The Black Panther Party, Hollywood, and Popular Memory 11
movement as a threat to the traditional gender and racial order which may only
be redeemed through violence.
While the box office success of the reactionary Forrest Gump is
lamentable, the dialectic in filmmaking remains an operative factor in the
industry. The racist imagery contained in Birth o f a Nation convinced AfricanAmericans to make their own films to counteract white control over
representation of the black commimity.^^ Similarly, a year after Forrest Gump,
Mario Van Peebles and Gramercy Pictures released Panther, which sought to
depict the BPP as playing a historically significant role in the black liberation
struggles of the 1960s. Unfortunately, Panther failed to attract much of an
audience, earning only $6,834,535 during its brief theatrical release.'"^ While
Forrest Gump dominated popular culture. Van Peebles’s Panther introduces the
possibility of popular film presenting alternative visions of the past not shared
by the dominant culture.
Van Peebles asserted that his film on the BPP was intended as what the
filmmaker termed “edutainment” rather than a documentary. Acknowledging
that some critics might classify Panther as a political thriller. Van Peebles
explained that he was hoping to attract a younger audience.
The movie had to move, to have a flow, a rhythm, and, yeah,
some humor. If the film rocks, if it not only informs but
entertains as well, then maybe, just maybe, the kids might go,
not just the folks who know, not just the baby boomers who
remember, but the younger brothers and sisters who need it the
most. Like the one in our early test marketing for the film who
said he thought ‘Huey Newton’ was a cookie.
The director encountered difficulty in funding the film, spuming the
efforts of one studio executive to impose a white heroic figure upon the story of
the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, the filmmaker did not perceive his film as
anti-white, concluding, “Ultimately, the Black Panther Party was an indelible
part of American history. To do the movement justice, I can only hope that the
film, like the Party, has an emotional resonance that exceeds color lines.”^^ In
the final analysis, the commercial success enjoyed by Van Peebles as a director
with New Jack City (1991) and Posse (1993) secured the funding necessary to
make Panther.
Van Peebles’s interest in making a film on the Panthers owes much of
its origins to his father, filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, whose novel on the
Panthers is the source for the screenplay. The elder Van Peebles was a favorite
of the Panthers, especially Huey Newton, owing to his 1971 film Sweet
Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Many film historians credit Sweetback as
beginning the wave of black exploitation films of the 1970s in which, for better
or worse, Hollywood discovered black audiences. Made on a shoestring budget