Bootlegging The New Yorker For Posterity

Wyatt Cenac and Donwill Illustration by João Fazenda

NOTE: This was published in the print edition of the July 25, 2022, issue, with the headline “Screen Sounds”. Consider this post the equivalent of framing it and hanging it on a wall. The article is copy/pasted from The New Yorker.

This spring, the comedian Wyatt Cenac and the rapper Donwill reintroduced “Shouting at the Screen,” their pop-up Blaxploitation-film experience, at Nitehawk Prospect Park. There were technical difficulties. What do comedians and rappers know about A.V. setups? Turns out, not a lot. At one point, the screen went blank. “We had to explain that this wasn’t part of the movie,” Cenac said, the other day. The film re-started but shut off again minutes later.

“So we had a sing-along,” Donwill said. “I’m not sure why, but we sang ‘September.’ ”

Alcohol and food helped mollify the crowd. “I have to imagine there were some people who were, like, ‘We paid for a babysitter. I don’t care how long this takes, we are not going back to those children,’ ” Cenac said.

Cenac, who is currently working on animated television and film projects for Warner Bros., and Donwill, who recently released a quarantine-inspired album called “SPACE,” have been friends for twelve years. They were sitting on a mid-century-modern couch at the record store Legacy Dumbo, where they were shopping for music to play at the next installment of “Shouting at the Screen,” at the end of July. “It started more than a decade ago, at an event space in Dumbo,” Cenac said, of the screening series. “But then that place got shut down for questionable business practices.”(The owner was convicted of tax fraud and grand larceny in 2014.) The show moved on to a spot in Williamsburg, then to the Bell House, in Gowanus; the Alamo Drafthouse, in downtown Brooklyn; South by Southwest, in Austin; and Sketchfest, in San Francisco, before the pandemic put it on hiatus. For the first movie screening since lockdown, Cenac and Donwill chose “Willie Dynamite,” from 1974, which stars an actor named Roscoe Orman.

They typically pair a movie with drinking games; for “Willie Dynamite,” each time Willie wore brightly colored attire members of the audience took a drink. “The guy who plays Willie was hired to play Gordon on ‘Sesame Street’ the same year, so, looking at a lot of Willie Dynamite’s outfits, we kept trying to tie them to ‘Sesame Street,’ ” Cenac said. Bernard Johnson, the film’s costume designer, who later worked on “New Jack City,” dressed Orman, in one scene, in green bell-bottoms, a fur coat, and an oversized Cossack hat, making him look a little like Oscar the Grouch.

The movie follows pimps and prostitutes as they weigh the pros and cons of unionizing. “The social worker in that movie turns out to be the hero, because she is trying to provide the sex workers with alternatives,” Cenac, who wore a bucket hat with two Charlie Brown pins and a vintage Malcolm X T-shirt, said. The plot bore a resemblance to a recent viral Reddit post about college women forming what they called a “hoe union.” (Among other things, the students vowed to leave any party if they couldn’t mix their own drinks, if the hosts were sexual harassers, or if male-to-female ratios were enforced.) Cenac and Donwill discussed.

“The first thing I thought was, Is it like something with OnlyFans?” Donwill, who wore a Basquiat T-shirt, said. “But I think the concept is on point.”

They started to riffle through records. They wouldn’t say what film they would be playing at the next screening, but they were looking for albums that honored the Blaxploitation era. Cenac gravitated toward a drawer labelled “R. & B. Soul/Funk.” He picked out a 1989 LP called “Stay with Me,” by Regina Belle. “I haven’t seen this album since I was a teen-ager,” he said, and reminisced about listening to requests come in on late-night radio. “Those always felt like these awkward, tension-filled cliffhangers. Does the crush listen to the radio at night?”

Donwill, perched on a red stool, peered at “Right On Be Free,” from 1970, by the Voices of East Harlem. He began spinning the stool in circles. “The typography is really cool,” he said. He found a trumpet resting on a Fender Rhodes piano and posed for a picture with it.

Talk turned to the films. “Blaxploitation gets looked at in cinema as this sort of outrageous time, but it was also really a hotbed of independent filmmaking, and it doesn’t get credited that way,” Cenac said. Filmmakers compensated for meagre production budgets with catchy soundtracks, and by taking advantage of an untapped pool of talent. Cenac brought up “The Thing with Two Heads,” a 1972 film about an experiment in which a white man’s head is surgically attached to a Black man’s body. “Rick Baker, who would go on to be an Oscar-winning special-makeup-effects artist, that’s the first movie he ever worked on,” he said. He flipped through a drawer of records and paused at a Herbie Mann and Bill Evans album. “There’s a chase sequence in ‘Cleopatra Jones’ that takes place in the L.A. River basin,” he said. “Everyone says ‘Bullitt’ is the movie that has the best car-chase scene. But maybe there’s an argument to be made for ‘Cleopatra Jones.’ ”

The pair gathered up their haul, which included “Wild and Free,” by Dazz Band, and “Joy,” by Teddy Pendergrass. Donwill showed Cenac the cover of another of his selections, “Steamin’ Hot,” by the Reddings. “Look, it’s T.L.C.!” he said. ♦