Bad Motherfucker Page 7

  The two theater directors whom Jackson has named as especially influential on him are Douglas Turner Ward of the Negro Ensemble Company, who directed him in A Soldier’s Play, and Lloyd Richards, who directed The Piano Lesson. Richards was the director of the Yale Drama School, and his pedagogy extended into his rehearsals, Jackson recalled. “They both taught me how to ask myself the right questions when I’m preparing to do a role or how to sit down and read a script and figure out who that person is: write an autobiography, give him a complete life from birth, family, educational background.”

  “You never know what’s going to come out,” Richards said of Jackson’s fertile mind. “You were glad he thought of it, because you would have thought of it if you could have thought of it.”

  “August writes three-hour plays,” Jackson said, and Boy Willie “talks for about two hours and ten minutes in a three hour play, so all you can do as an actor is grow.”

  Onstage at the Yale Rep, Jackson found himself at a new peak of performance. (Backstage, he would affectionately tease the young girls in the cast if he heard them practicing: “Y’all doing our lines?”) It lasted only a few weeks: when the play relocated eighty miles south, to New York City, it was time for Jackson to step back. He still showed up at the theater every night as an understudy, but unless Dutton was gravely ill, he wouldn’t be going onstage. “I was okay with it,” Jackson said, “until it was time to do it.”

  Jackson would sit outside on the Walter Kerr Theatre’s fire escape, listening to Dutton doing the role that he had originated, feeling the sour bile churning in his guts. “I rocked that play,” Jackson said matter-of-factly. “Charles was great, but I was better.”

  He had never been resentful about losing out on a part previously—but he had never gotten demoted before. Jackson explained, “It’s frustrating knowing that you’ve done something that was raved about critically, that you had to listen to every night backstage, and not just saying to yourself, ‘I would have done that differently,’ but hearing the audience response to it—because that’s what theater is. It’s that live give-and-take and knowing that you used to be out there doing that and the audience was responding to you.”

  Eight performances a week, Jackson “sat backstage, feeling sorry for myself.” To take the edge off his bitter, self-pitying mood, he used cocaine more heavily. He snorted enough coke that he blew a hole through the septum in his nose (the cartilage separating the two nostrils), so he started smoking it instead. Every success the play had only fueled his resentment, and there were plenty of honors: the Drama Desk Award, the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award nominations for the play and, painfully, for Dutton. “The mounting frustrations of knowing how well you did something, and not doing it and seeing someone else reap all the benefits of doing it kind of combined to make me a bit crazier than I probably normally would have been,” Jackson admitted.

  Jackson became an expert at getting high on a tight schedule. He would check in at the Walter Kerr before showtime, and then in the space of forty-five minutes, “I could go score, go by my house, cook it, get back on the train, and be back at the theater—nobody would miss me.” He told himself that nobody at the theater noticed what he was doing, so he didn’t need to make any efforts to cover up his escalating cocaine consumption. “That’s how people saw me every day, so it was nothing unusual,” he rationalized. They didn’t see him first thing in the morning before he left home—that was the one time of day he was guaranteed to be sober.

  Nancy Chiu.

  5 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 1977–1988

  I want to get up and act every day,” Samuel L. Jackson said. “And there’s a limited number of acting possibilities in everybody’s lifetime. So I’m trying to maximize my shit.”

  This filmography (divided into eleven chapters) covers all of Samuel L. Jackson’s acting work in movies fifty-five minutes or longer from 1977 to 2021, regardless of whether the movies debuted at the Cinerama Dome, on a television network, or on a streaming service. While once it seemed useful to differentiate between movies that were projected in theaters from 35mm prints and ones that made their way into our homes through other means, modern technology has made those distinctions mostly pointless. Our tally doesn’t include Jackson’s appearances in commercials, music videos, or episodic TV series, or his work in documentaries, either as a narrator or as a talking head. (And we went to press before the release of The Protégé and Blazing Samurai.) That still leaves us with 140 movies: consider Jackson’s shit to be maximized.

  Unless you are Samuel L. Jackson himself (hi, Sam), you probably haven’t seen all these movies, so to help you navigate the ocean that is the man’s filmography, I offer two ratings on a ten-point scale: an assessment of the movie itself and the “SLJ Factor.” The SLJ Factor measures the entertainment value of Samuel L. Jackson in any given movie, factoring in the quality of his performance and the amount of his screen time (and acknowledging that sometimes he can rock a movie with just a cameo). Think of it as a numerical answer to the question “If I’m watching this movie primarily because I’m a fan of Samuel L. Jackson, how much will I enjoy it?”

  My spoiler policy: I try not to give away a movie’s surprises gratuitously, but I also don’t worry about keeping every secret of a film that came out years ago. When bad movies have dumb plot twists, I get particularly loose-lipped.

  Watching 140 Samuel L. Jackson movies in the space of a year, I witnessed Jackson giving the best part of himself: not just showing up and doing his job in masterpieces and turkeys alike, but injecting every role with intelligence and panache. In good times and bad, we can count on Jackson to illuminate the human condition and inspire our inner motherfucker.

  The Displaced Person (1977)

  Sulk

  MOVIE: 4/10 SLJ FACTOR: 3/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 2

  It’s not surprising that a public-television drama from 1977 was slow and talky by modern standards; it is surprising how relentlessly it used ethnic slurs. That isn’t just a reflection of the casual racism in its setting, a Georgia farm right after World War II: xenophobia and a fear of miscegenation are what drive this thorny little tale. Mrs. McIntyre, the proprietor of the farm, takes on a Polish refugee family. At first she is delighted by the work ethic and mechanical aptitude of Mr. Guizac—qualities that rankle the other workers on the farm, Black and white alike. But when he tries to bring over a young blond female cousin, a concentration-camp survivor, to marry one of the Black laborers, she sours on him and reveals the limits of her Christian charity. She doesn’t fire Guizac, but she stands by silently when a disgruntled worker lets a tractor crush him.

  “I never felt no need to travel.”

  The movie, clocking in around an hour, was presented on The American Short Story series: it’s an adaptation of a Flannery O’Connor novella, with a script by Horton Foote, approached so reverently that it was filmed on O’Connor’s family’s farm. But while the original novella still has bite, this version feels toothless. The cast includes Irene Worth, John Houseman, and Robert Earl Jones (father of James); Samuel L. Jackson plays Sulk (the laborer getting set up with the Polish cousin), who is described by O’Connor as “a yellowish boy with a short woodchuck-like head pushed into a rounded felt hat.” Jackson plays a servile supporting character who doesn’t seem to be disguising any greater intelligence, but he has one arresting moment, when Sulk shares in the moral responsibility of Mrs. McIntyre: when a disgruntled worker lets a tractor roll over Guizac and crush him, they stand by silently, and their faces tell you that they’re horrified both by what’s about to happen and by themselves.

  The Trial of the Moke (1978)

  Johnson Whittaker

  MOVIE: 6/10 SLJ FACTOR: 4/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 30

  The Trial of the Moke tells the true story of Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, running up against a racist commanding officer at Fort Davis in Texas in 1881 and then being framed and court-martialed. A stage play presented by the Milwaukee Repertory Company, it was filmed for public television; it had a shoestring budget and the play was unexceptional, but it got by on the strength of the underlying story. The uneven cast included compelling work in a supporting role by Alfre Woodard.

  “Henry, you’ve got to stand up for me! There’s no one else on my side!”

  Jackson plays Johnson Whittaker, another one of the first Black cadets to attend West Point. Whittaker appears in brief flashbacks in his dress uniform, first hopeful and luminously handsome, then despondent when he’s being hounded out of West Point and Flipper won’t vouch for him. And then, when Flipper is being railroaded, Whittaker and James Smith (another pioneering Black cadet) appear in top hats, tails, and blackface, apparitions speaking in minstrel-show dialect about Flipper’s predicament. Their appearance is a gut punch, as it’s meant to be: a vivid expression of the inescapable racism surrounding Flipper.

  The Exterminator (1980)

  Extra (uncredited)

  MOVIE: 5/10 SLJ FACTOR: 1/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 53

  Samuel L. Jackson took pride in not working as an extra: when he was a stand-in for Robert Hooks on the 1976 TV movie Just an Old Sweet Song, he observed that in the caste system permeating a movie set, the extras reside at the bottom. They’re not quite lepers, but nobody learns their names, they eat last, and sometimes they don’t even have access to a bathroom. The one exception to his no-extra-work policy was this lurid exploitation movie, a surprise hit. As the lead actor, Robert Ginty, walks through Times Square, Jackson is visible for a few seconds behind him, wearing a hat and oversized sunglasses, holding a cigarette and a shopping bag—and then he’s lost in the crowd.

  Ginty, previously better known as a law student on The Paper Chase, seems miscast as a Vietnam vet who t
akes the law into his own hands after his best friend is savagely beaten by a New York City street gang. He’s following in the mode of Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry series or Charles Bronson in Death Wish, indulging in the same vigilante fantasy that led Bernhard Goetz to shoot four teenagers on a New York City subway in 1984. The movie delivers the violent thrills of a mobster who gets lowered into a meat grinder and a purveyor of child rape who gets burned alive: torture with a righteous sheen. The bloody narrative hurtles along, but it finds time to pause for a Stan Getz concert in Battery Park, for a cop who carefully cooks a hot dog at his desk by running electrical current through it, and for us to see the protagonist’s chosen reading material: Jean-Paul Sartre and the New York Post.

  Ragtime (1981)

  Gang Member No. 2

  MOVIE: 6/10 SLJ FACTOR: 3/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 86

  Ragtime feels like an American history class taught by Mr. Forman, who was groovy but unorganized and so had to cram everything that happened in the twentieth century into the final week before summer vacation. It warms up with the “Trial of the Century,” ripped from the actual headlines of 1907: the prosecution of Harry Thaw, the deranged millionaire husband of model Evelyn Nesbit, for the murder of famous architect Stanford White. Nesbit is played by Elizabeth McGovern, in an Oscar-nominated performance; in an unlikely bit of casting, novelist Norman Mailer plays White. The cast is filled with future stars, including Jeff Daniels, Debbie Allen, John Ratzenberger, and Fran Drescher—and on the other end of the career timeline, it features the final hurrah of James Cagney.

  “Don’t turn around and you won’t get hurt.”

  It doesn’t always cohere; much of E. L. Doctorow’s novel is reduced to period window dressing. In a role that seems like it was mostly left in the editing room, Mandy Patinkin shines as a Jewish silhouette artist who leaves the Lower East Side to become a successful film director. The center of the movie, we eventually learn, is Coalhouse Walker (a strong performance by Howard E. Rollins Jr.), an African American jazz pianist who gets hassled by some racist firemen in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City. (Doctorow’s inspiration for that character was Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas.) When Walker’s car gets vandalized by the firemen and he can’t get legal satisfaction, he embarks on a campaign of retribution, bombing firehouses and ultimately invading the swank Pierpont Morgan Library. Stubborn and proud, Walker refuses to back down, even though that costs him his family, his job, and ultimately his life.

  Jackson plays a member of Walker’s gang. He doesn’t get many scenes, and his face is often covered with a baggy cloth hood. When we can see him, he makes for an imposing but extremely dapper Black revolutionary, accessorized with a vest, a bow tie, and a cigarette insouciantly dangling from his mouth. We don’t know the specifics of the racial insults that have led him to join this terrorist campaign, but his eyes burn with righteousness.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

  George

  MOVIE: 4/10 SLJ FACTOR: 4/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 0

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies than any other novel in the nineteenth century; by effectively, if sentimentally, dramatizing the horrors of slavery, it fueled the abolitionist movement and arguably led to the Civil War. For some reason, this cable-TV movie adaptation was motivated less by a desire to educate a new generation about slavery’s moral stain and more by a desire to rehabilitate the reputation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book. Although this was the first English-language movie version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with sound, the novel spawned countless stage adaptations in its heyday, many of them with blackface and minstrel-show stereotypes—some of them even pro-slavery. Those productions are how the phrase “Uncle Tom” got fixed in popular culture as a cringing, ingratiating slave who betrays other Black people.

  “I am a free man, standing on God’s green soil, and I claim my wife and my son as my own.”

  The Uncle Tom played here by Avery Brooks is noble, proud, and moral; Brooks, the best thing about this movie, said that he based his performance on Josiah Henson, the fugitive slave whose autobiography inspired Stowe. Phylicia Rashad (of The Cosby Show) portrays Eliza, who flees with her young son after he is sold by the Kentucky farmer who owns them both. Eliza’s famous crossing of the Ohio River, hopping from one ice floe to another, is reduced here to a more placid swim with a raft, because Rashad was pregnant during the shoot. On the other side, she is reunited with her husband George (Samuel L. Jackson), who leads his family north to the freedom that awaits them in Canada. George is little more than a stock role in a melodrama—the upright and brave husband—and Jackson’s performance is stiff. He has one memorable scene, however, where he confronts the slave catchers pursuing them, even shooting one.

  Director Stan Lathan contrasted his work here with the movie version of The Color Purple released two years earlier, where a white man (Steven Spielberg) adapted a novel by a Black woman (Alice Walker). Lathan said, “I liked the challenge this production presented: A Black man’s interpretation of a white woman’s interpretation of Black reality.”

  Magic Sticks (1987)

  Straßenhändler (“Street Peddler”)

  MOVIE: 3/10 SLJ FACTOR: 4/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 2

  When they build the One-Joke Comedy Movie Hall of Fame, the 1980s wing will include specimens such as Weekend at Bernie’s (the joke: it’s funny when people pretend a corpse is still alive!) and So Fine (the joke: people go crazy when the hot fashion trend is jeans with see-through panels on the butt!). And the curatorial staff will give a prominent location to Magic Sticks (the joke: magical drumsticks produce a beat that make people lose control of their bodies, with movements somewhere between dance and rhythmic spasms!). The gimmick is only fitfully amusing, and the filmmakers don’t seem to know what to do with it. Felix, the scarf-wearing percussionist who acquires the sticks, plays in a band, but the movie bogs down in a subplot where gangsters want to use his magical abilities to assist in criminal enterprises.

  “Hier läuft ja nicht jeden Tag ein Drummer über den Weg.” (“It’s not every day that a drummer passes this way.”)

  This West German production, filmed in New York City with an English-speaking cast, never reached theaters in the USA; the German-language dub did get a commercial release. George Kranz, starring as Felix, was a real-life German musician (best known for the club hit “Trommeltanz (Din Daa Daa)”), but the cast included at least three American actors who went on to bigger things: Samuel L. Jackson, Lauren Tom (Amy in Futurama), and Jackson’s pal Reginald VelJohnson (Sgt. Al Powell in Die Hard, or as Jackson put it, “that fat black cop that’s outside talking to [Bruce Willis] anytime he’s in the building”).

  As a guy selling detritus on a New York City sidewalk, Jackson kicks off the movie when Felix crashes his bike into a nearby taxicab. Checking out the miscellaneous junk, Felix offers to trade shoplifted yogurt and sardines for an LP and a flyswatter, but Jackson gives him the magical drumsticks. Having provided the inciting incident, Jackson disappears from the movie, never to be seen again. Jackson plays his brief scene winningly: he knows he’s just a human plot device, but with a cheroot in his mouth and a savvy air, he makes for a charming one.

  Eddie Murphy Raw (1987)

  Eddie’s Uncle

  MOVIE: 5/10 SLJ FACTOR: 2/10 MINUTES UNTIL HE SHOWS UP: 0

  Eddie Murphy, one of the biggest stars in the world, swaggers onstage in New York City, wearing a black-and-blue paisley leather suit, and does a masterful set of stand-up comedy. He does a lethal bit on Bill Cosby; he tells the story of getting into a fight at a nightclub (he blames white guys getting belligerent after watching Rocky movies); he concludes with a brilliant impression of his drunken father, ineffectually laying down the law while misquoting Motown songs.