Pimp-Producer, Whorehouse Sets, and Motorcycle Gangs: The Chaotic Making of Abar, The First Black Superman

Scandals & Feuds4/5 wildness

Pimp-Producer, Whorehouse Sets, and Motorcycle Gangs: The Chaotic Making of Abar, The First Black Superman

Abar, The First Black Superman / 1970s

The production of Abar, The First Black Superman reads less like a conventional movie shoot and more like a street-level caper from the blaxploitation era. The project was the brainchild of James Smalley—a black pimp from Louisiana—and white actor/screenwriter Frank Packard. Filming was audaciously guerrilla: scenes were shot without permits in Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills and Watts neighborhoods and portions were filmed inside an operational whorehouse. The shoot’s ad-hoc nature and the producers’ ties to the margins of the economy produced tense confrontations with authority. At one memorable moment, motorcycle club members who had been hired as extras to portray a black motorcycle gang actually surrounded the cars of the white police officers who had been summoned to shut the production down; the officers ultimately chose to stay in their vehicles rather than force the issue.