BMF: A cat named shaft, a man called tidyman

by Raymond Embrack

A development meeting in L.A, 1999.
"What ’70’s remake can we franchise next?"
"Shaft?"
"Which one’s that?"
"Blaxploitation. Black private dick, sex machine to the chicks."
"Blaxploitation, huh? No good. No mainstream appeal."
"We mainstream it."
"Have him protecting a white murder witness."
"Check."
"What’s a private dick? Is that like a cop?"
"Right."
"He can be a cop or he can be a cop."
"Then we’ll make him a cop."
"Except Shaft isn’t a cop. If Shaft is a cop but Shaft isn’t a cop, what is he?"
"Shaft is a cop, yet he isn’t a cop."
"Therefore, Shaft isn’t Shaft. How can Shaft not be Shaft?"
"Make him Shaft’s nephew."
"Needs female appeal. Give him a female partner."
"A female of color."
"Black?"
"Or Latino."
"Make it a Latino played by a black actress."
"Check."
"The bad guy: white or black?"
"White is too blaxploitation."
"Black is too black."
The result:
"It’s Giuliani time," says Samuel L. Jackson as Shaft’s nephew while blowing away Puerto Rican bad guys.

Cop to Shaft: "What did you get?"
Shaft: "I got laid."
The movie Shaft (1971)

In Hollywood, Shaft was on a losing streak. Now three pictures had tried to match the heat of the first Shaft, the one with the Issac Hayes theme song about the man who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about. A brief ‘70s TV series alternating with a James Stewart lawyer show had been only about toning down the BMF (he lost the black leather) and making him safe for the squares in sub-QM plots.

The third film was Shaft In Africa , a three-word pitch in a development meeting that could only have happened in the ‘70s. Not as bad as it sounds but so far from the source you feel the slippage. Shaft’s Big Score was closer to the source, cold, funky, had bigger guns and bigger explosions. But it’s strictly sequelville, baby.

The movie Shaft has everything. It has the song, the black leather, the white chick Shaft has to get rid of in the morning, the immortal line delivered by Bundini Brown’s gangster: "Cat say he gonna be here, he should be here." Directed by LIFE photographer Gordon Parks, it’s also one of the great New York pictures of the 1970s, a time capsule so specific it keeps a huge wall calendar behind Shaft’s desk (January 1971).

At the highest level of cool, private eyes are known for their theme songs. There’s a Muzak version of the Shaft theme. There’s a reggae version. Sammy Davis Jr. covered it adding lines like: "Shaaft…Shaaaft is The Maaan….can you dig it?"

But we still haven’t reached the source.

Postwar cool came and went. Today it’s as gone as the hat band. Ernest Tidyman died in ’83. He had written the screenplays for The French Connection and Clint Eastwood’s coolest western, a twisted version of High Noon named High Plains Drifter. He was a white guy who created "the man who would risk his neck for his brother-man". He wrote six Shaft novels. There was a time when you could find Tidyman on every paperback rack. I first found him in a supermarket. But when Tidyman went out of print, the books went with him.

Why the hell had he gone to Jamaica, anyhow? The pussy was neither better nor more plentiful. He sure as hell didn’t need a suntan and, in fact, his black-brown coffee bean skin was more sensitive than that of most whites to the burning Caribbean glare. Vacations are middle-class bullshit, he thought. The only things that made him tired were drinking, smoking, and screwing—and he never let work interfere with them.
Shaft’s Big Score (novel 1972)

The Shaft novels are paperback rack thin, fitting easily into a marine’s pocket. The read, quick and intense. But the plots are thin enough to leave lots of room for drinking, smoking, and screwing with room left. When done by space age hacks, books like these were disposable reading between rest stops. When done by someone like Tidyman, they are perfect things of their kind.

A "big, perfectly proportioned, keenly conditioned coffee-brown slab of a man" in his early thirties, John Shaft had grown up on the streets of Harlem then went to ‘Nam to stay out of prison. He carries scars from the gang rumbles of his youth, from the war, and a few bullet scars taken in the private eye field. His office is in Times Square. His bachelor pad is in Greenwich Village, across the street from his hangout, the No Name Bar.

Unlike the movie version, Shaft has no facial hair; to him, men with mustaches are "unsanitary assholes". He isn’t picky about his cases, but he has an extremely low tolerance for bullshit.

"The ripping sound you’re gonna hear, cocksucker, is your arm coming out of the socket."
Shaft Has A Ball (novel, 1973)

To go with the sex and violence, Tidyman has a taste for the absurd. In Shaft Has A Ball, the crew robbing a luxury hotel of mob money pulls the job during a "fag convention" dressed in drag. Shaft Among The Jews opens with Shaft sitting in his redecorated office after letting his latest chick talk him into hiring a decorator, now "paying the price of pussy" with an office that was like "an old friend had been murdered in his sleep". Then seven Orthodox Jews walk into his office with a case.

In Shaft’s Carnival of Killers, Tidyman starts to subvert the BMF image. On a Caribbean vacation that turns into intrigue, the sex machine takes a break to score a threesome with two chicks from New Jersey in his hotel room, pretending he doesn’t speak English. Instead, they become blind drunk on champagne and Shaft passes out when one of the chicks jumps on his back to ride him like a horse. The book climaxes with a self-consciously overweight Shaft chasing the killer while wearing a too-small toreador costume.

Goodbye, Mr. Shaft takes him to England to bodyguard two little rich boys—as un-Shaft as he gets but still a BMF. It ends with Shaft in a hospital bed looking like a mummy and near death. Reading that one, you can almost feel the end coming. Tidyman wrote seven Shaft novels if you count the one no one’s ever seen, The Last Shaft, which ends with Shaft dead. As though he could see the future of the BMF: meetings.

Copyright© 2003 Raymond Embrack

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UPDATE: Click here to see Raymond Embrack's review of The Last Shaft

RAYMOND EMBRACK is the author of five books, lives in Los Angeles.
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