Jim Brown by Dave Zirin

Author:Dave Zirin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

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The Hollywood where Jim Brown initially built his film career in the late 1960s and the 1970s was a unique time in the history of the movie business. It was when a young generation of filmmakers were turning on to sex, drugs, and social struggles and creating a new commerce that fit the tastes of the baby boomer/flower power era.

Before this time, Hollywood was a top-down, vertically operated system controlled by wealthy overlords: studio chiefs who ran star-system assembly lines that were populated almost entirely by white actors and actresses. But in the late 1960s and the 1970s, just as on campuses and in communities throughout the country, things ceased to be the way they had always been. Movies like The Graduate, Easy Rider, and Bonnie and Clyde signaled an utter reorganization of the studio system. A new generation of young directors—auteurs—like Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, and Scorsese were given an unprecedented amount of power to realize their visions.

This new paradigm could not have taken shape without the movements of the 1960s, and these struggles also created space for a rugged black presence like Jim Brown to emerge as a new kind of screen star. But there were still limitations. While this was the era when auteurs could challenge studio chiefs for creative supremacy, these auteurs were almost invariably white men, albeit with shaggier hair, and weed on their breath instead of whiskey. Not even someone with the fame and drive of Jim Brown was able to chart his own path in a Hollywood dream factory just awakening from a monochromatic reverie.

Brown, with his NFL stardom, good looks, and powerful frame, was approached about acting while still an active player. He was in Los Angeles for the 1964 Pro Bowl, and “a guy from 20th Century Fox” walked up to him and said he should come down to the studio lot for a screen test. As Brown remembered, “I broke into Hollywood the old-fashioned way. I knew somebody.” Even though Brown had no acting experience, he quickly “caught the bug.” Brown first arrived in Hollywood during the NFL off-season. His debut film was a 1964 western, Rio Conchos; he played a U.S. Cavalry officer, a Buffalo soldier, sent to investigate how Apaches in Mexico were getting their hands on powerful U.S. Army rifles. The film is a liberal morality play. Star Richard Boone is a highly trained ex–Confederate soldier who hates the Apaches because they killed his family. Early in the film, his character is arrested and forced to lead a ragtag, multicultural scout team made up of a Union officer, an Apache woman, a “knife-wielding Mexican” played by Tony Franciosa, and Jim Brown. They discover that the person who is supplying the Apaches with weapons is actually another ex–Confederate soldier, played by Edmond O’Brien. The film ends with Boone’s character overcoming his racism and dying to save the Apache woman and the Union officer. Brown’s character is killed as well, which may have been the official start of

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