Reasons to Love New York
New Yorkcelebrates the citys timeless, peerless connection to movies.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
When you madeBlack Caesar, where were you in your career at that point?
So I was kind of finding my own way then, establishing the character that I wanted to portray.
I started looking atLittle CaesarwithEdward G. Robinson.
They were called gangsters, but what made them gangsters?
Edward G. Robinson helped little old ladies cross the street, gave them flowers everybody loved him.
But he was a gangster.
So I decided to make my character like that a loved character that was a gangster.
But you never really determined what I did in the movie as a gangster.
You were an assassin, right?No.
Black Caesar was a gangster, period.
But Im killing a bad guy.
Im killing somebody that deserves to be killed, who society hasnt been able to extinguish.
How did you meet the director Larry Cohen?
Ive read a story that Larry Cohenhad not written this for you.I met Larry Cohen a couple times socially.
I knew him from restaurants in Beverly Hills.
Having met him socially, he said, Wow, this is the guy.
I wasnt depending on Larry Cohens script to carry me through because I knew he didnt understand Black motivation.
Do you remember any big changes you made to the script or the plot?Yeah.
To move her uptown from the community that shes living in.
I was under the covers in the bed when she came in to clean the room.
I rise up and I say, Mom, you dont have to work anymore.
This is your place.
And she looks at me and she says, I cant live here.
Black people cant live here.
They would destroy me.
I say, Mom, nobodys going to touch Tommy Gibbss son.
But it didnt work out.
She refused to take it.
She was very resistant.
She said, Jews cant even live in this building.Exactly, exactly.
So that was me indicating the closeness between the families of Black people.
Did you know Harlem before the shoot?I knew the real Harlem.
I didnt know the bullshit Harlem we have now.
That was old Harlem.
It was happening on the street, you know?
And old Harlem was where you shot?We went everywhere.
We meet in the middle of the street and he shoots me.
(We put the gunshot in later.)
I fall down on the street, Im rolling around.
The cars … Nobodys blowing their horn.
I get up, and Im crawling.
I fall across the street into a wastebasket.
I said, Yeah.
He says, Well, be gone in 15 minutes.
Dont be here when I come back.
Wait, youre kidding me.
Because thats an amazing scene.Traffic stopped.
They werent going around.
It stopped both ways, and everyone watched me writhe around with a white suit on.
And my character was at Tiffanys, so I had a Tiffany bag in my hand.
I dropped the Tiffany bag, and Im rolling on the street.
Everybodys walking around me.
Everybodys stopping and looking.
You would think a guy would pick up a Tiffany bag and run off with it.
It was a local guy who picked it up and handed it to me.
You think everybody sort of was like,This has got to be a movie?I dont know.
They didnt know it was a movie because there was no camera.
Were you a little concerned about getting run over?No.
There were no production assistants holding the traffic back?I dont even know where Larry was.
There was no production assistant holding traffic back, man.
You dont hold back free background.
I dont know where Larry was because he couldnt be anywhere to be seen.
He was watching it all from someplace.
Hey, man, that was all guerrilla filmmaking.
Thats amazing.Nobody was standing around waving the people back.
People would step out of a door and jump back when they saw the taxicab coming down the sidewalk.
You couldnt even do that today,.
You just go up on the sidewalk.
The cab driver just did it.
We gave him $100 and after we finished the scene, he took off.
And we had a cart from a supermarket going down the street as a dolly.
They were real people jumping out of this cars way coming down the sidewalk.
But in Harlem, man, I was drawing crowds like crazy when Im walking down the street.
That worked out fine for the character of Black Caesar.
So it worked better in Harlem for the realism.
Anybody that was walking with us in another side of town we had to pay as an extra.
We didnt have to pay those people in Harlem because they were happy to see me.
I had some notoriety.
Did Larry prepare the crew?
This is all guerrilla.
Or did you guys just know this was the deal?No.
The crew dont care.
I did a film calledOriginal Gangstas.
They had a midnight basketball team, and that was all the thugs, all the bad guys.
But it was a midnight league.
I went to the midnight league and watched them.
Then after it was over, I blew a whistle and stood in the middle.
Listen, Im going to make a movie.
I need you guys to be in my movie.
These guys were very polite.
These guys were on time.
These guys just needed somebody to respect them.
Did they have minor roles, or were they just extras?They was extras.
They were the fighting guys.
They were the thugs.
They played their role believably.
We wanted guys who didnt have to fake being what they were.
Just be what you are.
And if you win the goddamned fight, well change the movie.
But if you hit me, Im going to kick your ass.
And then you go back, Oops, I didnt mean that back either.
It made it popular because a lot of people started shooting movies down there after that.
They figured it was safe; it was okay now.
The only change was it got expensive to shoot there because guys started to ask for money.
Youre going to show the name of my store, you got to give me some money.
$50, $100, or something for showing the name of my store.
So they got very businesslike down there.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
