LOOK AT THE HAMMER, MAN!

The last time Fred Williamson reached an audience of millions it was playing the gruff police captain in STARSKY & HUTCH. Still, he doesn’t want to be known as a funny guy. It’s all about the image, he said repeatedly during the long and entertaining talk Roel Haanen had with him in 2011 during the Antwerp Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror Convention. He built that image as a pro ball player, pioneer of the black action cinema and cigar chomping tough guy in Italian exploitation flicks. ‘We didn’t have heroes. We had Steppin’ Fetchit!’

Let’s start at the beginning. You grew up in Chicago? 

Yeah, Chicago and Gary, Indiana. I never wanted to be a an athlete, but I got into sports because that’s where all the girls were. Girls liked guys who did sports. Being a football star was never a calling for me, but it came natural. I had the size, I had the reflexes and I was very competitive. Anything I involve myself in, I want to be the best.

Were you competitive as a child?  

Yeah. I grew up a very good looking kid. And that meant that kids picked on you. Because if you had a certain look, they thought you weren’t tough. I had to fight for my place all the time. I wanted them to know I was not only a good looking guy, but I could also kick some ass. Once you win a few fights, people start coming after you because you’re a winner. It’s a non-stop process. I’ve been a fighter all my life.

Did you come from a big family? 

No, just me. And the neighborhood thugs. When I look back to where I came from, at all I’ve accomplished it’s just amazing to me. I fly all over the world, but as a kid I remember seeing planes and just fantasizing about flying in one. It still feels unreal to me, having become a football star and a movie idol. I’m a ghetto guy, you know? I never thought I would be in this position. But it happened because everything I get into I work very hard at.  

I remember the first time I made a pro football team. I spent all my money calling my friends back in Chicago to tell them. Because I couldn’t believe it myself. And they didn’t believe it either! They said: Bullshit, man. You’re right here, across the street somewhere. And I said: No man, I made the team!

You studied to become an architect? 

My favorite class in high school was drafting. It was my last class of the day and I would always stay late, just drawing and creating things. It just felt natural to me to go from being a draftsman to becoming an architect.

So how did you wind up becoming an actor after your sports career? 

I retired from pro football after ten years and I went to work as an architect. I found out that nine to five and an hour for lunch did not suit my personality. So I started thinking about doing something else. I saw a couple of Julia episodes on television and I noticed that each week the guest star was a new boyfriend. So I said: I’m better looking than any of those guys. I’m going to Hollywood! I was in San Francisco then. I drove up to Hollywood and accomplished it in two days.

And how did you become an action star? 

I thought if I was going to do this I was not going to lose my identity. Remember, we were coming out of the sixties. They were still attacking black people in the streets with dogs and hosing them down. There were no black heroes. There was Sidney Poitier. Good actor, not a hero.  

If I was going into this business I was going to be what I was as a football player. On the field I was The Hammer and The Hammer was not somebody you negotiated with. You either got out of the way or you got your ass kicked. That’s how I got that nickname: knocking people off the football field. If I tackled you, your helmet went one way, your ass went one way and your shoes went yet another way. That’s how I played the game. My motto was: do unto others before they do unto you. Because after they do unto you, you might not be able to do unto them. I never got hurt playing football because I always initiated contact. If you do that, the other guy is getting the brunt of the force. And if I was not involved in the action, I got away from it. If you stay and watch, there is always someone coming. Even if it’s a cheap shot. He breaks your leg, he gets a fifteen yard penalty and stays in the game while you’re in the goddamn hospital. I was not going to let that happen to me.  

So if I was going to get into movies I wanted to get in on the same level as I was in football. I found out that was only possible if I controlled my own destiny: direct my own films, raise the money, do my own projects. So after M.A.S.H. and TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON I had a meeting at Paramount and I said I was interested in doing a western. They said: Great! And I said: And I want to call it THE LEGEND OF NIGGER CHARLEY.

That title was your idea? 

Of course. I was playing off of the negativity. That wouldn’t work today because the word doesn’t mean anything anymore. Back then the people at Paramount said: What? You want to call it what? I got the go-ahead. Movie cost about 600.000 and made about thirty or forty million dollars. Mostly because of the title. In certain parts of the country it was called THE LEGEND OF CHARLEY. In the south it was just CHARLEY. It did well wherever the title was complete.

It’s still controversial because another western of yours is out on DVD under the title BOSS.  

Yeah, that was BOSS NIGGER. My idea again. I was pushing the name hard. It disturbed people and that’s how you get their attention. You want some kind of emotion, even if they’re pissed off at you. When I played football and I came out on the field there were 25.000 people on this side cheering me on, and 25.000 on the other side boo-ing me. But that’s 50.000 people watching what I do!

BLACK CAESAR was one of your biggest early successes.  

BLACK CAESAR was my attempt to do a black hero in the image of Edward G. Robinson. I remember coming up in the fifties and watching all these gangster movies, with Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and George Raft. They played bad guys, but you loved them. They kill twenty people and then help an old lady cross the street, you know? I wanted to play a gangster that was not a ghetto gangster, but one of these guys. Tommy Gibbs tries to be a good man. He’s a criminal, but he takes care of his mother, he kills only bad people. So that when he goes down in the end, you were also a little dismayed. This is what I wanted to create. I went to Sam Arkoff with the idea.

How did Larry Cohen get involved? 

We got Larry to write it. He’s a good writer. He put it together real quick. We worked on it together. We also did the sequel HELL UP IN HARLEM. We created a good thing for that time. I didn’t want Tommy to be a dope pusher, because I know kids watch what I do. Anytime I do a movie, I represent a people and I’m conscious of that. It has helped me make the right decisions in my career.

What’s your take on the NAACP who back then thought black action films were not good for black emancipation? 

That was stupidity. I told them that. First of all, it was creating jobs. We were working. Black actors were happy. Second, the black audience was happy. Now, suddenly, they are seeing black heroes. We’re winning fights on the screen. We’re not getting killed all the time. To this day I have three rules: I don’t get killed. I win all my fights. And I get the girl at the end of the movie, if I want her. We didn’t have those heroes. We had Steppin’ Fetchit! The NAACP were wrong for what they did. To show you how stupid they were: they wrote to the heads of the studio’s saying they wanted to read all the scripts in advance to see if the movie would convey the right image of black people. No one’s going to let you do that! MGM laughed at them. But the stupidest thing they did, was when a film called MANDINGO came out. Every black actor tried out for it, but no black actor wanted to do it. Because it was such a degrading part. They couldn’t find anybody, so they got Ken Norton, who was not an actor but a boxer. What did the NAACP do? They gave the producer an award! How the hell are you giving the producers of MANDINGO an award? They just didn’t get it, man. Their heart was not in the right place. It was all lip service.

Black action movies as a genre faded at the end of the seventies. Why do you think that happened?

It faded because nobody learned the business of the business. When I got into acting I didn’t just want to act, I wanted to learn everything. So I learned the business. Every time I did a film I learned something. About lighting. About camera angles. I learned how to distribute the films. How to market them. So when the studio’s stopped providing money for black action films, I was ready to go to Cannes and pre-sale my own films. My black colleagues didn’t know about pre-sales. Even today black film makers don’t know shit about foreign markets. They only understand the American market. I learned the business by being fucked. You’re trying to make a deal. Somebody screws you royally. You don’t do that again. I went to Cannes every year since 1975. By the third year I was like Sam Arkoff, man.  

So you kept going while Jim Kelly and Jim Brown all but disappeared from the stage.

I kept making movies because I raised the money. They were sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. And if the phone doesn’t ring, you don’t work. I hired them occasionally. Last time I tried to get everybody together was with ORIGINAL GANGSTERS. I hired Larry Cohen to direct, but he had become such a hard-to-get-along-with old man I had to fire him halfway through. He started rewriting it, taking it into another direction. I let Larry go after I slapped him a couple of times. I brought everybody back. Now I’m preparing the sequel to that, called OLD SCHOOL GANGSTERS. It’s got me and Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Bernie Casey, Antonio Fargas, Gary Busey and Robert Forster. 

Are you gearing up to do that one?

I got half the money. I’m making the movie for 1.2 million. You would think it would be easy for me to get 1.2 million with this cast.

Is it so much more difficult to get your films financed nowadays?

Well, business is business. If I put together a cast like this, it’s gotta mean something, right? Maybe Jim Brown by himself doesn’t mean anything, or Bernie Casey. But all of them collectively? I gotta be able to raise 1.2 million? Even if it’s a piece of shit it’s gonna make 1.2 million easily with cable and video. Fans like you are gonna watch it.  

What did you think of the black movies that emerged in the nineties, like MENACE II SOCIETY?

Those gang movies are a product of the hip hop culture. Guys trying to be cool. I hope it dies out. What’s really bad about it, is that the public buys it. That’s even more depressing. It means they have not grown. They still have the ghetto mentality.

How did you wind up in Italy and working with Enzo Castellari and Lucio Fulci?

By selling my films in Cannes and Milan. I met a lot of Italian distributors who were buying my films. So I said: why don’t I make these films directly with you? Then I make money and you make money. I did four or five BLACK COBRA’s, FOXTRAP, THE MESSENGER, THE NEW BARBARIANS, THE BRONX WARRIORS, INGLORIOUS BASTARDS. That was the first one. Before that, the Italians wanted me to do a western. I really wanted to do it, because I had seen what Clint Eastwood had done with Italian westerns. But it coincided with BLACK CAESAR, so I couldn’t do it. They were really gearing me up to be the next Woody Strode. He did a lot of movies in Italy. You know, taking his shirt off and doing strong man stuff like lifting rocks. But he was getting old and he could hardly walk anymore.

Woody Strode also made the transition from football player to actor. Was he a role model for you?  

No. He was a nice guy and we had the same kind of background. But he was already in Italy when I started out doing movies. He sold an image too. He wasn’t a great actor, but he had this aura, this presence of strength, masculinity and power. John Ford molded him that way. 

I also wanted to work in Italy because the black audience doesn’t get to see their heroes outside of the ghetto. I wanted them to have a star with international flair. Like I did with THAT MAN BOLT. I wanted to take them places, so that they could say: Look at the Hammer, man! He’s in Hong Kong, he’s in Rome, he’s in Paris!

But THE BRONX WARRIORS and THE NEW BARBARIANS are really different films than what you were making in the States. They aren’t necessarily meant for the same audience, are they?  

They’re all action movies with the Hammer, a character they can identify with and who does all his own stunts. If you see me jumping out of a moving car, that is me jumping out of the car. If you see me sliding down a rope, it is me. I make sure there are no cuts, so that you can see it’s me. Like in INGLORIOUS BASTARDS where I jump off the bridge onto the moving train. I made sure the camera was on the train so I could jump toward the camera. But I told them: you’re only getting one shot. There was almost a catastrophe on that stunt, because they forgot they had the camera on the second car behind the engine, and it was a smokestack engine. We didn’t calculate that I would blinded by the smoke of the goddamn’ train.  So when the train went under, I couldn’t see anything. I had to rely on the stunt coordinator. I jumped on his signal.

You still do your own stunts? 

Of course.

But the roles are less physically demanding. 

No, not really. Nothing’s changed. My body still feels the same. I’m eating black jelly beans. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me alive. I don’t know why a 73-year old like me still looks so good. Mother Nature’s been kind to me, man. And I have no choice, because in Hollywood they don’t have stuntmen my size. They’re all small guys, Eddie Murphy size. They’re five-eight or five-ten. I’m six-three.

Whatever happened to Mark Gregory? The lead actor from THE BRONX WARRIORS? He only did a couple of movies in the eighties and then disappeared altogether.  

Mark Gregory made no footprints in the snow when he walked.

What does that mean? 

It means he was gay. He was so gay it took them almost three months to teach him how to walk properly without that gay strut.

Well, he was a little effeminate.  

He was a lot effeminate. He wasn’t even an actor. Castellari found him in a coffee shop. You know, with his hair and half-shirt on and his muscle tones, but he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. Took a lot of work for that guy to talk and walk straight.

If you look at the artwork from those days they always portrayed the action heroes as really big and muscular. On the video box of THE BRONX WARRIORS Mark Gregory looks almost like Conan.  

Yeah, Mark Gregory wasn’t that big or muscular, but he was cut. Look, if you’re pretty it’s harder to convince people you’re tough. Ugly guys have it easy: people already assume you’re a tough guy.

Are there any believable tough guys on screen anymore? 

No, hardly any. There’s no Richard Widmark, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan. They all wanna be cutie pies now. These guys spend more time in the makeup chair than the women do.

The BLACK COBRA movies… 

Yeah, I love those. Especially the first one. That was a good movie. After that, typically, the Italians got cheap. They went to Manila to shoot it for New York, because they got a bunch of tall buildings there too. Never mind all these Filipinos walking down the street. That’s why the Italian film production faded. They didn’t want to spend any more money. Castellari was the only one who bothered to go to New York and shoot some exteriors for three or four days, then go back to Rome and shoot the rest. The others were too lazy or too cheap to do it.

But you stayed in Italy until the very end. Even in the nineties you made films there.  

Yeah, I’m thinking of going there now. Franco Nero is talking about doing a western with Castellari. They want me in it. That would be great.

You still talk with Castellari? 

Sure. He’s still out there, working. In two weeks I’ll be seeing him at a screening of INGLORIOUS BASTARDS in Jacksonville, Florida. Bo Svenson will be there also.

You worked a lot with Bo Svenson, in your own productions even.  

Yeah, he was popular for a time, but then he almost stopped working, except for me hiring him. Then he became a jerk. A hard guy to deal with. He would go up to a young actor with just a small part in the movie and say: Did you get paid yet? Did your check clear? Did you get your per diem? I got my per diem this morning. And then these kids would come up to me and start problems. Bo became a real troublemaker. I had to slam him up against the wall a couple of times.

You keep slapping people on the set! 

Sure! I slapped Gary Busey around too. He also has a reputation of being a real troublemaker. I called him in my office first day of the shoot. I grabbed him by the collar, slammed him against the wall and hit him a few times. I said: Gary, I will kick your ass if you’re late or create shit on my set! I will beat the shit out of you every time I see you. And you’ll never know when I’m gonna walk by you and knock you on your fucking ass! Gary says: Hammer, we’re friends man! He’s a jerk.

But isn’t he clean now? 

Yeah, he’s clean, but he’s still a jerk! He likes to test people, directors especially. You ask him something simple: Do this, do that. Gary will say: I’m not sure I like that. Now you got a whole day conversation on your hands with Gary Busey. You know, he crashed his motor cycle one time. Doctors put his skull back together but they left a little hole. So now he says he can receive messages from outer space. And right now he’s getting a message that this is not the right way to do the scene. He started that shit with me and I said: Gary, by the time you finish that sentence you’ll be lying on your ass.

Did you ever see the parodies on black action films, like I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA and BLACK DYNAMITE?

There’s a character in I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA called Hammer. They wrote that for me. What happens in the script is: Hammer takes about ten guns and sticks them into his pockets and down his legs. He goes outside, trips and falls and all the guns go off. He’s writhing on the street as the bullets kill him. I said: How dare you send me a script like this? Why the fuck do you want me to play this role, huh? That means you don’t respect me. I tore up the script and threw it in the guy’s face.  

That was Keenan Ivory Wayans?

Uh-huh.

What about BLACK DYNAMITE? Did you see that?

I didn’t like that either. How you gonna do a parody on the films we used to make? What’s so funny about that? Comedy is fine, as long as you don’t disrespect me doing it. 

I think that film was right on the line between parody and loving homage.

Oh yeah? Well, it failed. It didn’t do shit. It was out one week. Well, he made his point. Good for him. And it was a bad role for [Michael Jay White]. He’s got potential. A good martial artist. A strong look. I don’t know why he wants to make some stupid shit like that. Maybe he wasn’t working and needed the money, but sometimes it’s better to turn things down. Because where are you gonna go from there?  

Do you turn down parts?

Weekly. I get so many offers. They all want me to bring in a black audience, but they’re all nothing parts. Demeaning parts. Getting killed in the first five minutes. I ain’t doing that. They tell me: But you’re a strong character. You die strong! I say: You don’t get it. I ain’t dying!

You once called yourself the black Clint Eastwood.

Yes, because just like me he protected his image and he learned the business. Charles Bronson never learned the business, so when they stopped making the movies he was in, he just went away. But Clint molded himself, created this image and that’s what he sells, and that’s what I sell. You don’t want to surprise your audience by doing a dance movie or a comedy. Clint tried it a few times, but in the next DIRTY HARRY he killed twenty people in the opening credits, just to remind everyone.

On the other hand there’s Burt Reynolds. What killed his career were the comedies he did where they all race across country. He was funny in it, and they did well, but after that nobody knew what Burt Reynolds was. Before that he was a tough guy. Now suddenly he wants to be tough guy and funny guy. That’s hard to pull of. Nobody knows what you are anymore.

Eddie Murphy did have the potential to mix the two, like in BEVERLY HILLS COP and 48 HRS. But he’s not smart enough. He got silly. Doing impersonations with the fat suits, that Tyler Perry shit. My point is: mixing funny and tough is really hard. But mixing silly and tough is impossible. There used to be actors who could be funny and tough, like Dean Martin.  

You did STARSKY AND HUTCH a few years ago and you were really funny.

Why was I funny? Because people didn’t expect me to be there and also I was the straight man. I didn’t do anything funny or comical. I stopped the fight in the shower. I took a hit like an action star. So as long as I don’t step outside of my character I will do these roles. Same thing with FROM DUSK TILL DAWN.

It’s a play on your image, then.

Exactly. Because that’s what I’m selling.

Are there any pictures you regret doing?

No. I like all my films. I’ve been in bad movies, sure. But I’ve never been bad in a movie. I have control over what I do, and I only do what I like. I’ve had a great time doing the movies I did. It would help me financially if I took every part that came along, but I sell an image. Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, they all sold an image. If you give that up you got nothing, man. Nothing left to sell. Look at Richard Roundtree. He was doing SHAFT and he should be doing SHAFT 226 by now. Instead he’s just a guy looking for a job. His agents told him: The world knows who you are now. You are Richard Roundtree, the actor. You don’t have to take black parts anymore. Hey! Wrong! You’re black! You are who you are because the audience loves you. And your audience is always right. If they want to see you as Shaft, you play Shaft! No, what does he do? ROBINSON CRUSOE! Playing Man Friday next to Michael Caine. Sitting in the sand with a stick. Where’s your leather jacket? Where’s your gun? Walking down the beach in raggedy ass clothes. Guy lost his whole audience, because he threw away his image. Now he does a lot of those walk-on parts on television. I tried to restore some of his marketability as a black action star by hiring him in my movies..

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This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.