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Jessie Maple (February 14, 1937 – May 30, 2023)[a] was an American cinematographer and film director most noted as a pioneer for the civil rights of African Americans and women in the film industry.[3] Her 1981 film Will was one of the first feature-length dramatic films created by an African American woman.[4]
According to an obituary in The Washington Post, Maple was born on February 14, 1937, in McComb, Mississippi,[b][5] one of eleven siblings (4 brothers and 7 sisters).[6] Maple's father worked as a farmer and died when she was 13; her mother worked as a dietician and schoolteacher.[5] Now in Philadelphia, Maple was a student at the Franklin School of Science and Arts, where she studied medical technology.[5]
In the 1960s and 1970s, Maple was head of a bacteriology and serology laboratory in Philadelphia and New York.[7] She later wrote for the New York Courier. She received film training through Ossie Davis's Third World Cinema, and through the National Education Television Training School, a program run by WNET public television in New York City.[6]
The latter program was established for African Americans to learn behind-the-scenes camera jobs in order to get into the union, but funding for this program was short-lived; as Maple noted, "It was so successful that after one year they shut it down."[8] She began her career in film as an apprentice editor for Shaft's Big Score! and The Super Cops.[9] After being admitted to the Film Editor's Union, Maple studied and passed the examination for the Cinematographer's Union.[6]
Following a prolonged legal struggle in 1973, Maple became the first African American woman admitted to the New York camera operators union.[6][10] She described her lawsuits and struggle in a self-published autobiographical book, How to Become a Union Camerawoman (1976). In a 2020 interview, she said, "After I passed the test and got into the cameraman's union, then they told the studios not to hire me and blacklisted me. I decided, well, I'm going to fight this....I decided, let me get this out the way, I sued them all at once, ABC, CBS, NBC, and I won."[11]
Working for many years as a news camerawoman, Maple recounts she had her best moment when she realized she could "edit the story in the camera and prevent the editor from taking a positive story and making a negative one out of it," particularly in stories with a race element where black people were often left out of the news story. According to Maple, "I would shoot [the story] in a way where they couldn't cut the black person out of [it]. They had to see both sides of what happened and what they had to say."[8]
In 1974, Maple cofounded LJ Films Productions with her husband, Leroy Patton, to produce short documentaries.[12]
In 1981, Maple released the independent feature film Will, a gritty drama about a girls' basketball coach struggling with heroin addiction. With that release, Maple has been cited as the first African American woman to direct an independent feature-length film in the post-civil rights era.[13][14] In order to show her own film, and other independent movies by African Americans, Maple and Patton opened the 20 West Theater, Home of Black Cinema in their Harlem brownstone home in 1982.[15] Her second independent feature film was Twice as Nice from a screenplay by poet and actress Saundra Pearl Sharp.[16] Released in 1989, the film is a tale of twin sisters who play basketball.
The Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University holds the papers and films of Maple in the Jessie Maple Collection, 1971–1992.[17]
Jessie Maple Patton died in Atlanta on May 30, 2023. She was survived by her husband, her daughter, a grandson, five sisters, two adopted daughters, and several nieces and nephews.[2]
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Jessie Maple, Pathbreaking Filmmaker, Is Dead at 86
She was believed to be the first Black woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. She also broke ground as a union cinematographer.
Jessie Maple, who built careers as a camerawoman and an independent filmmaker when Black women were almost nonexistent in those fields, and who then left meticulous instructions for later generations to follow in her footsteps, died on May 30 at her home in Atlanta. She was 86.
Her death was confirmed by E. Danielle Butler, her longtime assistant and the co-author of her self-published 2019 memoir, “The Maple Crew.”
Director and camerawoman were just two of Ms. Maple’s many jobs. She also worked as a bacteriologist; wrote a newspaper column; owned coffee shops; baked vegan cookies; and ran a 50-seat theater in the basement of her Harlem brownstone.
Ms. Maple had been writing a column called Jessie’s Grapevine for The New York Courier, a Harlem newspaper, when she moved to broadcast journalism from print in the early 1970s because she wanted to reach more people.
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After studying film editing in programs at WNET, New York’s public television station, and Third World Cinema, the actor Ossie Davis’s film company, and working as an apprentice editor on the Gordon Parks films “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972) and “The Super Cops” (1974), Ms. Maple realized that she yearned to be behind the camera.
In 1975 she became the first African American woman to join New York’s cinematographers union (now called the International Cinematographers Guild), according to Indiana University’s Black Film Center and Archive, which holds a collection of her papers and films. But, she said, the union banned her after she fought to change rules that required her to complete a lengthy apprenticeship.
“If I had waited, I never would have become a cameraperson,” Ms. Maple told The New York Times for a 2016 article about women who broke barriers to work on film crews. “So I took ’em to court.”
She sued several New York television stations for gender and racial discrimination in the mid-1970s, and she won a lawsuit against WCBS in 1977 that earned her a trial period with the station. That blossomed into a freelance career there and at the local ABC and NBC stations.
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Ms. Maple wrote that she faced crew members who did not want to work with her and nasty whispers, sometimes quite audible, behind her back. But she persevered, even when she got assignments that felt especially difficult — for example, flying in a helicopter to get aerial footage on a near-daily basis even though she had motion sickness.
In 1977 Ms. Maple wrote about her experiences in “How to Become a Union Camerawoman,” a detailed guide to succeeding in a forbidding industry.
But as TV news moved from film to video, Ms. Maple decided that she would rather become an independent filmmaker, with complete control of her work. She made short documentaries with Leroy Patton, her husband, including “Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit?,” before turning to features.
Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films about issues that were important to her community.
“I want to tell the stories about things that bother me which may not otherwise be told,” she wrote in her memoir. “I strive to use the resources that are around me. Most importantly, I work to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”
According to the Black Film Center and Archive, Ms. Maple was the first known African American woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. That film, “Will” (1981), followed a former college basketball player struggling with addiction (played by Obaka Adedunyo) who takes in a 12-year-old boy to prevent him from developing a habit of his own. Loretta Devine, in her first film role, played Will’s significant other.
Ms. Maple’s second feature, “Twice as Nice” (1989), was the story of twin sisters, both college basketball standouts, who are preparing to take part in a professional draft. The movie starred Pamela and Paula McGee, twins who won back-to-back N.C.A.A. basketball championships at the University of Southern California but were not professional actors.
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In 1982 Ms. Maple and Mr. Patton opened a theater to show “Will” and other independent films in the basement of their brownstone on 120th Street in Harlem. They called it 20 West, billed it as “the home of Black cinema” and featured movies by up-and-comers like Spike Lee. They closed it about a decade later — because, she said, she wanted to focus more on her own films.
Ms. Maple’s films have achieved greater recognition in recent years than they did when they were released. In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art screened “Will”; that same year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (now Film at Lincoln Center) showed both her features as part of a series called “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986.”
Ms. Maple was born on Feb. 14, 1937, in McComb, Miss., about 80 miles south of Jackson, the second oldest of 12 children. Her father was a farmer, her mother a teacher and dietitian.
Her father died when she was 13, and her mother sent her and many of her siblings to the Northeast, where she went to high school.
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After high school she studied medical technology and then started working in bacteriology. She eventually ran a lab at the Hospital for Joint Diseases and Medical Center (now part of New York University’s hospital system) in Manhattan while the hospital administration searched for a permanent replacement because, she wrote, she did not have a Ph.D. She was credited with leading the preliminary identification of a new strain of bacteria; on her lunch breaks, she joined other, lower-paid workers who were trying to organize.
It was a steady, well-paying job, but Ms. Maple, who was married and had a young daughter, tired of the work and left bacteriology in 1968 to pursue journalism. She was on assignment for a magazine in Texas when she met Mr. Patton, a photographer for Jet and Ebony magazines who lived in Los Angeles, and they developed a bicoastal relationship.
Ms. Maple had separated from her husband; Mr. Patton was still living with his wife. In time they divorced their spouses and married, and Mr. Patton moved to Manhattan. (Ms. Maple was sometimes billed as Jessie Maple Patton in her film work.)
Ms. Maple is survived by her husband; her daughter, Audrey Snipes; five sisters, Lorrain Crosby, Peggy Lincoln, Debbie Reed, Camilla Clarke Doremus and Stephanie Robinson; and a grandson.
Ms. Maple worked relentlessly to accomplish her dreams. She supplemented her income through ventures including two Harlem coffee shops she ran with Mr. Patton and a line of vegan cookies she made in the 1990s, which were eventually available at retailers on the East Coast.
“I was too busy doing the work to slow down,” she wrote in her memoir. “I’d like to believe that my efforts have paved the way for the people behind me to work just as hard but struggle a little less.”
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