Production
According to Melvin Van Peebles, the original production was of a white detective story, but following the success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the original script was scrapped in favor of an adaptation of Ernest Tidyman's 1970 novel Shaft, which focused on a black detective. However, production of Shaft had begun in January 1971, well before the release of Van Peebles's film, with Roundtree's casting in the title role widely reported. As early as January 5, 1971, The New York Times had reported that the film's 10-week shooting schedule was about to begin, that Roundtree would play the title role, and that Tidyman's book formed the basis for the film.
Tidyman, who is white, was an editor at The New York Times prior to becoming a novelist. He sold the movie rights to Shaft by showing the galley proofs to the studio (the novel had not yet been published). Tidyman was honored by the NAACP for his work on the Shaft movies and books.
Read more about this topic: Shaft (1971 film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)