January 29, 2004

Ron O'Neal, 1937 - 2004.

Superfly He died on January 13, the day before the special edition DVD of Superfly was released. But as Emory Holmes II writes in the LA Weekly, there was a lot more to Ron O'Neal than Youngblood Priest: "His abiding passions were opera (he had a superb voice), theater, and the social and political absurdities of American life."

But the must-read remembrance is Matt Haber's:

Quentin Tarantino, a self-styled "white Negro" like [Norman] Mailer, used it to express Jules Winnfield's (Samuel Jackson) anger in Pulp Fiction: "Well I'm a mushroom-cloud-laying motherfucker, motherfucker! Every time my fingers touch brain I'm Superfly TNT, I'm the Guns of the Navarone!" Even the toe-headed dork from The Real World: New Orleans named his Web site Supa-Fly.com.

None of these people quite gets what Superfly is about, mostly because they think it was a glorification of crime, ghetto nihilism, and machismo. It most certainly was not. It was all about, as one character said, "gettin' out of the Life," not the pleasure of that life.



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Posted by dwhudson at January 29, 2004 11:31 AM

Comments

That's a cool piece (as you'd expect from low culture) and worthy tribute to O-Neal, but it may be a bit overly charitable about "Superfly".

I recall seeing Curtis Mayfield describe how he was appalled by the project when first approached about it, describing it as something like "an advertisement for selling cocaine" (i forget his exact phrasing). He said he agreed to do the soundtrack only because so he could balance the movie's message, and convey the dark side of the game that he didn't see conveyed properly in the film.

Posted by: Jay Smooth at February 2, 2004 6:46 AM

I always thought SuperFly was a kind of weak movie with a nice soundtrack. I've always been a big fan, however of Phillip Fenty's (Superfly's writer) other film The Baron.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075729/

There's a lot of unexpected depth and quirkiness to this movie and I wonder why no-one seems to take notice to it. Watch out for the mutilated Golan-Globus release of the film, "The Black Cue".. it's almost unrecognizable.

Posted by: Wiley Wiggins at February 6, 2004 11:09 AM