SUPERFLY directed by Director X, written by Alex Tse, with Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell and Lex Scott Davis. A Sony release. 116 minutes. Opens Wednesday (June 13). See review.
Super Fly isn’t the only blaxploitation classic Hollywood is revisiting. Shaft, Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown are all set for reboots.
“This is where we are in Hollywood,” says Brampton-bred Director X, the music video veteran whose SuperFly remake hits theatres on Wednesday.
“’Hey, that was a hit before. Maybe it will be a hit again,’” he says.
I would only add that this is what happens when franchise moviemakers realize diversity is good for business. They go looking for recognizable IPs with Black-centred narratives, which are so limited that once you get past Beverly Hills Cop, you’ve got to go digging into a genre that left its controversial mark from the margins.
“There weren’t a lot of movies before this point that are well known enough in the culture,” says X as I sit down with him at the Ritz-Carlton. Even he admits that, like most young audiences, he hadn’t seen the original until he was handed a script for the reboot. Super Fly is one of those titles where you know the influence even if you haven’t seen the source material.
“I did know that Super Fly was about a drug dealer who wanted to make a million dollars and get out of the life, which is a lot of information to have about a movie you’ve never seen from 1972. The music (by Curtis Mayfield), the name and the visuals have always been floating around. They’re in the zeitgeist.”
At the same time, Super Fly was very much a product of its time and I wonder how well its archetypes translate today. Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest was a high-rolling drug dealer with flamboyant threads and a custom Cadillac (loaned to the production from an actual pimp).
The character has been criticized for reinforcing stereotypes of Black criminality – though I think the film addresses that with a weariness in Priest’s voice when he complains about the positions “the (white) man” would allow him to hold.
That frustration seemed to be echoed in the blaxploitation genre as a whole. In 1972, what other stories were African-Americans allowed to tell?
You don’t really feel that anxiety in Director X’s SuperFly, which is less concerned with blaxploitation politics and more keen on being… well… fly. The new movie has flashy cars, colour-coordinated villains and pink-washed images much like the X-directed video for Drake’s Hotline Bling. It’s a movie showing off hip-hop’s aesthetics much like Hype Williams’s Belly before it.
Director X, who learned his craft under Williams, did the storyboards for Belly two decades ago. That was right before he would strike out on his own as a prominent music video director and join forces with fellow locals to build Toronto’s hip-hop scene into what it is today.
Before Drake marinated his rhymes in West Indian flavours and dubbed Toronto “The 6ix,” there was Kardinal Offishall, “The T-Dot” and Director X (Little X at the time).
“The Kardi generation – my generation – was when we started really embracing where we’re from, our city as well as our roots,” says X, revisiting that moment when West Indian accents were pronounced on Toronto’s hip-hop tracks like BaKardi Slang, in which Kardinal Offishall plays Urban Dictionary for those south of the border (“T dot says ‘yuh dun know’”).
“We were putting our dialect – that was unique to our city – into the music and into the way we spoke, really proudly, saying, ‘No, we talk like this.’ It was the beginning of people asking, ‘What’s up with Toronto?’”
Soon after, X began his game-changing work with Jamaican dancehall star Sean Paul. The latter already dominated Canadian airwaves and had been collaborating with Kardinal, but the X-directed videos for Gimme The Light and Get Busy helped Sean Paul pop off in the U.S.
“That reggae explosion was hand in hand with Toronto culture,” says X. He explains how choreographer Tanisha Scott and local dancers like Stacy Simpson (whom X baptized Ponytailz) had moves that would blow away what was coming out of the U.S. and help establish Toronto as a unique musical destination.
“You had this mix of both worlds,” says X, describing the T-Dot’s moves. “There was this North American sensibility with this West Indian root, and it just translated. We were selling West Indian culture through the diaspora.”
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