A Black Artist Hollywood Couldn’t Buy

I was living in the El Cerrito Hills, a suburban community located outside of Berkeley, when the idea of producing a parody of soap operas came to me. It might have had something to do with the treatment I got from Hollywood when some producers there expressed interest in my novel Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, a western. Producer Chuck Barris, of The Gong Show, flew me to Los Angeles to talk about movie possibilities. He put me up in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not once did we have a conversation about my novel. Next, Ivan Dixon and Quincy Jones were interested, and producer Michael Dayan even had a script written and offered me thousands of dollars. I thought that I’d get a stereotype-free film if I placed the novel in the hands of Black producers. But I turned down the Dayan offer only to have Quincy Jones back out of the deal.

I had learned from Black nationalists in New York that if you wanted to control your creative output, you had to produce it yourself. Instead of continuing to only write articles that agitated for change, in the midseventies I too wanted to offer an alternative to the degrading roles that Hollywood and television assign Black actors.

Along with my publishing partners at the time, the late Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson, I decided to do something about it. Lucky for us, Bill Gunn was available. We had little money—$40,000—but had an outstanding cast and crew. The result was Personal Problems. While Gunn’s previous creations had been stunted by producers who attempted to commercialize him, I insisted that he be given total control over this film. Leading our cast were Vertamae Grosvenor (who wrote the classic Vibration Cooking, performed with the Sun Ra Arkestra, and later became an NPR commentator), Sam Waymon, Walter Cotton, and Jim Wright. The famed photographer Robert Polidori led the crew. We weren’t aware that some of those who appeared in our film would become prominent, going on to star in movies and television series, or that Bill Gunn would become an icon.

I am listed as a writer on Personal Problems, but I was also the executive producer. I guided the project by writing a treatment that Gunn and the actors used as the basis for their improvisations. I paid the actors, the ground producer, and the crew, and I raised the money by writing grants. Since then, I have spent thousands of dollars to support Black and Puerto Rican theater. My plays have provided actors with the kind of roles that Hollywood has denied them.

The idea for the project originated in the kind of calls that I received from friends and strangers in the late 1970s, informing me about career updates, prizes won, or personal problems. I called Steve Cannon, my publishing partner at the time, and suggested that we create a radio soap opera for his show on WBAI-FM New York. This evolved into a rarely shown thirty-minute video version, which was directed by Gunn and photographed by Bill Stephens’s “People’s Communications Network.” The backdrop was the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident; a radio report from the disaster plays in the background as scenes unfold. The video cost $5,000.

With a larger grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gunn continued to direct. Now that our actors, producer, crew, and director were settled, we produced the three-hour version of Personal Problems, which has since been hailed as a classic. In this feature,the only scene included from the earlier version is a monologue by Sam Waymon.

We viewed ourselves as part of the “race films” tradition, which extends back to the early 1900s and consisted of Black filmmakers who weren’t willing to wait around for Hollywood to act right. Most critics can only identify one Black filmmaker from this period, Oscar Micheaux, whose films I saw as a child at a segregated theater in Buffalo, New York. But there were many others. Our link to this tradition was Jim Wright, who had acted previously in W. D. Alexander’s Souls of Sin and in Orson Welles’s all-Black version of Macbeth.

This was a pirate video. We ignored the rules. Without asking the manager’s permission, we filmed a party scene in a suite I rented in the Gramercy Hotel. Though we called it a “meta–soap opera,” the movie is hard to categorize. It confused people. After a screening at the New School of Social Research in New York, the audience members of the Black cognoscenti were baffled. At a showing at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, some members of the audience walked out—I have a photo of their exits. A white feminist accosted me at a showing in Rochester, New York. She argued that the lines I’d given to the women in the café scene were sexist, though it was the women actors who had created their lines.

We knew that we’d made a mark when, after a showing on WNYC TV, Vertamae Grosvenor boarded a bus and the driver greeted her by her character’s name, Johnnie Mae. We had more success among the grassroots than with the elite. After the showing on WNYC in New York and KQED in San Francisco, I was selected by the National Endowment to tour with the video. Our confidence buffeted, I asked to present Personal Problems to representatives from PBS for a possible broadcast. Two of the network’s Black personnel watched it, and one of them berated it. She seemed to bear a personal animus toward Gunn and inexplicably brought Kathleen Collins into the discussion, dismissing both filmmakers as members of “the Hudson River School.”

I returned to New York. I was very depressed. I knew that the commercial channels would never take a risk on Personal Problems, the first Black-produced soap opera. We thought that PBS would be our key to a national showing of the video. WNYC approached us about doing a series. We turned it down. We weren’t interested in the money. We wanted a larger audience. The actor Calvin Lockhart had even committed to appearing in future episodes.

There were a few showings after that. One was in Appalachia before an all-white audience. These working-class whites seemed to identify with the Black working class as depicted in the film. But in the late 1980s, the tapes went into a storage room trunk. There was a screening in 1991 at the Whitney Museum’s Bill Gunn retrospective, but the film did not fully emerge until the 2000s, when Jake Perlin, then a curator for BAMcinématek in Brooklyn and now the artistic and programing director at the Metrograph, revived interest in it. Had it not been for Perlin, who arranged to have the fifty-four ¾-inch tapes digitized, Personal Problems would have suffered the same fate as most of those films produced by Black filmmakers from the early 1900s to the 1950s: wearing out until vanishing.