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Top of the Queue: Hayes, 'Shaft' made movie music cool

Jane Burns  —  8/24/2008 12:06 pm

When a character played by Keenen Ivory Wayans finally begins to fulfill his destiny as a black superhero in "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," he gets the best advice possible from his mentor, played by Bernie Casey.

Every good hero, Casey says, needs a theme song.

The guy who knows the most about that could have delivered the line himself, if his character in the movie hadn't just accidentally shot himself several dozen times. That was Isaac Hayes, playing a rib joint owner/former black hero named Hammer in the 1988 spoof of the 1970s blaxploitation films.

Hammer survived, of course, because this was a comedy. That the movie could even spoof the importance of a cool theme song was because of Isaac Hayes, who died earlier this month.

Let's face it, you can't talk about a movie theme without talking about Hayes' 1971 masterpiece, "Shaft."

What would that film be without that song or its soundtrack? Would anyone remember it? It's an unnecessary question: Hayes created such a powerful theme for his hero, it made James Bond look like a weenie.

Since then, movie music such as the themes from "Star Wars," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Superman" or even "Purple Rain" became so commonplace and iconic that it's hard to remember when that wasn't always the case. A quick glance at the other songs nominated for an Oscar in 1971 along with "Shaft" tells you everything you need to know about movie theme music at the time. (Or at least about what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thought was good.)

Johnny Mercer and Marvin Hamlisch were nominated for a song from "Kotch."

Henry Mancini, with Marilyn and Alan Bergman, were nominated for a song from "Sometimes a Great Notion." Robert and Richard Sherman wrote a song for Disney's "Bedknobs and Broomsticks."

The song from "Bless the Beasts and the Children" was performed by the Carpenters.

So you can only imagine the jolt Oscar got when Hayes, covered in gold, performed his song at the Oscars that year, and justifiably took home the little guy with the bald head to match his own.

Unfortunately, a collection that captured that night, "Oscar's Greatest Moments," hasn't made the leap from VHS to DVD. However, a chance to see Hayes perform that song in that era is out on DVD.

"Wattstax" was a film version of a 1972 music festival in Los Angeles that marked the 1965 Watts riots. The concert itself was called "the black Woodstock" and drew 100,000 people to the Los Angeles Coliseum. The film intersperses commentary on everyday black life from Richard Pryor and people in the community.

The concert features the Staple Singers, the Bar-Kays, the Emotions, Albert King and many more. But the final act, deservedly, was Isaac Hayes. He was resplendent in gold chains, his bald head so different from the giant Afros around him, including that of emcee Jesse Jackson.

But when "Wattstax" first arrived in theaters, Hayes' performance of "Shaft" was cut out because of rights issues (it was restored for the DVD version). Instead, the initial theatrical release showed Hayes performing another song, "Rolling Down the Mountain Side," which was recorded away from the concert and spliced in to look as if it were performed there.

"I felt so damn phony," he says in the "Wattstax" audio commentary, "because it was counterfeit."

To a younger generation of viewers, Hayes was best known as Chef on "South Park."

An infamous Scientology-bashing episode led Hayes, a Scientologist, to quit appearing in the show (that episode is in the season nine collection).

His look was so iconic that many of his other movie roles, even small, became memorable, too. He didn't have a big role in "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," but he did get to be in the film's best scene, when a very young Chris Rock tries to buy one rib at Hammer's rib joint. Hayes didn't just do one kind of film, showing up in Mario Van Peebles' western "Posse" and Mel Brooks' "Robin Hood: Men in Tights."

He had a small, gentle role as the club owner in "Hustle & Flow" but his influence on that film came another way. When a rowdy bunch called Three 6 Mafia shook up the Oscars in 2006 by performing a rap song called "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" and then picked up the trophy for best song, it had a familiar feel.

It was a reminder that, when a song so captures a film that an award cannot be denied, sometimes even the stodgy Academy can dig it.

Jane Burns  —  8/24/2008 12:06 pm