Elvis Mitchell makes leap from critic to filmmaker with 'Is That Black Enough For You?!?'

About four years ago, Elvis Mitchell was having dinner with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. As the former film critic for the New York Times and a longtime voice on NPR, he is afforded such audiences.

Soderbergh asked Mitchell what he was doing with his career, and Mitchell told him he had an idea for a movie, a documentary about the history of Black film, filtered through his own experiences growing up in the 1970s. "He looks at me and he goes, 'that's a great idea. I can cash flow this for you,'" says Mitchell.

A few years later, after ironing out the details (and Mitchell learning what it meant, exactly, to "cash flow" a project), the pair was filming Harry Belafonte — Mitchell interviewing, Soderbergh shooting — and the screen legend shared a wonderfully profane quip about the prime of his career where he said about himself, in the third person, "Belafonte could really not be f---ed with." "That's when I thought yeah, we've got a movie here," Mitchell says.

That movie is "Is That Black Enough For You?!?," a thorough chronicle of Black film in Hollywood and Mitchell's own experience with and around it. The documentary features interviews with Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, Zendaya and yes, Belafonte, and it streams on Netflix starting Friday.

For Mitchell, who was born and bred in Highland Park, the film marks his leap from film critic to filmmaker, a rarely accomplished ascent, which is just the latest step in his lifelong (but sometimes conflicted) love affair with cinema.

As a child Mitchell, who turns 64 next month, would visit his grandmother in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during summers, and television was a way for him and his twin sister to beat the miserable heat. At 6 years old, he remembers turning on "The Andy Griffith Show" and being scolded by grandma.

"Why are you watching that? Where are the Black people in that show?" he recalls her saying, which flipped a switch in his brain about how the content he absorbed and how he related to it. It forever altered his perception, which up to that time had been fairly innocent.

"There was always this immersion and distance from movies at the same time," says Mitchell, over a Zoom call from Los Angeles earlier this week. "Even though there was this constant love for movies and what they could do, there was also this understanding of the way I and people like me did not fit into them. It's this weird thing: it's hard to love something that doesn't love you back."

Though complicated, Mitchell's passion for the cinema remained, and he recalls the time he and a friend ran into actor D'Urville Martin in downtown Detroit in 1975. Martin, shocked the young teenager recognized him, invited him to watch a new movie he had just directed, which was showing at the nearby Plaza Theatre.

The movie was "Dolemite." Mitchell and his friend sat and watched it four times in a row, a formative experience where Mitchell says "the fabric of space and time" started to shift.

"The currents had parted, and I got to slip inside in some weird sliver of a way," he says.

From that point on, there was no turning back.

Mitchell began writing about film as a movie critic for the student newspaper while attending Wayne State University in the late '70s; for him, the draw of free movies was enough to seal the deal. It turned out to be his calling, and he rolled it into a career, writing about movies first for the Michigan Chronicle and then covering TV for the Oakland Press, and later becoming film critic for the Detroit Free Press in 1987.

That led to Mitchell's gigs at the Fort-Worth Star Telegram, LA Weekly and the Times, and Mitchell became a frequent guest critic with Roger Ebert on "Siskel and Ebert" after Gene Siskel's death in 1999.

It was around 1999 when Mitchell started thinking about "Is That Black Enough," and it took nearly 20 years and just the right prompting (and clout) from Soderbergh to put it into motion. Filmmaker David Fincher ("The Social Network," "Se7en") also came on board as a producer, and he pushed Mitchell to go farther and to put his personal stamp on the project.

"There was this piece that was going to be the beginning of the movie, and I showed it to (Fincher) and he looks at me and goes, 'it's fine,'" says Mitchell, leaving space for the sad trombone he must have heard in his head. "Hearing 'it's fine' from David Fincher is like getting that favorite teacher saying, 'yeah, I guess you have a lot of potential.'"

He says Fincher asked him, "'what is it you can do with this that no one else can do? If you can't define that, there's no point in you making it. You're wasting your time, you're wasting the audience's time.' And rather than it being a chastisement, it liberated me," Mitchell says. "I thought, oh, I'll just treat this like anything I write. And that's how I began to define it: it's as much an essay as it is a documentary film."

Mitchell sifted through thousands of hours of archival material from films ranging from "Friday Foster" to "Night of the Living Dead" to "Black Mama, White Mama" — the completed film has 165 film clips, give or take — and "Black Enough" talks about the history of Hollywood through the prism of race, how the independent film movement led to the blaxploitation era of the 1970s and the things mainstream cinema borrowed or outright stole from Black film, often without attribution.

There's a clip in the beginning of the movie from 1973's "Five on the Black Hand Side" where a character says, "I ain't giving up nothing but bubble gum and hard times, and I'm fresh outta bubble gum." Some 15 years later, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper would use a riff on the quote in John Carpenter's "They Live," though few ever traced it back to its original source.

Mitchell uses the film to convey his experience with the cinema, peppering it with in-jokes and personal asides, and he's honored to be able to deliver the documentary to viewers on the same weekend that "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" hits theaters. He sees his movie as sort of an unintended companion piece to the Marvel blockbuster, and the 100 years of film that led up to "Wakanda Forever's" release.

As for what's next for the critic-turned-director, the experience of making his first film is still sinking in.

"I don't know what to do next. I'm in this weird position where I should be wearing a red vest standing in front of a Costco or something, and instead I'm getting to think about if there's something else I want to make a movie about,"he says. "I'm in a peculiarly blessed position, and I'm not looking down on it."

agraham@detroitnews.com

@grahamorama

'Is That Black Enough For You?!?'

Rated R: for nudity, some sexual content, language, violence and drug material

Running time: 133 minutes

On Netflix