Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

This being the Saturday night showing of the brand-new Jim Brown movie, the huge auditorium (there were probably 1,400 seats) wasn’t exactly packed, but it was definitely busy, and buzzing with anticipation. My little face was the only white one in the audience. This was to be my first movie in an (except for me) all black movie theatre in a black neighborhood. This was 1972. By 1976 I would be venturing on my own to a mostly black theatre called the Carson Twin Cinema in Carson, California, which is where I would catch up on all the Blaxploitation and kung fu film classics I’d missed in the earlier part of the decade (Coffy, The Mack, Foxy Brown, J.D.’s Revenge, Cooley High, Cornbread, Earl and Me, The Watts Monster, Five Fingers of Death, Lady Kung Fu, The Chinese Connection) as well as all the other exploitation films that came out around that time. And by the early eighties, I found my way back to that theatre row on Broadway. Though by that time, the neighborhood was far more Mexican than black, and the 35mm film prints they showed usually contained Spanish subtitles.