Artists, Actors Place Ad To Counter ‘Panther’ Critics
African-American artists, actors and activists have joined forces to decry conservative critics of the movie “Panther” and lend support to director Mario Van Peebles and his father, Melvin, who scripted the film.
In a full-page ad that ran in the weekend edition of the Hollywood Reporter, such luminaries as Maya Angelou, Danny Glover, Jesse Jackson, Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Cicely Tyson praised “Panther” as a “message of strength, dignity and empowerment to the African-American community.”
The movie, a fictionalized account of the Black Panther Party and its rise to power in Oakland in the late ‘60s, has been blasted as a “two-hour lie” by the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
Center director David Horowitz took out an ad in Daily Variety last week that aired various complaints about the movie.
A similar ad was rejected by the Hollywood Reporter as “too political,” Horowitz said.
A call placed to the trade paper Monday was not immediately returned.
The film is a largely positive portrait of the Panthers, shedding light on their breakfast program for inner-city children and, primarily, on the pride the organization instilled in black communities.
But the film’s hearty doses of fact and fiction unsettle some; in fact, the story is narrated by a fictional character.
While it is a fact the FBI went after the Panthers with a fierce single-mindedness, the filmmakers accuse law enforcement of consorting with underworld figures to plant cheap drugs in black communities to destroy the Panthers. There is no proof of such a plan.
Van Peebles has said his film is not meant to be a history lesson, but “a broader spectrum of the personal as well as the political and (to) show what the Panthers meant to American society.”
The harshest criticisms have come from former Panthers.
Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, now a Philadelphia community activist, called the film “a false ripoff of the story of the Black Panthers Party.” And Eldridge Cleaver, once the Panthers’ minister of information, described the movie as “a travesty.”
Time magazine referred to the film, the first to depict the rise and fall of the controversial Black Panther Party, as a “Molotov cocktail of fact and fancy.”
In their ad, the African-American leaders questioned Horowitz’s motives for criticizing the movie, asking, rhetorically: “Why such unprecedented and un-American persecutions for this film?”
Horowitz defended his criticisms, saying he hasn’t called for a boycott of “Panther.” Instead, he wants “Panther” audiences to recognize certain fallacies in the script.
Others whose names appeared in the pro-“Panther” ad included Quincy Jones, Spike Lee, Alfre Woodard and Louis Gossett Jr.