Mr. Sam Greenlee passed away on May 19, 2014. He’s survived by his wife Maxine McCrey Montano, his daughter Nakita and granddaughter Nailah. Mr. Greenlee was 84 years-old.
The DuSable Museum of African American History will host a memorial service for Sam Greenlee, a lifelong Chicagoan, on Friday, June 6 at 6:30 p.m. Early arrival is recommended. Sam was beloved and he’ll be missed. For more information, call Pemon Rami at 773.420.2730.
Sam Greenlee was a poet, writer, and helped make his book, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, into a film in the 1970s. He had a long and varied career including government service, teaching, and being an author and poet. He taught screen writing at Columbia College Chicago for a time.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door is about a disillusioned black CIA officer who quits his job and begins training Black Panthers and street gang members as “Freedom Fighters” who will fight to overthrow the government. The title is a pun on the slang meanings of “spook.”
The book was made into a movie in 1973. The movie was reviewed by Vincent Canby for The New York Times.[pullquote]It is such a mixture of passion, humor, hindsight, prophecy, prejudice and reaction,” Canby wrote, “that the fact that it’s not a very well-made movie, and is seldom convincing as melodrama, is almost beside the point.” Vincent Canby, 1973 NY Times[/pullquote] but was the object of a campaign to mute its political message. It is funny, radical, and oftentimes, very “right on” about politics in the 1970s as well as politics today.
Greenlee lived in Chicago but had to film the movie in Gary because the filmmakers couldn’t get permission to shoot the film in Chicago. The film was released at the height of “blaxploitation” films, which were popular and widely shown. According to Greenlee, the theatrical copies of Spook were destroyed by the F.B.Iut he kept the negatives in a safe and so was able to show the film.
The film was scheduled to play in a variety of cinemas around the country when it was released in 1973, but was pulled under unexplained circumstances which Greenlee and those involved with the film attributed to the F.B.I the time, J. Edgar Hoover was head of the F.B.Id Richard Nixon was President of the United States.
A documentary about the making and suppression of the film was shown along with the film itself in Chicago in 2011. According to Nina Metz writing for the Chicago Tribune, the film was “pulled by its distributor, some allege, bowing to pressure from the FBI. The narrative, about disciplined efforts to take down The Man through brain power and armed revolts, was intentionally controversial, and it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to presume the film made those in certain corridors of power nervous enough to “disappear” the movie altogether.”
Since 2012, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” has been in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as one of the country’s “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films.” You can view the film on YouTube. The book is available as well.
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