THE MAN'S WORLD

Samuel L Jackson was still a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, when Gordon Parks’ seminal movie, Shaft, first came out in 1971. “It was pretty awesome stuff for me,” he says, stroking the neatly trimmed beard which has replaced the moustache once sported by Richard Roundtree, the original John Shaft.

“It was the first time I actually saw someone who looked like me, sounded like me, dressed the way I’d always wanted to dress and played a hero. John Shaft was our first real hero. It was all about Black Pride, and he was very proud: he was strong, he was smart, he was unafraid. He had the power and even the ego that we all wanted to have.”

Even now, almost 30 years later, John Shaft is a hero in the neighbourhoods across 110th St. “I’ll be walking down the street in New York City,” says Roundtree, “and wherever I’m going, people are screaming out ‘Shaft!’ I get so much love. It’s just incredible!” Iconic and exciting at the same time, Shaft left behind it an indelible image of Roundtree - an actor whose previous screen roles had been little more than bit parts - striding through New York to the pulse of Isaac Hayes’ equally memorable score, in a perfectly tailored polo-neck and the kind of long black leather coat that the young Jackson could only have dreamed of owning back in the early seventies. The film engendered a couple of sequels and a host of imitators, the best of which were Superfly, starring Ron O’Neal, and Coffy, headlined by Pam Grier, who recently starred opposite Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Most of all, though, Shaft marked a real change in the kind of roles being offered to African-American actors.

“Things were different then,” says director John Singleton, who was only four years old when the film first came out. “Up until that time, we really only had Sidney Poitier. When Richard Roundtree came on the scene in Shaft, it had an effect which was just wild. Everyone wanted to copy it.”

Singleton went on to become the youngest individual (and the first African-American) ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar when his Boyz N the Hood was released in 1991. Since then, he has also directed Poetic Justice, starring Janet Jackson; college drama Higher Learning; and Rosewood, the story of a small African-American town in the Deep South in the twenties, which was released in 1997. But a remake of Shaft has been a dream of Singelton’s since before Rosewood was even completed: news first broke that he was trying to set it up back in the autumn of 1996.

The problem, however, was finding an actor of sufficient stature to take on such an iconic role - someone who would not only live up to Roundtree’s memory, but would also take the story somewhere new. “We only have a few actors who can play this type of role today,” says the director. “Sam Jackson was absolutely the pinnacle of those guys. Shaft is a cool, contemporary presence - a man who moves easily among many different worlds. He’s as much at home downtown as uptown. That’s the way the character was originally, and that’s what Sam brings to it now.”