Next year we are holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. We’ve invited George Clooney, Alec Baldwin and James Woods.
Next on the list is Pam Grier.
Grier, 76, is known for starring in low-budget “blaxploitation” action films in the 1970s, like 1973’s Coffy and 1974’s Foxy Brown, as well as her star turn in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. The actress was recently at the Bethesda Theater in Maryland to introduce her classic 1974 movie Foxy Brown. I worked at the Bethesda when it was the Bethesda Cinema ’n’ Drafthouse in the 1980s, and I was excited to meet Grier for the meet and greet. We talked about how the social changes in the 1970s, and her role in them, were meant to bring men and women closer together, not cause a competition.
Grier hasn’t come down as explicitly a liberal or a conservative, but rather a tough, independent-minded thinker who lives in reality. Take the recent answer she gave to the Hollywood Reporter about the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the films that Grier starred in: “It wasn’t called ‘exploitation’ until I walked in a man’s shoes. I used martial arts and I held guns. I come from a country environment, went hunting with a 30-06 [rifle]. I understand rifles and guns and hunting and throwing people over my shoulder. So maybe they meant it was ‘exploiting’ the woman, the little woman who’s not supposed to fight for herself, supposed to let the man come in and save her. Well, sometimes they’re not there and you have to be a little bit exploitative to save your ass, OK?”
“We set it up for men to be comfortable,” Grier added. “Women are not taking your job away from you, just being a partner. Because somedays you don’t want to get up. You came back from war. You’re impaired. You can’t keep up in front of your family. The women said that’s OK, we’ll take care of you. That’s the greatest feeling of love and honor in your relationship that you can have.”
That answer could have been given by Ann Coulter.It shows the kind of independent spirit and guts that we are looking for at the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
My favorite memories about Grier don’t involve the 70s or Tarantino at all but her films of the 1980s. Bethesda Cinema ’n’ Drafthouse, a beautiful converted art deco theatre that had been transformed into a pre-Alamo Drafthouse – except along with theater seats we had round tables, a bar and a full kitchen. It was while bartending there that I saw Grier in Above the Law and The Allnighter. Even before that I knew her from the 1983 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which she plays the Dust Witch.
Before she spoke I asked Miss Grier about Jackie Brown, considered by many to be Quentin Tarantino’s best film.
“Well, it was made creatively by Quentin Tarantino,” Grier said, “and I got to play in his sandbox of creativity with Samuel Jackson, Michael Keaton, Robert De Niro, Robert Forster, Richard Fonda, and, of course, Elmore Leonard, which the story was kind of based on. But it was interesting, and it still is, and more so because, you know, you look at the film, Jackie Brown is still about the color of manipulation and power and how you look at the gender issues and political issues. So it’s complex. The entire film is a master class of discovery and cinema and politics and so many things. So every time I see it, it’s something interestingly new. So it’s going to translate many years into the future, whether we like it or not. So it’s got its own legs, if you will. I’m enjoying it, and I will always, because I’m a learner, it’s, for me, a teaching of how I can express art and politics and gender and economics and all in one. You know, it talks about her life, Jackie Brown, and her many lives.”
I wanted to ask Grier about Something Wicked This Way Comes, which bombed in 1983 but is now considered a cult classic, but it was time to screen Foxy Brown. Grier took the stage for the intersection and offered her kind words of healing for men and women. She then reminded everybody of something important. “If you want to survive like Foxy, an international spy whose life is surrounded by danger, you have to be crazier than the people targeting you.” Everybody cheered, and down went the lights. Grier’s is the kind of spirit we want at the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
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