Here is a review in the Chicago Tribune from Bill Savage:
The history of Chicago's urban spaces and race relations can be viewed through many lenses. Gerald R. Butters Jr.'s new book, "From Sweetback to Super Fly: Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop," adds a vital new point of view to Chicago's ongoing conversation about race and how people interact in shared spaces like movie theaters.
Butters' foundation is the idea of the "occupation of geographic space." Spaces do not necessarily belong to different groups of people. Instead, people choose to frequent spaces open to them, and then by their occupation make such spaces their own.
Chicago's Loop, with its businesses, restaurants, stores and theaters, had traditionally been a white space, occupied by white workers, tourists and consumers of culture. But if enough African-Americans came to the Loop to work and eat and shop and watch movies, their presence could reshape the racial identity of the place. A space could become multi-racial, or, if abandoned by one group, change its racial identification in the wider culture.
That's exactly what happened in the first half of the 1970s, as the Loop became perceived as a black space. This spatial/racial shift was not an isolated phenomenon; it was "a microcosm of larger structural alterations in the nation." As is so often the case, the Loop was central not just geographically but symbolically. As a result of the civil rights movement, "(p)sychological barriers fell as black Chicagoans, goaded by the Black Power movement and frustrated by years of segregation, began moving freely throughout the city. As the 1970s began, new patterns of geographic occupation — brought about primarily through the patronizing of entertainment venues, especially motion picture theaters — emboldened black Chicagoans."
The movie business is, from start to finish, all about money. With the closing of many neighborhood theaters on the South and West Sides, African-Americans began to spend their money downtown at the same time white audiences — perceiving the city as inherently dangerous due to urban unrest, including riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — were fleeing to the suburbs. Loop theaters therefore made more money booking black-themed movies. As they booked more such fare, from "quality" black dramas to so-called "blaxploitation" action flicks, white audiences dwindled further, creating a reinforcing circle.
Butters' examination of the politics of racial identity both within these films, and in the critical discourse around them, is outstanding. He argues that "to lump all the black-themed films from 1971 to 1975 under the rubric of blaxploitation is to ghettoize them and disestablish their importance and relevance to the African American community." Hollywood had marginalized black talent and black subject matter forever, so to see black heroes and heroines onscreen, whatever the artistic merits of the genre, was vital to a growing sense of black pride.
Elite, if not elitist, African-American cultural critics could deride these movies as lacking uplift or glorifying cultural dysfunction (much as some critics do today regarding rap music), but audiences paid for what they wanted: black narratives at the show.
But not exclusively. Butters shows without a doubt that black audiences were far more Catholic in their tastes than movie bookers, critics or white suburbanites thought. Movies such as "Jaws," "The Exorcist" and "The Godfather" appealed across racial lines, attracting both black and white audiences in the Loop and suburban theaters alike. ("The Godfather" movies and their depiction of Mafia culture, in fact, were part and parcel of the narrative tropes that movies such as "Shaft" and "Super Fly" exploited.) African-American and white audiences also filled theaters together for the exotic new genre of kung fu movies, but films featuring African-American men and women as heroes in dramatic crime narratives were central to the transformation of downtown movie-going audiences.
Also important to the new status of the Loop was the parallel phenomenon of big-screen pornography. Court cases knocking down censorship restrictions had led to the production and distribution of both soft-core and hard-core pornography (Hollywood studios desperate to make money in an industry that was on hard times had something to do with it as well). Several downtown theaters exclusively or predominantly screened pornography, which also contributed to the perception of Loop movie-going as less than family friendly. (By 1990, there were no movie theaters in the Loop at all, Butters reports.)
Then there's the matter of the physical spaces of the theaters themselves. Though some of these movies made good money in their disparate genres, the large theaters were expensive to maintain, and many owners didn't bother. As the physical structures deteriorated, the Loop gained a reputation for crime, seediness and decrepitude that was one part reality (many of the theaters were falling apart and infested with rodents) and one part prejudice (crime rates in the Loop, then as now, were lower than in outlying neighborhoods, despite media hype). But movies are all about reputation, even glamour, and once a Loop theater gained a reputation for being an X-rated venue, or for criminality, or for blackness, many potential customers drove to the brand-new and sparkling clean suburban mall theater instead of venturing downtown.
Butters frames his discussion of the content of these films, as well as the culture of the movie business, with the voices of contemporary critics, African-American and white alike, especially two men familiar to most Chicago film buffs: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Siskel and Ebert were reviewing these films in and writing about these theaters during the early '70s, and Siskel especially comes alive as a thoughtful critic attentive to the environment moviegoers sought (fewer loud video games in the lobby, not to mention fewer rodents in the theater) and to the content of the films and the broader cultural context in which the Loop was perceived.
Finally, Butters connects his narrative of art and commerce to the politics of the early 1970s, when so much of the Loop was declared subject to the eminent domain and bulldozers of the Richard J. Daley administration and "urban renewal." Much of the criticism of Daley-era programs emphasizes how he rebuilt the city in destructive ways, by obliterating neighborhoods for the University of Illinois at Chicago or creating the vertical ghettoes of the Robert Taylor Homes on the ruins of Bronzeville. But Daley and his real-estate developing cronies set their sights on the Loop as well. Vast swaths on either side of State Street were slated for demolition, including every Loop movie house. Luckily a few (the Chicago Theatre, the Oriental) were saved, thanks to preservationists and the less bulldozer-happy administrations of Mayors Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne.
Butters is often a graceful writer, with a sharp wit, able to turn a vivid phrase and fluent in the jazzy slang of show-biz-speak: Profitable movies have "legs," and "b.o." is "box office." With hilarious understatement, he describes The New York Times as "not a bastion of black revolutionary thought."
But, given its $60 price tag, the book needed serious editing, which it did not get. Far too often, three or four sentences labor to do the work one or two could have done, with awkward repetitions of subjects, key phrases and facts. Crucial ideas get buried mid-paragraph, and framing issues — like the particular ownership or location of theaters — are repeated between and within chapters (sometimes even within paragraphs). Some facts of film history need better explanation (e.g.: an X rating did not originally designate a film as sexually explicit hard-core pornography; X just meant a movie intended for adult audiences only). The illustrations of newspaper ads for different films, useful but not essential to Butters' arguments, are poorly reproduced and so add little.
Luckily for all concerned — especially for any reader interested in a deeply informed, nuanced and insightful new take on racial change and Chicago's film culture — "From Sweetback to Super Fly" overcomes these problems.
Butters takes his readers back to a time not just before streaming video, or the Internet, or DVDs, or VHS. He takes us back to a time when African-Americans, finally free to go wherever they pleased to consume entertainment, lined up on the streets to patronize the grand movie palaces of Chicago's Loop. The fact that this liberation coincided with the decline of the Loop as a destination for white Chicagoans and suburbanites is the tragic result of yet another narrative of racism in Chicago.
Bill Savage teaches Chicago literature at Northwestern University.
"From Sweetback to Super Fly: Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop"
