7 Films | October 19th & October 26th
In 2021, some troll, apropos of nothing, posted a mean tweet about, of all people, Pam Grier. The backlash was swift and fierce. In what is indisputably the greatest tweet ever, one Jason Adams responded: “Pam Grier is trending with politics, so I naturally assumed she had been nominated as Secretary of Badassness.”
Grier, actor, screen goddess and empowerment icon, is the subject of the fourth season of TCM’s podcast, “The Plot Thickens,” following seasons devoted to director Peter Bogdanovich, the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and Lucille Ball. Grier’s story, told primarily in her own words, contains multitudes. It is a Hollywood story and a survivor’s story, and as host Ben Mankiewicz notes, “she has survived far more than most.”
Think Pam Grier and what may immediately come to mind are the taglines for her blaxploitation classics. Note the prolific use of exclamation points; she warrants them!:
“The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town!” (Coffy, 1973)
“She’s brown sugar and spice but if you don’t treat her nice, she’ll put you on ice!” (Foxy Brown, 1974)
“Wam! Bam! Here comes Pam! (Friday Foster, 1975)
“She’s One Mean Mama!” (Sheba, Baby, 1975)
True story: I used to work in 16mm non-theatrical film distribution. In addition to schools and libraries, I serviced the prison market. We had the rights to Roger Corman’s New World Pictures library. This included the ne plus ultra of women in prison films, Gerardo de León’s Women in Cages (1971) and Jack Hill’s Big Doll House (1971), both featuring Grier. They were in high demand.
Over time, our film inspection department began to report tiny discrepancies in the footage counts when the films were shipped back to the company. Grier’s nude scenes, in particular, were being snipped frames at a time by enterprising prison editors. In one extreme case of Pam worship, an entire scene was lopped off and replaced with random stock footage so the out-in footage counts would sync up.
But as this season of “The Plot Thickens” will reveal, there is much more to Grier than her Queen of Blaxploitation films status. She only made a handful of these and has had a varied film and television career. Over the course of 10 episodes, says Mankiewicz in the first installment (two were made available for preview), Grier takes stock of her life and career—the good, the bad and the exceedingly harrowing—her romances with famous men and talks candidly about being a black women in Hollywood and America in the 1970s and today.
Pam’s “tells a vital part of movie history,” Mankiewicz says. “She was a trailblazer. That term gets used a lot, but in Pam’s case, it’s true.”
Grier came to Hollywood, she says in “The Plot Thickens,” with nothing but a single pair of jeans, a bucket of “Colonel Sanders chicken” and $33 dollars. She had no acting experience, but a job as a receptionist for American International Pictures, the MGM of B-movies, got her noticed.
The bulk of Grier’s 1970s filmography was the opposite of Oscar bait. She did R-rated exploitation movies with titles such as Women in Cages (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), to earn film school tuition money.
But she was a powerful force onscreen and put asses in the seats (and in the cars, for the drive-in crowd) with her formidable take-no-jive screen persona. She was the first female action hero. She did her own stunts. She did the requisite nudity. And she sassed out dialogue like, “This is the end of your rotten life, you motherfuckin’ dope pusher,” and “You want to make me crawl? I’m gonna piss on your grave tomorrow.”
Foxy Brown contains the iconic image of her pulling a gun out of her prodigious afro (her idea, by the way); this, after delivering to the female head of the sex slave racket that murdered her boyfriend, kidnapped her and shot her up with heroin, a jar containing the severed appendage of her boyfriend.
Just as the box office success of Easy Rider (1969) hipped Hollywood to the ticket buying power of high school and college students, blaxploitation films lured untapped black audiences into theaters. These films were also controversial for, some social critics said, glorifying negative black stereotypes.
They made Grier a grindhouse A-lister, but unlike other actors who got their start with Roger Corman—Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone (notice a pattern?)—she was not afforded the opportunities for lead roles in mainstream films.
She portrayed a homicidal junkie prostitute in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), the Dust Witch in Disney’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), the ex-lover of Bruce Dern’s marathon man in On the Edge (1986), and Steven Seagal’s partner in his breakout vehicle, Above the Law (1988).
In the 1980s, she did some memorable appearances on such TV series as Night Court, The Cosby Show and Frank’s Place. She had recurring roles on Crime Story, Miami Vice and The L Word, for which she was nominated multiple times for an NAACP Image Award.
In 1996, she experienced a mini-Pam-aissance with a return to her blaxploitation roots in Original Gangstas (1996) opposite Fred Williamson and Jim Brown, and had a fun featured role as Hershe Las Palmas (formerly Carjack Malone), a former partner in crime with Kurt Russell’s cult hero Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A (1996).
But in 1997, Quentin Tarantino afforded Grier the star vehicle she long-deserved, and she delivered in the eponymous role of Jackie Brown. In “The Plot Thickens,” the grindhouse-savant says that he was looking for an actress that was mid-40s, looks like she’s mid-30s and looks like she can handle anything. “Pam Grier fits the bill, that would be pretty terrific,” he says.
And she was. She earned a Golden Globe nomination (the Oscars snubbed her, surprise, surprise) and was a winner on the film festival circuit. She at last earned something from her peers that was to her more important than fame: respect.
Pam Grier has been working steadily for 50 years, but as “The Plot Thickens” rivetingly chronicles, she is much more than just a Hollywood survivor. Pam candidly recalls being sexually abused at the age of six, as well as her dramatic relationships with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and comedians Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor.
Speaking with Mankiewicz from her ranch, the 72-year-old makes a stunning entrance that befits her indomitable spirit. Mankiewicz pulls up to the 12-acre property to find his host in a cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses, dancing under the Colorado sky. “She is prepared for anything,” Mankiewicz observes.
“I’m alive,” Grier proclaims. “I can’t believe it. That’s a milestone for me in our crazy world, it really is.”
