Tag: The Invaders

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The Invaders, the Mad Lads, & John Gary Williams

The Mad Lads (Photo: Richard Williams)

Amid the smorgasbord of screenings available during this week’s Indie Memphis Film Festival, there’s one non-festival screening that any afficionado of either documentaries or Memphis activism should make a point of seeing. While The Invaders was featured at Indie Memphis seven years ago, it’s more relevant than ever. The local activist group from which the film takes its name was both a part of and ahead of its time.

Many reviews note that The Invaders were not unlike the Black Panthers, but as original Invader John B. Smith told the Memphis Flyer after the film was made, “We were not the Black Panthers. We were not gun toters or anything. We were a social change organization. We had a program that we were running in the community, we were working with young people, and when we got involved in the sanitation strike is when the Commercial Appeal and the Press Scimitar picked up on the Invaders. We had been operating a year before then.”

Thus, they’re a key to understanding the local Black community at the time. Another Memphis quality of the group was how close to the musical world its members were, and this week’s celebration of The Invaders will also spotlight a Stax Records singing group of the era, the Mad Lads. The film screens at the Crosstown Theater on Thursday, followed by a performance by the Mad Lads at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music on Friday, and the twin events are a hat-tip of sorts to a founder of both the Mad Lads and The Invaders, John Gary Williams, who died in 2019. His presence will be deeply felt by many who attend.

It makes perfect sense, then, that the Mad Lads performance (led by Williams’ brother Richard) will be preceded by the unveiling of a new exhibit area at the Stax Museum focused solely on John Gary Williams and his impact. Stax Museum collections manager and archivist Leila Hamdan says, “This exhibit is very important and meaningful. John Gary lived his last years as a very strong community member. He was a minister. He was a family man. And, you know, we want to honor him in all the phases of his life, not for being an Invader, or being in the Mad Lads. He was a lot more than that.”

Williams developed a following over the years for his work with both groups, but also for his solo album on Stax and its title single, “The Whole Damn World is Going Crazy.” All told, his story is one of increased awareness of the world’s injustices, underscored by his service in Vietnam, and his attempts to address that through both activism and art.

For Ari “King” Khan, whose brilliant, ’70s-soul-inflected score brings The Invaders to life, the two are inseparable. Well before last year’s Gonerfest, he was already excited about this week’s events. “For the 20th Anniversary of the Stax Museum, they’re going to make a John Gary Williams exhibit, and include the jacket of The Invaders in it,” he enthused. “They want to shine a light on revolution. I feel like Stax was so important, spiritually, cosmically, and politically. By embracing the story of The Invaders, the museum’s correcting a grand error. Imagine if Dr. King had met with the Invaders and said, ‘We’re going to convert all the Black Power groups to working through nonviolence.’ Imagine if the ghettos had been transformed into intellectual playgrounds for poor people. America would look very different. People are very hopeless right now, but there’s a beautiful connection between doo-wop, rock-and-roll, and Black Power to inspire us, and it’s all there in the story of John Gary Williams.”

A Celebration of the Mad Lads and the Invaders includes a screening of the film at Crosstown Theater on Thursday, October 26th, 7 p.m., and a performance by the new Mad Lads at the Stax Museum on Friday, October 27th, 6 p.m. Original Invaders member John B. Smith will speak at both events. Free.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Invaders

The Invaders gained prominence during the 1968 sanitation workers strike

In the summer of 2020, as protests against police violence spread in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many Americans got a glimpse of what it was like during the height of the Civil Rights era. There was righteous anger, a sense of purpose, and a shared commitment to justice — but there were also bitter disagreements over which tactics were most effective, and a tug-of-war between those who believed state violence must be met with citizen violence, and those who believed nonviolent resistance was the only way. The newfound camaraderie of the street protests came with a frisson of suspicion — is one of us a Fed, reporting our plans and movements to the same law enforcement agencies whose methods and priorities we’re protesting?

All of this will sound familiar to anyone who saw The Invaders when it debuted at Indie Memphis in 2016. The film that director Prichard Smith and writer/producer JB Horrell made, tells the inside story of the Bluff City’s own homegrown Black Power group. Vietnam veteran John B. Smith founded The Invaders when he left the army after his tours of duty. The group aligned themselves with the militant rhetoric of groups like the Black Panthers. The Invaders first gained prominence during the sanitation workers strike of 1968, and then infamy when they were blamed for the riot which overtook Dr. Martin Luther King’s final march in Memphis. Later, the group’s claims that they had been the targets of a spying and smear campaign by the FBI’s COINTELPRO unit were confirmed.

Juanita Thornton

(In the spirit of full disclosure, this columnist worked briefly as a writing consultant on the film, but has no financial stake in the project’s success.)

“I don’t think there are enough stories looking at some of the inner pockets of the Civil Rights movement,” says Smith. “There are the main stories that you hear about the ministers and Dr. King and whatnot. But I would venture to guess that there are many, many more stories like The Invaders that should be told just to give a wider understanding of the whole situation. I think it will continue to be relevant. I think you could argue that if it came out in the middle of the George Floyd protests, that would have been the most relevant time it could have come out. But that’s not how it panned out.”

During the film’s 2016 festival run, which featured a stop at Doc NYC, The Invaders producers, including Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer, made a deal with a distribution company to help get the film out. But later, Smith says, they asked, “When you say ‘Help,’ does that mean you’ll help us pay for these licenses for all the different archival stuff that we had to license?’ And they basically came back and said, ‘No, we can’t help you with that.’ So from there we were kind of treading water, spinning our wheels.”

With The Invaders in limbo, Smith got a job with New York filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, whose documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues played at Indie Memphis 2022. “I happened to be on the subway train with him, on our ways away from work, and he was like, ‘Hey what’s up with that Invaders thing?’”

Jenkins showed the film to rapper Nas, who signed on to do a new voice-over for the film. “He actually showed up in my office and was like, ‘I’ve never heard of this story! It’s so great! I can’t wait to get this out!’” recalls Smith. “He actually said — and this just threw me — ‘I was having dinner with Colin Kaepernick last night and all I could talk about was The Invaders.’”

Memphis hip-hop superstar Yo Gotti came on board as executive producer to help get the project over the finish line. Now, The Invaders is set for release via video on demand (VOD), which means you can buy or rent it on streaming services or storefronts such as Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video. Smith says a wider release may be in the offing next year. For Smith, the release is the final milestone on a long journey. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says. “I guess it teaches you patience. There’s the things that you can control, and the things you can’t. Try not to sweat too hard the things you can’t because they will eat you up.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Judas and the Black Messiah Writes History with Lightning

In 2014, I had the privilege of helping Pritchard Smith and J.B. Horrell with their documentary The Invaders. My job as writing consultant was to punch up the voiceover and help sort out the structure of the complex story of Memphis’ homegrown Black Power militia. It remains one of my favorite film jobs ever.

The most heated debate we got into during that post-production period was about COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program, which targeted radical political groups in the 1960s and ’70s. And by “radical political groups,” I really mean, “people J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like.” It wasn’t the right-wing John Birch Society who were getting their phones tapped, their ranks infiltrated, and their leaders incarcerated. It was the Black Panthers.

Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah

These groups represented Hoover’s worst nightmare: revolutionary Black socialists. The Invaders, who were not directly affiliated with the national Black Panther organization, were mostly Vietnam veterans. Hoover and his rabid anti-communist allies thought they had been radicalized overseas by Maoist agitprop. But the truth was, it was the grinding poverty and relentless racism they experienced back home that lit their revolutionary flame.

The Invaders were blamed for the riot that broke out during Dr. King’s March 28, 1968 march in Memphis. But they denied involvement, claiming the window breakers on Main Street that day had been a COINTELPRO false flag operation. We believed them, but would the average viewer of the documentary? In the Obama era, the story sounded paranoid. Not so much anymore.

Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield

The Invaders, it turns out, got off easy. They only had their reputations besmirched. The next year, Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago-area Black Panthers, was killed by what can be described only as a COINTELPRO death squad — at least, that’s how we would describe it if it happened in another country. Hampton’s brief life and scandalous death are the basis for director Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah.

The film’s framework is formed by a trio of brilliant performances: Daniel Kaluuya’s turn as Fred Hampton is in the same league as Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X or Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln. When he’s delivering fiery oratory to rapt crowds, you believe he could be the Black Messiah. (That term comes not from ranks of the Black Panthers, but from Hoover himself, played with oily gravitas by Martin Sheen.) Hampton’s opposite in every respect is Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), a white FBI agent tasked with infiltrating and disrupting the Panthers. He is as blandly professional as Hampton is passionate.

Caught in the middle is Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). After he’s collared for using a fake FBI badge to carjack carjackers, O’Neal is blackmailed into going undercover in Hampton’s Panther chapter. Once inside, the people he meets aren’t the dangerous terrorists of Hoover’s vision. He comes to admire Hampton’s emphasis on small-bore community organizing over grandiose dreams of revolution. But O’Neal is not a communist “fellow traveler.” His FBI handler woos him with fancy dinners, fat wads of cash, and, when Hampton needs a driver, a new car.

With such an epic story of political struggle, it would have been easy — and perhaps even satisfying — for King to draw cartoonish good guys and bad guys. But even when he’s slam-banging big action sequences, such as the police siege of Panther headquarters, which devolves into a pitched firefight, King chooses moral complexity. Sometimes when O’Neal looks at Hampton, he sees a community-minded politician at the beginning of his career. Other times, he sees a Marxist-Leninist strongman building a cult of personality. Mitchell sees himself as a career-minded law enforcement professional who is shocked when confronted with his boss’ overt racism. But when the time comes to plan the hit on Hampton, he just follows orders.

What ultimately humanizes Hampton (and damns O’Neal’s treachery) is his relationship with poet Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback). The chairman may be a hard-nosed revolutionary, but Hampton is utterly unprepared when Johnson takes a shine to him. “I wouldn’t have thought of you as shy,” she says as she tries to goad the 21-year-old into kissing her for the first time.

Kaluuya’s earth-shaking performance may be the headline, but everything from the noir-toned cinematography to the banging score is honed to a razor edge. Whether it’s mining gangster pictures like Boyz in the Hood for tense scenes of urban combat or twisting the narrative into JFK paranoid pretzels, Judas and the Black Messiah succeeds on every level. Judas and the Black Messiah is now showing at multiple locations, and streaming on HBO Max.

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Film Features Film/TV

2016: The Year In Film

I’ll try to be polite about this: 2015 was a banner year for film. 2016 was not. It was a year when bad decisions came back to haunt Hollywood, where cynicism reigned, and where even a total box office gross topping $10 billion won’t stop “the sky is falling” talk. Nevertheless, there were some bright spots. So here’s The Memphis Flyer‘s look back on the year a lot of people would like to forget.

Gods Of Egypt

Worst Picture: (4-way tie) 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, The Angry Birds Movie, Independence Day: Resurgence, Gods of Egypt

The most hotly contested category in our annual film awards was for the bottom spot. Bad movie overachiever Michael Bay’s 13 Hours is an incoherent, slapdash bit of agitprop that turned out to be the first shot in a frighteningly effective anti-Hillary PR campaign. Gods of Egypt looks like a cutscene taken from a particularly boring FPS video game, despite its $140 million budget. The Angry Birds Movie is the video game adaptation no one wanted, and it’s even worse than it sounds. Independence Day: Resurgence is a monument to the hubris of director Roland Emmerich. These “winners” just edged out a pair of DC comics misfires, the turgid Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the laughable Suicide Squad. It was a rich year for poor movies.

10 Cloverfield Lane

Most Claustrophobic: 10 Cloverfield Lane

There was a recurring theme among horror films in 2016: being trapped in an enclosed space with a madman. In Green Room, an unlucky punk band battled neo nazi Patrick Stewart in a secluded skinhead club, while in Don’t Breathe, three thieves get what’s coming to them when the blind homeowner they’re trying to rob turns out to have a basement of murderous secrets. But the best of the bunch was 10 Cloverfield Lane, where John Goodman holds Mary Elizabeth Winstead hostage in a bomb shelter while the world burns around them. Prophetic? Let’s hope not.

Little Men

Overlooked Gems: Maggie’s Plan, Little Men

The rule of thumb for films in 2016 was this: If a movie cost more than $100 million and it’s not made by a Disney affiliate, it’s going to suck. The good stuff was on the low end of the budgetary scale. Maggie’s Plan is a 2015 leftover directed by Rebecca Miller that combined great characterization, fine acting by Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore, and a script where a couple of smart women turned the tables on a clueless man. Little Men is Memphian Ira Sachs’ ode to boyhood friendship wrapped in a warning about late-stage capitalist rent seeking. Seek them out instead of watching Suicide Squad, please.

Arrival

Best Sci-Fi: Arrival

Imagine Independence Day, only instead of a cigar-chomping fighter pilot for a hero, you get the woman whose job it is to try to talk to the aliens. Director Denis Villeneuve took Ted Chiang’s unfilmable story about linguistics and the nature of time and created a quiet masterpiece. It proves Hollywood can be smart, it just usually chooses not to be.

Sausage Party

Best Animation: Sausage Party

While big-budget, live-action Hollywood flailed, the animators flourished. Kubo and the Two Strings, Zootopia, and Moana combined groundbreaking visuals with positive messages. But the best of the bunch was an unlikely R-rated Pixar parody by Seth Rogen that turned Disney positivity on its ear, then did terrible, terrible things to the ear. Terrible things.

The Invaders

Best Memphis Movie: The Invaders

In contrast to the horrors from Hollywood, Memphis filmmakers were on a tear in 2016. Morgan Jon Fox’s long-delayed web series Feral was a big hit for streaming service Dekkoo and will be returning with a second season in 2017. Indie Memphis’ Hometowner category was bigger than ever, with six feature films and enough shorts to fill four programming blocs. The best of the bunch was The Invaders by director Prichard Smith and writer/producer J. B. Horrell. The story of Memphis’ homegrown Black Power movement and the 1968 Sanitation Worker’s Strike that led to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wowed the crowd on opening night of Indie Memphis. Look for it in distribution in 2017.

O.J. Simpson

MVP: O.J. Simpson

From the first moments of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander’s mini series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, I — along with the rest of America — was completely hooked. The crack cast and incisive writing brought the tragic farce to stunning and immediate life. Then came the epic Ezra Edelman documentary O.J.: Made in America, which went even deeper into the former football player’s dizzying heights and murderous final act. The story’s indelible intersection of class, race, sports, sex, celebrity, and violence made these works feel like windows into the roiling American subconscious.

Black Phillip

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Black Phillip, The Witch

The quiet menace of Black Phillip, the devilish goat from Robert Eggers’ Puritan horror The Witch, stood hooves and horns above the pack. The hircine villain was a method actor, randomly attacking people on set with such frequency that the fear Anya Talor-Joy and Ralph Ineson showed on screen was real. Live deliciously, Black Phillip!

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead.

Best Performance: Don Cheadle, Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle’s dream project was a phantasmagorical biography of jazz legend Miles Davis. In addition to writing and directing, he also turned in the year’s best performance by playing Davis as first the brilliant young visionary battling prejudice in the late 1950s, and then the haunted, bitter superstar trying to find his way back to greatness in the 1970s. Not nearly enough people saw Miles Ahead, so be sure to give it a spin.

Miss Sharon Jones

Best Documentary:
Miss Sharon Jones!

There was a moment in Miss Sharon Jones! where director Barbara Kopple follows the terminally ill soul singer as she returns to church for the first time in years. Jones gets up to sing with the worship band, returning to the stage for the first time after a rough bout of chemotherapy, and the pure life force which animated her bubbles explosively to the surface. In one long, ecstatic take, Kopple and Jones created the best movie moment of the year, and one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.

La La Land

Best Picture: (tie) Moonlight,
La La Land

I was torn between these two very different films for Best Picture of 2016 until I realized I didn’t have to choose. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a stunningly photographed, heroically restrained story of a terrified boy growing into a hardened man, and the forbidden love that haunts, and ultimately redeems him. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, on the other hand, bursts at the seams with life and song, resurrecting the classic Hollywood musical with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The two films couldn’t be more different, but they represent the pinnacle of film craftsmanship and provide indelible experiences for the audience.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis Announces First Crop of Movies for 2016 Festival

A documentary about a controversial chapter of Memphis history, a coming-of-age drama by one of Memphis’ favorite sons and a look back at a seminal Bluff City work by Hollywood’s hottest writer will be the centerpieces of the 2016 Indie Memphis Film Festival. 

Indie Memphis released this video today to reveal the first crop of the160 films that will screen at the weeklong festival in November. 

Indie Memphis Announces First Crop of Movies for 2016 Festival

The Invaders

The opening night film will be The Invaders, a documentary by director Prichard Smith, writer J. B. Horrell (who is better known as the Memphis musician behind Ex-Cult and Aquarian Blood), and executive producer Craig Brewer. The film traces the history of Memphis’ indigenous black power group of the 1960s, The Invaders. Contemporaries of the Black Panthers, The Invaders became infamous during the aftermath of the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike. The film tells the story from their perspective, shedding new light on the events leading up to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Full disclosure: This columnist consulted on the film) 

Little Men

Director Ira Sachs, a Memphis native who lives in New York City, has been garnering acclaim for his new film Little Men, which will premiere at Indie Memphis before beginning its run at the Malco Ridgeway. Sachs, who recently had a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions from the audience. 

Free In Deed

Director Jake Mahaffy’s Free In Deed, shot in Memphis in 2014, is based on a true life story of faith healing gone wrong. It premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival and has garnered international acclaim from Europe to Australia. 

The People vs. Larry Flynt

20 years ago this summer, The People vs. Larry Flynt shot here in Memphis. Directed by Milos Foreman, the film was the brainchild of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who scored this year’s biggest television hit with The People vs. OJ Simpson. Karaszewski will return to Memphis for the twentieth anniversary screening of his epic tale of the Hustler publisher’s visit to the Supreme Court. 

Kallen Esperian: Vissi d’arté

The closing night of the festival will be director Steve Ross’ locally produced documentary profile of the Memphis opera singer Kallen Esperian: Vissi d’arte’. The film premiered with a pair of sold-out shows earlier this year, and the closing night gala will give more Memphians an opportunity to see this remarkable work. 

This year’s festival, sponsored by Duncan Williams runs from November 1-7. Tickets are now on sale at the Indie Memphis web site.