How Samuel L. Jackson Became his Own Genre

It was after “Jungle Fever” that Jackson began to see scripts that no longer had him wondering “which page I was killed on.” Most of those scripts “had Denzel’s fingerprints on them, but I had no issue with that.” Some (“White Sands,” “Amos & Andrew”) led to feature roles, but most ended up with him playing Sancho Panza to a host of white stars like Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis and Geena Davis. The secret to playing these sidekicks, he said, was to approach the part “as if I was the audience member hanging out” with the star — a selfless job, but he didn’t mind. Sometimes the sidekick role was written for a white character, and Jackson played it without color; other times he played the white role as a black man. And sometimes those sidekicks were black characters, like Zeus Carver in “Die Hard: With a Vengeance,” which he was able to embellish with his electric flourishes. “Zeus Carver was the most like me of any character I ever played,” Jackson said. In an early scene, Willis is forced to stand on a street corner in Harlem wearing a racist sandwich board. A group of black men see him and approach in anger. Across the street, Zeus Carver emerges from his small shop, sees what’s about to happen and comes between the men and Willis. After he saves Willis, he berates him for being such a crazy white racist. It’s obvious that Zeus Carver is a racist, too, but it’s persona for show, worn on the outside like the pimp suits on Jackson’s blaxploitation heroes. And it’s a pose that the fundamentally fair and humane Zeus Carver is unable to sustain.

When Jackson had starring roles in two Tarantino movies, Jules in “Pulp Fiction” and Ordell Robbie in “Jackie Brown,” it did not play well with some black directors like Spike Lee and the Hughes brothers. According to Jackson, Lee told him he used too many “niggers” in “Jackie Brown.” “Spike thinks he’s got the pulse of the whole race,” Jackson said. “I think he was having this thing with Quentin.” When the Hughes brothers, who cast Jackson in “Menace II Society,” complained that white directors didn’t have the right to use black street talk in their movies, Jackson said, he asked them, “How many times I say ‘nigger’ in your film?” In Jackson’s view, “You can’t censor another artist because you say he’s the wrong race.”

Jackson also has no patience with those who put down early black actors like Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit, whose work reinforced demeaning racial stereotypes. “If you wanted to work in film in those days,” he said, “that’s what you did. They were proud of who they were, which gave them a nice life in the black community of Beverly Hills.” Then he told me a story he heard years ago from a gaffer about Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, a k a Stepin Fetchit, the first millionaire black film star, whose roles as “the laziest man in the world” have been so reviled by African-Americans that they seldom appear on TV anymore. Perry, who made 54 films between 1925 and 1976, presented certain problems on a set. The light used to illuminate the faces of white actors didn’t fare as well with black faces. So a new, smaller and more intense light was developed to illuminate black skin. One day, Perry took his place for a scene, and the director called for “the nigger light.” Perry walked off the set and refused to return until the name of that light was changed. It has been known ever since as the inky. (Until he heard this story, Jackson said, he always thought “inky” was short for “incandescent.”)

Jackson went on to ask me if I knew that at the ceremony at which Hattie McDaniel won her Oscar for “Gone With the Wind” she was seated by the door to the kitchen. “We had people who were pioneers, and I appreciate what they did for me,” he said. “They paved the way for guys like Sidney Poitier to let his dignity show through. I’m not some guy who doesn’t know who Jackie Robinson was.”

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