RICHARD WESLEY'S BLACK FILM FOCUS
A throwback interview 1986 with the noted screenwriter and playwright
The first writer I ever met who had a beautiful home and a cute family was Richard Wesley. He had a lovely place in Montclair, New Jersey, two daughters and a wife who was both an editor at Essence and wrote detective novels. Richard had earned his lifestyle by starting his career as a young “angry black playwright” in the glory days of black theater when it was the voice of black liberation and a breeding ground for almost every major African-American actor (Denzel Washinton, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Viola Davis, Dorian Harewood and many more) who’d later populate Hollywood hits. Plays like ‘The Black Terror’ and ‘The Mighty Gents’ built Richard’s reputation as a man with a distinctive voice.
One of the people who were impressed with Richard’s pen was Sidney Poitier. In the ‘70s celebrated actor/director wanted to transition from the straight dramas that made his reputation to lighter fare. He recruited Richard to write screenplay to 1974’s all-star black comedy ‘Uptown Saturday Night’ and its 1975 sequel ‘Let’s Do It Again,’ both starring Poitier and Bill Cosby. In the later film Calvin Lockhart plays a gangster named Biggie Smalls, a name later claimed by the Brooklyn rapper Christopher Wallace.
In the mid-80s, I co-hosted a WNYE series called ‘Black Film Focus’ with Black Filmmaker Foundation head Warrington Hudlin. This was on the cusp of the black film explosion ignited by Spike Lee. The goal of our broadcasts was to shine a light on the many black filmmakers behind the camera who needed to be seen and Richard was definitely one of those. At the time Richard had just written an adaptation of Richard Wright’s classic, and controversial novel, ‘Native Son,’ so much of talk is about that landmark work. I was twenty-eight at the time of the interview, still relatively new to being on camera, so cut me some slack when you watch this.
Richard, who’s taught in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for many years, was recently honored as a recipient of the Legacy Playwrights Initiative Award at a ceremony in Manhattan, a richly deserved honor for a great writer and role model. I was lucky to find this conversation on an old VHS tape in a file cabinet, so the timing of this post couldn’t be better. He’s one of the people who’s career set a path for me and many others.