Between its attention to detail and subtle humor, Black Dynamite is one of the most original approaches to film making since Woody Allen's early comedies. It’s hard to say what’s more tragic, that moviegoers have been reduced to relying on the mediocre talents of Judd Apatow and Jason Friedberg to provide them with big screen laughs, or that the funniest film in years was released this past October and couldn’t build an audience until it came out on DVD.

Labeling this film as a mere Blaxploitation spoof would be a gross simplification, as it boasts action sequences that could take on Bruce Lee and bad-ass dialogue that could rival anything to come out of Shaft’s mouth. Michael Jai White (Spawn & Dark Knight) proves to be a rare triple threat of martial arts, acting, and comic timing. He holds an undeniable presence as Black Dynamite and delivers side-splitting jokes with a straight face and total commitment to his character. White’s brilliant performance is framed by a stellar ensemble effort with too many stand-outs to list. To name one, Cedric Yarbrough (“Reno 911!”) has less than ten lines as Chocolate Giddy-Up but manages to make each one memorable and quotable.

Director/co-writer Scott Sanders maintains a delicate balance, mining the self-imposed limitations of a low-budget film for comic gold while creating a flawless homage to the Blaxploitation genre. One of his crowning achievements may be that Black Dynamite could slip into the company of other films from that period and escape being detected as a modern-day manifestation. Mr. Sanders recently took time to talk with Culture Catch about the experience of making Black Dynamite.

Culture Catch: How would you describe Black Dynamite?

Scott Sanders: It’s an homage and a parody at the same time. Our whole original goal was just to make another Blaxploitation film, and it just lends itself to comedy because you’re making something that’s set in a very specific time frame, 1971 to 1975. It just lends itself to jokes from the period.

Culture Catch: How many of the gags were pre-planned and how many did you discover along the way?

Scott: Most of it was pre-planned. We had a lot of comedians there, so they did improvise a lot of stuff, but for the most part the structure was always there. I think people think there was probably more improvisation than there was, actually. Ultimately what people love about it, and this hurt it a little bit, is you really have to pay attention. When people see the cover and don’t really know anything about Blaxploitation or don’t really think about it, they don’t think it’s the kind of movie you really have to pay attention to. I mean, there are some jokes in there like, there’s a moment where one of the militants reads his stage direction. Unless you read the script it’s kind of a hard joke to get. Three of us wrote it- Mike [Jai White] wrote a huge portion of the script and there are jokes that I didn’t get until I’d seen the movie the tenth or twelfth time. I don’t know why. There are so many jokes and great bits, like the joke where the aunt says, “Your mother would be turning over in her grave if she was here to see this.” I didn’t get that joke until I was watching it in the theater. I just never thought of it.

Culture Catch: The comedy of the film has a growing absurdity as it builds to the end. Like, early on you have Honey Bee smoking an unlit cigarette and by the end you have swinging doors on the Oval Office of the White House. Was the film shot sequentially and you built on that?

Scott: It was always kind of planned that it would get more and more absurd at the end, but we wanted to do it in a way that felt consistent with Blaxploitation movies. Our inspiration drew from crazier and crazier Blaxploitation films. You know, the whole evil plot is very, very similar to Three the Hard Way. We always wanted to end it that way, with Black Dynamite fighting Dick Nixon with nunchucks. We were very fortunate; the guy who played Nixon is a friend a mine. It was just one of those weird things where if I ever made a movie and I needed a character to play Richard Nixon, I’d hire this guy because he looks just like him.

Culture Catch: Was he doing the voice or was that dubbed over?

Scott: No. That’s him doing the voice.

Culture Catch: Wow. That’s unbelievable that you could find someone that looks like Nixon, can do the voice, and works well with nunchucks. That’s not something on everyone’s resume.

Scott: He practiced nunchucks like six hours a day. Once he got the role he was like, “OK. I’m practicing.” He’d just be practicing nunchucks and he wouldn’t break character. He’s a very method actor. He would be Richard Nixon all day long. He treated it very seriously. Of all the things in the movie, that ending is what most people are torn on. Either people really love it or really hate it -- or some people, who don’t like the movie, only like that scene. So it’s definitely a weird direction to go in, but that’s the journey with Black Dynamite. Nothing can happen to him. They shoot out his parachute and he lands standing. He just bends his knees a little bit but he’s fine.

Culture Catch: Or like the mob guys shooting the machine guns at him and he just ducks and dodges the bullets.

Scott: Well he does get hit once in shoulder. That’s one of the little things,one of the little errors that I just didn’t think of. I have to really unlearn a lot of things I learned on Black Dynamite, you know, because you just kind of let things go. But the doctor goes, “The bullet went in and out,” and you can clearly see that the bullet didn’t go out.

Culture Catch: That wasn’t intentional?

Scott: No.

Culture Catch: I always thought that was a clear joke. My friends and I were laughing our asses off because we were like, look, there’s no exit wound.

Scott: Exactly. There’s no exit wound. But nope, that’s just one that slipped by me. Like, we were going for a lot of intentional graininess for the movie, and one of our solutions was to just not clean the gate, and this got us into some trouble because during the whole Dr. Wu and Black Dynamite fight there was a gigantic piece of hair, and it was just up there and it was huge during the whole fight. We had to digitally take it out and that was really expensive. You live and learn. We took a lot of chances, but that was one we shouldn’t have taken.

Culture Catch: I have to ask you, the swinging doors -- how did you decide on the swinging doors for the Oval Office?

Scott: One answer is we didn’t have a lot of money. I mean, the place we picked -- also the Oval Office is not oval. We went to a sound stage and we needed to shoot there and it had swinging doors and I was like, well, there you go. The funny thing about Black Dynamite is the situation just lends itself to the jokes, like the room that we picked had swinging doors so I was like, OK, it has swinging doors.

Culture Catch: Am I correct in saying you shot mostly on Super 16?

Scott: Yeah. We shot on Super 16 Color Reversal stock.

Culture Catch: Aside from not cleaning the gate, were there any other techniques you used to give the film the period look that it had?

Scott: The film stock really did it. We used more of that film stock than anybody has ever used. It gave the film that pop. Also my DP [Shawn Maurer] was phenomenal, he did a great job. Not only did we shoot it quickly, he had to light it and like, I mean he left in some obvious shadows and just crazy stuff. I just thought he was really courageous in the way he shot the film. Like the scene where Black Dynamite first goes to Honey Bee’s brothel, to me that's probably my favorite scene because it totally looks like a 1970s movie. It’s like you’re really in a 1970s movie, more than anything else I had ever seen up to that point.

Culture Catch: Did you have an interest in Blaxploitation films prior to making Black Dynamite?

Scott: Yeah. I had seen a lot of them. I kind of came to it the way a lot people did. I was mostly like a Dolemite person. I always liked the absurdity of Dolemite, it was always fantastic to me. But I always liked the other ones as well, the more competent ones. During the course of Black Dynamite we watched everything, like Black Sister’s Revenge and Darktown Strutters -- there are so many of them that you just keep finding. We actually used footage from three different Blaxploitation movies in Black Dynamite as stock footage: The Dynamite Brothers, a movie called Black Heat, and this movie called Mean Mother, which was incredible because it was during the height of the Blaxploitation days and Mean Mother is just an Italian movie that they stuck in the middle and because Blaxploitation was hot they got the actor from the Italian movie to do a couple of scenes with a black guy in an afro and they just put those scenes on the beginning and end of the movie. So you can just see people excited to see a movie called “Mean Mother” and it’s just an Italian movie bookended with a guy in an afro. It’s kind of the quintessential Blaxploitation film with an emphasis on ’ploitation.

Culture Catch: Now, Blaxploitation films obviously have a negative connotation for a lot of people, I mean the NAACP and a whole bunch of movements worked to push them out of the theaters in the late 1970s. Was this at all a concern for you?

Scott: Ummm, it had always been a thought, but I really wasn’t that concerned about it. To be honest, it didn’t really pan out that way in terms of the reception of the movie. The irony I guess is I was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Black Dynamite, which is kind of funny, you know, because the NAACP is part of what got rid of it in the first place.

Culture Catch: I don’t know if this was intentional, but is there any sort of parallel between the Anaconda Malt Liquor scam and CIA involvement in crack trade?

Scott: I mean, at some point, there are real conspiracies and there are fake conspiracies. The real conspiracies kind of spurred on ridiculous things that actually occurred in the black community, like people thinking that Church’s Fried Chicken would poison black people. I mean, those are conspiracies that black people believe are true. So I think we’re kind of playing off that as well, the truth that spurs on paranoia. We’re kind of making fun of everything. One of the things that the movie kind of does that’s interesting, or at least that was intentional, is we’re kind of making fun of racism in general, like the absurdity of it. It’s funny to me. If that makes any sense…

Culture Catch: Absolutely--

Scott: Like the First Lady calls Black Dynamite a “moon cricket.”

Culture Catch: I love the extreme stereotypes of the white characters, like the evil mob guy who keeps saying “coon” with the meanest, ugliest looking face possible or the white doctor with his wagging finger. I mean, where did you find the white detective from the opening shots?

Scott: We found him through regular casting. That was the thing, like the movie behind the movie. I always thought that guy would be, it was the 1970s so that guy would be like a retired actor from cowboy movies from the '60s. Like he just got called up to do this Blaxploitation movie. He used to work on Gunsmoke. With the doctor, we literally made the decision that we would have a variety of performances like Blaxploitation movies where actors weren’t consistently in the same movie. It was just sort of a game day decision, just push this thing, whatever you’re doing.

Culture Catch: You have a family history in politics. Your grandfather, E. V. Wilkins, was the first black mayor of Roper, North Carolina, right?

Scott: Yeah, and my mom is the mayor there right now.

Culture Catch: How did you end up in film making?

Scott: My parents sent me to this hippie camp, in like the late '70s or something, and we made this psychedelic version of Hansel & Gretel on Super 8 and I just liked the whole process of it and wanted to do that, it was really fun. But I didn’t really do anything about it until I went to college and majored in it, then I came directly out to Hollywood after I graduated from high school.

Culture Catch: What directors inspire you?

Scott: Spike Lee was a huge influence, and what was great is Spike Lee really liked Black Dynamite so we became friendly and I got to talk to him about it -- that was just a great thing. His books were really inspirational for me, walking through the process of writing a screenplay and keeping a journal. Also the Coen brothers, who I love, and Stanley Kubrick I really love. To me I always think something like Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange are funny movies to me, but funny in a way that I appreciate. Dr. Strangelove, in an odd way, is sort of an influence on Black Dynamite. It’s one of those movies at the same time while it’s satire. You can be the movie, be part of the genre, and be satirical at the same time. Whereas I think in a lot of today’s parody movies, those movies are in their own spoofy genre.

Culture Catch: What really works with this film is the actors’ commitment and not treating the script like they think it’s funny. They’re playing actors who are playing actors in a way.

Scott: Exactly. It was the whole idea we had, like a whole meta thing. Mike always thought he never was Michael Jai White playing Black Dynamite, he was Michael Jai White playing Ferrante Jones, the running back for the Baltimore Colts, playing Black Dynamite. That’s just how we looked at it. So, when the movie behind the movie slipped out, he eventually goes to Ferrante Jones.

Culture Catch: Like the scene where Dynamite is talking about how they made the streets a pleasant place to take an afternoon stroll and then the camera cuts late and Dynamite goes stone-faced?

Scott: Yeah. It was funny because we were about to do that and Mike was like, “I really don’t like this,” and I was like, that’s because Ferrante Jones doesn’t like it either, and then he was like, OK, OK, OK…

Culture Catch: Who did you think your audience was going to be when you were making this film, and who do you think your audience is today?

Scott: It’s a little weird how it all played out. I had always thought it would be a straightforward Friday audience. It sort of evolved that way on DVD; now it sort of is like a hip, black audience. I was surprised it was received as well as it was in the film festivals, so it existed as a film festival movie and then was discovered on DVD. It’s been spreading a lot on Twitter. Random people start talking about how it’s their favorite movie of the year. Like Lil' John said the night of the Oscars, screw Hurt Locker, Black Dynamite should win for film of the year, and he tweeted. It’s just random. A sort of culty, random sort of thing.

Culture Catch: I know there’s been talk of a sequel; is there any progress towards that?

Scott: I just have to see how the DVD is doing -- and it looks like it’s doing really well -- if people want to do another one, which we totally want to do.

Culture Catch: You’d have to stick with the way you did casting the first time, like Cedric Yarbrough.

Scott: Oh yeah, that’s like one of people’s favorite lines in the movie, “I sell drugs to the community.” He improvised that. When he did that the first time it was hilarious, he was like, “but wait, that’s what I do.” He did it a couple of different ways, but it was just funny when he straight did it that first time.

Culture Catch: Now, I wouldn’t normally ever even suggest such a thing, but has there been any consideration as to how awesome Black Dynamite merchandise would be? Like a Dynamite action figure, so you could play out the “I threw that shit before I walked in the room” fight scene with Dr. Wu.

Scott: We were actually selling “I sell drugs to the community” T-shirts.

Culture Catch: Where are those? How do I get one of those?

Scott: I don’t know if they’re still for sale. It’s the Black Dynamite website… there’s like a store of T-shirts. The weird thing is we had boot-legged T-shirts before the movie came out. It was really weird. They were making Black Dynamite T-shirts like a year before the movie came out. It’s really weird too, because I run into people and almost all of them have seen it. We had a big bootleg issue, where people saw a bootleg cut, it’s a longer cut. I think the bootleg added a lot to the cult status of it. That’s when a lot of people started talking about the movie. It’s still playing in theaters -- it plays very much like Rocky Horror. It’s always playing at universities. It plays in Dubai this weekend. The whole Black Dynamite experience is just loads of randomness, like the movie.

Culture Catch: Are there any other projects, aside from Black Dynamite, that you’re currently working on?

Scott: We’re working on a couple of movies. Me and Mike are working on stuff together. I’m working on trying to make a zombie movie. It’s so weird right now with the movie business. Everything, by necessity, has to be a spectacle on some level. And I like spectacles, I just want to make interesting spectacles.

Culture Catch: Just because it’s a spectacle doesn’t mean it has to be dumb.

Scott: Yeah. Like District 9, that to me kind of nails the kind of thing I’m interested in. Yeah, it’s an alien movie, but it’s set in South Africa and that’s a whole new gig.

Culture Catch: Black Dynamite is one of the most intelligent comedies to come out in years, and though it was critically acclaimed, it had a very short theatrical release and didn’t sell very well until it came out on DVD. Do you think that says something about moviegoers today?

Scott: It’s hard to say. We didn’t have a lot of money to promote it. Under any variety of circumstances maybe it would have made a lot of money, so I don’t know if it was people or the situation. It’s really hard to tell, the whole experience of movie making is so random. For instance, we actually opened in seventy theaters. What would have happened if we had opened in eighteen theaters like Up in the Air or Precious and really promoted and used the money for the print adds for those eighteen? Maybe it would have made a lot more money. It’s just how it’s released, it’s not really anybody’s fault, you just never know. Especially it’s hard for Hollywood when they don’t have a template for what this movie is. Initially, one of the things that was hard is this is a black movie that appeals primarily to white people ,and there’s not really a template for that. It’s hard because the movie isn’t really a spoofy, spoofy, spoofy movie. We showed it to a test audience and this woman came up and said, “There are a lot of errors in this movie. It’s very unprofessional.” And it’s like, OK. Who knows? If people don’t get it, then they don’t get it. Then she said, “If this is a spoof, then you need to let me know it’s a spoof.”

Some people get Black Dynamite while others need an explanation. Either way, this instant cult classic can be appreciated by stoners and film buffs alike. And with cameos from the likes of Arsenio Hall and inventive terms such as “kung-fu treachery,” it’s not hard to see why. To grab a copy of Black Dynamite, go to: www.blackdynamitemovie.com. - C. Jefferson Thom

Mr. Thom lives in New York City and walks dogs, writes plays, and loves dissecting pop culture.