to make a blaxploitation movie that was as close to a 1974 blaxploitation movie as you could make in 2009. We wanted to emphasize humor, but we didn’t want to go too far outside of the strict boundaries of the genre.
For us, the humor comes out in how anachronistic it all is. Everything is exposed; the clunky structure of the plots, the huge tonal shifts that can occur within a scene from one moment to another, and the desire to please the audience at any cost no matter how implausible the scenario.
Given the attention span of modern audiences, one of our biggest challenges was to speed up the pacing of the film while still maintaining a real blaxploitation feel. This was somewhat difficult, because real 1970s-era blaxploitation movies have long stretches of dead time. Our collective memories sometimes remember only the fun, quirky moments, and forget the boring parts. Most of these movies can be excruciating to sit through without pressing fast-forward on the remote control. Our goal was to have as many of the fun, quirky, strange moments from these films, while minimizing all the predictable monotonous scenes. We wanted it to be blaxploitation concentrate…to feel more blaxploitation than the original films did.
Increasing the pacing is necessary due to the Internet, YouTube and the whole viral video phenomenon. Modern, quick video clips have affected me as a filmmaker. Effective viral videos have a tendency to be very economical. They give you the setup, they give you the punchline, and then they are done. They are not constrained by time expectations…they are as long or as short as they need to be. This was a huge consideration while making the film. Give people the tone and essence of these old films while increasing the pacing for maximum efficiency.
