A Conversation with Kevin Willmott.

Kevin Willmott is, by necessity, a person of many talents. As an independent filmmaker on a small (sometimes approaching nonexistent) budget, he must be, by turns, screenwriter, actor, producer, director, impresario, and salesperson to keep his projects afloat and on track. To survive financially between films, he often works for other filmmakers and in other theatrical areas, over the past several years writing or co-writing several screenplays for film and television, as well as acting in or directing plays in a variety of venues. Finally, as an assistant professor in the film department of the University of Kansas, he teaches regular classes on a year-round basis. Needless to say, Willmott has been involved in every phase of filmmaking and theater, yet he's also a long-time social activist, working for years on behalf of the homeless and even leading demonstrations for fair employment practices.

While best known for his film Ninth Street (Ideal, 1999), in the last five years Willmott has also written or co-written six other screenplays and three television scripts, acted in or directed a number of plays, and served as a "script doctor" for such notable directors as Oliver Stone. The screenplays, most of which he co-wrote with Mitch Brian, include: Shields Green and the Gospel of John Brown, purchased for 20th Century Fox by producer Chris Columbus, which tells the story of Green, an ex-slave and disciple of Frederick Douglass who accompanied Brown to Harper's Ferry, where he died; Civilized Tribes, about the conflict that occurs when a woman of mixed African American and Native American heritage falls in love with a railroad tycoon in late nineteenth-century Oklahoma, also written for 20th Century Fox; Little Brown Brothers, re-written for Stone, which takes place during the Philippine Insurrection and centers on a black soldier who finds he is fighting on the wrong side in a war of racial exterminat ion; Marching to Valhalla, an adaptation of a book for young adults about Custer by Michael Blake, also done for Stone; C.S.A., an imaginative drama Willmott is presently making in the Lawrence, Kansas, area, which explores what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War and slavery continued until the present; and Colored Men, his most recent screenplay, which explores the deadly Houston race riot of 1917 and the trial that followed.

Since 1998, Willmott has also co-written three teleplays with Brian. The first, due to air this year on NBC, is House of Getty, about the life of financier J. Paul Getty. The second, The 70's, a two-part series shown in early 2000 on NBC, follows two protagonists, one white and one black, through the events of this turbulent decade, including Watergate and Vietnam. The last is a rewrite for CBS of an adaptation of a novel by Christopher Paul Curtis called The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, about a Northern black family who visit their aging grandmother in the South.

In addition, Willmott has been active in the theater. In 1998, he directed the play Buffalo Hair, by Carlisle Brown at Kansas City's Coterie Theater. The following year he directed Little Tommy Parker's Celebrated Minstrel Show, also by Brown. And in 2000, he played Oedipus in a production of Sophocles's Oedipus the King at Southwest Missouri State University.

In the following interview, Willmott talks about all of his projects and what he sees as their common vision. Mostly he discusses the film Ninth Street, because he spent so much time with it and because it seems to sum up his views about America and race at this point in our history. The film, which was released directly to video in 1999, is about the last days of an all-black business district in a small Kansas town, Junction City, located next to Fort Riley, the large army training base. The time is 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. The district, situated primarily on one block of East 9th Street, had been in existence since before World War I, when the Tenth Cavalry (Buffalo Soldiers) had been stationed at Fort Riley. The district served the legitimate needs of Junction City's sizable African American community (who largely migrated there after the Civil War)-such as hair care, transportation, food service, and entertainment-and the illicit needs- including prostitution, gambling, drinking, and, eventu ally, drugs-of Fort Riley soldiers, both black and white. Finally demolished as a purported nuisance in 1976 by order of the (all-white) Junction City Commission, 9th Street has been depicted, usually disparagingly, at different periods of its existence in accounts as varied as Joseph Stanley Pennell's 1944 novel The History of Rome Hanks, a bestseller about post-Civil War Kansas, and David Parks's Vietnam memoir GI Diary. Many people, however, remember it as a center of black culture, purportedly visited by legendary jazz figures such as Charlie Parker and Jimmie Smith. The film Ninth Street attempts to capture this varied sense of the street's character.

Ninth Street portrays the interactions of its two main characters, aging winos named Huddie and Bebo (played by Willmott and Don Washington), with the operators of the street's legal businesses-for instance, the owners of a cab stand (Issac Hayes) and a restaurant (blues singer Queen Bey)-as well as the practitioners of its illegal ones, including pimps, prostitutes, and gangsters. The film's only white character is an activist Catholic minister played by Martin Sheen. The events of 1968, primarily the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, as well as Vietnam, form the backdrop for both the film and Willmott's vision of present-day America. As he elaborated to me in the course of the interview that follows, this period was, in his view, a nodal point in the development of African American society.

Willmott, who was reared in Junction City, originally wrote, produced, and performed in Ninth Street as a play, but, as he says, he always thought of it as a movie. Eight years in production, primarily because he made it incrementally as he could raise money, Ninth Street attempts to show how a certain spirituality has been lost to the black community as it has pursued middle-class status and material success. Through the film Willmott advocates a return to a sense of selfhelp and mutual dependency necessary to the salvation of the black community, a somewhat more conservative message than is normally seen in contemporary African American films. Stylistically, too, the film differs: Edited in a Robert Altman-like, nonlinear set of encounters between characters, it depicts small-town community life, as opposed to that of the urban ghetto; and its violent episodes take place primarily y off-screen. In the interview, Willmott talks about both the substance and the style of Ninth Street, how they evolved from hi s own past, and how he projects his uniquely spiritual vision into his work.

Loeb: Before we talk about Ninth Street in particular, what do you see as some of the commonalties of all your projects?

Willmott: That's a good question. I don't think I've ever thought about it in those terms, because the projects seem to arise individually. One thing that's obviously present in all of them is race, of course, but also the concept of leadership-whether or not to assume it at some crucial point. In Shields Green, there's a reluctant leader/hero. it's like The 70's in the sense that there's a kid-Shields Green, in this case-who is running from reality, and he ends up embracing the reality of race and assuming the mantle of leadership. I mean, at first Green only wants to get his family free from slavery, but then he grows into a person who believes that all slaves need to be free.

In Colored Men, Baltimore, the main character, is at first resistant to accepting or responding to the plight of the men in Houston who are so obviously victims of the Army's murderous racism, yet he ends up leading a rebellion against the Houston police. His background is privileged, and he embraces a Du Boisian, closed-rank nation. In fact, he's sent by Du Bois himself to study ways to integrate the military; Du Bois historically was heavily involved in the defense of the men in Houston. In the film, of course, I have him involved beforehand.

Loeb: In other words this theme, leadership in overcoming racial prejudice, connects to all historical periods; it's a continuum. Willmott: Yes, Frederick Douglass sends Green to meet John Brown, similar to Colored Men. Each tells the black leader a truth that he doesn't understand--for example, Baltimore says to Du Bois, you don't understand the plight of ordinary blacks.

Loeb: Because he's operating mainly according to ideals.

Willmott: Yes, though pragmatics enter in, particularly when it comes to the concrete realities of slavery. Douglass is a politician, so he needs both, but that's the conflict--between the political and the emotional.

Loeb: How does C.S.A. fit into your oeuvre?

willmott: Well, as I said, identity is the other big commonality, along with leadership. Here, the main subject, Fauntroy, falls from leadership because of a racial identity problem that he's in denial about. He's a sort of Confederate Kennedy, charismatic, and he always finds ways to keep slavery going. The pretext is that the BBC wants to inter-view some slaves, and they're being sent hand-picked people, of course, because the C.S.A. wants to keep a tight rein on what's said. Fauntroy promotes one named Horace, who he thinks is trustworthy, and the BBC interviews him. But, unfortunately for Fauntroy, Horace knows Fauntroy's background--which is that he has some black blood. Now this is a big, big problem, one that gets into a consideration of DNA analysis because Fauntroy tries to evade the problem by giving a mock-Clintonian answer.

Loeb: How do you see Little Brown Brothers fitting into this scheme, and for that matter where does it stand at this point?

Wilimolt: Well, it's still in development. Oliver Stone farmed it out to another director. It's essentially a rewrite of a totally different script from some Philippine writers. Stone liked the basic setting, which has a natural analogy to Vietnam, and called Mitch Brian and me in to look at the script, which we did. Then we pitched the new idea, and he bought it.

However, back to your first question, Little Brown Brothers is also about racial identity. In fact, it's basically a metaphor for this problem. The Philippine War was about assimilation, ostensibly about bringing the American way of life to the people of the Philippines, and for them it became assimilate or die, literally. The metaphor is that this white soldier is sent there and finds out that the situation is more complex than he's been told. His sergeant is an abusive racist; in fact, the war, he finds out, is all about race and lying about identity in a national sense--forcing a certain identity on people. Like Vietnam, it's ultimately a race war.

The film is based on an actual historical figure, a guy named Fagin, who deserted and led the Philippine nationals against the Americans. In fact, General Funston became obsessed by him and undertook a virtual vendetta. I took this basic story and built on it. The white soldier who is the main character has found out he's part black and undergoes a crisis of identity. Eventually, he sees that his interests are more with the Philippine rebels than with the American colonialists, and he deserts to join Fagin. He decides that the rationale of just doing your job is no excuse when a thing is wrong.

Loeb: So it's a case of conscience prevailing over duty?

Willmott: Yes, it's all about conscience, which is the struggle, and one that should occur before you go to war as a nation, not after the fact. We lied to get there in the Philippines, and it's obviously not the last time this happened.

So the metaphor of Little Brown Brothers revolves around our lying to get there and then claiming to see the truth. Of course, then the rationale changes, just like it did with Vietnam: "Yeah, but now we're too involved to get out."

Loeb: You mentioned The 70's earlier. Flow does it tie in?

Willmott: Well, we see the same theme in the Watergate story in that film. Byron, the main white character, basically doesn't understand. He's lied to by his father, his country, even his own self. He doesn't face up to the truth until Nixon goes down. It's another example of a conscience gained almost too late, after CoIntel-Pro and the FBI destruction of black leadership.

Loeb: How about the theme of identity in C.S.A.?

Willmott: Well, it's about how we got here racially from the images and norms being the things that defined black people. By reversing the concepts, we expose the flaws underlying these images. The South really didn't give up anything important after the Civil War; their way of life was maintained for another century. In the process they came to define black people in this country; Cone with the Wind is a good example. In trying to unify North and South, the North in essence agreed to accept a lie about slavery. Even in reversing the situation, the South wants the North to come back into the fold; they're going to romanticize the war. They're not going to talk about the real issue, a common identity in a common lie, which was that the war was never about slavery, but rather States' rights. This goes down a lot easier than genocide. So, the result is that the classic image of the slave is a happy, nonthreatening one--for example, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen--that black people spent decades trying to live down. All my films deal with the complexities of African American identity and the lies that have to be broken down to arrive at a more secure self-definition of who we are.

Loeb: Let's talk about Ninth Street. It seems like one of the reasons you got involved in the project in the first place, even as a play, was from a sense of personal history, obviously because you were there and saw it firsthand. How much did this figure in?

Willmoti: Well, I could never call myself a 9th Street expert. For one thing, my parents wouldn't allow me to go down there. You know, we'd sneak down there when we were in high school. But more than anything I grew up hearing about it, which in some ways might be better than if I'd been an actual participant. I got to hear the other side of the story, the one about who these people down there really were--not about the vice but about 9th Street as a cultural center. They were my parents' friends, and I got to hear about their personal lives, their personal problems, their struggles trying to keep going. These were--most of them, anyway--legitimate business people.

Loeb: Like your mother, for instance? She ran a restaurant, didn't she?

Willmott: She ran a pool hail. She didn't own it; she just ran it--the one on the side of the Blue Note Grill. But my father would never let me go down there, although I do remember him talking to some guys one day. It's a very vague memory. They were sitting on the corner, I think in front of B&W Cab. They sat under a tree, a situation which is kind of like my old couch in the movie. He was very kind to them, and they seemed to be old buddies. They just had a quick conversation and moved on. That was kind of the vibe that created the idea.

Loeb: So you remember a feeling, just from that one encounter, that has grown into the entire project?

Willmott: Yeah, and of course I just took that and did what I wanted. But the street had this kind of feeling, as most of those streets do: "I'm here and I'm waiting to see what's going to happen." I mean these guys like Bebo and Huddie in the film aren't going to go anywhere; they're not going to do anything; they just kind of wait to see what's going to happen. And that's what these two men were like that my father was talking to. They're always there, or in the pool hail if it's raining.

Loeb: The whole thing just started with a series of impressions on your part. That was its gestation as much as anything else?

Willmott: I think so. I wanted to say something about 9th Street, but it was when I decided to center it around the two old winos on the sofa and linked it to what I wanted to say about the people and the period that it all came together. It never existed as a documentary--nothing like, "I want to document 9th Street." It started as a thing of wanting to explore some topics that I was very interested in. I didn't think the incidents that actually occurred were nearly so important as 9th Street was as a place, as a function.

Loeb: What kind of place, what kind of function, did you see in it?

Willmott: Well, two different functions. One, which I got from my parents and their friends, is the whole function of it as business district, as ownership of the black district. You know, "This is ours. This is where I go to have a beer, to have a bite to eat, to get my hair cut, to catch a cab. This is ours." Also, with that, there's the aspect of "This is the party street; this is where I go to have a good time." When my parents went out with their friends, to drink or to get something to eat, that's where they went.

And, of course, the other function of the district is the whole thing of its being there for the black soldier. Being able to explore the military allows me to get into the war in Vietnam and the street's dependency on the military: the positives about that, the negatives about that, and how that eventually is what killed the street in some ways. The dependency brought in people who didn't care about the street, who just wanted to use it for their own ends. They, along with the city commission, eventually brought the whole place to an end.

Loeb: Although you fictionalize it, you eventually focus on the Tilly Polite shooting in the character Queen Bey plays, Mama Butler. Of course, it was an actual event, and a pretty famous one, since the State Supreme Court case is still in all the law books.

Willmott: Tilly was a friend of my mother's, and her murder hurt my mother very dearly. I remember her coming back from the funeral crying, and I think that, symbolically, what I tried to do with that shooting is to show what eventually killed the street. When Tilly and James Gilham and the other leaders of the street either left or were killed, then the real foundation that held that place together was gone. The old timers kept 9th Street as a functional business district, but when they died or left, these other influences came in and completely exploited the area. I don't deal with the Tilly shooting in the film the way it actually occurred, but her death and the effect it had on my mother are lasting impressions that I really had to make an important statement about.

Loeb: Just to change subjects a little, Isaac Hayes, who's made a real comeback lately, not only plays a fairly significant part in the film but also did the original music. How were you able to get him for a low-budget film by an unknown with no money?

Willmott: A woman who owns a talent agency in Kansas City had a connection with him and said he might be interested. So we sent him just his part, and he really liked it. He said it reminded him of growing up in Memphis. Isaac, you know, grew up at the time of the film. He knew the old timers, the kind of neighborhoods they had then, who ran those kind of joints, what they cared about. If you needed taking care of, needed a meal, they'd take you in the back and feed you- that whole world that is gone to a large degree. Usually, Isaac plays a tough guy or a detective. Because he's got that great look and that great voice, they always cast him as a tough guy and put a gun in his hand. He rarely gets the opportunity to play something he knows. You don't know who Isaac is in this movie for a long time. One of the neat things he did was that he never took his hat off. I think he did that because he wanted to show people that he is a character actor; he doesn't just have to be a heavy. He's told me that this is the best thing he's ever done, and I think it's because he's never had an opportunity to do anything like this before. But it's also because he liked working with us; he knew we didn't have any money and were struggling. You know, he had just been in this movie, It Could Happen to You, and they had him staying in one of the best hotels in New York. Then he comes over to our movie, and we're taking up a collection for ice, and he was just really beautiful. He didn't play the big star role, yet he made the whole thing fun.

Loeb: What about Martin Sheen? He seems to suggest that there's a broader, caring community out there, one that doesn't concern itself with mere materiality? In fact, didn't Sheen agree to a part in the film because of your work on behalf of the homeless?

Willmott: Partly. The thing that introduced me to him, that got me in to see him, was our mutual friendship with Dan Berrigan. That got Tim Rebman, my co-director, and me kind of a handshake with him that let us start talking. He invited us to his trailer while he was working on Matter of Justice, and we rapped some more. I think he really did like what we were about, but I also think he liked the things we'd done on our film.

Loeb: What about the part you wrote for him, as a white priest-can you explain how that fits in?

Willmott: I wrote him in as Father Frank Coady, an activist priest who's come down on the street. Back in those days, priests would come down, hang out, and help out in various ways. In terms of plot, he has a scene with a young preacher, Johnny, that serves to show the difference in how both these guys think religion should work in the world. Johnny believes that religion is not a worldly thing at all--that it only has to do with getting to heaven--whereas Father Coady believes very much that religion should have something to do with the here and now and should affect people's lives in positive ways, not just through spiritual assistance and guidance but also through making sure they have enough to eat or a place to stay. Father Coady says, for instance, "Dr. King says that the church is a place to go forth from." And Johnny's reply is, "If King had been in the church being Reverend King instead of out on the streets being Dr. King, he wouldn't be dead now." That's to me the real issue in American religion n ow. The church has to have a real effect on people's lives.

Loeb: You base the character Martin Sheen plays on a real person, a priest actually named Frank Coady. Can you talk about this?

Willmott: Yes. In 1974 I got thrown out of a public high school and was essentially on the street. Through a job that I got at the local Catholic cemetery I ran into Father Frank, who was a deacon at the time, and it really changed my life because he allowed me to go back to school at Saint Xavier. We became really close friends; he was very interested in movies and supported me in my interests in that area, really pushed me to go to college. He also opened my eyes up to the social justice side of the Catholic Church, mainly through the work of the Berrigans. This is the side that I love about the Church, the side that ultimately caused me to become a Catholic. There are a lot of other things that I can take or leave, but that side I really love. There are some great heroes that come out of that side of the Church. I was able to meet Dan Berrigan and other people who influence me in everything I do.

Father Coady was never down on 9th Street; he was around pretty much right when it was being closed down. But the activism that we did in Junction City together is what I tried to capture in the film. He was a person who got involved with me and my friends and my community and tried to help the community, very much like Father Grappi and other people who were activists in the sixties, and tried to help out. What I tried to do was take Father Coady as a person and match him with people like Father Grappi and Father Berrigan, people that I knew had been activists at that time in the sixties, and I made this character down on 9th Street with Martin.

Loeb: Let's talk about Ninth Street in the context of other African American films. Where do you see yourself in terms of what's going on today?

Wilimolt: My personal outlook on things is probably a little different from that of the other men and women making black-oriented films right now. I come from a somewhat different background, a more rural background; I was an activist for the homeless.

Loeb: Which makes you simultaneously more progressive and more conservative.

Willmott: Exactly. I paid personally for my activism. It wasn't just vocalizing about issues, but rather acting on my beliefs. This gives you a different perspective on things; at least I hope it does. If you're smart it does. I think the big thing we do in Ninth Street is deal with violence as subject matter but not as a tool to sell the film.

Loeb: Its representation isn't particularly graphic?

Willmott: No, and even if one could call it graphic, the small amount of it in a story that's about a very violent street, or violent situation, is more indicative of what we're trying to do. I'm more interested in exploring the issues of violence than in seeing violence. A problem all filmmakers have right now is that people have seen violence for so long in movies, and seen it so vividly portrayed, that it's hard to shock them with violence any more. It seems to me that we need to look more internally--not so much depict the violence as explore its roots, the reasons that we are being violent.

I think that, after films like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, movies about the hood became less effective. We've seen it; we know it now; anything more about it just becomes grist for the mill. I'd like to see a movie that explores life in the hood, but taken to the next level. Take it to what the future is going to be, maybe an absurd level. Maybe by taking it to an absurd level we can see more clearly what's going on now. If we take it out of the bounds of reality--these movies have all been ultra-reality-based--we might get a whole new perspective. If you're numb to what's going on today in the hood, if you're numb to seeing black people murdered every day on television, if you're numb to seeing young black men hauled off every day in the movies, maybe I can re-humanize you if I can put the hood in another context. Maybe I can fight the dehumanization of all of us, because I think that's the ultimate problem. I'm interested in exploring more hopeful themes.

Loeb: While we're on the subject of violence, can we shift to Colored Men for a minute? I know it's about violence of a different type--white on black--and takes place nearly a century ago. Where does this film stand?

Willmott: It's been difficult finding a home for it. A lot of people claim to admire the script, but it appears that it may be too controversial for them. Which says something about race: Things may have gotten better, but only in very confined terms. The question the script raises--even transposed to that point in history, 1920--is whether violence is ever justified. After all, there had been virtual genocide going on for fifty years, since the 1870s.

However, Hollywood isn't particularly comfortable with this fact; it would just as soon call it and show it as something else, something more limited or isolated. Rosewood is the only Hollywood film to really explore this period, and the message they got from it was that this sort of thing doesn't do well. A former agent told me this right off the bat, and this is the reason he's former. Hollywood people have a tough time even talking about the subject of systematized white violence against blacks. The whites start feeling guilty and the blacks angry. There's no progress; everyone just clams up.

Loeb: So you don't have any takers right now?

Willmott: Well, I've had several people show some interest, but they'd like me to tone down the violence. That's also true of the Birmingham story. There are lots of cliches when it comes to slavery--hounds, whips, singing. We try to use examples outside of those. We're trying to make the horror horrific on another level, the psychological.

Loeb: Tell me, if you will, about any plays or films that influenced you.

Willmott: Well, playwrights more than filmmakers, I think. A couple of the playwrights that influenced me were David Mamet and Charles Fuller--Soldier's Play, especially. I like Fuller's historical emphasis there. I think that one of the films that really influenced Ninth Street was Nothing But a Man by Michael Roemer, which came out in 1964. Abbey Lincoln and Ivan Dixon are in the film. It was a real breakthrough at the time because, although Roemer was a white director, the film showed some images of blacks that people had never seen. It was a very small, very intimate movie, and it let me know that something small could be very profound; that's one of our objectives with Ninth Street as well. I also went to a lot of Blaxploitation movies when I was a kid, and they influenced me in knowing that you could make independent films. You know, Sweet Sweetback and some of those things that came along before Spike Lee regenerated interest in black independent film.

Loeb: So what you're working on is not in the mainstream of black filmmaking, in your estimation?

Willmott: I don't think so. There are probably moments that look like other movies, but I think the philosophy that's behind the film, the approach, is very different. That's not to say that we're special, you know; it's just different. In so many of the films that Hollywood makes right now--and this doesn't necessarily refer to the directors, who may be black, but all the people who really make the film and sell it, the real power--you get to see this kind of filtered image of black people. A lot of people think there are a lot of negative images of black people, and obviously there are, but even the ones that aren't particularly negative are still filtered.

Loeb: What do you mean by filtered?

Willmott: I mean that basically Madison Avenue and Hollywood--I include Madison Avenue because so much of Hollywood is about selling--know black people, but they know them through a filter. They know certain types of black people: For instance, they know a hip-hop black kid, now; they definitely know that. So when they go in to do something like a Kool-Aid commercial, they say, "Okay, I need a hip-hop type of black kid to play this part." When that kid comes in and auditions, they know what they're looking for and go, "That's him." Now, that kid may have nothing to do with black life in reality, but somehow there's this kind of image that's been created through movies, television shows, whatever that's produced this hip-hop kid. And so Hollywood embraces that; that type of black sells, and that type of black seems to be one that people are really interested in. Specifically, in movies right now, the hip-hop black is also the bad nigger that is the killer, the guy that's out of control. So if you make a movie with that type of character or image right now, audiences have been trained by Hollywood to recognize it as a type and identify with it, whether it's accurate or not.

The types I'm interested in examining are not the types Hollywood has identified as being commercial. Bebo and Huddie have a blues kind of outlook. They're from a jazz kind of world, and blues and jazz are not that popular right now. Jazz is always going to examine a certain degree of tragedy; blues is going to examine the darker side of life.

Loeb: You've already told me about how you and your father once visited East 9th, and the impressions the people there made on you. How did you finally decide to base the play and film on a conversation between two people? And what went into them--obviously you had to make them more than just two echoes of each other?

Willmott: I was influenced by Mamet's Duck Variations, a play I acted in when I was at Marymount College in Salina, Kansas, about two men on a park bench. I played one of the old men, whose relationship carried the play. It proved to me that it didn't take much, spectacle-wise, to make a good story, and gave me the confidence to explore an area that in some ways is not cinematic at all. 9th Street sort of comes to these guys as they sit around. They establish the core of the story through their conversations.

9th Street was a very diverse place--a lot of clubs, lot of different people, lot of interesting stuff. It's very difficult to capture this on film, impossible in fact. But by putting these two guys there, you have a base to start with that allows you to build all these other areas that make up the film. A lot of movies would get onto the gangster aspect and develop that, whereas by having the film grounded in these two philosophers, you bring the whole story to another level beyond just an action movie or another story about how tough the streets are. You always come back to them; the story is intercut so that all kinds of things go on, but you always come back to them. They are the street. Their lives are symbolic of the street; but the situation gives us a chance to explore some other personal issues as well.

Loeb: Can you elaborate on these issues?

Willmott: Huddie is questioning his own existence, whether God can really love someone like him, who basically has never achieved anything in life. He's had a couple of failed marriages; he's an alcoholic; he's never had a job of any consequence; he's been, in American Dream terms, a failure.

Bebo has a different story. He's been in the military, lost his leg in World War II; he's also an alcoholic, estranged from his wife. He came back from the war thinking that things would change for black folks, but they haven't really. Bebo has a lot of self-hate. You get your leg blown off; you think that you're going to be treated like a hero, or at least be compensated and appreciated; and then, when it doesn't happen, you begin to think, Well, maybe I'm not worthy of being appreciated, maybe being black is a problem.

The basic question is, Can God love a place like 9th Street? Can God accept these people's lives no matter how much they screw up? The answer is that not only can God love persons like Huddie and Bebo, but maybe He actually comes closest to them. That's one of the themes of the film that is really important to me-that Jesus was probably closest to the poor.

Loeb: This spiritual aspect seems to have become more and more apparent as the play has been turned into a film, and the film has in turn been revised.

Willmott: I think it's always been in there; the film just gave us more ways to show it. Certainly their lives, even in the play, are pretty clearly a metaphor of the street. Huddie's question about whether or not God can love a wino is the only thing that he asks in the whole movie. I never really explain his coming to terms with the question, but he acts in such a way that you believe that he's come to some conclusion. Huddie's rejection of the street preacher who says, "Come to the church, and you'll get right," his rejection of conventional theology, his giving up his Bible to the young soldier going to Vietnam--what I hope I do with all these is show that Huddie and Bebo have a ministry of their own. In their everyday, undramatic way, they're very religious--certainly spiritual.

Loeb: In a slightly larger, symbolic sense, this sense of spirituality doesn't get passed on to their successors, the new hustlers who take over, does it?

Willmolt: That's the real difference between the hustling that went on in the old days and the hustling that's beginning to go on by the time of the film. The old hustling--prostitution, gambling, and you name it--operated under this kind of unwritten law that said, "We're human beings. We may be doing things that are degrading, because we have to, but we don't have to treat each other that way." Back in those days you didn't have, for instance, people there killing each other for no reason. If someone got murdered, it was over a very specific issue or problem.

Loeb: So you're saying that it's really a paradoxical sort of relationship between conventional morality, which isn't really pertinent to the lives of the people on 9th Street, and what you're calling spirituality, which is more or less condemned by the moralists?

Willmott: Exactly. It's very difficult to explain this concept of being involved in the vices and, at the same time, treating people as human beings. How can a woman who's a prostitute--which is the ultimate in degradation in some ways--be an example of treating a person as a human being? If this woman is a prostitute in a community that supports prostitution and doesn't really question the institution of prostitution, then how can a community at the same time be a loving, human community? I think the answer to this is that they don't judge each other, that they accepted the proposition that whatever you had to do to hustle to survive was okay: "Just don't hurt me, don't hurt your neighbor, and don't hurt your friend." Some people did engender hurt, but there was still this kind of commandment that said you're not supposed to do that, we're going to try our best not to do that.

It's the whole thing with Jesus and Mary Magdalene and not casting the first stone. We have that in the film, when Mama Butler is talking about Carrie Mae and prostitution, her being on the corner. They talk about the relationship to soldiers, how they're both being prostituted--the soldiers coming down there being prostituted by the system, which is using them to fight an unjust war, and the prostitutes being used by the system because there are no other opportunities for them. There were no real jobs for black women at that time, so they came to 9th Street from all over the country to make a fast buck.

What the community said was that you can come down here and we won't judge you, but there are certain rules, or protocols of self-respect, that we try to live by. These rules weren't written down anywhere, but it was the code of the leaders of the street. If you asked those people, they probably couldn't have told you that there was a code, but it appears to me was that they had one. And it was near the end, in the sixties, when the young guys came in and didn't have that code, that they brought the street down. The injunction not to hurt one another started to be violated more and more, until it eventually became a dead commandment.

Loeb: So if we want to call 1968 Day One--the time of the old order passing and the new in the process of beginning--why did it happen? Second, were you conscious of the significance of that particular point when you were writing Ninth Street, or did you become conscious of it later on?

Willmott: I think I became more and more conscious as I did it. The film is really about the transition in the ghetto in America from the 1960s until now. A whole new mentality emerged, one based on money, based totally on what I can get now. Community, self-respect, and some sense of charity--all those things that were part of 9th Street in the midst of all the wild, crazy hustling--that's all gone now, because when the doors of opportunity started opening, community got rejected.

Most black-oriented films that are out right now deal with the time after the transition. They deal with what's happening now; they deal with the senseless, crazy violence. What our film deals with is how we got to where we are now, with how community just went out the window. Community got in the way of profits, so we dropped community. The whole thing became get rich quick--the mentality that became so apparent in the 1980s. When the doors opened up in the 1960s and started letting black people in a little, you had a whole group of people that had never had anything before, and all of a sudden they were told, "Come on and get it, guys; we're going to let you have some of this." And after Dr. King was killed, I think we lost our vision. We kind of jumped into the mix, and maybe the mix wasn't something we wanted to get into in the first place. Maybe, instead of jumping into the vat, we should have taken a spoonful of it and tested it. In the rush to succeed, the rush to attain, to better ourselves, we didn' t question what success was in this country. The white people who opened up the door and said, "Come on in," well, they were miserable. But we thought that because they had money, because they had stuff, that was the thing to do.

In Ninth Street, we say, "I don't know if that's the thing to do; in fact, I don't think that's what it's about at all." The two winos question the whole American way of life. I mean, for example--although it's a joke in the film--the whole thing about, "What if God wanted everyone to be like us, and we're the only ones who've succeeded?" It seems to be a given that you're supposed to make a lot of money to succeed, but what made that a given? I think it was a mistake not to have questioned that. Maybe we're supposed to work hard and take care of each other and live in some kind of peace with each other and not worry about that other stuff. I think if Dr. King had lived he would have helped guide us in that way.

Loeb: There's something to that. He was, near the end, the organizer of the Poor Peoples' March.

Willmott: King was always in conflict with people when they tried to give him things. He'd say, "I don't want this stuff." He knew it wasn't the point. It's not that materialism is totally bad, but it's not the point, and what happened was that it became the point. You know, "We need this car, and we'll get it no matter what we have to do." One of my favorite expressions is that black people are more American than any-body. You put anything on the market, and we'll have it before the richest people in town have it. We try to find our identity in all this stuff, which is why kids kill kids over tennis shoes. And what the film says is that, not only is this stuff not worth it, but it's only that--stuff. One of the big lines is when Huddie tells Love the pimp, "All you're talking about are dead dreams. All those things you hold up so high don't matter; you better find you something that does." That's the real question for all of us--all these things we're pursuing, are they just dead dreams?

Jeff Loeb is Chair of English at Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri, and a former contributor to African American Review. His major fields of study are contemporary American literature--in particular, that of the Vietnam War--and African American literature.